CivicSkinny’s Merry Christmas to more than 200 Iowans and not one clergy among them? No sense in letting organized religion mess up a good holiday. Mike Rowley -Clive GOP rewards banks for bad behavior A reversal of taxpayer protections slipped into the recently passed $1.1 trillion spending bill
Read More →Reader says image was stereotypical Cityview publication’s recent cover story (“Where do they go?” by Eleni Upah) dealt with important issues faced by transgender individuals in Iowa and across the country. The cover photo, however, was stereotypical, trans-phobic and damaging to that community. You owe your readers, and every
Read More →A modern Benedict Arnold Ted Cruz is holding up the budget vote in Washington. He wants to push his own anti-immigration bill as a part of the deal. But yet, Ted Cruz is a Latino immigrant himself! He was born in Canada of a Cuban father. He should be working
Read More →The recent midterm elections have proven the dire warnings about the “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision have come true. The court ruling, in effect, gives corporations the ability to buy elections by allowing them to spend unlimited amounts of “dark money.” We just endured the results of that ruling with
Read More →CivicSkinny’s afterthought — “If Chuck Grassley were a lawyer, Joni Ernst would not be a senator” got me thinking… If Washington had sons, he might have accepted that whole “monarchy in America” thing to keep them employed. If Lincoln had Netflix, he might have served two full terms. If Spiro Agnew wasn’t a tax-dodger, then
Read More →Great cover story last week (“Doing Time in Des Moines”). I enjoyed reading of this committed activist and the challenges he faced by choosing to serve jail time. After author Steve Clemens painted his word picture of the toilet paper pillow, I felt compelled to flip back three pages to the “Paid for by taxpayers”
Read More →Des Moines newspapers and magazines must have a yearly quota on the number of stories they do about the Des Moines Social Club. At least Cityview’s recent cover story, Social Status (Nov. 13), isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Obviously Christine Hensley isn’t aware of the theatrical irony of her reference
Read More →If the phrase “all politics is local” is true, then despite the seemingly sweeping changes of the 2014 election, very little has changed in our own Iowa political landscape. When Iowa’s elected legislatures go back to “work” in January of 2015, the Democrats will still control the Iowa Senate (26 to 24). The
Read More →One of the most important and controversial issues in the recent campaign was immigration reform, which has split the Republican Party down the middle with moderate Republicans supporting the Senate Immigration Reform Bill and the far right Tea Party opposing it. The Democrats unanimously supported the Senate-passed bipartisan Immigration Reform
Read More →Reading Douglas Burns’ cautionary column (Political Mercury, Oct. 23) about the prospect of Joni Ernst actually getting elected to replace Tom Harkin reminded me of H.L Mencken’s assertion that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it — good and hard.”
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