Posted April 30, 2025in Political Mercury
Many politicians can persuade you to believe in them. That’s a commonly reached feat. But the defining leaders, elected officials like Tom Harkin, Robert Ray, Henry Wallace and Harold Hughes, are able to summon the inspiration to get Iowans believing in themselves, their own worth and futures. More than any
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Posted April 02, 2025in Political Mercury
Any conflicted pregnant woman who watched the just-concluded Paramount series sensation “Yellowstone” likely scheduled an abortion before the final cowboy deserted Kevin Coster and Taylor Sheridan’s fictional Montana ranch. Costner should reimburse them. “Yellowstone,” a wildly popular and exceedingly entertaining show, sent strong signals about blood and bloodlines, legacy and lore, and
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Posted March 05, 2025in Political Mercury
Compound interest. Of all the strands of imagination and provocations and fear and excitement that engage one during Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Weiner’s terrific book, “Long For This World: The Strange Science of Immortality,” the one that rushes to the fore for me is compound interest. And civil war. In
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Posted February 05, 2025in Political Mercury
The conversation came rushing back to me sometime between the Carter grandchildren’s heart-tugging memories and Andrew Young’s magisterial closing eulogy during the funeral for President Jimmy Carter. As a 10-year-old boy, I thrilled at the return of my father, Robert Burns, to Carroll from a late 1970s trip to Washington, D.C. — and
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Posted January 01, 2025in Political Mercury
In reading the-then (and now-again) publishing sensation “Hillbilly Elegy” eight years ago as it announced a culture-crashing new voice, I found myself stopping at points in the book, both angry and doubtful of its author’s authenticity. I’d intended to fiercely pan “Hillbilly Elegy” in reviews, but I was persuaded then that JD Vance
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Posted December 04, 2024in Political Mercury
I am Dave. If you are online at all, you are Dave. We all are. Human editors, real ones, survive at near-extinction levels. Seeing one at work these days is like watching a bald eagle glide a river canyon, one diving majestically for fish, the other for truth. For the
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Posted November 06, 2024in Political Mercury
(Editor’s note: Doug Burns is a producer of this documentary.) The a-ha moment struck like spring lightning on the groovy 1970s couch, just a hop, skip and a few blocks from the Simpson College campus. I could read! What a discovery for this little kid in Indianola, Iowa. I
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Posted September 10, 2024in Political Mercury
Tom and Ruth Harkin leaned forward in their Fleur Cinema seats in Des Moines in the early evening of July 17 as a film chronicling the civil rights journey of people with disabilities rolled across the screen. They knew the activists, people with a range of physical disabilities, some here,
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Posted September 04, 2024in Political Mercury
A modern political Mason-Dixon line appears to be taking form north of Mason City and south of Albert Lea — somewhere around the Minnesota-Iowa border. The crash of cultures is no accident. And now, the increasing divide will be exposed (and expanded, most likely) under a national spotlight in which
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Posted July 31, 2024in Political Mercury
The conservative master blueprint Project 2025 will start the next civil war. Just not in the ways you think. In a crammed catalog of things I just don’t want to think about — in a kind of running and screaming and kicking way — the storyline I’d most like to avoid considering,
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