Bruce Lear responds to Governor Kim Reynolds’ recent open letter to Iowans, enclosed in full at the end of this post. -promoted by Laura Belin

Dear Governor Reynolds,

Thank you for your letter to all Iowans. I thought I’d take a minute to respond, certainly not for all Iowans, but for one very concerned citizen.

The theme of your letter seems to be that we are all in this together. We are. But there are different levels of “together.” It’s a lot like the old story of the chicken and the pig asked to contribute to breakfast. The chicken drops off her contribution and leaves, and the pig sacrifices everything.

Emilene Leone explains the step-by-step process to creating her “home gone wild in suburbia,” with phenomenal photographs of the flowers, birds, and insects that visit her native plant garden in Davenport. -promoted by Laura Belin

For the last two summers, I have been working on converting large sections of my home’s yard to native plant space. I’ve been documenting the process both on my own Facebook page, as well as on Casa Leone Gardens. I was invited to write a post about my project for Bleeding Heartland’s wonderful “Wildflower Wednesday” series, and I’m so happy to do so!

Dan Guild sees Joe Biden’s choice as influenced by Bill Clinton’s counter-intuitive but “phenomenally successful” pick for vice president. -promoted by Laura Belin

After weeks of speculation, Joe Biden has made his choice: Kamala Harris. He wasn’t late. As the table below shows, his announcement was actually a little earlier than most by a day or two.

Will it matter? Political scientists have studied the matter and usually concluded no. I think the answer is more nuanced than that.

Brad Zaun’s fifth campaign for the state legislature will be his toughest yet.

Like affluent suburban areas around the country, Iowa Senate district 20 has been trending away from Republicans. Democrats in the northwest suburbs of Des Moines did well in the 2019 local elections and more recently surpassed the GOP in voter registrations.

Zaun has adapted to the new environment with messaging that doesn’t mention his party affiliation, his votes for many controversial laws, his numerous attempts to ban abortion, or his early support for Donald Trump’s candidacy.

On the contrary, he is campaigning as an “independent voice” and leader on improving education and mental health services.

Two of Iowa’s best resources for public policy research have merged, the institutions announced on August 6. The Child and Family Policy Center and the Iowa Policy Project are building “on a collective 50 years of experience” and will be known as Common Good Iowa.

Look to Common Good Iowa for the rock-solid research, rigorous policy analysis and focused advocacy that Iowans have come to expect from CFPC and IPP, and for a new, invigorated approach to advance a bold policy agenda advancing equity and effective policy in four areas:
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• Well-being of children and families, especially those failed by our current systems
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• Adequate and equitably raised revenue to support strong public structures
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• Workplace fairness and living wages for all Iowans
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• Clean air, water and sustainable energy for a healthy future for all

Common Good Iowa will maintain offices in Des Moines and Iowa City, according to a news released I’ve enclosed below.

The two organizations have long collaborated on research published under the banner of the Iowa Fiscal Partnership. Some of their “greatest hits”:

“Quite simply, when someone serves their sentence and pays the price our justice system has set for their crimes, they should have their right to vote restored automatically, plain and simple,” Governor Kim Reynolds said on August 5, shortly before signing a critically important document.

Executive Order 7 automatically restores voting rights to most Iowans who have completed prison sentences or terms of probation or parole associated with felony convictions. The Iowa-Nebraska NAACP estimated that the order paves the way for more than 40,000 people to vote this year. Going forward, approximately 4,700 Iowans who complete felony sentences each year will regain the same rights.

Reynolds had publicly promised to sign such an order seven weeks ago, after Republican senators declined to advance the state constitutional amendment that was her preferred way of addressing the problem.

Both the substance of the measure and the way the governor announced it revealed aspects of her leadership style.

Julie Ann Neely: “We will live through this, but when the pandemic runs its course, environmental degradation will remain to disrupt our economy and threaten our health.” -promoted by Laura Belin

While simultaneously trying to stay safe and reopen the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic reminds us daily that we are all part of the interconnected web of life on earth. We are struggling with unprecedented disruptions in healthcare and the economy, as climate disasters increase in frequency and intensity, exacerbating health risks.

Long after this wave of infections ebbs and a vaccine is developed, we will still live with the reverberations. Whether we are able to deal with them depends on the leaders we elect in November.

In the grand scheme of things, Mother Earth doesn’t give a fig about politics, the stock market, big profits, or the lines we draw in the sand that divide us. Nor does she need us.

Herb Strentz profiles the most trusted figure of the COVID-19 pandemic and a Sister of Charity whose service to the targets of the Postville raid was legendary. -promoted by Laura Belin

Pardon the trifling with the McDonald’s jingle, but it catches the refreshing touch intended to recognize a couple of wonderful people — one you’re familiar with and one you’ll be delighted to meet.

They are Dr. Anthony Fauci, 79, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and Mary McCauley, 81, a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Today’s featured plant won’t win any popularity contests. In fact, I know people who rip Virginia stickseed (Hackelia virginiana) out of the ground as soon as they identify it anywhere on their property.

This common woodland species, sometimes just called stickseed, has unimpressive flowers that become irritating burs. The burs spawned the common names beggar’s lice or sticktight. I don’t pull up these plants like I do with garlic mustard, but I keep an eye out for them so my shoes, clothes, and dog don’t end up covered in burs.

Virginia stickseed is native to most of the U.S. and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains. I frequently see it in the woods or near woodland edges. According to the Illinois Wildflowers site, “Stickseed prefers disturbed wooded areas and it is rather weedy.”

I took the pictures enclosed below in Windsor Heights, Clive, or Urbandale.

Katie Rock is the Campaign Representative for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign in Iowa. Beyond Coal is a national campaign led by the Sierra Club to retire the U.S. coal fleet by 2030. You can find her on Twitter @KatieRockIA. -promoted by Laura Belin

Our current unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. Now is the time when we need to think and act boldly as a community so we can all get through this together. We need our state, and our service and utility providers to step up for families. We need to ensure no one faces eviction or loses their essential services during this time.

The base pay for Iowa’s medical director and state epidemiologist Dr. Caitlin Pedati increased by 45 percent as the current fiscal year began on July 1, records obtained by Bleeding Heartland show. The additional $3,144 that Pedati began receiving per two-week pay period would translate to an extra $81,744 in base salary over twelve months.

The doctor leading the state’s COVID-19 pandemic response also received more than $55,000 in overtime pay from March through early July, even though her job class would not normally be eligible for overtime compensation.

Aspiring lawyers gathered in Des Moines on July 28 and July 29, for about eight hours each day, to take Iowa’s Uniform Bar Exam in person.

More than a dozen states, accounting for about two-thirds of exam takers, postponed or otherwise altered plans to administer the grueling two-day test that determines where attorneys can practice law.

However, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected calls to shift to an online exam or offer a limited “diploma privilege” so that graduates of the University of Iowa or Drake University law schools could practice in this state without passing the bar. Instead, the judicial branch’s Office of Professional Regulation took several steps to reduce the chance exam takers could spread COVID-19 to one another.

Van Buren County had 24 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of July 29, according to Iowa’s official coronavirus website. But the local health department had recorded 46 cases in that southeast Iowa county by that date.

The discrepancy in one small county’s reported COVID-19 case numbers could point to big trouble for managing school closures this fall.

The old saying, the “The Devil is in the details,” applies to Governor Kim Reynolds’ July 30 press conference in more ways than just the policy she announced.

Charles Bruner: Joe Biden’s plan to improve the caregiving and education workforce is “every bit as ambitious as the New Deal at the time of the depression or the New Frontier/War on Poverty/Great Society efforts of the 1960s.” -promoted by Laura Belin

It may or may not receive the media attention or the public dialogue it deserves during the campaign, but presidential candidate Joe Biden’s “Plan for Mobilizing American Talent and Heart to Create a 21st Century Caregiving and Education Workforce” represents the type of bold vision that has the potential to reshape and fundamentally improve our society.

It opens with a recognition of the critical role caregivers and helpers play in our society:

Rob Johnson, Al Womble, and Eddie Mauro of the New Frontier Fund jointly authored this commentary. The No Justice No Peace PAC is online at www.njnppac.com. -promoted by Laura Belin

History is a curious thing. Our understanding of our past changes with time – moving through phases where our perception shifts, evolves and deepens. This examination of our history is constant, and it happens in the public sphere through discussions via social media, the news, commentary, and politics.

We are in the midst of a significant reorganization and shift in how we see, hear, and experience the history of race in America. It’s colliding with a time when Americans fundamentally re-evaluate how we relate to our institutions of government, our neighbors, and our local communities.

This confrontation is messy. It’s fraught with conflict. And it’s necessary.

Tyler Granger compares the recent work of U.S. Representative Cindy Axne and Senator Chuck Grassley. -promoted by Laura Belin

America’s clean energy economy has been hit extremely hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. An estimated 620,000 U.S. clean energy workers lost their jobs from March 2020 to May 2020, and clean energy employment has fallen by 18 percent over that same time period.

Allies of U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley affectionately call him the father of Iowa wind energy. That may have been true a decade ago, but Grassley has been an absentee father in 2020 when it comes to renewable energy.

Bruce Lear: Some Republicans are using difficult decisions about reopening schools during a pandemic to justify redirecting public funds toward education vouchers. -promoted by Laura Belin

One of the inevitable consequences of any disaster are scam artists who prey on the vulnerable. This pandemic is no exception.  There have been scams from surefire cures for COVID-19 peddled by medical hucksters to clever crooks plotting to steal stimulus checks.

Now comes yet another scam, only this time victim is public education, and the scam artists aren’t shadowy figures no one knows. Instead, these are federal and state Republican office holders, trying to use a pandemic as cover for ripping off public money to use for private schools for vouchers.

Clay Pasqual is Operations Director at the Progressive Turnout Project, which is a grassroots-funded organization located in Davenport and aimed at increasing voter turnout amongst Democrats. -promoted by Laura Belin

I’ve been advocating for maintaining and adopting reforms to our health care system that promote quality care, affordability, innovation, technology and science for nearly a decade now since the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Seeing my mother struggle with and ultimately pass away from pancreatic cancer a few years ago further reinforced to me the importance of encouraging innovative research and technology in the health care field that can detect, prevent and cure deadly diseases like pancreatic cancer before it’s too late.

The flowers of this prairie inhabitant have eluded me for years. Fortunately, I have friends with better timing.

Leadplant (Amorpha canescens) is indigenous to most of the Midwest and plains states, but it’s not one of those native plants you’ll often see along the roadside, like ironweed.

Although leadplant (sometimes called lead plant) is not rare or threatened, I’ve only found it in good-quality prairies, where it “tends to grow in clumps.” The Illinois Wildflowers website validates my experience: “The presence of Leadplant is a sign of high quality habitat. Because of its deep roots, recovery from fire is very good.”

Speaking of which, the Friends of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden website notes that “The alternate name ‘Devil’s Shoestrings’ comes from the deep roots which farmers were never able to plough out.” The more common name of leadplant comes from “the whitish or hoary color tinge from the fine leaf and stem hair.”