2018

President Trump is forcing the nation’s taxpayers to subsidize his reckless tariffs with a $12 billion giveaway to farmers. Even though Trump’s punishing tariffs are a huge mistake, one could argue that farmers alone shouldn’t bare the resulting economic pain Trump inflicted upon them. Protecting and preserving small family farms has always been an important…

 Iowa Starting Line Podcast host Pat Rynard discusses the changing voter trends in Iowa’s blue-collar counties along the Mississippi River. Joining us are Burlington Hawkeye reporter Libby Meyer and IBEW union leader Pete Hird.

Although I am, and have been for many years, a registered Democrat, I have always held former President Herbert Walker Bush, the first Bush president, in the highest regard. Through the presidential campaign of 1988, Bush referred many times to “a thousand points of light,” primarily in reference to promoting volunteerism in American Society. As…

Democratic candidate Kayla Koether has won an important first step in the legal battle to get 33 absentee ballots counted in the House District 55 race, an election where she trails Republican Representative Michael Bergan by nine votes after last week’s recount. This morning a judge ordered the Winneshiek County Auditor to take the ballots…

During the 2016 campaign, Trump and his supporters crucified Hillary Clinton over her use of private emails while she served as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration. Trump’s campaign rallies regularly featured chants of “lock her up” based on Clinton’s use of emails. Trump called Clinton’s email usage a scandal “bigger than Watergate” and…

 Iowa Starting Line Podcast host Pat Rynard discusses the changing voter trends in the Iowa suburbs with Ankeny Area Democrats Chair Zaak Barnes and Representative-Elect Jennifer Konfrst, who flipped a red Iowa House seat to blue to in the Des Moines suburbs.

The woman in charge of Democrats’ campaign efforts in the House next year will be Cheri Bustos, one of the party’s leading strategist on winning difficult Midwestern seats. The Illinois congresswoman was selected today by her House colleagues to chair the DCCC, the party’s campaign arm that oversees most House races. She beat out two…

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…