Winners

Rest assured, you starving Bangladeshis, you malnourished children of sub-Saharan Africa, Des Moines residents appreciate your plight. Home to the World Food Prize, where we roll out the red carpet for scientists and social activists who increase the food security of residents struggling to fill their stomachs in the most impoverished corners of the globe, we understand the terrible tragedy of world hunger. And we Central Iowans show our solidarity for those in need the best way we know how - we take precious time out of our prime-time television-watching schedule, saunter down to the World Food Festival, pay a nauseating amount of money to gluttonously chow down on our seventh meal of the day, purposefully oblivious as to its ethnic origin, toss half of the calorie-laden indulgence into the trash can as we bitch about the obnoxious foreign music, get fucked up on Miller Lite and try to remember where the hell that nick-knack was from that we bought to make our new downtown loft apartment look, like, worldy, or something. See? Who says Iowans don't care?

Losers

Maybe being best friends with Newt Gingrich and leaving your wife and mentally disabled child for your secretary aren't such strong political moves after all. And maybe being an out-of-touch Washington type doesn't qualify you to be governor of Iowa either. Just ask gubernatorial candidate and Congressman Jim Nussle, who is not only best friends with Newt Gingrich and left his mentally disabled wife and child for his secretary, but is also the owner of some unpleasant campaign data released last week. Nussle, who has been thought to be a shoo-in for the G.O.P. side of the ticket against a weak Democratic field, was the subject of a Zogby poll published by the Wall Street Journal online last week that showed the Congressman losing a six-point lead to Democratic frontrunner Chet Culver since May (the two are virtually tied) and losing more than 20 points to Ed Fallon, who, according to the poll, only trails Nussle by 5 percent.

It goes without saying, we're sure, but hundreds of Central Iowans standing in line all night for fast-food chicken sandwiches might go a long way toward explaining some of our state's low self-esteem issues. Sure most people recognize us as the potato state, but the rest of the country sees us as a bunch of fat, cheap losers. And last week's Chick-fil-A promotion at Jordan Creek where hundreds of people waited for the opportunity to get fattening food from the new stand at the mall - albeit for free - helped justify such sentiment. Making it worse was The Des Moines Register, which gladly gave up column space in its "news" section to kiss Chick-fil-A squarely on its feathered ass by telling the newspaper's dwindling readership that the restaurant does not serve fast food, but is rather a "quick-service" restaurant before gushing: "None of its chicken comes in pre-breaded. Workers fillet the chicken breasts onsite, then put them through a milk wash before breading and seasoning them." Thanks for the scoop.

Inconvenience is getting stuck behind a senior citizen on the freeway or knocking your toothbrush into the toilet. Inconvenience is when the city is repaving your street the day of your kid's birthday party, not paving the way for sex offenders to converge on your neighborhood because the law says they have nowhere else to go. Sex-offender residency restrictions have caused no shortage of controversy as Central Iowa cities both large and small - including Des Moines just last week - are frantically expanding the child molester ban to include gathering spots such as public parks, to make sure the sex offenders pushed out by adjacent towns aren't allowed to land in their communities. Sounds good, unless you happen to live in those few remaining slivers of real estate that remain outside the safe spots, where residents worry they could soon find themselves in the middle of state-sanctioned sex-offender ghettos. But last week, legislators stubbornly refused to give their 2,000-foot ban a second thought in the upcoming session, and, as a seeming slap in the face to those living in neighborhoods that could soon host a disproportionate number of sex offenders, Senate Democratic Leader Mike Gronstal added insult to injury when he told The Register: "Whether there is an inconvenience for certain people, we are not particularly sympathetic to their inconvenience." Any room in your neighborhood, Mike? CV

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