January 2017

How will we miss Vice President Joe Biden once his time in office soon ends? Let us count the ways. Top among them will certainly be the delightful “Uncle Joe” antics we see every other January at the Senate swearing-in ceremony. In his role as Vice President, Biden serves as the official President of the…

The election of 2016 provided many surprising results to longtime Iowa politics watchers, but one county shaded in red stood out most of all: Dubuque. The working class Catholic river town of Northeast Iowa was won by the Republican presidential candidate for the first time since 1956, when it was Dwight Eisenhower on the ballot. With just…

Another year has come and gone, and it’s a time when people take stock of the 12 months we’ve lived through. Looking back on 2016, a bunch of words aptly describe this year: anger, division, animosity, hatred, intolerance, stress, upheaval. I wish more people were familiar with the late Albia attorney Frank J. Karpan, a…

Excerpt from Jack Hatch’s new book, now on sale at Amazon and available at Barnes and Noble. Iowa acted before the passage of the federal Affordable Health Care Act with insurance reform, a limited expansion of Medicaid and enrolling the highest percentage of children with health insurance than any state in the nation. And then…