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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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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