Posted November 04, 2020in Political Mercury
Our coverage of the 2024 presidential election started — for me, at least — on Oct. 1, 2020 — well over a month before the Nov. 3 election. U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, a Harvard-educated Arkansan, campaigned in Carroll and elsewhere in Iowa for Sen. Joni Ernst. But was he really,
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Posted September 30, 2020in Political Mercury
One of the last questions I asked President Barack Obama during an interview in his second term was this: Would he consider locating his presidential library and museum in Iowa? It’s not a silly or throwaway question, and the president answered it with great seriousness, because it is in our
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Posted September 02, 2020in Political Mercury
One of my great misfortunes is that I never got to know my grandfather, the late publisher of the Carroll Times Herald, James W. Wilson. Either he died too soon, or I was born too late. I was 7, and Grandpa Wilson was 77 when he passed in 1977. Nothing
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Posted August 05, 2020in Political Mercury
Many white Iowans involved in urgent conversations on race in the Hawkeye State digest observations and challenges to institutions — business, political or educational — as insults to them personally, an attack on their whiteness, a reflex that stalls and complicates change, says Stacey Walker, one of Iowa’s ascendant young
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Posted July 01, 2020in Political Mercury
Walk a box store or surf a retailer’s website with one of our nation’s top product safety advocates, and you’ll see some of the horrors he’s dedicated a professional life to removing from the seemingly, but often deceivingly, safe shelves from which Americans grab the stuff of quick errands or
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Posted April 01, 2020in Political Mercury
J.D. Scholten — an Iowa Democrat who rose from obscurity to national prominence with a near-miss challenge to U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, two years ago — has filed nomination for a second run in the sweeping, 39-county 4th Congressional District. Scholten, 40, a former minor league baseball player from
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Posted March 04, 2020in Political Mercury
Win or lose, primary or general, Des Moines businesswoman Theresa Greenfield rolled off one of the better observations about small-town living I’ve heard, a comment that shows she understands the distinctions between our communities. We share values, to be sure, but life is different in Carroll than Creston, and residing
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Posted February 05, 2020in Political Mercury
“Step aside, hick,” the urban Democrats can tell us. Talented rural Democratic candidates for the Iowa Statehouse with deep wells of connectivity in their communities — like Stuart’s Warren Varley, Manning’s Peter Leo and Rippey’s David Weaver — went down to defeat by muscular margins in their 2018 election bids
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Posted January 01, 2020in Political Mercury
The former vice president talks small-town retail, future of ag and nuclear arms. American agriculture can get to net-zero carbon emissions and make money doing it while still feeding the world, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says. “It’s hard for people to get their head around it because it’s so
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Posted December 04, 2019in Political Mercury
Scholten “talks common” in Iowa’s small towns. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and a politician with an instinctive connection to younger and blue-collar voters, called for a “political revolution of working people” in a raucous rally for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in Council Bluffs
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