🗣️ It’s Friday: Time for Only in Iowa, Positively Iowa, this week’s
pet photo, and of course, reader replies!

Kum & Gone: It truly is the end of an era.

What do you think about these new automated license plate readers popping up around Iowa?

El Azul Mexican Market is just one of the many immigrant-owned businesses you can support across Iowa. (El Azul Mexican Market)

🐕 This is Luna, a 3-year-old Mastador (part Mastiff, part Labrador, per reader Patti K.)

“The pictures are during her first time out staying in our camper this summer in Eastern Iowa,” she wrote.

Looks like she’s right at home!

Send me your pet photos here.

Readers are invited to add to the conversation by emailing responses@iowastartingline.com. Please include your first name and last initial. You may also want to include your city, but that’s up to you. I may edit your content for conciseness or to correct typos.

Penny shortage:

• “At Kwik Star, they are rounding up or down to avoid the penny problem. This is now a company policy (per the employee who checked me out).” — Coleen G.

• “Regarding the penny shortage, it’s a nightmare for retailers big and small. My work world involves independent bookstores. When Canada stopped using pennies, they put out official guidance for what amounts for cash sales would be rounded up and rounded down to the nearest nickel. It was incredibly straightforward and done long before any shortages happened. Here in the US, especially for bookstores outside major urban areas, we’ve heard from many stores that their local bank (often a branch of a major national one) will no longer provide pennies to businesses. Of course, neither the federal government nor any state government has provided official guidance on how to handle the lack of pennies. Truly, America has been made great again.” — Jeff S.

New Iowa layoff:

• “IDT in Coralville has laid off 136 employees. A close friend of mine was affected.” — Treyner W.

Remember Big Ag is the problem, not farmers:

• “Regarding public attacks on farmers: Some negative public perceptions of farmers are problematic, as they transpose into political policymaking.

   

  For example, at the gym this morning, my trainer says to me (as he knows I am a farmer) that, in general, farmers create bad health outcomes for us (i.e., water pollution, pesticides, and cancer, etc.). Then the trainer says he knows of solutions. He saw a television program about brothers and sisters who inherited farmland and converted it into an array of organic food crops used by local restaurants.

   

  I responded that it takes a lot of financial investment, which is out of reach for many farmers, to make that conversion to organic and do the specialized marketing. That answer didn’t elicit any verbal response, which, in and of itself, reveals a barrier to convincing the public that farmers aren’t the culprits.

   

  Meanwhile, farmers are reacting to these publicly voiced concerns by rallying around talking points composed by big ag corporations. ‘They want to punish farmers.’ ‘They are against farmers.’ Therefore, many farmers are driven to the far-right political sphere as perceived protectors of family farms.

   

  In my opinion, the far right is for maintaining the status quo—that of big ag corporate interests, not for the interests of family farmers.

  When fighting farmland pollution, we should tie the problem not to farmers but to big ag corporations, and there are better ways forward to assist family farmers than propping up big ag corporations’ [status] quo. Those best practices need to be communicated alongside efforts to fight pollutants.” — John C., Iowa City

Why we don’t have enough doctors:

• “Rural America relies on foreign doctors. Trump’s visa fee shuts them out. The Trump administration’s demand for companies to pay a $100,000 fee to hire an immigrant worker using an H-1B visa has created turmoil among rural health providers.” — Doug N.

Boycott of Target:

• “The kettles are at Target also. Why be so petty? It still had to cost the Salvation Army donations. Let us keep politics out of Christmas.” — K.O. Kelting

  (NOTE: Yes, let us keep politics out of Christmas—on that, we can agree.)

Soundoff feedback:

• “If you would be so kind, would you pass on my compliments to Steve Corbin for his ongoing most helpful information?” — Greg C

Letter of the Week:

A response to readers defending Trump’s ICE kidnappings

“The Googlebot says, ‘The “fourth pillar of democracy” is the press or media, acting as the “fourth estate” alongside the other three pillars: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Its role is to inform the public, promote transparency, hold the government accountable, and act as a watchdog over the other branches of government. This is essential for the healthy functioning of a democracy.’

In other words, an informed populace is essential for democracy to survive. Because how do people know who to vote for without knowing their true intentions? How do we know which policies to support without seeing their effects? If we want a free country, we must know the facts.

If you believe every arrested immigrant is a criminal, you have not been informed—you’ve been influenced. Reputable news outlets have published dozens of stories featuring law-abiding tax-paying people on various stages of our legal pathway to citizenship, and even full United States citizens, seized and held for weeks in abusive conditions while their jobs get taken or their businesses crumble, or deported to lose everything, totally against the law. If you haven’t heard of this, you’re not informed. You are influenced.

You are influenced to feel righteousness in your country treating people so badly whether it’s legal or not, and feel proud to vote for the politicians who do that.

It’s kind o’ hard to tell, sometimes, what’s factual news. There are actual propaganda machines calling themselves news outlets, breaking every journalistic ethic, spouting untruth after lie, twisting public opinion and influencing elections.

[Some] claim most newspapers and ‘legacy news’ are one-sided and suppress the Republican side. I say there’s a difference between refusing to quote a politician and and catching one in in a lie. I hear NPR quoting Republicans all the time, often with caveats like, ‘did not provide proof’ or, ‘this was proved false.’ And look what Republicans did about it—rather than clean up their act, they stripped emergency alerts, community bulletins, local news, high-school events reporting, in some cases any radio at all, from millions of rural Americans. If you were unaware of that, you are influenced, not informed.

Catching more Republicans than Democrats in a lie does not necessarily indicate a liberal bias. It could simply mean there are more Republicans who lie. It’s our responsibility as freedom-loving citizens to look carefully for, and insist upon, the truth.

The fourth pillar’s main function is to keep politicians honest for us, and to keep politics transparent. Claims that respected ethical news organizations are that biased are anti-truth propaganda, and any politician or mouthpiece who shuns honest fact-checking is up to no good.

It is vitally important for the citizenry of a democracy to know the difference between factual news and avaricious lies passed off as news. The easiest test is to ask yourself: Is this messenger appealing to my emotions, or to my intellect? If they are trying to make you feel outraged, or fearful, cheated, or whatever powerful emotion, chances are they’re an influencer, not an informer. If you disbelieve it, just ask ’em. They’ll tell you whatever keeps making them money, assure you it’s true in fact, and refuse to show you any proof.

Informers just state the facts and leave how you feel about them up to you. Informers want you to think. Influencers don’t, they want you to feel.

Secondly, [some] seem to feel that President Trump is not suppressing our freedom of the press. Nothing could be further from the truth. For an in-depth analysis of just one example of media suppression, [here’s] The Poynter Institute. …

Thirdly, the influencer’s lies get spread. [Some] have lied for President Trump, trying to believe he is being transparent, like a healthy democracy needs. He does not ‘hold many informal and formal press conferences several times a day.’ And impromptu, never-a-straight-answer shouting sessions, not informative press conferences.

Lastly, I didn’t see [them] really disputing the actual definitions of fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian, autocrat. Rather, [they] deny that they apply to President Trump. Political science experts the world over say, unquestionably, they do. …

So, what’re ya gonna do? Remain a Trumpist denialist while he derails our democracy? Or take a stand for our liberty, for which many Americans have sacrificed their very lives, so—in the words of our first Republican President— ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’?“

— Dixon S.

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