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Americans these days seem to get along like dogs and cats.

We don’t trust each other. We constantly snipe back and forth. This person is a crook. That person is dumber than a box of rocks.

This acrimony and animosity have not provided a very fitting backdrop for the tranquility that is supposed to accompany the Christmas season.

I’ve learned a lot of lessons about money, some easier than others, in the years since I pushed a lawnmower back and forth across Mrs. Carroll’s and Mrs. Greiner’s yards in Bloomfield long ago.

My start as a gainfully employed contributor to the U.S. economy was inauspicious in the grand scheme of things. But I felt like a regular John D. Rockefeller – in blue jeans and a ball cap, instead of a suit and top hat – when the ladies settled up by handing over a couple of dollar bills each week.

We Iowans like to think of ourselves as the true occupants of middle America, the geographic and societal equivalent of Baby Bear’s porridge.

We are not as conservative as some sections of our country, nor as liberal as other sections. We don’t have the wealth that some regions do. We don’t have the poverty that is found elsewhere.

But clearly, Iowa is out of step with other states when it comes to a basic right – the right to vote in our elections.

David prevailed over Goliath in the famous tale from long ago using an unconventional weapon, his sling and a few stones.

These days, river rocks aren’t a potent weapon. Now, it might just be the spotlight.

And the spotlight was shining brightly last week in Iowa when an Associated Press reporter cracked open 32 years of cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church’s Sioux City Diocese.

Let’s skip the debate over whether our president bears even a smidgen of blame for contributing to the domestic terrorist incidents last week in the United States.

Let’s agree we are never going to agree, so there’s no use driving each other’s blood pressure higher by talking more about that.

Yes, there will always be people who are so mentally disturbed they think they are improving life in our United States by gunning down 11 people in a synagogue or by mailing 13 pipe bombs to people the culprit, and the president, dislike.

Having said that, I wonder when will Americans and our political leaders stand up and say enough is enough?

Each year in October, when the Iowa countryside transforms from gorgeous summer greens to harvest season hues of tan, some of the world’s top agricultural scientists and anti-hunger activists gather in Des Moines to compare notes.

The occasion is the presentation of the annual World Food Prize. It’s three days of conversations about the progress, or the setbacks, in the quest to adequately feed the world’s expanding population.

Is Roby Smith in political trouble, or do Republicans just have unlimited campaign dollars?

Judging from the mammoth amount of money incumbent State Senator Roby Smith has raised and spent on this year's election, either state Republican strategists think he's in trouble or the party of fiscal conservatism has few concerns when the spending helps retain its Senate majority in Des Moines.

There’s an old expression that officials of Indian Hills Community College obviously have not heard about – or have chosen to ignore.

The expression is simple: If you find yourself in a hole, stop shoveling.

But the school continues to shovel – digging itself ever deeper into legal trouble and into a public relations quagmire.

It’s confession time:

I cannot say with confidence what transpired in that upstairs bedroom in a suburban home in Montgomery County, Md., on that summer evening, apparently in 1982, during a gathering of unsupervised, beer-drinking teenagers.

Unless you have just awakened like a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, you know the party in question involved a 15-year-old girl named Christine Blasey and may or may not have involved a drunken 17-year-old boy named Brett Kavanaugh.

Most Iowans are pretty frugal. They don’t waste their money. They especially don’t like it when they believe government officials fritter away our tax money.

That’s why I think many people in Iowa are not familiar with the case of Chris Godfrey.

Otherwise, if they were truly informed about what has occurred in the past six and a half years, I am convinced they would be steamed about the decision and actions of Terry Branstad and Kim Reynolds when they were governor and lieutenant governor.