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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Posted July 03, 2024in Political Mercury
After the rains, or in the routines of daily life, in one of the more war-ravaged reaches of the globe, residents would spot the signs of unexploded munitions, mortars and other devices of death. The Army National Guard’s combat engineers would scout and remove rocket rounds and similar weapons for
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Posted June 05, 2024in Political Mercury
Harold Beach, a northeast Missouri farmer who runs a row-crop operation and raises hogs and cattle, traveled to central Iowa recently to urge one of the nation’s top regulators to stop a multi-billion-dollar takeover of a Lee County fertilizer plant he and other rural advocates say will further erode competition
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Posted May 01, 2024in Political Mercury
Deep in the warm hurricane of 1980s nostalgia-minded groups on Facebook are the occasional references to fearful school-kid preparation exercises for a forefront haunt to humanity at the time — the night-shaking stalk of the prospect of a world-ending nuclear holocaust. Remember duck and cover under the chewing-gum-ridden desk chairs?
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Posted April 03, 2024in Political Mercury
If civil judgments don’t drain the Trump Machine into cashless-ness, the former president may want to open up theaters in the swing states for free showings of the Jason Statham movie “The Beekeeper.” Screenwriter Kurt Wimmer may be accidentally inspiring MAGA more effectively than any speechwriter in Trump’s infamously off-script political orbit. “The Beekeeper” is
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Posted March 06, 2024in Political Mercury
We were all in the formula, the algorithm of horror that is a modern school shooting. Death for some, dehumanization for others. In covering the Perry school shootings Jan. 4, what struck me was the hope-stealing realization that so many students and families seemed prepared for their roles. The students I talked
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Posted January 31, 2024in Political Mercury
Tom Harkin still has it. The pulse of Iowa on instinct auto dial and a force of moral clarity and that defining doggedness, an aw-shucks ease with voters, and a rhetorical sledgehammer ever ready when he needs it. He’s fast, too, on the draw with a prescription for Democrats in
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Posted January 03, 2024in Political Mercury
Twenty one years ago, Chuck Offenburger and I had ringside seats for a rare and fascinating journalistic forum: the now late George “Lefty” Mills, the legendary Des Moines Register reporter; the late Bob Beck, the former publisher of Centerville’s Daily Iowegian, a towering figure in journalism and Republican politics for decades; and my
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Posted December 06, 2023in Political Mercury
Six-year-old Hayes Hofmeister of rural Cedar Rapids, a Springville, Iowa, farm kid, can’t stop talking about Josh Turek — “that guy in the wheelchair” — the one who plays basketball and has Paralympics gold medals. The one who inspired him at Camp Sunnyside. Born with Spina Bifida, Hayes, a bright-eyed kindergartener,
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