Posted August 05, 2025in Stray Thoughts
One of the frustrations of being a **former** newspaper editor is no longer having a few dozen reporters to pursue answers to questions going unasked and unanswered each day.Two of my go-to questions were “why” and “why not.” And my favorite open-ended query to a newsmaker was “explain this to
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Posted July 28, 2025in Stray Thoughts
My family has called Davis County home for 185 years, all the way back to when William D. Evans and William Henson climbed down from their wagons in 1839 and 1840, a half-dozen years before Iowa became a state. Evanses, Hensons and their neighbors were on the town square
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Posted July 21, 2025in Stray Thoughts
Andy McKean is a charming country lawyer from Anamosa. He grew up in New York and was drawn to Iowa by his family roots. He has owned a bed-and-breakfast, called square dances and played in a dance band named the Scotch Grove Pioneers. His tenure in the Iowa Legislature stretched
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Posted July 15, 2025in Stray Thoughts
One longtime truism of journalism is “Names make news.” That shorthand stems from the fact people better understand the significance and context of news when they learn about events and issues through the eyes and experiences of people they know or with whom they can identify. The late Iowa Supreme
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Posted June 17, 2025in Stray Thoughts
People living in central Iowa received a wake-up call last week that should drag water-quality back in front of the state’s 3.2 million residents. Iowa’s largest water supplier, one serving a fifth of the state’s homes and businesses, ordered its 600,000 customers to immediately reduce water demand by ending lawn-watering
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Posted June 09, 2025in Stray Thoughts
Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” focused on manners and goodness, two virtues sometimes forgotten today. Shortly before the novel was published, our Founding Fathers settled on the free exchange of ideas as one of the fundamental concepts they wanted to guarantee in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But
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Posted June 02, 2025in Stray Thoughts
If an opinionated old guy from southern Iowa delivered the recent commencement address at the United States Military Academy, my message would have contrasted with the one given by another opinionated old guy, one from Queens, N.Y., by way of the White House. When I was a newspaper editor, I
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Posted May 27, 2025in Stray Thoughts
Last week, the Pentagon accepted the emir of Qatar’s gift of a Boeing 747, a $400 million bauble donated for our president to enjoy by a monarch whose family has ruled the tiny Mideast nation for more than a century. Our commander in chief said the United States would be
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Posted May 19, 2025in Stray Thoughts
The Iowa Supreme Court gave citizen engagement and accessibility to public meetings a much-needed boost Friday in an appeal of a lawsuit against the Iowa City Community School District. The district’s practice of posting full videos of school board meetings on the internet for on-demand public viewing was at the
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Posted May 12, 2025in Stray Thoughts
You may be experiencing whiplash this spring just trying to track the Iowa Legislature’s zig-zag movements. It comes from what some might charitably call a lack of consistency on a key theme. A set of bills from the Republican majority at the Capitol illustrates this inconsistency. First, there’s the Legislature’s
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