Posted September 23, 2024in Stray Thoughts
Thirty-three years ago on a snowy Friday in November, the nightmare of mass school shootings shocked Iowa like it has never been shocked before. It was 3:40 p.m. A former [...]
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Posted September 09, 2024in Stray Thoughts
I have fielded a bunch of emails, text messages and phone calls in the days since the school shooting in Winder, Georgia. Each one is from Perry, Iowa. Each one [...]
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Posted August 26, 2024in Stray Thoughts
We are in the home stretch of another presidential campaign, and it is important for voters to be alert for the unintended consequences of candidates’ promises. Office-seekers and their supporters [...]
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Posted August 19, 2024in Stray Thoughts
Here we go again. Don’t be surprised if there is a hard-fought campaign between now and the November election over a guy named David May. You may not recognize his [...]
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Posted August 05, 2024in Stray Thoughts
During the 40 years I was a newspaper editor/manager, I strived to ensure the staff incorporated context into their articles. Sometimes, in a journalistic shorthand, that was described “the Iowa [...]
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Posted July 29, 2024in Stray Thoughts
Some memories stick with you — like that August day around 1960 when my parents loaded my two brothers and me into our Dodge Coronet and headed to the Iowa [...]
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Posted July 22, 2024in Stray Thoughts
For the past couple of years, Republicans often accused Joe Biden of dodging the media — refusing to sit for extended interviews, declining to be questioned in regular White House [...]
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Posted July 08, 2024in Stray Thoughts
Do you remember that phrase our nation’s founders wrote in the preamble to the Constitution 237 years ago? The one about forming a more perfect union? We have hit some [...]
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Posted July 01, 2024in Stray Thoughts
Through the years, justices on the Iowa Supreme Court typically avoid harsh or overzealous language in their decisions. That is why two separate dissenting opinions jumped out Friday when the [...]
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Posted June 24, 2024in Stray Thoughts
You know how some memories stick with you for no logical reason? One such memory involves my dad in the 1960s when I was a teenager. After World War II, [...]
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