Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

Marilynne Robinson has been called “America’s greatest living writer.” When she calls out Iowa’s governor over our state’s new education policies, we need to pay heed.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson, Ph.D., is professor emeritus in the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop (1991-2016). She continues to live in Iowa City where she writes, plans her lectures, and attends to worship at the Congregational United Church of Christ. 

She is the author of the Pulitzer-winning novel Gilead (2004) and four other novels, all my favorites, plus hundreds of essays, lectures, and collections. Her four novels in the Gilead series were selected as a set for Oprah’s Book Club in 2021.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

The word for today is optics — but not the kind where your eye doctor is an expert.

Instead of eyeglasses, I am thinking about the kind of optics that result when the perception of some person’s or some institution’s values are contradicted by the reality of the actions they take.

The Marshalltown Public Library provided an example of poor optics.

Lora Conrad lives on a small farm in Van Buren County.

Bidens. Whether you call them Bur Marigold or Beggarticks or one of a dozen different common names, they are all Bidens varieties. One year an explosion of many bright yellow flowers but another year, nary a one. That is a characteristic that Bidens cernua and Bidens aristosa have in common…along with making awns with multiple points all the better to grab anything hairy or clothed that walks by.

These are the two Bidens I see the most in Van Buren County. B. aristosa and B. cernua both have lovely bright yellow rays. However, they look different enough to tell them apart on the basis of the flowers alone, as shown in this side by side comparison. (Each is discussed separately below.)

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.

In the spring of 1972, Dad brought a college scholarship application home from work, funds made available through his Hormel union, then the “Amalgamated Meat Cutters & Butcher Workmen of North America,” now the less muscular sounding “United Food & Commercial Workers.” Applicants were required to take a proctored test about the history of the U.S. labor movement. Highest scores would be rewarded at several levels: $1,000 for first, maybe two at $500, probably several at $250.

Instructions included reading a particular book, something like “Mileposts in Labor History.” So, I’ll read the book, take the test, and win the money, ha. As I recall, I had a few days to make this happen, and eagerly swung by the high school library. Not surprisingly, the book was not part of the collection, nor was it in the town library. I did find several relevant volumes, however, one with more photos than narrative (Eugene V. Debs displaying anguish), a Samuel Gompers biography, and a history book with a Haymarket Square chapter.  

A Polk County District Court has ruled that the Iowa legislature “overstepped” when it enacted a law allowing police to search garbage outside a home without a warrant.

In a November 13 order granting a defendant’s motion to suppress evidence obtained through trash grabs, Chief Judge Michael Huppert found the 2022 law “void as inconsistent with the language of article I, section 8 of the Iowa Constitution as interpreted by the Iowa Supreme Court.”

Ohio residents voted to add reproductive rights protections to the state constitution on November 7, passing the measure known as Issue 1 by 56.3 percent to 43.7 percent. When that language goes into effect, it will prevent enforcement of a law Ohio’s Republican trifecta enacted in 2019, which would prohibit almost all abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected.

Iowa Republican lawmakers approved and Governor Kim Reynolds signed a similar near-total abortion ban in July. A Polk County District Court blocked enforcement of that law, and the state has asked the Iowa Supreme Court to dissolve that injunction and uphold the law as constitutional.

Voters in Michigan, California, and Vermont approved reproductive rights constitutional amendments in 2022, and activists hope to place similar measures on the November 2024 ballot in other states, such as Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, and Missouri.

Some Bleeding Heartland readers have asked why Democrats aren’t trying to do the same in Iowa, where polls indicate a strong majority of adults believe abortion should be mostly or always legal, and the state’s partisan lean is roughly the same as Ohio’s.

The answer is simple: there is no mechanism for Iowa voters to place a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot.

Nancy Dugan lives in Altoona, Iowa and has worked as an online editor for the past twelve years.

A Polk County District Court has dismissed a legal challenge to a water permit linked to Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed CO2 pipeline. But the attorney for the petitioners indicated this won’t be the last attempt to derail the permits Summit-linked LLCs will need for carbon capture facilities.

As Bleeding Heartland previously reported, the suit filed by Kimberly Junker, Candice Brandau Larson, and Kathy Carter sought to review the decision by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to issue “a water withdrawal permit pursuant to Iowa Code § 455B.265.”

“Upon review of the Motion and the court file, the court finds and concludes that the Motion is supported by good cause and should be granted for the reasons stated in the Motion,” District Court Judge Jeanie Vaudt wrote in her brief November 7 order.

Tombstone of Lawrence F. Shea at his war grave on the American cemetery in Margraten, Netherlands. Photo by Arne Hückelheim, available via Wikimedia Commons

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

Veterans Day is around the corner. For John and Bob, the day will be for remembering the men and women who serve in the United States military—and two service members, in particular. 

For John, it will be his son, Robert, a Marine lieutenant who will forever be 29 years old. For Bob, it will be his father, Karl, forever the face on treasured family photographs of a handsome 26-year-old Army captain.

John and Bob are patriots through and through. They are not big-government fanatics. They have something else in common, too. They both believe the American people should never forget the ultimate sacrifice paid by members of the U.S. military, and that is a reason they are disappointed with a decision made by the government they love.

They believe the federal government has made a terrible, insensitive mistake by walking away from a pledge to the families of our war dead after World War II—to make it convenient for Gold Star families to remember their 234,000 loved ones who are interred or commemorated in 26 military cemeteries and memorials in more than a dozen foreign countries. 

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. 

In college, I worked as a security guard at a window factory. My job was to make rounds ensuring there were no intruders or fires. Usually there were two guards working in two connected factories. 

The factory was dark; guards were alone.

Most nights I read and dozed. The guards hired were either college students or people who couldn’t find another job, since $2.20 an hour was a lousy wage, even in 1978. 

One of the guards was a failed undertaker who tried to entertain us with mortuary horror stories. He also frequently left his building to jump out and scare the other guard on duty. Most nights, it was a joke.   

But one night, things changed.

Voters in Iowa’s large school districts overwhelmingly picked progressive candidates over conservatives on November 7. In many urban and suburban districts, candidates backed by local Democrats, the Iowa State Education Association (ISEA), and/or the LGBTQ advocacy group One Iowa Action ran the table, while candidates backed by activists on the religious right fell short.

The results are a rebuke to Governor Kim Reynolds and Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature, which enacted new laws in 2023 that undermined public schools and LGBTQ students, and restricted school library books and inclusive curriculum materials.

They also show the enduring strength of the state’s largest teachers union. For many years, Iowans elected school boards in September and city councils and mayors in November. The GOP trifecta changed state law so that beginning in 2019, school board and city elections would occur on the same day. The idea was to increase local election turnout and thereby diminish the ISEA’s influence over school boards. Nevertheless, candidates backed by public educators prevailed in many of this year’s most competitive races.

One city election also underscored how unpopular book banning is with Iowans. In the notoriously conservative town of Pella, voters rejected by 2,041 votes to 1,954 (51.1 percent to 48.9 percent) a ballot measure that would have empowered the city council to overrule the public library board.

Nancy Dugan lives in Altoona, Iowa and has worked as an online editor for the past twelve years.

Summit Agricultural Group operates at least seventeen wells in Kossuth County alone that have not applied for water use permits through the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ (DNR) Water Allocation Compliance and Online (WACOP) permitting system, Bleeding Heartland has learned.

The DNR confirmed the lack of permit applications in response to questions prompted by landowner Alan Laubenthal’s October 5 testimony at the Iowa Utilities Board’s evidentiary hearing in Fort Dodge on Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed CO2 pipeline.

“The department has not received permit applications for these facilities,” DNR outreach and marketing bureau chief Tammie Krausman confirmed in a November 3 email. “It is the applicant’s responsibility to know if they need a permit and apply according to the requirements. The requirement is 25,000 gallons in a 24-hour period. While facilities are capable of pumping more than 25,000 gallons per day, the permit requirement is based on the actual usage of water.”

UPDATE: The “no” campaign won in Pella by 2,041 votes to 1,954 (51.1 percent to 48.9 percent). Original post follows.

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.

“No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.” -Toni Morrison

It isn’t by mistake that I begin with a quote from an author whose books have been banned in more than a dozen Iowa school districts. Nor do I think it is a mistake that five women in Pella have been fighting a clean fight for democracy and have conducted themselves in a way that is neatly depicted in the second sentence of the quote.

It’s a textbook example of spending to influence an election.

A brand-new organization, “Citizens For Des Moines,” was registered with the Iowa Secretary of State on October 20. Its president, Doug Gross, is a prominent Republican attorney and major donor to city council member Connie Boesen’s mayoral campaign. The group paid to print and send at least two mass mailings attacking Boesen’s main rival in the mayoral race, which reached numerous Des Moines voters less than a week before the November 7 election.

Iowa law requires disclosure of independent expenditures that support or oppose a candidate for office, and requires political action committees to periodically report on their fundraising and spending. But Citizens For Des Moines exploited gaps in the law, so voters will be unable to find out who donated to the group or how much was spent on mail targeting city council member Josh Mandelbaum.

Five of the eight Iowa counties with the largest Black populations “had trial juries that were fully representative of their jury-eligible Black population” during 2022 and the first half of 2023, according to data analyzed by the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP. However, trial juries in Polk County and Scott County failed to hit that benchmark, and Dubuque County was “particularly problematic,” with zero Black members of any trial jury during the eighteen-month period reviewed.

The same review indicated that trial juries in Linn and Woodbury counties were close to being representative of the area’s jury-eligible Latino population, while Latinos were underrepresented on juries in Johnson, Marshall, Scott, and Polk counties, and particularly in Muscatine County.

Russell Lovell and David Walker, retired Drake Law School professors who co-chair the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP Legal Redress Committee, examined juror data provided by the Iowa Judicial Branch and presented their findings at the 11th Annual Iowa Summit on Justice and Disparities in Ankeny on November 3.

Nancy Dugan lives in Altoona, Iowa and has worked as an online editor for the past 12 years.

Internal Iowa Utilities Board documents provide little insight into the board’s decision to hire Carolina Dispute Settlement Services and North Carolina attorney Frank Laney to conduct mediation sessions on Summit Carbon Solutions’ CO2 pipeline project.

The records the board provided in response to Bleeding Heartland’s request do reveal, however, that the board hoped for a stronger response to mediation from landowners along Summit Carbon’s proposed path.

According to Iowa Utilities Board general counsel Jon Tack, the board did not enter into a written contract with Carolina Dispute Settlement Services or Laney. “The Iowa Utilities Board does not have a contract with Frank Laney or Carolina Dispute Settlement Services and will ensure any payments do not exceed State of Iowa procurement limitations,” Tack told Bleeding Heartland via email on October 30.

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.  

Cheryl Tevis writes Unfinished Business, a weekly Substack newsletter for the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this column first appeared. She is an editor emeritus with Successful Farming at DotDash Meredith, and a contributor to the Iowa History Journal. Cheryl is president of Iowa Women in Agriculture.

My stint on a rural Boone County school board from 1996 to 2005 was no picnic. It was punctuated by controversies over one-way vs. two-way sharing agreements, reorganization votes, and open enrollment petitions. Our board and our new administrator struggled to dig the school out of a financial hole created by a predatory sharing agreement and made worse by the erosion of farm families during the 1980s farm crisis. We worked hard to prevail against a relentless pounding from adverse rural demographic trends.

I’m certain some of the district’s constituents were sorry they ever had voted for me. And as my term ended, personal relationships within our board were strained, and cratering.

Arnold Garson is a semi-retired journalist and executive who worked for 46 years in the newspaper industry, including almost 20 years at The Des Moines Register. He writes the Substack newsletter Second Thoughts, where this article first appeared.

The pair of buildings rising at local taxpayer expense in a field northeast of Sioux City grew out of an idea that would have cost $1.2 million when it was offered ten years ago. Over time, the idea transformed into something entirely different, a new jail facility with what would become an eye-popping price tag. 

The situation has caught the attention of many in Sioux City and may be a cautionary tale for other communities planning major civic improvements.

Iowa Republicans have seen more advertising against former President Donald Trump this year than GOP voters anywhere else in the country.

The Win It Back PAC, a super-PAC with “close ties” to the conservative advocacy group Club for Growth, spent more than $4 million over the summer to run six different television commercials in the Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and Sioux City markets. The Republican Accountability PAC kicked in $1.5 million on its own series of tv ads in Iowa. AFP Action, an arm of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity network, has sent numerous mailings with anti-Trump messages to Iowa households and paid for dozens of Facebook ads seeking to convince Iowans the former president is unelectable. New groups have popped up to fund direct mail in Iowa attacking Trump on issues ranging from LGBTQ rights to COVID-19 policies to crime.

Nevertheless, Trump is as well positioned for the 2024 caucuses as ever, according to the latest Iowa Poll by Selzer & Co for the Des Moines Register, NBC News, and Mediacom. Among those likely to attend the GOP caucuses in January, 43 percent support Trump, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley are tied for second place at 16 percent. No other candidate was in double digits.

Selzer’s findings are consistent with other recent polls of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, showing Trump ahead of DeSantis by at least 20 points and in most cases by more than 30 points.

One could argue the barrage of anti-Trump messages dented the front-runner’s appeal. His numbers in Iowa are lower than his support nationally, where he’s been hovering at or above 55 percent lately in presidential GOP primary polls.

But any early success from the television, direct mail, and digital ad blitz seems to have dissipated. Selzer’s polling suggests Trump’s level of support held steady among likely Iowa GOP caucus-goers: 42 percent in August, 43 percent in October. His lead over the second-place candidate grew from 23 points in August to 27 points this month. Trump’s supporters are also more enthusiastic and “locked in” than those leaning toward other presidential candidates.

The latest Iowa Poll validates the conclusions of research Win It Back PAC conducted this summer: most ads seeking to drive Republicans away from Trump either have no effect or increase his support among the target audience.

Mitch Henry chairs the Iowa Unity Coalition.

The Iowa Unity Coalition believes Chelsea Lepley has a proven track record of working side by side with the citizens of Des Moines Ward 2. She is a third generation east-sider who was raised by a single dad who had a good union job. Chelsea is a homeowner in Capitol Park and a graduate of Iowa State University.

Chelsea has served as a neighborhood leader and president of her own neighborhood association. She has served on the Des Moines Park & Recreation Board, the Polk County Trust Funds Board and many other local boards and commissions with the City of Des Moines.

Chelsea is a highly effective and down-to-earth leader. She has experience working with local small business owners, nonprofits and her fellow neighborhood leaders. Chelsea is invested in strengthening her community.

Vote Chelsea Lepley, a new generation leader on November 7.

Top photo of Chelsea Lepley provided by the author and published with permission.

Editor’s note from Laura Belin: Bleeding Heartland welcomes guest posts advocating for progressive or Democratic candidates in the upcoming city or school board elections.

The Des Moines Register’s editorial board has also endorsed Chelsea Lepley for Ward 2, saying she “has the better conception of the innovation and oversight people need from the council,” and has done “practical work that gives her perspective on the sometimes subtle dynamics that determine whether policies succeed or fail.”