Iowa’s Republican legislators, Governor Kim Reynolds, and Senator Chuck Grassley inspired the majority of Bleeding Heartland’s most-read posts during the year that just ended. But putting this list together was trickier than my previous efforts to highlight the site’s articles or commentaries that resonated most with readers.

For fifteen years, I primarily used Google Analytics to track site traffic. Google changed some things this year, prompting me to switch to Fathom Analytics (an “alternative that doesn’t compromise visitor privacy for data”) in July. As far as I could tell during the few days when those services overlapped, they reached similar counts for user visits, page views, and other metrics. But the numbers didn’t completely line up, which means the Google Analytics data I have for posts published during the first half of the year may not be the same numbers Fathom would have produced.

Further complicating this enterprise, I cross-post some of my original reporting and commentary on a free email newsletter, launched on Substack in the summer of 2022 as part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Some of those posts generated thousands of views that would not be tabulated as visits to Bleeding Heartland. I didn’t include Substack statistics while writing this piece; if I had, it would have changed the order of some posts listed below.

Governor Kim Reynolds with her predecessor Terry Branstad in photo originally published on Reynolds’ official Facebook page in September 2020

Scott Syroka is a former Johnston city council member.

Antitrust regulators should block the proposed sale of OCI Global’s Iowa Fertilizer Co. plant in Wever (Lee County) to Koch Industries. The deal would be outrageous, but we must look back to fully understand why.

HOW IOWA TAXPAYERS HELPED FUND OCI’S FERTILIZER PLANT IN WEVER

Then-governor Terry Branstad and Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds offered nearly $550 million in tax giveaways to OCI’s predecessor, Orascom, to build the plant prior to its 2017 ribbon cutting.

That included $133 million in local giveaways such as Lee County property tax abatement over twenty years. Another $112 million in state giveaways like corporate tax credits and forgivable loans. And an estimated $300 million in federal tax giveaways from the get-go thanks to the Iowa Finance Authority approving Orascom for $1.2 billion in Midwestern Disaster Area bonds created by Congress after the 2008 floods.

Governor Terry Branstad and Democratic State Senator Jack Hatch are holding their second debate tonight in Burlington. The discussion will focus on economic issues. C-SPAN is televising the debate (channel 95 in the Des Moines area). I’ll be live-blogging after the jump. I expect to hear a lot of bogus statistics from Branstad about jobs he allegedly created. Reality: no economist or labor market analyst tracks the fake statistic the Branstad administration made up (“gross over the month job gains”). That’s just a fiction to allow Branstad to claim he’s on track to create 200,000 jobs. Also, median incomes in Iowa have not grown significantly.

Any comments about the debate or the governor’s race in general are welcome in this thread.  

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jack Hatch announced today that Cedar Rapids City Council member Monica Vernon will be his running mate. In addition to following the Iowa tradition of female lieutenant governors, Vernon balances the ticket geographically and ideologically. An elected official in Iowa’s second-largest city for seven years, she has been campaigning around northeast Iowa since last summer as a Democratic candidate for Congress. She carried Linn County and finished a strong second to Pat Murphy district-wide on June 3.

Some Democrats are grumbling that Vernon is a longtime Republican who joined our party just five years ago. But frankly, Hatch isn’t running in a Democratic primary. He needs to appeal to a statewide electorate including thousands who have become disaffected from the GOP, just like Vernon did. Anyway, she is arguably more progressive than Governor Chet Culver’s running mate, lifelong Democrat Patty Judge. Despite the complaining, there shouldn’t be any major snags when the Iowa Democratic Party’s statewide convention officially nominates Vernon for lieutenant governor this Saturday.

After the jump I’ve posted background on Vernon and other recent news from the Hatch campaign, including his first television commercial for the general election and highlights from his weekend appearance on Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” program.

Immediately following Governor Terry Branstad’s Condition of the State address to Iowa legislators yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal told Iowa Public Television that he “didn’t hear anything I disagreed with.” Not every Iowan who closely follows state government shared his reaction. State Senator Jack Hatch, the leading Democratic challenger to Branstad, slammed the governor’s “very shallow agenda” of “low expectations.”

After the jump I’ve posted more detailed comments from Hatch and a few other Iowa Democrats, as well as statements released by several non-profit organizations, which called attention to important problems Branstad ignored or glossed over.  

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? I’ve been thinking about some high-tech failures. For instance, genetically-modified seeds were supposed to solve farmers’ weed problems. Yet weeds resistant to glyphosate (the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide) are “gaining ground” across Iowa. The problem is worse on farms where Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have been planted the longest.

Rootworms “resistant to one type of genetically engineered corn” are also a growing problem. Genetically-modified seed was supposed to make corn plants poisonous to rootworm, but now farmers are “deploying more chemical pesticides than before.” The outcome was predictable.

On a related note, research shows that nitrogen enrichment through added fertilizers can hurt plant diversity and productivity of grasslands in the long term.

Some Midwestern cities and towns “are absorbing a financial beating after betting big on an innovative coal-fired power plant” during the last decade. “Clean coal” was always a boondoggle.

Speaking of costly investments, the state of Iowa continues to shovel tax credits to Orascom for a fertilizer plant project that would have been built in Iowa anyway. But hey, what’s another $25 million?

This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

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

Governor Terry Branstad didn’t draw the right lessons from Indiana’s experience when he proposed his Healthy Iowa Plan as an alternative to expanding Medicaid. Below I’ve posted excerpts from Laura Hermer’s recent commentary on the Healthy Indiana Plan.

Iowa’s top economic development official, Debi Durham, still can’t answer basic questions about why the state offered more than $100 million in tax incentives to a company that was going to build a fertilizer plant in Iowa anyway. Follow me after the jump for Durham’s non-responsive response on the Orascom deal during this week’s “Iowa Press” program.

Speaking of which, the Branstad administration is stonewalling Iowa Watchdog reporter Sheena Dooley’s efforts to obtain more information about the Orascom deal.

UPDATE: For the hundredth time, family budgets are not comparable to the federal budget. Plus, Michael Tomasky summarizes three basic principles of fiscal policy that should be conventional wisdom already: “Modest deficits are perfectly sustainable. Budget cutting, far from being ‘responsible,’ hurts the economy. And balanced budgets don’t create jobs-it’s the other way around.”

Governor Terry Branstad traveled to Fort Madison yesterday to discuss a fertilizer plant project involving the largest tax incentive package in Iowa history. Previewing a likely theme of his re-election campaign next year, Branstad spun questions over his administration’s handling of the Orascom deal into an attack on Iowa Senate Democrats and the Koch brothers.

The Egyptian company that received the largest tax incentive package in Iowa history has a subsidiary accused of defrauding the federal government out of $332 million, Ryan Foley reported yesterday in a must-read story for the Associated Press. Excerpts from Foley’s article are after the jump, but I strongly recommend reading the whole piece.

Iowa Economic Development Authority Director Debi Durham admitted that the federal lawsuit over improper contracts “did not come up in our due diligence,” which is no surprise. Durham’s negotiating strategy seems to have been not to question anything Orascom executives told Iowa officials. Although Governor Terry Branstad has claimed Iowa landed the fertilizer plant deal “by the skin of our teeth,” evidence suggests Orascom would have invested in Iowa even without generous state and local tax incentives.

Iowa Economic Development Authority Director Debi Durham went to the statehouse yesterday to advocate for more tax credits to use as business incentives during the next fiscal year. She inadvertently revealed that in the negotiating department, she could benefit from wisdom that President Ronald Reagan borrowed from a Russian proverb.

Iowa Senate Ways and Means Committee Chair Joe Bolkcom asserted today that state and local tax dollars were “wasted” on a deal to lure a company to build a fertilizer plant in Lee County, because the Orascom corporation already had huge financial incentives to build in Iowa.

A bidding war between Iowa and Illinois ended yesterday, as an Egyptian company’s representative stood with Governor Terry Branstad to announce plans for a $1.4 billion fertilizer plant in Lee County. A package of state, federal, and local tax incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars will support the project, costing taxpayers more than $1 million for each of the 165 permanent jobs created.