Dan Guild: Donald Trump has positive ratings on handling the economy. But he’s staking his campaign on a “law and order” message. -promoted by Laura Belin
Politics can be as complicated as you like. You can build statistical models to calculate the odds of a candidate winning. Complicated ideological positions can be constructed precisely delineating what is right and wrong.
Most of the time, politics isn’t that complicated.
Herb Strentz reviews recent comments from Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst and Governor Kim Reynolds. -promoted by Laura Belin
Sea-going metaphors and idioms hardly reflect life in Iowa, but may be useful in considering the double whammy that’s hit us with COVID-19 and Trump.
At least that drives this take on our U.S. senators and governor during past few weeks. As one idiom would have it, they are rearranging the deck chairs aboard Iowa’s political and virus-ridden “Titanic.”
Governor Kim Reynolds directed that nearly $450,000 in federal funding the state of Iowa received through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act be used to cover salaries and benefits for staff working in her office.
According to documents Bleeding Heartland obtained from the Iowa Department of Management through public records requests, the funds will cover more than 60 percent of the compensation for 21 employees from March 14 through June 30, 2020.
Reynolds has not disclosed that she allocated funds for that purpose, and reports produced by the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency have not mentioned any CARES Act funding received by the governor’s office. Nor do any such disbursements appear on a database showing thousands of state government expenditures under the CARES Act.
The governor’s communications director Pat Garrett did not respond to four requests for comment over a two-week period.
Iowa continues to attract national media attention due to our high coronavirus case numbers, uncontrolled outbreaks on college campuses, Governor Kim Reynolds’ refusal to mandate face coverings, and her stubborn insistence that all school districts return to in-person instruction.
Another milestone in our state’s losing battle to contain the virus passed with little notice this week. Iowa moved up to eleventh place among the 50 states in terms of COVID-19 cases per capita, surpassing early hot spots New York and New Jersey.
There’s no excuse for how poorly we are managing the pandemic.
Attorney General Tom Miller will not investigate Linn County Auditor Joel Miller for alleged consumer fraud, he informed Secretary of State Paul Pate on September 11.
Ira Lacher: This is about refusing to do anything that could have saved your neighbor from dying. -promoted by Laura Belin
Imagine if, on December 8, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt had told the American people, on the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor:
“There’s this little thing we’re having with Japan. But it’s fine, and it’s going to go away. It’ll be like a miracle.”
Or if on September 12, 2001, President George W. Bush had said:
“Shame on the lamestream news media for reporting fake news that passenger planes were hijacked by terrorists yesterday and crashed intentionally into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”
Dr. Yoni Libbie: Governor Kim Reynolds is exploiting the unseen and denied nature of American death. -promoted by Laura Belin
A lone man’s name became iconic when an agent of the state slowly suffocated him under a uniformed knee.
More than 1,200 Iowans, and 190,000 coronavirus-infected Americans, slowly suffocated, unseen and unnamed while Iowa’s chief executive bumbles with “data and metrics.”
We do not know the names of the COVID-19 dead.
Until we do, we are denying the reality of death and life.
Less than a month into the new academic year, Iowa state officials changed guidance on student absences in a way that will make it difficult for school districts to hit a key metric for transitioning to online learning.
The overwhelming majority of wildflowers Bleeding Heartland has featured over the past eight and a half years have been native to North America. Occasionally I’ve showcased plants that are widespread in Iowa, even though they originated on other continents.
Rough cinquefoil (Potentilla norvegica) can’t be placed definitively in either group.
Its scientific name and alternate common name (Norwegian cinquefoil) suggest a European origin. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers the plant native to most of the country.
Tens of thousands of employees at Iowa’s state universities will have their payroll taxes withheld as usual this fall, despite a recent executive order from President Donald Trump.
Trump moved last month to suspend payroll taxes from September 1 through December 31, 2020. Affected employees would see slightly higher paychecks for the next four months, but would have lower take-home pay from January through April 2021 as employers withhold double the amount for payroll taxes.
Josh Lehman, communications director for the Iowa Board of Regents, told Bleeding Heartland on September 9,
Dr. Greg Cohen has practiced medicine in Chariton since 1994. 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. -promoted by Laura Belin
To the citizens of Lucas County and Iowa:
I haven’t hugged my children or grandson since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have continued to go to work every day to provide medical care to the people of Lucas County and Southern Iowa. Sometimes I wear one mask. Sometimes two. Sometimes a gown. Sometimes two pairs of gloves. Sometimes safety glasses or a face shield.
Bruce Lear: The drive to throw the schoolhouse door open, even in coronavirus “hot zones,” has spawned some terrible ideas. -promoted by Laura Belin
In sports we call them unforced errors. In normal life we call them missteps. But in a pandemic, we call them deadly and foolish.
Unfortunately, the drive to throw the schoolhouse door open for business five days a week, eight hours a day, even in coronavirus “hot zones,” has spawned some terrible ideas in the name of trying to pretend, “I’m OK, You’re OK.”
Iowa is not OK.
State Auditor Rob Sand had “great news” to share with members of the Iowa House and Senate Appropriations Committees in May. Federal officials had agreed not to demand repayment for alleged overbilling, provided that Iowa changed its billing practices for future audits. The savings to the state would amount to tens of thousands of dollars for each fiscal year.
Documents Bleeding Heartland obtained through a public records request confirm that key Reynolds administration officials were on board with the reform plan, and Iowa Senate appropriators took it up in June as the legislature was completing its work.
The records also show that State Representatives Gary Mohr and John Landon refused to move the fix through the Iowa House.
What they don’t explain is why.
When Iowans begin voting on October 5, they will see nine tickets for president and vice president at the top of the ballot.
The most controversial campaign may be that of Kanye West, widely seen as a stalking horse for President Donald Trump and a gravy train for Republican campaign consultants. He has been knocked off the ballot in some states but survived two objections to his candidacy in Iowa last week.
West’s inclusion reflects well on Iowa’s ballot access policies but poorly on the Republican operatives who got his name in front of voters.
Ira Lacher asks, “Why do we continue to treat this president, who has lit a bonfire and thrown convention onto it, in a conventional manner?” -promoted by Laura Belin
The 2016 election was all about convention.
Donald J. Trump pledged he was going to “drain the swamp” — toss out conventions that had made government the enemy of “real Americans. ” And millions, who believed themselves the victims of an unfeeling, bloated, radical-liberal bureaucracy biased in favor of minorities and coastal elites, believed him.
Trump didn’t disappoint. He has fulfilled the wet dreams of conservatives by gutting many regulations on business, slashing the federal non-defense workforce and rolling back environmental protection.
But he also has thrown out almost every unwritten rule pertaining to the presidency since George Washington was handed the keys.
Preethi Reddi found that eight Iowa counties along the Mississippi River continue to have more COVID-19 cases per capita than seven border counties on the Illinois side. -promoted by Laura Belin
In May, Governor Kim Reynolds and the four other Republican governors who elected against stay-at-home orders prematurely published an editorial in the Washington Post titled, “Our states stayed open in the covid-19 pandemic. Here’s why our approach worked.”
Recent data contradict that bold title and point to a need for change in Reynolds’s less aggressive approach to controlling COVID-19 spread.
Governor Kim Reynolds provided many jaw-dropping moments at her latest news conference on September 2: from falsely claiming to have implemented “a lot of” the White House coronavirus task force’s recommendations to defending her “personal responsibility” mantra to misleading about why the state still doesn’t provide accurate COVID-19 testing data, to walking away from a reporter’s follow-up question.
But one exchange, more than any other, crystallized why Iowa is still one of the worst states for COVID-19 spread.
The agency handling payroll for Iowa’s executive, judicial, and legislative employees will not follow President Donald Trump’s recent executive order allowing payroll taxes to be deferred for the last four months of this calendar year.
Wendy Noce, the Centralized Payroll program manager for the Iowa Department of Administrative Services, announced the decision in a September 4 email to state entities.
The Iowa Secretary of State’s office has confirmed in writing what Secretary of State Paul Pate said last week: county auditors may place secure drop boxes outside government buildings, to make it easier for voters to hand-deliver absentee ballots.
Linn County Auditor Joel Miller has opted not to fight the state’s interpretation and will remove three boxes his office had set up near grocery stores in the Cedar Rapids area.
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate has sent his statewide mailing of absentee ballot request forms to active registered voters, his office announced on September 4. “The forms include pre-paid, first class mail postage and an envelope to return the request form to the voter’s county auditor,” the news release clarified.
The secretary of state’s mailing will look like this on one side:
