Posted August 05, 2026in Political Mercury
In an inviting and richly reported new book populated with larger-than-life figures cut from the fabric of everyday life in early 1900s central Iowa, the city of Des Moines emerges as the most riveting character. David and Rose Donovan’s “The Nastiest Saloon in Iowa: Murder, Prostitution, and Corruption in the Heartland” reveals
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Posted July 01, 2026in Political Mercury
Democratic candidate for governor, Rob Sand, has selected Crawford County Supervisor Dave Muhlbauer, a cattleman-farmer and deeply rooted rural Iowan from Manilla in western Iowa who ran for the U.S. Senate five years ago, as his lieutenant governor running mate. The pick fortifies Decorah native Sand’s efforts to bridge the
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Posted June 03, 2026in Political Mercury
Dozens of West Des Moines educators delivered a pointed rebuke of U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, a Valley High School alumna, during a May 16 rally that served as both a public condemnation of her record and a call to action ahead of Iowa’s closely watched U.S. Senate race. The event, organized
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Posted May 06, 2026in Political Mercury
Iowa native Don Tate jokes that people often ask if he was born with a pencil in hand. It would explain a lot. Tate, who was raised in Des Moines, has 90 published books to his name as both a writer and illustrator, with a four-decade career in book publishing
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Posted April 01, 2026in Political Mercury
It’s head-spinning to be at once depressed and optimistic. But there I was. Somewhere between ideation and actualization. Something pulled me back. Mostly curiosity, I think. Wanting to know what happens next, a reporter’s DNA, has gotten me through a lot. You gotta live to see tomorrow to know if
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Posted March 04, 2026in Political Mercury
Speaker of The House Mike Johnson is just wrong on his decision to deny a request from the family of the late civil rights leader and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol. Historical precedents swing both ways on this. Dick Cheney and Charlie Kirk didn’t lie
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Posted February 04, 2026in Political Mercury
Early into the first speech I heard her give, Stephanie Steiner said she had a child at age 15. It’s defining in many ways for Steiner, an Iowa Democratic congressional candidate who would go on to have six more kids, battle her way through a truant and self-described wayward childhood
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Posted December 31, 2025in Political Mercury
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and his orbiting panelists relentlessly mocked the weight of a Dunlap, Iowa, Democrat, a rural middle- and high-school band teacher and candidate for the Iowa Legislature, in a viral three-minute national broadcast recently. The barbs aimed at Dunlap City Councilman Benjamin Schauer, who is running in Iowa
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Posted December 03, 2025in Political Mercury
I’ve covered a lot of traffic-crash deaths. “Walking down the track, picking up body parts gives you an appreciation for the power of a train,” an Ames police sergeant told me in the early 1990s in the hours after a collision, just along the Union Pacific Railroad line, in the
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Posted November 05, 2025in Political Mercury
With a rare sense of place, a know-it-when-you-see-it Iowa-ness, Art Cullen’s roaring new book is nothing short of an unsparing mirror for 3.3 million of us in the state. With still-night whispers of truth and bar-fight ferocity, this western Iowa newspaperman reveals the masquerade-ball leadership that’s turned so many of
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