Posted March 20, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
Oh, for the 1970s — were it not for those wildly ridiculous pants. Those of us in older generations remember a time when K-12 educators were asked to teach reading and writing and arithmetic, with a field trip to the zoo or some such place thrown in maybe once or
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Posted March 13, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
The “Iowa Nice” guy — he of the snark and snarl, the Internet sensation with the clockmaker’s timing for profanity — talked of being nice. Honestly. For real. Even in a virtual world. “We have to somehow transition into listening again,” Scott Siepker said. Siepker, a Mount Carmel native and
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Posted March 06, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
Congressman Steve King — not a person one usually associates with Shakespeare in word games — is playing a convincing Hamlet with his teasing and toying over a possible bid for the U.S. Senate. The Kiron politician is the Republican keeping other Republicans in a holding pattern. The rest of
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Posted February 27, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
The thing about a bully is, nobody expects the bullied to win the fight — they just want to see some fight. So let’s say you’re on the school bus, a squirmy, gangly, pimple-faced seventh-grader so uncomfortable with talking to girls that you run from animated female characters when playing
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Posted February 20, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
The brilliant actress Maggie Smith of “Downton Abbey” quoted the playwright Noel Coward on “60 Minutes” Sunday night in talking about her advancing age. She’s 78. “It seems like you eat breakfast every 30 minutes,” Smith said, referring to how days go racing by as one matures. Fair enough. For
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Posted February 13, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
Let’s get straight to the point. The Harkin Institute of Public Policy shouldn’t be located anywhere that’s accessible by taking a taxi from an airport. Visitors and researchers should have to traverse — by car or small plane — the farms U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin has so ably represented for
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Posted February 06, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
“No one’s a Boy Scout, not even a Boy Scout.” “I hate children. There, I said it.” — “House of Cards” Francis Underwood The just-released, made-for-Netflix political drama “House of Cards” — 13, 50-minute episodes rolled out in a delicious package — is so damn good it makes you
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Posted January 30, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
Congressman Bruce Braley admitted he had a hard act to follow. Iowa’s two U.S. senators, Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley, who were both sworn into Congress in 1975, celebrated their 10th presidential inauguration dating back to President Jimmy Carter, who was in attendance in Washington, D.C., last Monday as President
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Posted January 23, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
Will Iowa Republicans in 2013 accept from first-term U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida what they wouldn’t from war-hero, political veteran John McCain in 2008? One could be speaking for the other on immigration, allowing, of course, for five years difference, and taking into account the Republican Party’s suicidal approach
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Posted January 16, 2013in Featured Story, Political Mercury
What a delight to chronicle the story of Lillian Braden and her 12 brothers and seven sisters, all biological kids of Jans and Elizabeth Peters, German Lutheran immigrants who settled near Glidden in the early 1900s. Mrs. Braden passed away at the age of 92 earlier this month, the last
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