Photo of Caitlin Clark first published on the University of Iowa’s Hawkeye Sports website in 2023.

Bernie Scolaro is a retired school counselor, a past president of the Sioux City Education Association, and former Sioux City school board member.

I am one of those snowbirds from Iowa residing in South Carolina. I happily cheered on Caitlin Clark and the Iowa women’s basketball team throughout the NCAA Final Four tournament. While my Carolinian friends cheered for their Gamecocks, they nonetheless enjoyed and admired the ride the Hawkeyes provided for myself, the state of Iowa, and actually, most of the nation. 

Photos by Bruce Lear, published with permission

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com  

There’s a learning curve for every change. How sharp the curve is depends on the speed of the change. The journey from Iowa snowbound to Florida snowbird was abrupt but welcome.

We bought a small place in the land of alligators and golf carts and headed South a day after the last January blizzard. Here are a few lessons from our snowbird education.

Amy Endle began her career in Iowa and has been a school psychologist with an Area Education Agency since 2012. She emailed the message enclosed below to all members of the Iowa House and Senate on March 23.

Dear Iowa Legislators 

I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to inform you of my family’s difficult decision to leave Iowa after 12 years of residency and return to our native Wisconsin. I have proudly served Iowa children, parents, and schools as a school psychologist since moving to Iowa in 2012. 

This decision was not made lightly and is driven by concerns directly impacting our livelihood and the educational future of our 3 children. The core reason for our departure stems from the increasing insecurity surrounding the sustainability of a gutted Area Education Agency (AEA) system. The knee-jerk decisions passed by legislators more interested in pleasing the governor than serving children in Iowa have not only affected the professional stability of highly trained education specialists, but have also cast a shadow over my family’s future in Iowa.

Lanon Baccam is a combat veteran, former USDA official, and candidate for Iowa’s third Congressional district.

On this International Women’s Day I’m thinking about the nine incredible women in my life. My wife, three mothers-in-law, four sisters, and my mom—Bounmy Baccam—the bravest, most loving, and generous woman I know.

My family’s story traces back to Laos and is deeply impacted by the Vietnam War. A conflict so violent that to this day Laos maintains a notorious distinction of being the most bombed nation on earth. Two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos—the equivalent of an entire planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years on an area the size of Oregon.

Shutterstock image of an angiogram is by April stock

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

I had a heart attack on the evening of February 27. All is well.

Tuesday about 7 p.m. I was sitting at the press table at the Jefferson City Council meeting, taking notes, when my chest started to hurt. I figured it was probably acid reflux, which I have from time to time, so I waited for it to go away.

It didn’t. It hung around after the meeting adjourned at 8 p.m., so when I got home I told Kathy that if it didn’t disappear by 9:30, I would go out to the emergency room at Greene County Medical Center to have it checked out.

Heather Sievers is the founder of Advocates for Iowa’s Children and an Altoona mother of a child of rare disabilities. Photo of Heather with her daughter Rowan was provided by the author and published with permission.

I am speaking out to educate our communities and give voice to thousands of families across the state who are begging our Iowa legislators to stop the Area Education Agency (AEA) education reform bill from being passed into law during the 2024 legislative session.

Having spent years building my professional experience in effective health care transformation, performance and process improvement in large systems, I know we are not doing this the right way. We are not taking time to perform a credible and thorough study to determine what reform is needed before enacting a bill. A change of this magnitude cannot be rushed, or it will inevitably fail. The risk is too high to gamble on our children’s well-being and their futures. 

Any harm to our children as a result of the decisions made this legislative session will never be forgiven, nor forgotten. Our integrated AEA system works and is a national treasure. Many states aspire to implement a system like we have, and my personal story demonstrates that our system works. 

Flag designed by Reddit user oshaboy to be compliant with the U.S. Flag Code of 1818

Alexandra Dermody is a Davenport-based Gen Z community advocate, nonprofit director, and small business owner.

The experience of transgender Americans is fraught with difficulty, particularly for trans women of color, who are disproportionately targeted for violence and prejudice. Startling data from the Trans Murder Monitoring project exposes a disturbingly high number of murders of transgender individuals worldwide, with a notable portion occurring in the United States.

This violence is not haphazard but rather a direct result of pervasive discrimination present in all aspects of society—from employment opportunities to inadequate health care access. These are not isolated occurrences, but rather symptomatic of a larger societal issue that systematically deprives transgender individuals of their basic rights and humanity.

From left: State Representative Dick Myers, Chip Carter, and Tim Kraft in December 2003. Photo by Dave Leshtz, published with permission.

Dave Leshtz is the editor of The Prairie Progressive.

The first sentence of Tim Kraft’s obituary in the Albuquerque newspapers last month labeled him as the manager of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 Iowa caucus campaign and, later, “a top aide to President Carter.”

Not a bad legacy for a kid from Noblesville, Indiana. It gives a hint of the extraordinary, suggesting that the deceased man was smart, talented, and deserving of recognition for helping to elevate a nationally unknown politician and farmer from the South to the presidency.

For those of us who have worked the caucuses or on campaigns, we know just how remarkable of a feat that was—and why, almost 50 years later, it’s worth the lede in his obituary. We also know just how far out of the norm it is for the person who orchestrated that win to be so humble and down to earth.

Phil Specht is a retired farmer and a father who also lost a son. He wrote this poem on February 9, 2024, as a “deeply personal response to a very public mistreatment” of President Joe Biden, first by Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report and then by the press.

How Dare You Ask The Date My Son Died

I could not tell you.

A black cloud obscured the calendar.

Was it a Monday?

I do not know.

My five-year effort to gain a seat on the Iowa House press bench ended less than five days after the Institute for Free Speech filed a federal lawsuit on my behalf.

House Chief Clerk Meghan Nelson informed me shortly after 5:00 pm on January 23 that the Iowa House approved my application for work space, and a spot has been reserved for me in the press box on the floor of the House chamber.

Photo by Julie Gammack of an Iowa Democratic caucus on the south side of Des Moines, January 15, 2024. Published with permission.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He serves as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

The Facebook message came in late Monday morning. “Just wondering if you are going to your caucus tonight. I’m worried that there will only be a few people there. Nobody seems interested this year in the Dem caucus.”

My friend, who lives 200 miles distant, began this exchange by noting a recent column I had written. I respond, “Yes, you bet I’m going. Sometimes we send important messages simply by showing up, which is why I named my column such.” 

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

Nikki Haley needed an entire day to admit, rather furtively, that slavery was a possible cause of the Civil War. Donald Trump thinks that the bloody struggle from 1861-65 (which Trump, in a rare burst of accuracy, described as “very rough time”) happened because Abraham Lincoln was born too soon to read the “Art of the Deal.” Had the Great Emancipator been so fortunate, Trump said in Newton on January 6, “you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.”

Iowans whose knowledge of the Civil War goes slightly beyond Ken Burns’ PBS series three decades ago are shaking their heads in wonderment at such ignorance. But history is as much a vantage point than an absolute certainty. I learned that lesson in September, 1963, and the first days of classes in my junior year at Lincoln High School in the Nebraska capitol city.

Photo of Joan Marttila provided by the author and published with permission.

Joan Martila is a retired Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency audiologist. She is a former president of the Iowa Speech Language Hearing Association as well as a former president of the Iowa Speech Language Hearing Foundation. 

Another election year is upon us. I can guess what you’re thinking, because I have heard others say it: Why do Iowa Democrats have so many losers running of office? 

I am one of those losers. Let me tell you my side of the story.

AJ Jones is a writer. She is a creator of art and expresses herself across different mediums. She embraces her neurodivergence as a unique way to view the world and create a better future.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month is always difficult and one of remembrance. I remember the last conversation I had with Linda, a friend from work. She told me how her husband had tied her up and locked her in the downstairs bathroom of the house for several hours. How he had threatened her with a knife and how he had previously threatened her with a gun. 

You can imagine how that conversation went. I often wonder if my advice was sound.  

Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization. In this photo from 2001, he is standing in front of a salt rock in the Negev (southern Israel).

A death toll of over 2,800 and growing. Some 150 Israelis—men, women, children, the elderly—held hostage in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. Entire families massacred. Bodies of dead babies. Israel is in a struggle to the death with its blood enemy, Hamas.

Being a New Yorker born and bred, I must admit that I never felt the need to fly until, as a college graduate, I joined my classmates as we boarded a flight to Israel, bound for our first year of rabbinic study in Jerusalem. It did not take long before I fell in love with the 4,000-year-old homeland of my people. Since then, I have journeyed there several times.  It is my home away from home; second in my heart only to my beloved U.S.A.

As a lover of Israel, I can attest that these days a heavy cloud hangs over the Jewish people, not only in Israel but around the world. It’s a cloud of anguish, violence, fear, death, and profound grief, born of the recent Hamas attacks waged against the Israeli towns and villages on Israel’s southern border, along with the ongoing barrage of missiles fired by Hamas, targeting civilian populations as far away from Gaza as Tel Aviv. The pain of Jews is very real and very raw, as there is hardly a Jewish household, inside and outside of Israel, untouched by a personal loss because of this, the greatest mass murder and hostage taking of Jews since the Holocaust.

Dr. Greg Cohen has practiced medicine in Chariton since 1994 and is vice president of the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians. He was named the Rural Health Champion by the Iowa Rural Health Association in 2014 and was awarded the Living Doc Hollywood Award for National Rural Health day in 2015. He was named a Distinguished Fellow by the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians as well as Physician of the Year by the Iowa Osteopathic Medical Association in 2019.

Dr. Cohen’s first commentary about the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most-viewed Bleeding Heartland posts in the sixteen-year history of this website.

Three years ago, I wrote a letter to the editor about my experiences as a rural physician six months into the COVID-19 Pandemic. There was no vaccine, no Paxlovid, and only experimental treatments for patients sick enough to be hospitalized. About 180,000 Americans had died. I had not hugged my children or grandson in nearly six months, and in my recurring dreams, I was suffocating in an ICU bed. (I finally hugged my children seven months later, after we had all been vaccinated.)

Dave Leshtz is the editor of The Prairie Progressive.

228 E. Bloomington Street in Iowa City was a battered old duplex across the street from Tweedy’s grocery store, the future site of Pagliai’s Pizza. The elderly landlady lived in one half of the duplex. I lived in the other half with a married couple and their baby, plus whoever needed a bed for the night or the week or the month. 

A block south on Linn Street was the Hamburg Inn #2. The year was 1967, and the Burg was in its pre-caucuses heyday. I ate breakfast, lunch, or dinner there almost every day.

The customers were vividly eclectic: hungover fraternity brothers, young couples who obviously had spent the night together, lawyers with nearby offices, small-time gamblers, alcoholics who had trouble lifting that first cup of coffee to their lips without spilling, poets, and house painters.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He took the photo above of Shellsburg School (now Vinton-Shellsburg).

Teachers have earned appreciation for more than a week in May or during tragedies like school shootings or a pandemic. They really do train all other professions.  

People who boast about pulling themselves up with their bootstraps have short memories. If I tried to pull myself up with my own bootstraps, they would have broken, and my boots would have remained firmly on the floor. No, in my tiny school in my tiny town, I had some dedicated motivators called teachers.

Tracy Jones is a progressive political activist in Davenport. These comments are a longer version of testimony she delivered at an Iowa House public hearing on July 11 (see video below). She is pictured here on the left, speaking to State Representative Luana Stoltenberg.

In the spring of 1972, my mom was a pregnant 32-year-old with three young children. My sister was eleven years old, my brother was eight, and I was fifteen months old. Our mom had just experienced the collapse of her second marriage, and her pregnancy was not my dad’s.

I can only imagine the shame, fear and guilt that must have clung to her. Our mom was raised in a conservative and religious household. I’m certain an abortion wasn’t the first thing on her mind, but she knew her medical history. She had difficult pregnancies and suffered from severe preeclampsia with each.

As the pregnancy progressed, it became clear that this would be the pregnancy that would kill her. She needed an abortion but was living in a state where it wasn’t legal.

Bleeding Heartland user PrairieFan is an Iowa landowner.

My boxelder trees look horrible.

The foliage on the outer branches is a sickly pale green. The leaves are twisted and stunted. Looking at other plants near my house, I see cupped and contorted leaves on trees, vines, and wildflowers. As happens every year, farm chemicals have trespassed (drifted) onto my conservation land.

Iowans who don’t know what it is like to live near typical corn and soybean fields might guess that farm-chem trespass would be a very occasional accident, followed by apologies, handshakes, and maybe a “sorry” gift. But that is not how it works in much of rural Iowa. 

Larry Osweiler grew up in Keota, Iowa and now lives in Indiana. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he is an aficionado of Iowa treats found nowhere else: Pagliai’s Pizza, Sterzing Potato Chips, Maid-Rite’s, and kolaches from anywhere close to Cedar Rapids.

I got interested in Iowa politics in 1964 at the age of 8, when Governor Harold Hughes was running for re-election. I had sent for a picture of the governor and received a package from his office a few weeks later. I remember showing it to everyone on the school bus.

While waiting on the bus one afternoon, I remember Evan Hultman riding by on the back of a convertible with a Hultman for Governor sign on it. Hughes won with 68 percent of the vote. Hard to believe there was once a day when a Democrat would win a statewide race in Iowa by that large a margin.

I studied the book I’d received and memorized almost every state official. John Schmidhauser was elected to Congress from the first district. At our dinner table that election night, I wondered how my dad was so sure Lyndon Johnson was going to win the presidential election.

Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional.

My aunt, who raised me after my parents died, would wake up early on Sunday to prepare a meal, then take a cab, at great expense, to visit her sister, confined to a mental institution. “If she were Catholic,” one of the nurses in the ward told me, “she would be a saint.”

But she also threw around the word “shvartze” to refer to black people. “Shvartze” technically means “black” in Yiddish, but it’s also the equivalent of the N-word. So, yes, my aunt was a racist. But she also did good for me, her sister, and uncounted others. And I still say a memorial prayer for her on the anniversary of her death.

No such sentiment may be forthcoming for Scott Adams, the longtime cartoonist who created “Dilbert.”

Deb VanderGaast is a registered nurse and child care advocate seeking to advance state and national child care and disability policy, inclusive child care practices and improve access to quality, affordable child care for working parents. She was the 2022 Democratic nominee in Iowa Senate district 41.

The LGBTQ+ community in Iowa is under attack, and so are our schools. Many people think the acceptance of queer people in our culture is causing an increase in transgender and queer kids. They think exposure to transgender and queer people in education, books, movies, music, and the community is “grooming” kids to question their gender and sexual identity.

They are completely wrong.

Adolescence is a time when kids form their identities and “try on” various roles as they explore who they are and who they want to be. Our society now allows many more options as acceptable choices for youth to consider, but this increased acceptance has not changed who kids are becoming. Rather, it has allowed adolescents to safely express who they already are. They are no longer constrained by social biases against gay and transgender people.

Aime Wichtendahl is a member of the Hiawatha City Council and first openly trans woman elected to government in Iowa.

When Iowa Republicans gained a trifecta in 2017, I told our city manager, “I don’t know what their economic agenda is, but I bet it has something to do with gay marriage and abortion.”

Fast forward six years and little has changed—except the legislature devotes extra time attacking transgender youth to feed their lives into the never-ending culture war dumpster fire.

This column by Daniel G. Clark about Alexander Clark (1826-1891) first appeared in the Muscatine Journal.

Do you know where your people came from? How they arrived on this continent? How they made their way to Iowa? If not, might it make a difference in your life to learn their stories?

On May 2, 2010, I posted on Facebook: “I just found a ‘smoking gun’ historical document that confirms my hypothesis (ever stronger over the past decade) about my ancestors’ role in the Underground Railroad. I am descended directly from men named as key players in Connecticut, including my great-great-grandfather who migrated directly to Durant, Iowa. Do I sound excited?”

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Given all the hoopla and hokum—and bitterness of kicking someone in the teeth—about the legend that there once was a celebrated Iowa caucus, let’s get back to reality.

Let’s consider whether there once was a Virginia who wondered about Santa Claus, and whether he actually was a fellow who dealt with things that really mattered—like merriment, consideration of others, and even being jolly.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

The pending end of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses will no doubt set off long nights of reminiscences covering a half-century among the state’s political/media intelligentsia. But I will step forward with a claim that is not to be challenged.

I was the first-in-the-nation critic of the Iowa caucuses. It happened entirely by accident.

This post was supposed to be a book review.

I bought a copy of Sylvan T. Runkel: Citizen of the Natural World at the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat in September, thinking it would be perfect to review for my Iowa wildflowers series. Runkel co-authored some of the best Iowa wildflower guides, and I’ve used Wildflowers of Iowa Woodlands and Wildflowers of the Tall Grass Prairie countless times.

Co-authors Larry Stone and Jon Stravers both knew Runkel and interviewed many of his friends, relatives, and former colleagues while researching their biography. As expected, I learned a lot about how the famous conservationist grew to love the outdoors and became passionate about native plants and natural landscapes.

The book also struck a chord with me as I’ve been coping with the most physically challenging year of my life.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register, where this essay first appeared. He serves as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

Some people live in town and have a second home on a lake or in the country. For almost two decades, we’ve reversed these items. Our primary residence is in rural North Iowa – in the country – with a turnkey town home in the greater Minneapolis area. There, for the last ten weeks, we’ve provided “supporter housing” for a political campaign worker in the Twin Cities.

Accommodating this short-term boarder was not demanding duty. We’re often not there, more true recently as delayed travel plans were rescheduled for earlier this fall. Furthermore, providing temporary housing is consistent with a vague “transition strategy” as we seek different ways to support causes we believe in.

Let me explain how this relates to politics.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

The windowless Office Lounge bar on Grand Avenue nestled across a narrow alleyway from the Register and Tribune Building in downtown Des Moines was a hopping place in the early morning hours of Wednesday, November 6, 1974.

Longtime Office Lounge owner Dorothy Gabriel continued her election-night tradition of keeping the Register’s semi-official bar open after hours (to the apparent indifference of the Des Moines police) so that the newspaper’s staff could blow off the heat and tension of election night.

Zach Elias grew up in Bettendorf and is a graduate student in philosophy who studied at the University of Dubuque.

I consider myself a curious person. Sometimes that quality has been to my benefit. Sometimes it has been to my detriment.

My curiosity particularly emerges during any election season. Every time, my political voice is reenergized when I see signs in the yards of my neighbors, political ads, and announcements of candidates coming into town.

The first cold winds of the winter season call an end to a fun, untethered summer. The beautiful fall leaves in the frame of the big combines put me in a reflective mood. Who wouldn’t stop to admire all the change? It’s as if nature knows a big decision looms, and is doing its best to sober you up from the summer sun.

Charlie Hodges is a Democratic activist in Polk County.

As some of you may have heard, President Joe Biden revealed his student loan forgiveness plan last week. Shockingly (sarcasm), Iowa Republicans reacted with faux outrage and misinformation.

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst had this to say about those who may be receiving assistance through the plan:

To the Iowans who coach student athletes or lead other public school-based activities:

As a new academic year begins this week, you may feel more emboldened to bring your religion into practices, games, or other school group gatherings. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that high school football coach Joseph Kennedy was wrongly disciplined over his post-game prayers on the field.

Writing for a 6-3 majority in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Justice Neil Gorsuch mischaracterized Kennedy’s actions as a “short, private, personal prayer.” In fact, the coach sought public acclaim and extensive media coverage for giving thanks to God at the 50-yard line, sometimes surrounded by players.

No doubt the coaches who copy Kennedy will be celebrated in many Iowa communities.

I’ve been thinking about how coaches like him will change the school sports experience for students like me.

The ankle I severely fractured in January continues to interfere with my wildflower outings. Although I’m able to walk a couple of miles now, I have limited range of motion, which makes it hard to cover much distance on uneven ground like unpaved trails or prairies. My ankle flexion is still too limited for me to feel comfortable doing the long bike rides that used to provide lots of material for this series.

This week, I struck out looking for the plants I had hoped to feature. So I dove into my files and pulled out a selection of wildflowers I’ve found in August over the past six years.

Shawna Anderson: Birth control pills may have saved my life and also helped me to conceive.

When the U.S. House approved a bill in July to protect Americans’ access to birth control, 195 Republicans voted no. Those House members, including Iowa’s Representatives Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and Randy Feenstra, opposed codifying not only my right to access family planning, but also my health care.

As a 43-year-old married mother of two and grandmother, I never thought I would see the day that I needed to defend access to any reproductive care, but here we are. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned what I grew up hearing was the law of the land, Democrats are trying to ensure that people like me will have access to the health care we need.

A friend once told me we should call birth control hormone therapy, because that’s really what it is. Not only does it aid in family planning, but it can treat some medical issues. Let me tell you how birth control/hormone therapy may have saved my life and helped me to conceive.

Nick Covington taught social studies at Ankeny High School from 2012 to 2022 and became the full-time Creative Director of the Human Restoration Project when his teaching contract ended on June 1. You can follow Nick on Twitter @CovingtonEDU. This article was originally published on May 15 on Medium.

On Feb 25, 2022, I resigned as a social studies teacher at Ankeny High School, a position I have held since 2012, effective at the end of the school year. I will not be returning to the classroom this fall.

I have not told all of this story in one place, but I want readers to understand the full context of my decision to leave in its relation to our nation’s destructive and divisive cultural forever war.

U.S. Army veteran Joe Stutler shares his keynote address (as prepared) for the Cedar Rapids Memorial Day ceremony in 2019.

One Veteran’s perspective on the meaning of Memorial Day:

Good morning…..

You’re asking yourselves, “who is this guy and why is he here?”….I wondered the same thing when Linn County Director of Veteran Affairs Don Tyne called me several weeks ago from the Commission meeting to ask if I’d be willing to speak today.

Why me, I asked? I’m not a retired general, not a Medal of Honor recipient, not a Congresscritter or Governor or the like….heck, I’m not even running for office….

Ira Lacher shares a personal story that busted the myth of the “good guy with a gun.”

Years before Donald J. Trump placed the approval of the highest United States official on the toxic streams that run through America, I had it out with my brother-in-law one Thanksgiving Day about the granddaddy of them all: unfettered access to personal weapons of mass destruction. The stridency on both sides soared to such a pitch, the rest of the family vacated the room.

But I had to say what I said in a manner holding nothing back. Because months before, I’d learned what the seduction of a firearm can do to even those whom most of us would consider the most rational of souls.

What follows is a true story. I have eliminated names because everyone involved is still living, and they deserve anonymity, because I consider them the most rational of souls.

Editor’s note: This column contains discussion of sexual abuse.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register, where this essay first appeared. He serves as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

Two decades ago, I became dimly aware of the poet Richard Eberhart. Not because of anything he had written or done recently to breach my knowledge gap. Rather, because he was from Austin (Minnesota), as was Dad’s family. Despite his minimal interest in poetry, it was Dad who first brought Eberhart to my attention, logical in light of their shared Austin background.

My curiosity piqued, I began investigating. “Who’s this famous poet… from AUSTIN?”

This column first appeared in the Carroll Times Herald, where Douglas Burns is the vice president for news.

In the 1960 movie “Inherit the Wind,” a signature piece of filmmaking that dramatizes the Scopes Monkey Trial, Spencer Tracy’s character, the attorney defending the teaching of evolution in schools, in very animated fashion delivers one of the best lines in cinematic history.

“Why did God plague us with the capacity to think?” says Tracy’s Henry Drummond. “Why do you deny the one thing that sets man above the other animals? What other merit have we? The elephant is larger, the horse stronger and swifter, the butterfly more beautiful, the mosquito more prolific, even the sponge is more durable.”

Drummond is the fictional character based on legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow who squared off with populist/evangelist William Jennings Bryan in arguably the most significant debate in American history: the Scopes trial in 1925.

“Inherit The Wind” is one of Carroll educator James Knott’s favorite movies.

Janice Harbaugh is a retired counselor and teacher, a fifth generation Iowan and fifth generation Greene Countian. She writes for Greene County News Online covering county government and writing occasional features.

My heart is in Ukraine.

In 1999, my husband and I met a foreign exchange student sponsored by a program in Jasper County. Alona was from a village in Ukraine and she lived with us on our acreage near Mitchellville for several months.

We learned about the history of eastern Europe, the conditions in Ukraine, her family, and her hopes for the future as we traveled around Iowa, showing her our history and treasures. She told us people in Ukraine know Iowa because of agricultural exchanges.

We would visit family in Greene County and I told her this is some of the richest soil in the world. Alona would tease me that soil in Ukraine is “deeper and a little blacker.”  

Glenn Hurst is a family physician in southwest Iowa and a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate.

I grew up the younger of two boys in a military family whose ancestors immigrated from western Europe. By the time I was old enough to be making significant memories, my family had settled into a rural community just outside the Air Force base where dad was stationed in Nebraska. I did most of my growing up in that small town.

This was the late 1970s and early 1980s. To my memory, all the kids in my classroom for the first eight years were Caucasian. I do not recall a single person of color. I do not recall a single book we read or that was read to us where the main characters were anything other than white, mostly male, and gender normative.

Dr. Anita Fleming-Rife relates her family’s story in making the case for the Build Back Better Act.

In 1966, thanks to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s anti-poverty programs, I attended the Des Moines School of Practical Nursing—a year-long program. Our government invested in me, paying my tuition, buying my books and uniforms, and providing a stipend. 

When I divorced in 1971, I was able to take care of my three young children without government aid. This investment yielded even more dividends. Because I worked with other professionals who saw my hard work ethic, grit, and determination, they encouraged me to go back to school. I did, and I worked two jobs for the first half of my bachelor’s degree. I transferred from the urban center to a college town with three children in tow and completed my B.A. I would later earn an M.A. and PhD.

Edward Kelly, Jr. is a former Pentecostal Fundamentalist minister.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his 1963 book Why We Can’t Wait, “Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads as a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity.”

I was a vicious carrier of that disease, marked by the symptoms of fear, hatred, and bigotry. I carried and spread it as a contagion for 30 years as a Fundamentalist preacher. I took great pride in my views, even referring to myself from the pulpit as a “Bible Bigot”—as if intolerance based on scripture was morally acceptable.

In 1996, while serving as an interim pastor in a small Assembly of God Church in eastern Iowa, I experienced a depressive suicidal crisis. There is something to be said about the Buddhist practice of accepting suffering as a part of the human experience. My depressive episode opened me up to introspection. After treatment, I began a long process—taking two decades—involving paideia.

I spent much of Saturday reading or watching eyewitness accounts or reflections on the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

I was living in the UK, so the first half of my day passed routinely as I worked on my dissertation at home. Nothing unusual was on the BBC newscast I watched over my lunch break. The first plane struck the World Trade Center a little before 2:00 pm. I got a call soon after urging me to turn on the television and watched the horror unfold for the rest of the day and evening.

The attacks were a top news story in the UK for a long time. Most people don’t know 9/11 was the deadliest terrorist incident in British history. At least 67 UK citizens lost their lives, mostly in the World Trade Center or on the airplanes. No Irish Republican Army bombing had ever claimed nearly as many victims. For weeks afterward, I remember random strangers in London offering their condolences for what happened to my country as soon as they heard my American accent.

I’ve been covering Iowa politics on this website for more than fourteen years, and I can truthfully say this adventure never gets old. But I’ve been meaning to let Bleeding Heartland readers know about two relatively new projects I’m enjoying as well.

“What would you say if you saw it in another country?”

Dartmouth political science professor Brendan Nyhan used that catch phrase throughout Donald Trump’s presidency (up to its very last day) to highlight the president’s public comments or official acts that in any other country would be seen as warning signs of a slide toward authoritarian rule.

The thought experiment always resonated with me, because I saw it in another country.

Kyla Claussen is one of some 16,000 Iowans on waiting lists for disability services. -promoted by Laura Belin

My name is Kyla Claussen and I’m from Avoca, Iowa. I have an unknown progressive neuromuscular disorder that has been slowly taking skills away from me over the past five years. By March 2020, I was unable to walk independently anymore or work. Last August, I went on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and then applied for the Physical Disability Waiver and the Health and Disability Waiver.

I’m now waiting for services in my home, along with 15,956 Iowans on the waiting list for one of the waivers for people with disabilities. Most likely, I will be waiting for one to three years.

Lori Hunt is a Democrat from Polk County, a member of the Planned Parenthood Speakers Bureau, professional cat wrangler, writer, breadwinner, and bread baker. -promoted by Laura Belin

One of the first questions people ask when you meet someone is what do you do for a living? Where do you work?

If you are in between jobs or not quite at your desired one, you sigh, explain your circumstances, and give an elevator pitch as to how it happened and what you’re looking for. Our job is so tied into our identity and self worth. 

I was furloughed from my retail job at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was scheduled to start another job with the U.S. Census Bureau, but that got put on hold as well. In March, the warehouse called my manager at home and told her of the plans to temporarily shut down the store. She came over, locked up, and sent us home. 

In the rush to get out, I didn’t even grab my empty Tupperware and cheese in the fridge. We all figured we’d be back in a month. Not so likely.

Rachel Bruns is a volunteer advocate for quality maternal health care in Iowa. -promoted by Laura Belin

As I plan to write several posts in the coming weeks related to maternal-child health in Iowa, I want to introduce myself to Bleeding Heartland readers. For this piece, I’m going to provide some high-level information on the landscape around maternal health in Iowa from my perspective as a maternal-child health advocate.

But first, some background on myself and how I became involved in this work.

Connie Belin passed away on June 23, 1980. She was only 49. I was eleven, the youngest of her five children.

I’ve learned a lot from the defining event of my childhood, but it comes down to this: you never stop needing your parents.

Amy Ward: “We heard that Jay’s passing was peaceful and that two nurses held his hands, but oh, how we hungered to make sure the last words he heard were from those who really loved and knew him.” -promoted by Laura Belin

In early February, our family watched the news about the novel coronavirus. We hoped, as I imagine others did, that our family would somehow remain untouched by the pandemic. That was not to be our fate.

Many of the most powerful COVID-era images that I have seen were taken from New York City or Los Angeles: stark cityscapes that seem far away and nearly foreign. In May, we buried my father-in-law Jay at a peaceful suburban cemetery – not in a big city, but in our verdant hometown of Des Moines, Iowa.

Religious institutions across Iowa are now allowed to hold large services, under Governor Kim Reynolds’ latest proclamation related to novel coronavirus, which took effect on May 1. While most churches declined to schedule in-person services for this Sunday morning, some are looking at ways to modify their space or practices in order to resume face-to-face worship soon.

In mid-March, the governor temporarily prohibited religious or spiritual gatherings of more than ten people. Her April 27 order lifted that ban, provided that houses of worship “implement reasonable measures […] to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19 consistent with guidance issued by the Iowa Department of Public Health.” Among other things, the department recommends that people practice good hygiene and adjust the layout so congregants not from the same household can “sit at least six feet apart.”

That advice is insufficient to keep those carrying the virus from infecting others.

Tanya Keith is an activist and small business owner in Des Moines. -promoted by Laura Belin

You may have heard yesterday that Adam Schlesinger, founding member of Fountains of Wayne, passed away from COVID-19 complications. Perhaps you liked their music, and will miss his talents. For me, his passing was a defining moment.

Tanya Keith is an activist and small business owner in Des Moines, and author of the recently published Soccer Stars on the Pitch. -promoted by Laura Belin

On Sunday, my son coughed as he was unloading the clean dishes. Thus began my adventure of losing faith in Iowa’s COVID-19 response.

I grabbed the forehead scanner and “beeped” him. Normal. But it gave me pause. With three kids, and kids not presenting with symptoms, I decided to beep all the foreheads in the house. I was normal, the teen was normal, but the preschooler scanned at 100.4 and my husband at 99.9. 

Holding out hope that testing standards had relaxed enough to include all symptomatic Iowans, I called the Urgent Care associated with our doctor’s office. They told me I would need to call the Iowa Department of Public Health’s hotline at 211. So I did.

Paul W. Johnson is a preacher’s kid, former Peace Corps Volunteer, former state legislator, former chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service/Natural Resources Conservation Service, former director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, and a retired farmer. -promoted by Laura Belin

As my life’s journey winds down, I often wake at night and mull over the wonderful life this world, my country, my state, my community, and my friends and family have given me.  Music has been an important part of my life. 

The gospel songs I learned in church, the country and western and pop music of the 1950s came first. Then came classical music.  Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto in D – tense, boisterous, serene. It could be the theme music of my life. Or the theme music of the 300-year-old white oaks in our woods. Or of the Monarch butterflies that stop by our prairies in fall and feast on the nectar of the late-blooming asters before the north winds send them on a wild ride to their winter hangouts in the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico.

Recently Stuart Hamblen’s song of the 1950s, This Old House, has washed over me. It goes, “Ain’t a gonna need this house no longer, Ain’t a gonna need this house no more.”

Tanya Keith of Des Moines spoke to the Iowa Senate subcommittee considering Senate Joint Resolution 21 on January 16. -promoted by Laura Belin

The Iowa Senate Republican majority has proposed amending Iowa’s constitution to state that the document “does not secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.” I believe this is wrong on so many levels. But State Senator Jake Chapman refused to allow me to speak more than two minutes at the subcommittee meeting he chaired, even though I was the only person testifying with a personal story.

I encourage you to watch my testimony, but I hope you will honor my story by also reading the full text of what I wanted to say. I find it disgusting that this issue was pushed out of subcommittee so quickly, and that Chapman clearly has no interest in hearing from Iowans about it. Here is the video:

Ira Lacher reacts to a Des Moines Register guest editorial by an Iowan living in New York, who has encountered “ignorance toward Middle America.” -promoted by Laura Belin

As you may have guessed from my posting name, I was born closer to West Farms Road in the Bronx, New York, than to any farm in Iowa. But when I was 22, I left New York City and moved to America.

So it was with great bemusement that I noticed the give and take on social media surrounding Colleen Connolly’s op-ed in The Des Moines Register about how New Yorkers and East Coasters in general dis Iowans and other Midwesterners.

Ryan Bruner is an Iowan who is approaching politics with love. -promoted by Laura Belin

Holidays are a time of reflection. Thinking back on my childhood in western Iowa, there could have been no more perfect place to spend my early years. Within a three-mile radius from my childhood home was my whole world– school, church, family, friends. I rode my bike to school and walked a block every Sunday to a packed Saint Lawrence Church. My friends and I would race to our neighbor’s front yard to play football after school and leave our bikes unlocked by the street without a care in the world.

We grew up in a Midwest dream town. Neighbors took care of each other and set aside differences for the greater good of the community.

Ira Lacher: “We hear that as Jewish Americans, we must be for Israel right or wrong and that anyone who is not is an anti-Semite. What rubbish!” -promoted by Laura Belin

During the 1960s, many of us protested the war in Vietnam. War supporters immediately accused us of being unpatriotic. “America right or wrong” became the mantra of the hard-hats.

We protested because it was becoming obvious that America was engaged in an immoral war, which was costing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese, as well as the reputation of America around the world. That didn’t stop those who believed that America can do no wrong from vilifying us as anti-American. As traitors.

But we were not anti-American. We were anti-war. Anti-government. And we were protesting because we loved America. But hated what it was promulgating.

The same phenomenon is happening today. But it involves Jewish Americans and Israel.

“Now these are shirts!”, Governor Kim Reynolds posted on her political Facebook page on August 12, next to a picture of herself with two Iowa State Fair-goers.

The shirts she found appealing sent a clear message: real Americans and military service members are Christians.

Heather Marie Dunn is a transgender Iowan and “recovering right-winger” in Polk County. -promoted by Laura Belin

To the FAMiLY Leader,

This open letter was inspired by your call for dialogue. As a fellow evangelical Christian who is a transgender woman, I welcome dialogue. I commend Bob Vander Plaats for being willing to sit down with the late Donna Red Wing for coffee.

However, here is why you may be running into resistance from the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. I can’t speak for them, but I suspect most progressives are hesitant to dialogue with you for the following reasons.

Heather Marie Dunn is a transgender Iowan and “recovering right-winger” in Polk County. -promoted by Laura Belin

“She lied to me,” were my first thoughts when I heard Governor Kim Reynolds had signed the health and human services budget that included a mean-spirited exclusion of transgender and intersex health care from Iowa’s Medicaid system.

Matt Chapman has been helping to organize neighbors since residents of his mobile home park recently received notice that rent will go up by some 69 percent in June. -promoted by Laura Belin

The evictions have started where I live at Midwest Country Estates in Waukee. The new owners, Havenpark Capital, have a business model devoid of any compassion or even a passing concern for the elderly and vulnerable in the mobile home park they purchased. They made a promise to the shareholders, and apparently there is no room for empathy when dividends are being maximized.

I turned 50 years old this month. Ten years ago, I marked my milestone birthday by flagging “40 good bloggers over 40.” This time, I am casting a wider net to highlight not only people with their own blogs (which are, unfortunately, in a state of decline), but any political reporters, commentators, or authors who are in their second half-century.

Many writers I enjoy reading were too young to be listed here, such as Douglas Burns, Andie Dominick, Todd Dorman, Juliette Kayyem, Andy Kopsa, and a star of political blogging’s “golden age,” Atrios/Duncan Black. An early draft of this post included William Petroski, who recently retired from the Des Moines Register. His coverage of Iowa legislative happenings is missed.

One of my all-time favorite bloggers, Steve Gilliard, would be in his 50s now. I’ve often wished he had lived to cover Barack Obama’s presidency and the Donald Trump disaster.

On to the list, in alphabetical order:

Tim Nelson is a Des Moines-based activist and social media provocateur. -promoted by Laura Belin

An Open Letter To Heterosexual, Cisgender, Caucasian Men Currently In Or Flirting With The Alt Right- Made Public For Sharing)

Hello There,

My name is Tim Nelson, and I am probably what some of you would call a cuck or a beta .ale. I am a heterosexual, cisgender, caucasian male in my twenties involved in leftist activism and politics. I regularly bat for women, trans people and other minorities on my various social media accounts.

Alexandra Rucinski: “Calling a woman a ‘man hater’ contributes to a violent culture that is killing women.” -promoted by Laura Belin

At the very beginning of this year, a man lined up five women on the floor in a bank in Florida and shot each of them in the head, killing all of them within minutes. It barely made national headlines.

Every day, at least three women are killed by their intimate partners.

A woman is raped in America every two minutes.

It goes without saying that women have every reason to be afraid of the men they encounter.

What does that fear look like, and what is really being said when a woman who is honest about those fears is labeled a “man hater”?

Iowa House Chief Clerk Carmine Boal has refused to grant me credentials for the chamber during the 2019 legislative session. Staff for Governor Kim Reynolds have ignored repeated messages seeking credentials to cover the governor’s office or an explanation for denying my request.

Under the U.S. and Iowa constitutions, no government agency or official may restrain or abridge the freedom of the press. Government bodies must apply any media restrictions uniformly, without regard to the content of news reporting or commentary. That’s not happening here.

Tom Witosky, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, reflects on threats to tribal sovereignty and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claims to Native American ancestry. -promoted by Laura Belin

One cold winter day, my maternal grandfather, Cliff King, and I went for a long walk.

Late afternoon in Wisconsin with sunlight fading and snow crunching under our feet, we talked about a lot of things as a bracing breeze out of the north slapped our faces red. This walk was a necessary one for Cliff, who liked to walk outside because it was the only time he could get a chaw of tobacco out of from under the watchful eye of my grandmother and my mother.

He offered me a chunk and – having done a bit of it during my summers in an Idaho logging camp – I accepted. We walked quietly for a while, this man who had been born in the Indian Territory before Oklahoma had become a state and before he was recognized as a U.S. citizen and his grandson, now a college student.

While traffic numbers are easy to measure, picking out my most labor-intensive posts from last year is a subjective call.

Laura Belin’s not a new byline for me, but it’s new to this page. As of today, “desmoinesdem” is being retired.

The Bleeding Heartland community lost a valued voice this year when Johnson County Supervisor Kurt Friese passed away in October. As Mike Carberry noted in his obituary for his good friend, Kurt had a tremendous amount on his plate, and I was grateful whenever he found time to share his commentaries in this space. His final post here was a thought-provoking look at his own upbringing and past intimate relationships in light of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Friese was among more than 100 guest authors who produced 202 Bleeding Heartland posts during 2018, shattering the previous record of 164 posts by 83 writers in 2017. I’m thankful for every piece and have linked to them all below.

You will find scoops grounded in original research, commentary about major news events, personal reflections on events from many years ago, and stories in photographs or cartoons. Some posts were short, while others developed an argument over thousands of words. Pieces by Allison Engel, Randy Richardson, Tyler Higgs, and Matt Chapman were among the most-viewed at the site this year. In the full list, I’ve noted other posts that were especially popular.

Please get in touch if you would like to write about any political topic of local, statewide, or national importance during 2019. If you do not already have a Bleeding Heartland account, I can set one up for you and explain the process. There is no standard format or word limit. I copy-edit for clarity but don’t micromanage how authors express themselves. Although most authors write under their real names, pseudonyms are allowed here and may be advisable for those writing about sensitive topics or whose day job does not permit expressing political views. I ask authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest, such as being are a paid staffer, consultant, or lobbyist promoting any candidate or policy they discuss here.

Ann Crane (not her real name) is an Iowa woman who has suffered from chronic pain for nearly 18 years. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Around the country, there has been much discussion around the use of cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to treat medical conditions. Most states allow the use of medical cannabis, and a few have legalized recreational use of cannabis as well. Under a 2017 Iowa law, cannabidiol with no more than 3 percent THC can be used to treat a small number of “debilitating medical conditions” (recently expanded by one).

I am one of thousands who suffer from “intractable or chronic pain,” one of the qualifying medical conditions in Iowa.

A personal reflection from Ira Lacher, inspired by the tragic events of the past week. -promoted by desmoinesdem

When I was 22, I left New York and moved to America.

It’s a line I have used over the years to introduce myself. I use it in jest, and it gets a laugh. Most folks who hear it realize that New York City and the Northeast are worlds apart from the land between the coasts.

But I never realized how far apart until now.

Robert Niederklopfer is a cartoonist and active Democrat in Des Moines. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Comic books taught me not to be anti-Semitic, and I have my anti-Semitic father to thank for that.

President Donald Trump seems unable to behave appropriately in any situation, so his tone-deaf reaction to the murder of eleven people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue on October 27 was on brand.

Alexandra Rucinski is a patient advocate for Planned Parenthood and an activist for sex education and reproductive rights. -promoted by desmoinesdem

I was talking to my now fiance; we’d been together for a bit at this point, and we were talking about sex. Out of the blue, I asked him if he was beginning to have sex with someone, and then they changed their mind and asked him to stop, would he stop?

He very quickly responded that yes, he would immediately stop and that if he didn’t stop, that was rape.

That was the moment it clicked inside my head that what happened to me that summer day wasn’t ok. I couldn’t bring myself to call it rape yet, but that was the first time someone told me that not stopping was wrong, that not stopping was a violation. No one had ever said anything like that to me before.

Johnson County Supervisor Kurt Friese wrote this commentary before The New Yorker published new sexual misconduct allegations about Brett Kavanaugh on September 23. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Let’s get this out there at the outset: I am a person of tremendous privilege. I may not be at the very top of the privilege ladder, but as a college-educated, straight, white cis male who attended both public and private schools during my upper middle class suburban upbringing, as a successful business person, and now as an elected official, yeah, I’m up there.

The coming Jewish high holidays inspired this reflection by Ira Lacher of Des Moines. -promoted by desmoinesdem

The Jewish people are about to enter into the annual Ten Days of Repentance — Aseret Yemei Teshuva in Hebrew — in which, by tradition, we take stock of our behavior of the last year. Jews don’t have daily confession; we let it build up over 365 days and then try to purge ourselves of shame, guilt and what many of us would call sin, as we pray to God for another year of well-being.

“For the sins of one against God, God forgives,” says an age-old prayer. “But for the sins of one against another, God does not forgive, unless they have made peace with one another.”

So, as my people make preparations for this season of confession, I would like to confess: I’ve made my peace with Germany.

Ben Muller is a University of Iowa student. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Do you know why Republicans aren’t desperately jumping ship right now? Because they’re getting everything they wanted from Donald Trump. Not just the rich ones; his base too. So what if they lose their coal jobs? They were going to lose them anyway.

They voted for him because they knew it would make us miserable. Watching us squirm is worth more to them than any miracle a president can achieve in eight years, and can you really blame them? Think about how so many of us perceive these people. We’re as hateful as they are; we just happen to have the advantage of being a little more diverse, and thus we tend to think a little more globally.

It’s hardly unreasonable to suggest that the burden of taking the first step, being the bigger person, rests with those of us who concede we will never truly understand different groups of people if our opinions about those groups are divorced from cultural relativism.

Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet and the cancellation of her show are a macro example of what is happening in our everyday lives, folks feeling empowered to share openly what they used to hide: bigotry. After a visit from someone I have known for forty or so years, I was surprised how he had suddenly embraced right wing talking points.

A personal reflection by Jon Muller. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Those who read my posts have come to expect conclusions based on data, some level of quantification of a process, phenomenon, or proposal. There are plenty of data with respect to abortion that might inform our views, but this is simply my spiritual and moral view with respect to two claims.

1) Choosing to terminate a pregnancy is not a moral question.

2) The right of a woman to have an abortion should not be infringed.

Alexandra Rucinski is a patient advocate for Planned Parenthood and an activist for sex education and reproductive rights. Iowa’s near-total abortion ban inspired her to write this commentary. -promoted by desmoinesdem

I vividly remember the only sex-ed class I ever took in high school. A woman who worked for Planned Parenthood came to teach our class. I remember eyeing her with distrust as she talked about things absolutely forbidden to me. I didn’t listen because I felt like I wasn’t supposed to listen.

A personal commentary by Matt Chapman to coincide with the “Day on the Hill” for our state’s National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter. NAMI Iowa’s “mission is to raise public awareness and concern about mental illness, to foster research, to improve treatment and to upgrade the system of care for the people of Iowa.” -promoted by desmoinesdem

In the last few years I have found myself politically active and seem to be trying to make up for years of not having the right to vote and taking it for granted when I did participate. I would like to share where my focus is and relate how I came to feel so intensely about these issues. You never know when you may find your voice, and if it took me until my 50s, so be it.

Prominent Iowa Republican Jamie Johnson resigned yesterday as leader of the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Faith-Based & Neighborhood Partnerships, after CNN exposed a pattern of racist statements and “inflammatory remarks about Islam” between 2008 and 2016.

Johnson told CNN his past comments “do not represent my views personally or professionally”; “Having witnessed leaders from the entire faith spectrum work to empower their communities I now see things much differently.”

Whatever Johnson believes today, his generalizations about lazy, promiscuous, drug-using African Americans and Muslims who “want to cut our heads off” didn’t attract any special notice, let alone condemnation, in Iowa GOP circles. Republican activists elected the reverend to serve multiple terms on the party’s State Central Committee. Presidential candidates also sought Johnson’s support. He worked for Rick Santorum before the 2012 caucuses and for Rick Perry and Donald Trump at various times during the 2016 election cycle.

As a Jew, I want to express my utmost contempt for how Johnson praised American Jewish culture as a rhetorical device while denigrating other minority groups.

I was young and naive. Isn’t that how these narratives are supposed to start?

Kelly Roberts is a part-time writer/blogger, full-time Human Resources consultant, and newly minted political activist. Pictured above: her grandfather, Charles Moel (Pompoo, to her) -promoted by desmoinesdem

Once upon a time, during the dark, discombobulating night of a medical crisis, my family encountered Medicaid.

The author is a longtime personal friend. I can confirm this post accurately conveys what happened to her family. -promoted by desmoinesdem

I never worried about pre-existing conditions before the fall of 2008. We were young, healthy, and gainfully employed with employer-provided health insurance. What was there to worry about? It’s a little painful to admit how self-centered and over-confident I was, but there it is. Just keep a job with insurance or be sure to make COBRA payments and there was no problem. At the time, my husband was an engineer in working as a VP in manufacturing, and I owned two stores. Oh to be young, financially secure, and over-confident!

Then one day in September, I stopped to fill a prescription for my daughter’s eye drops and the pharmacist told me my insurance had been cancelled.

Taylor Soule is a blogger, editor and nonprofit communicator. You can follow her on Twitter @TaylorOSoule. -promoted by desmoinesdem

After reading The Washington Post’s profile of Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, I struggled to focus my reaction to his refusal to eat alone with women outside his marriage. Sure, it astounded me that a man could be successful — Vice President of the United States — despite excluding women in such a profound, sweeping way. But at its core, I found myself remembering a dizzying swirl of moments and microaggressions, each rooted in the notion that women are inherently distractions — not people, let alone professionals.

Freedom to chase any story that captures my attention is the best part of running this website. A strong sense of purpose carries me through the most time-consuming projects. But not all work that seems worthwhile is fun. Classic example: I didn’t enjoy communicating with the white nationalist leader who bankrolled racist robocalls to promote Donald Trump shortly before the Iowa caucuses.

Continuing a tradition I started last year, here are the Bleeding Heartland posts from 2016 that have a special place in my heart. Not all of them addressed important Iowa political news, but all were a joy to write.

For the first time last year, I put some thought into what posts had consumed the greatest amount of my energy. I realized that some of those deep dives were among my most satisfying writing projects. That new awareness informed my editorial choices in good and bad ways. Unfortunately, some election-related stories I would have covered in previous cycles didn’t get written in 2016, because I was immersed in other topics. On the plus side, those rabbit holes led to work I’m proud to have published.

Assembling this post was more challenging than last year’s version. Several pieces that would have been among my most labor-intensive in another year didn’t make the cut. A couple of posts that might have made the top ten were not ready to go before the holidays. Maybe they will end up in a future collection of seventeen posts I worked hardest on in 2017.

Like many politically active teenagers, I was excited to be old enough to vote for the first time, in 1988. I’d volunteered and caucused for Paul Simon earlier in the year, but I had no trouble coming around to support our party’s nominee, Michael Dukakis. I was fortunate to attend part of the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, where most people were confident we were going to win back the White House. By the time I filled out my absentee ballot in the fall, I was worried, because a disastrous debate moment and a brutal attack ad from George H.W. Bush’s campaign had turned things around.

Indeed, Dukakis was wiped out, gaining 7 million fewer votes and losing the electoral college 426 to 111.

As a college student on the east coast for most of Bush’s presidency, I felt proud that Iowa had been among the ten states to reject him. In fact, my favorite comeback to rude comments about “flyover country” was, “As least we voted for Dukakis.” It was more than people from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, or even California could say.

This week I looked up the Iowa returns from 1988 and realized that Dukakis carried this state much more convincingly than I remembered: 670,557 votes to 545,355 (54.7 percent to 44.5 percent). Dukakis outpolled Bush here by roughly as large a margin as Donald Trump’s advantage over Hillary Clinton this week.

When I looked at the county map of results, I was stunned to see that Dukakis carried 75 of Iowa’s 99 counties. Bush carried only 24.

Fifteen years later, images of the burning and collapsing World Trade Center towers are fresh in the minds of just about everyone old enough to remember 9/11. All topics are welcome in this thread, including any reflections on that horrific day.

Many people casually refer to “3,000 Americans” killed on 9/11, but hundreds of the victims were from other countries. Last year, the Brilliant Maps website posted a map created by reddit user thepenaltytick, showing all countries that lost at least one citizen. Most of the globe is covered.

The United Kingdom lost 67 citizens (some tourists, others working in the U.S.), making 9/11 the deadliest terror attack in that country’s history.

I was living in London fifteen years ago. Having watched the BBC’s uneventful news over lunch, I turned off the tv to get back to work on my dissertation. Around 2:00 pm, which would have been 9:00 am in New York, someone called and told me to turn the tv back on. I was glued to the BBC for the rest of the day and night. Watching the people trapped on the roof of the World Trade Center, I couldn’t understand why none of the helicopters could get close enough to rescue them before the towers collapsed. I could not believe a plane was able to crash into the Pentagon.

In Britain, as in the U.S., there was a tremendous public outpouring of grief after the attacks. British people are normally reserved with strangers, but many approached me after hearing my American accent in a shop or a train station, just to say how very sorry they were about what had happened in my country. UPDATE: Added below photos a reader sent, showing piles of flowers and gifts and notes left outside the U.S. embassy in London in September 2001.

I didn’t lose any friends on 9/11, and only one of my acquaintances lost a loved one that day; his father was on one of the planes that hit the towers. Even without experiencing a personal bereavement, I felt enraged, especially when reading newspaper profiles of the victims. During the Jewish high holidays in late September 2001, the last thing I felt like doing was reflecting on the past and forgiving wrongs from the past year. At that time, I heard a BBC radio segment featuring the UK’s Chief Rabbi, David Sacks. He reminded listeners that the Bible (he meant the Hebrew Scriptures or “Old Testament”) tells us once to love our neighbors, but tells us approximately 30 times to love the stranger. That’s because it is easier to love our neighbor, who is probably a lot like ourselves, than it is to love a stranger. It’s the only quote I remember from what must have been dozens of radio commentaries by Sacks I heard during my years abroad.

This week, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein called for a new investigation of the 9/11 events. Stein is headlining a rally at the state capitol in Des Moines today from 3 pm to 5:30. To any readers who attend: feel free to write about the speakers or crowd atmosphere in a comment or a guest post for Bleeding Heartland later. MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald analyzed Stein’s campaign strategy a few weeks ago, arguing she “seems unsure how to speak to anyone this side of Noam Chomsky” and has “misread” the Bernie Sanders playbook while attempting to appeal to Sanders supporters.

Big news on Friday: in a move without precedent, the Obama administration ordered that construction of the Dakota Access (Bakken) pipeline “will not go forward at this time” on Army Corps land bordering or under a North Dakota lake on Standing Rock Sioux tribal land. Gavin Aronsen wrote up the story for Iowa Informer. The federal action will not affect Bakken pipeline construction in Iowa. Though the project will probably be completed in all four states eventually, James MacPherson reported for the Associated Press that the government’s intervention “may forever change the way all energy infrastructure projects [affecting tribal land] are reviewed in the future.”

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Lauren Whitehead’s post on political activism while parenting got me thinking about my Iowa caucus experiences as a parent of young children. I did a lot of phone banking from home while kids were napping or my husband was watching them. I never brought my kids along to knock doors, but one of my sons enjoyed coming with me in the car to deliver yard signs.

We brought our baby to the 2004 precinct caucus. A good sling or other comfortable baby carrier makes this very manageable, and I would do it again with no hesitation. Caveat: that baby was both extroverted and a night owl. A baby who needs to go to bed early or gets overwhelmed by crowds would do better at home with a baby-sitter.

We brought a toddler and a preschooler to our 2008 caucus, which was much more challenging. Mr. desmoinesdem did most of the kid-wrangling while I was doing precinct captain duties. The caucus can easily take more than an hour, even if you don’t stay for the platform resolutions. The rooms tend to be crowded, leaving no place for a little one to run around. The atmosphere can be overstimulating or too stuffy for young children. Early evening is often not the best time for kids’ behavior anyway. If I could do it over, I would arrange for a nice babysitter who wasn’t interested in politics to watch my kids on caucus night.

I’m 100 percent for bringing older kids to the caucus. It’s a fantastic way for them to learn about the process.

After the 2010 elections, I wrote a post on explaining political disagreements and election outcomes to young children. I’m interested to hear how other parents have handled similar conversations.

On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned the Russian presidency six months before the end of his term, making Prime Minister Vladimir Putin acting president and forcing an early presidential election. I was in graduate school, working on a dissertation about corporate and state power over the Russian media during the post-Soviet period. I had recently spent eight weeks in Moscow reporting on the parliamentary election campaign for my former full-time employer, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I didn’t realize those would be the last Russian elections in which the outcome was not a foregone conclusion.

As soon as I heard Yeltsin had stepped down, I knew I would be returning to Moscow sooner than planned to help cover the presidential campaign for RFE/RL. I didn’t realize that someday I would look back on the sequence of events from Putin becoming prime minister in August 1999 to his first presidential election as the beginning of the end for what was supposed to be my life’s work.

I continued to freelance for RFE/RL for five more years, occasionally writing up daily news and producing in-depth reports on Russia’s 2003 parliamentary elections and 2004 presidential race. But over time, most of my favorite beats became irrelevant or much less interesting. The way Putin’s rise to power affected me can’t compare to the consequences for 100 million plus Russian citizens and many people in countries neighboring the Russian Federation. The fact remains: had Yeltsin chosen a different kind of successor, I probably would not have immersed myself in Iowa politics later.

Drew Miller didn’t know any of this when he invited me to start writing for Bleeding Heartland’s front page in early 2007. We’d never met in person or talked offline. Soon after creating this website with Chris Woods, Drew landed a new job that was incompatible with blogging. He knew “desmoinesdem” only as one of the earliest registered users at Bleeding Heartland and a regular commenter at other Iowa sites. I hadn’t put much thought into my alter ego’s name; desmoinesdem was just a handle for posting at American political blogs, beginning in 2003 when I was still publishing regularly about Russia under my own byline.

I have become attached to Bleeding Heartland as a vehicle for digging into the same topics I loved covering in Russia during the 1990s: campaigns and elections, legislative work, corporate influence over public policy, and media bias.

Thank you to everyone who has in any way supported my ongoing effort to reinvent myself as a writer.

While working on another piece about Iowa politics highlights from the year, I decided to start a new Bleeding Heartland tradition. Writing is a labor of love for me, as for many bloggers, but let’s face it: not all posts are equally lovable.

The most important political events can be frustrating or maddening to write up, especially when there is so much ground to cover.

Any blogger will confirm that posts attracting the most readers are not necessarily the author’s favorites. The highest-traffic Bleeding Heartland post of 2015–in fact, the highest-traffic post in this blog’s history–was just another detailed account of a message-testing opinion poll, like many that came before. Word to the wise: if you want a link from the Drudge Report, it helps to type up a bunch of negative statements about Hillary Clinton.

Sometimes, committing to a topic leads to a long, hard slog. I spent more time on this critique of political coverage at the Des Moines Register than on any other piece of writing I’ve done in the last decade. But honestly, the task was more depressing than enjoyable.

Other pieces were pure pleasure. Follow me after the jump for my top fifteen from 2015.

What’s on your mind this long weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Thanksgiving has been a national holiday on the last Thursday in November since 1869. I didn’t know that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt caused an uproar when he tried to move the date a week early in 1939, hoping to stimulate the economy.

For many people, Thanksgiving is inextricably linked to certain food traditions. One of them is leftovers the day after the feast. Please share your own favorite recipes for leftovers in the comments. Des Moines restauranteur George Formaro offered three of his favorite uses for extra turkey here. Most years I make soup on the day after Thanksgiving. Here are four ideas, two of which would work for vegetarians as well as for omnivores. We had a smaller gathering than usual yesterday, so I baked chicken rather than a turkey. I made curried butternut squash soup early in the day; this recipe also works well with canned pumpkin. I didn’t make cranberry sauce this year, but when I do, I like to mix the leftover sauce with apples for a pie a day or two later.

Matt Viser published a fantastic piece in the Boston Globe this week: “Michael Dukakis would very much like your turkey carcass.” Turns out the former Massachusetts governor and Democratic nominee for president in 1988 “collects Thanksgiving turkey carcasses to make soup for his extended family for the year to come.” I enclosed excerpts from Viser’s piece below, but do click through to read the whole thing. The Dukakis family recipe for turkey soup is simple and easy to adapt to personal tastes.

Ideally, everyone could have a restful and enjoyable Thanksgiving, but the holiday season brings extra stress to many. Some tips for battling anxiety or depression this time of year are here and here. The first holiday season after a major bereavement can be particularly difficult for mourners; Compassion Books has hundreds of resources for people coping with “serious illness, death and dying, grief, bereavement, and losses of all kinds, including suicide, trauma, sudden loss, and violence.” A separate section inclues age-appropriate books for children who have lost a parent, sibling, grandparent, or even a treasured family pet. Carol Staudacher’s book of short meditations, A Time to Grieve, has been a source of comfort to me at difficult times. Whether or not you are religious, Harold Kushner’s verse by verse analysis of the 23rd Psalm is fascinating and provides some helpful perspectives on grieving.

I used to loathe the end of January. Around that time, anxiety-ridden managers would start suggesting that I help organize the Black History Month activities for February. Bless their hearts. They either genuinely felt our staff needed to be more conscious of the contributions African Americans made to society, or somewhere in their manager handbook, this was mentioned in the cultural sensitivity part.

Growing up, I was always slated to read the “I Have A Dream,” speech in class or chosen to explain how the Underground Railroad operated without physical tracks. Back in 1st grade, when our progressive music teacher wanted us to learn about soulful pop music, she wrote a play and cast me as Michael Jackrabbit, the moonwalking bunny with a culturally ambiguous face.

All of this was a version of tokenism that I had become accustomed to before I even knew tokenism was a thing. Tokenism is race and gender agnostic. No one is safe. Consider the exemplary woman who has broken into the good ‘ole boys club of corporate America, or the lone gay man at a job  brimming with tough guys and their laughable displays of machismo, or in my case, the prototypical black face in nearly every social group to which I’ve belonged. Anyone can become a victim of tokenism, but it will always befall the Only One in the Room, a phrase that I’ve borrowed from a recent NPR article. The article, “On Wyatt Cenac, Key & Peele, And Being The Only One In the Room,” describes situations wherein there is only one minority in a group, otherwise known as the last 20 years of my life. Life is hard for the token, and it’s hard for the Only One. When you are both at once, it feels like playing a game of chess while balancing on a high wire.

Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, has reportedly died at the age of 84. I have nothing profound to say about his passing. Anyone who made it his life’s work to hold “God Hates Fags” signs at funerals is a sad commentary on his upbringing and the failures of our country’s mental health system.

Five years ago this spring and summer, the Phelps crowd came to central Iowa to protest the arrival of marriage equality and picket Jewish sites around town. The Jewish community chose not to engage with them. I wholeheartedly agreed with that decision, because the Westboro Baptist Church does not represent a social movement. They are basically a family cult of mentally ill people. I believe that they thrive on the negative attention they receive from those offended by their message. Being denounced on social media or confronted by a counter-protest is likely more gratifying than having no one react to their bigotry.  

I urge people who believe in tolerance to ignore everything the Westboro Baptist Church leaders say and do from now on. Focus your outrage on something more constructive.

Any relevant thoughts are welcome in this thread. I’ve enclosed below comments from State Senator Matt McCoy, who credited Phelps with inadvertently helping the gay rights movement.

P.S.- I am aware that it’s ironic for me to write about a topic I would rather see ignored.  

What’s on your mind this weekend? In the spirit of past Mother’s Day diaries at this site, I’ve posted some mother-related links after the jump. I also added my thoughts on the latest TIME magazine cover, a sexualized depiction of a three-year-old breastfeeding next to a provocative “Are You Mom Enough?” tag line.