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,
Read More →
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
Read More →
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,
Read More →
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
Read More →
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
Read More →
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?
Read More →
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
Read More →
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
Read More →
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
Read More →
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
Read More →
