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A seat at the table.

Iowa Majority Leader Jack Whitver provided that succinct explanation last week of what his fellow Republicans are looking to provide to Iowa parents as the state’s K-12 school districts wrestle with a host of controversies.

His colleague, Senate President Jake Chapman, set the tone a few weeks ago for addressing these controversies in this year’s session of the Iowa Legislature. Chapman accused some teachers of having a “sinister agenda” toward their students and vowed to push for a law that would make it a felony for teachers and school librarians to provide students with books that Chapman and some parents believe are obscene.

I stumbled across a statistical tidbit the other day that probably will surprise many people.

U.S. Census Bureau figures show that between 1900 and 2000, the state that grew the least in population, on a percentage basis, was Iowa.

Read that again.

No state had smaller population growth between 1900 and 2000, as a percentage, than Iowa. Not North Dakota. Not Montana. Not Wyoming. Not any other state.

Iowa Capital Digest

Gov. Kim Reynolds took time in her Condition of the State message to accuse Iowa teachers and school administrators of “pushing their world view” on students by allowing certain books in the school library or classroom.

The address came a day after Senate President Jake Chapman, an Adel Republican, accused both teachers and journalists of having a “sinister” motive and even promoting pedophilia and incest.

“Those who wish to normalize sexually deviant behavior against our children, including pedophilia and incest, are pushing this movement more than ever before. Our children should be safe and free from this atrocious assault,” Chapman said in his speech on the opening day of the legislative session.

Typically, in the days leading up to the start of a new session of the Iowa Legislature, the attention is on lawmakers’ goals and priorities — and on the pledges they make to work together for the good of the people of Iowa.

This year, however, Republican leaders who control the Iowa Senate announced a controversial decision that erases more than a century of openness — evicting journalists from the floor of the Senate chamber.

This ill-conceived action makes Iowa an outlier among the legislatures in the 50 states. You could count on one hand those that do not allow journalists on the floor of their legislative chambers.

Nowhere in their decision do Senate leaders pretend this change will better inform the people of Iowa about the important work the Senate does.

The Maginot Line was a continuous series of fortifications built along the French-German border by the war-weary French in the 1930s, with the hope it would deter the fascists from invading.

You know how that worked out.

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I traveled the 225 miles from Lansing to Ankeny on Christmas Eve, a drive through an Iowa landscape left snowless by an Arkansas December. Since the harvest is now long over, every square inch of land is left exposed, and lot of it is really, really exposed. My best estimate is that at least 50 percent and maybe as many as 70 percent of the fields were tilled. I don't have any data on this, but anecdotally fall tillage seems to be increasing, in my observation.

Weallwantcleanwater.

I can also say that I saw visible cover crops on only two fields, one near the town of Orchard and the other at mile marker 139 on I-35.

I posted these observations on my Twitter feed, and not surprisingly, that inspired some lively farmer responses that can be summed up mostly as:
• We want more time.
• We want more money.

Now I’d like to reply with the old joke about people in hell wanting ice water, but in this case, Satan is a sympathizer and these fellows are probably going to be provided with unlimited amounts of both.

Minnesota and its government officials delivered an important lesson recently on how to provide justice — and their lesson should be taken to heart by their neighbors in Iowa.

The contrast is jarring between the way government handled the deaths of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minn., and Autumn Steele in Burlington, Iowa. One was shot to death while trying to evade arrest. The other was the unintended victim of a fatal shooting.

Iowans should be uncomfortable with the questions that grow naturally out of these contrasts. We should be embarrassed by the starkly different ways government in the two states treated the people responsible for these deaths, police officer Kimberly Potter and police officer Jesse Hill.

When I walked out the door at the Des Moines Register for the final time on Dec. 12, 2014, there was an unfinished piece of work tucked away in a box of assorted stuff I carried.

The folder contained a few dozen newspaper clippings, press releases and notes to myself I had collected.

There was a common thread in all of this: They dealt with events across Iowa to raise money or provide other assistance for people in times of need.

I had hoped for several years to travel to a few of these events and then weave all of this raw material into a column for the front of the Sunday Register opinion section that I edited. But retirement caught up with me.

Monday, December 6,2021

Front note: The Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, is an ok movie, but far inferior to the former.

Literally seconds before typing this sentence, I discovered that one of this essay’s subjects is a celebrity, and not just some random millennial in a puffy coat. That person is Drake, who, according to his Wikipedia page, is “Aubrey Drake Graham, a Canadian rapper, singer and actor. Gaining recognition by starring in the teen drama series Degrassi: The Next Generation (2001–08), Drake pursued a career in music releasing his debut mixtape Room for Improvement in 2006; he subsequently released the mixtapes Comeback Season (2007) and So Far Gone (2009) before signing with Young Money Entertainment.”

Try putting that in CV format.

There’s a viral internet meme featuring two photos of Drake in the requisite puffy coat, and the meme is often being used to demonstrate contradictions or hypocrisy, which you may have noticed are a feature, and not a bug, of present-day America. I want to use that meme before it gets worn out, which happens so quickly these days! In fact, I want to wear it out before you’re done reading this essay. So here goes.

Let’s begin our meming (is that a word?) with commercial nitrogen fertilizer. I just checked Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship sales data for the 2021 crop year, and farmers purchased enough of the stuff to cover all our corn acres with 143 pounds of nitrogen, pretty close to the Iowa State recommendation using their N rate calculator and the March 2021 prices for corn (1) and nitrogen (2). In the context of water quality, however, things aren’t so tidy. We have 25 million hogs, 80 million chickens, 4 million turkeys and a couple million cattle that are excreting a shitton (in the science community, a shitton is oh, about a half a billion pounds, give or take) of nitrogen every year. We also have 10 million acres of soybeans that, with the help of bacteria, are fixing (adding nitrogen to the soil from the atmosphere) about 40 pounds of N per acre. Long and short, a whole lot more N meets the field (x) than meets the combine at harvest time (y), and in this instance, x-y=z, where z is pollution. Ag retailers love “x”, farmers love “y”, public drinks “z”.

Of course in Iowa, talking publicly about that equation (x-y=z) can you get in trouble, unless you’re willing to follow various rules of discourse established by the x-ers and y-ers. And that means never touching the third rail of Iowa Agriculture, regulation of nitrogen inputs. Crazy man that I am, I do that sometimes, but today I’m going to let this Drake fellow do it for me. In this and the scenarios that follow, Drake is the Iowa Agriculture Establishment.

Ooo that was fun, let’s do some more.

The death Sunday of Robert Dole was a potent reminder of what we have lost as a nation.

Another member of the Greatest Generation has left us — another of those Depression-era kids who came together to save democracy in the dark days of World War II.

The career of the 98-year-old Kansas Republican reminds us how diminished our nation’s political system has become in the past 25 years. Far fewer supposed leaders are willing to put their nation ahead of their political party.

Of course, Bob Dole was no shrinking violet when it came to politics. He did not shy away from a bare-knuckles fight. He could use a sharp-tongue and sarcasm to cut down an adversary, whether it was a Democrat — or a Republican.

by Kathie Obradovich, Iowa Capital Dispatch
December 6, 2021

News of the omicron variant of COVID-19 was like a bucket of ice water in the face after a refreshingly normal Thanksgiving weekend marked by in-person gatherings with family and friends.

The variant, first identified in South Africa, had already been confirmed as close as Minnesota by middle of last week. Chances are, it’ll show up in Iowa before you read this.

We don’t know much about this strain of coronavirus yet, including how easily it spreads and how effective current vaccines are at preventing infections, hospital admissions and deaths. It could be a relatively benign development, or it could drive a new, disruptive surge.

Either way, it should be a wakeup call. If omicron isn’t deadlier than delta or immune to the current vaccines, the next variants in line might be. How prepared is Iowa to deal with that?

The news hasn’t been terribly encouraging.