When U.S. Representative Steve King thinks out loud, national headlines often follow.

The Des Moines Register’s Robin Opsahl was first to report on King’s musings at the August 14 Westside Conservative Club breakfast in Urbandale.

“What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?” […]

“Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken place and whatever happened to culture after society? I know I can’t certify that I’m not a part of a product of that.”

To many, the comments seem indefensible. But I suspect many conservative Republicans in Iowa approve of King’s uncompromising stance on abortion, even if they don’t like how he talked about the issue.

Sandy Dockendorff is president of the Danville Board of Education and a longtime Democratic activist in southeast Iowa. -promoted by Laura Belin

As a rural school board member, nurse, parent, and grandparent, I’ve been looking for the presidential candidate who shares my vision for America — an America with great public schools, access to quality health care as a right, resources like broadband and child care in rural communities, and opportunity for struggling folks from all walks of life to gain economic security.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee put up a billboard on a busy Des Moines street this week, seeming to attack Democrat Kimberly Graham. It’s part of a strategy to elevate the profiles of “lower-tier candidates” for U.S. Senate in states including North Carolina, Maine, Colorado, and Georgia, Nathan Gonzales reported for Roll Call on August 14.

Of the seventeen milkweed plants (Asclepias genus) that are native to Iowa, only five are widespread in our state: common milkweed, swamp milkweed, butterfly milkweed, whorled milkweed, and sand milkweed.

Today’s featured plant, Tall green milkweed (Asclepias hirtella), is considered “scarce” rather than endangered or threatened in Iowa. Its native range includes parts of eighteen states from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, plus the Canadian province of Ontario. According to the Illinois Wildflowers website, preferred habitats have exposure to full sun, with “moist to dry conditions, and sandy or gravelly soil,” including “dry-mesic railroad prairies, sand prairies, rocky glades, edges of sandy wetlands, roadsides, pastures, and abandoned fields.” This species is sometimes known as prairie milkweed.

Tall green milkweed plants typically reach a height between one and three feet, so aren’t particularly tall compared to some summer wildflowers on the prairie, such as compass plant or cup plant. But it’s taller than a related species called green milkweed ( Asclepias viridiflora). The Minnesota Wildflowers site advises that flowers of Asclepias hirtella “are different enough to avoid confusion, plus A. viridiflora is typically a shorter plant with less densely packed leaves.”

I’ve never seen tall green milkweed in the wild, so relied on other photographers for all of the images enclosed below.

Governor Kim Reynolds’ office requested and received a $200,000 budget increase for the current fiscal year, telling key Republican lawmakers the funding would cover health and tax policy analysts. Both positions have now been filled.

Fifteen months before the 2020 election, Democrats have at least one declared candidate in each of the four most vulnerable Republican-held Iowa Senate districts. That’s good news for a party that needs to start making up ground in the upper chamber, where Republicans hold 32 of the 50 seats.

Bleeding Heartland will publish a fuller review of the Iowa Senate landscape (comparable to this first look at 2020 state House races) when the field is set in more competitive districts. For now, here’s where things stand in the top Democratic targets:

“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.

Twenty Democratic presidential contenders and Congressional candidate J.D. Scholten spoke to an excited, beyond-capacity crowd at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding on August 9. I love everything about this annual fundraiser in Clear Lake’s historic Surf Ballroom, except for the lack of Wi-Fi service.

C-SPAN posted all of the five-minute presidential candidate speeches with closed captioning transcripts, and the complete video from the evening is available on the Fox 10 Phoenix YouTube page. Mike Dec of the Blog4President website published photo galleries of all the speakers.

I left the Wing Ding with the same takeaways that have crossed my mind after almost every political event I’ve attended this year.

Ira Lacher: “Bump stocks and assault weapons notwithstanding, if we seriously want to reduce the number of gun deaths in this country, we need to have a come-to-Jesus debate about guns. But we’re not seeing that debate.” -promoted by Laura Belin

So, Republicans are finally and grudgingly moving forward on gun control. Consider these headlines:

From USA Today: Trump: Congress discussing ‘meaningful’ gun background checks

From Breitbart: Mitch McConnell: ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban ‘Front and Center’ in Senate

From the Washington Times: Trump on gun legislation: ‘Common sense things can be done’

Wow! Guess the public is getting to the president and Congressional Republicans after all. We can breathe easier, now that it seems we’ll be getting some commonsense laws that will at least severely restrict gun violence in America.

Except, no.

Eight weeks ago, two voting rights organizations warned Secretary of State Paul Pate that “Iowa’s voter list maintenance practices are arbitrary and unlawful.” They offered to work with his staff to bring Iowa into compliance with federal and state law, Jason Clayworth reported for the Des Moines Register on August 7.

Pate didn’t even acknowledge their letter.

Action alert from Tyler Granger of the National Wildlife Federation. -promoted by Laura Belin

Despite flooding that devastated the state of Iowa this Spring, our junior U.S. Senator Joni Ernst continues to ignore the climate crisis and to support President Donald Trump’s toxic agenda, which is harming Iowa’s health and economy.

At a recent town hall in Denison, Ernst heard from a Manning constituent, Peter Leo, about the need to act on the climate crisis. Instead of finding common ground, Ernst made the concern a laughing matter and suggested that combating climate change would “crater our economy.”

John Hale is an independent Iowan — thinker, writer, speaker, advocate, consultant. -promoted by Laura Belin

I was inexplicably drawn to a central Iowa Walmart Monday night. I didn’t need to buy anything, but I needed for some reason to be there – maybe to pay homage to those caught in the carnage in El Paso, and maybe to reflect a bit on what this nation has become.

Linn County Supervisor Stacey Walker has ruled out running for U.S. Senate in 2020, he announced in a post published on his website on August 8. He made the “quite difficult decision” mainly because the Democratic primary “was already heavily skewed in favor of one candidate.”

I’ve read a lot of statements by politicians bowing out of a campaign. Few have spoken as frankly about their reasons as Walker.

Dale Alison was managing editor at The Hawk Eye for 27 years before being laid off in 2017, shortly after GateHouse Media bought the Burlington newspaper. -promoted by Laura Belin

Iowans should be concerned that Gannett, owner of the newspaper they’re supposed to depend upon, has been swallowed by the smaller, lesser-known GateHouse Media.

Though the new company will adopt the Gannett brand (let’s call it new Gannett, compared to old Gannett), its DNA is certain to be GateHouse through and through. Despite what’s stated in company press releases, the company’s lineage is littered with bankruptcies, antiquated technology and deep staff cuts, particularly on the news side. The old Gannett had its own reputation for cost-cutting, but it was founded by a newspaperman, Frank Gannett, interested in covering his Upstate New York community. GateHouse was created by a Wall Street private equity fund only to make money.

I used to visit the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge near Prairie City several times a year when my children were younger, and when I regularly drove between Des Moines and Pella. But I hadn’t been there for more than a year until this week. Old friends vacationing from the east coast had heard of the place and share my love of native plants, so we spent half a day in the Prairie Learning and Visitor Center and on one of the nearby walking trails.

You can easily spend an hour or two in the center, watching a short film about the tallgrass prairie and checking out the permanent exhibits on plants and animal life. If you’re lucky, you may be able to see some of the bison herd from a large window overlooking part of the refuge. Volunteers staff the Prairie Point Nature Store, which has a fantastic collection of books (for children as well as adults), toys, t-shirts, postcards, and other small gifts. There’s no cafe or restaurant, but you can bring your own food and eat in the lunchroom.

On to the main attraction…

The Libertarian Party of Iowa and its prospective candidate for U.S. Senate in 2020 have filed a federal lawsuit charging that a new law violates their “violates fundamental voting and associational rights,” as well as equal protection guarantees, by requiring candidates from minor political parties to file nominating papers in mid-March, when Democratic or Republican candidates could qualify for the general election ballot as late as August.

Previous court rulings indicate they have a strong case.

Charlie Mitchell is a food systems writer and researcher in Des Moines. -promoted by Laura Belin

Where does Elizabeth Warren come up with all of these plans? I’ll tell you where she got her new one, aimed at rural communities and agriculture: rural Iowans from every corner of the state.

I know because I observed a member of the brain trust in action. John Russell is an ex-farmer employed by the Warren campaign to drive his black Chevy Colorado all over Iowa. His team calls him “Roaddog.” Though based in Mason City, he crashes on couches with generous supporters most every day of the week.

Bleeding Heartland welcomes guest posts by candidates for local offices in Iowa. -promoted by Laura Belin

Greetings, Iowa!

My name is Nino Erba, and I’m a candidate for Dubuque City Council this year. I’m running in Ward 4, which encompasses downtown and the wealthier households over the bluffs of our city. I’m running because after being involved for so long in city politics and understanding what’s going on in our city and why things happen, it’s time for a radical change. And I believe I’m best equipped for bringing about that change.

James Larew presents a contrarian view on last week’s Democratic debates. -promoted by Laura Belin

When the smoke had cleared from the Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to 3, 1863, it appeared to have been just one more bloody battle in the midst of a war that had no obvious end in sight. Only later—after thousands more skirmishes had been fought—would it become clear that so much more had been achieved at Gettysburg. History would show that the Civil War’s end, culminating in General Lee’s surrender to General Grant, at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, on April 9, 1865 had been predicated nearly two years earlier, when the tides of the entire war had shifted in the Union’s favor at Gettysburg.

So, too, history may record that, on July 30 and 31, 2019, in Detroit, Michigan, well before Iowa’s 2020 presidential nominating caucuses had even been convened, two successive Democratic party presidential nominee debates involving twenty candidates significantly winnowed the field and defined the ultimate outcome of the nomination process: that former Vice President Joe Biden would be the party’s nominee.

Old-timers often reminisce about how much better the Des Moines Register used to be, before Gannett arrived on the scene in 1985. The newspaper employed dozens more reporters and editors, had stringers in every Iowa county, top-tier journalists working in Washington, DC, and a powerful voice on the editorial page.

After several rounds of buyouts and layoffs, the Register has a much smaller newsroom, with no reporters on the ground in DC since 2011 and almost no stringers for more than a decade. The cutbacks have affected every aspect of coverage. The opinion page stopped running daily unsigned editorials in 2017. Last year, the Register “dropped the daily Business Page,” stopped running high school football scores in Saturday editions, and didn’t publish the midterm election results in print until Thursday, November 8.

Things are about to get worse at Iowa’s most important news organization.