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

My take: Don’t ever let a Nazi in your Iowa bar.

I’m still getting lovely autumn scenes from y’all—keep them coming!

“We waited until the first frost last week to harvest our small pumpkin patch,” reader Marc W. wrote.

Maria Gonzalez tours Marshalltown, Iowa’s small businesses with rural advocates. (Photo by Andrea Desky)

🐕 This is Duke, an 8-year-old rescue Vizsla, whom reader Ruth M. has had for a year now. “He’s a momma’s boy!” she wrote. “I think his prior life was pretty bad, but we are making it up to him.”

That’s what counts!

Send me your pet photos here.

Submitted by reader Pat B. of Iowa City.

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.

Food help:

• “First of all, I love Iowa Starting Line. I only started reading it this year and I really appreciate your coverage and the underlying humanity of your reporting.

   

  I just wanted to highlight the recent efforts of the Iowa City Mutual Aid group in trying to respond to the urgent need that will be happening in our community when SNAP benefits end.

   

  ICMA is quickly working to gather donations for hot meal services on Mondays and Fridays in November (and possibly expand into delivery) as well as to give funds directly to people in need of grocery money (no barriers). The goal is to help fill in the need that the existing meal services and food banks aren’t able to cover as well as to continue building local mutual aid networks that can be sustained long-term.  

   

  ICMA is working now to spread the word about their efforts to provide direct aid and their new meal services, and they really need donations! Here is the link to their donation page if you are able to share.

   

  And this is the form people can fill out to request direct aid from Iowa City Mutual Aid.” — Leah O.

• “Deluxe Bakery in Iowa City will give hot drink and food to anyone who asks. You might want to check the details before publishing, but it’s something like that.” — Sharon L. (NOTE: They are!)

• “Here’s the information from Johnson County about our SNAP emergency response.” — Jennifer B.

Are farmers still workers?

• “Maybe farm news should not be under the ‘working class’ headline as the average Iowa farmer is a multi-millionaire?“ — Charles J.

  (NOTE: Only around 6,400 Iowa farms, or just over 7% of farmers, make over $1 million annually. The majority, or 60% of Iowa farmers, make an average gross cash income of just under $33,000. I’d argue that puts them squarely in the working class.)

On Iowa immigrants winning court cases:

• “If they are here illegally, then ship them back. That’s where all our funding has gone. If the churches want then to start, then pay for them. Otherwise get them and their kids out of here.” — Pam W. (NOTE: Here’s where our funding has actually gone.)

Reader response feedback:

• “Another superb comment by Dixon S. in today’s posting, Amie. You really have some fantastically informed readers! Bravo!” — Greg C.

• “I have an addition for the essay about insurance: Homeowners’ insurance claims denied while climate change fuels the damage, caused by fossil fuels the insurance industry is invested in.”
  — Lynn J.

Recent pet photo inclusion of Kitty Kat:

• “He’s famous now and won’t be fit to live with.” — Dee G.

Newsletter correction:

• “National Drug Take Back DAY was LAST Saturday, Oct 25.” — Jami M.

Book bannings and burnings:

• “I saw your article about Annie’s Foundation this past weekend and wanted to send a short note to compliment you on your work and the site. I’m a historian who works on censorship and recently published a digital humanities project that maps and documents comic book burnings in America after World War II. It may surprise you to learn that there were several comic book burnings in Iowa in 1955. Confirmed fires took place in Mason City, Clear Lake, and Dubuque, with a suspected fire in Knoxville. I am currently looking into another suspected fire in Decorah.

   

  I hope you’ll take a moment to take a look at the site, which explores dozens of comic book burnings and incorporates hundreds of primary sources. Please feel free to share it with others who might find it useful. And please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions related to the project—or if you know of any other such fires in Iowa that I haven’t yet discovered!

   

  Best wishes from Virginia.” — Brian P.

Should our elected officials be mostly lawyers?

• “Attorneys, our nation’s infection:

  Way too many win our election

     then pass legislation

     of such complication,

  We’re forced to pay Legal Protection!

   

  Say that to a roomful of politicians and lawyers, and all you’ll get are stony stares, gritting jaws, and gripping fists.

   

  Don’t know why they’re so touchy about it. All that piece really says is: to enrich their whole profession, our lawyers deliberately overpopulate our Government, theretofore to forge and force upon us way too many all kinds of laws, with highly-extra-complex-ified legalese jargons and hyper-convolutionary legalistic procedures, systematically anti-pro-se-ing our legal systems, systemically quashing all hope of effectual self-fending, compelling us without recourse to count on completely their crapshoot legalistocratic interventions.

  
  Win, lose, or settle—all the lawyers in every action reap riches, raked right off the top, with our totally-attorney judiciary legally validating all of it, thereby securing their own opulent omnipotent government employment forever.

   

  Our constitutionary signatories are themselves mostly lawyers and judges; our legal system is expertly tailored perfectly suited for lining judicial dockets with lawyerly billable hours, and they all take full advantage, with the rest of us over the barrel.

   

  In other words, they’ve rigged the system. That’s all it says. The law may rule our government, but our lawyers rule the law, and they’d rather we didn’t notice. That’s all it says.

   

  Is it true?” — Dixon S.

“It’s finally fall here in Sumner, Iowa!” wrote reader Judy D. “These pics were taken November 6 as I was walking around my neighborhood. Had to wait a bit longer for the beautiful fall color this year. Definitely worth the wait!”

Letter of the Week:

Keep connecting the dots between wealth and oligarchy

“I found the bit about oligarchy and plutocracy from the COURIER Newsroom’s Ryan Pitkin good and most timely.

It is my personal view, enriched by history, that we have reinvented the 19th century’s Gilded Age with an obscenely wealthy plutocracy who, in a wave of consolidation of businesses and fields of information—newspaper, TV & radio, and movie studies and streaming services—are able to exert their power to control what millions of Americans understand to be true as well as to even know about at all.

In addition, since the ’70s they have funded multiple ‘think tanks’ that create ‘evidence’ and supporting arguments for their views, including having a stable of ‘opinion writers’ who regularly write columns for the shrinking number of newspapers out there that reinforce their anti-government and increasingly authoritarian views.

They were greatly aided in their ability to do all of this by the incredibly stupid and blind decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United by giving the purchasing power of the monied elite the same sanctified protection as ‘speech.’ The result: the best Congress and Supreme Court that money can buy!

It is also important to recognize that plutocracies are inclined to be authoritarian. Little wonder that our politics has become so extremely vile and that persons like Trump and his ilk are now in power and working hard to ensure that they stay in power.

All this is why it is so very important that groups like yours continue to connect the dots between policy—that which is considered and successful as well as that which never sees daylight—to those paying for its avocation and passage. Democracy is the enemy of plutocracy and a deadly poison to authoritarians of all stripes.

Which is why—connecting the dots—we see such attacks intensifying upon education, upon public funding for education, on history and culture, and on stories of—and symbols representing—those whose memory and example disrupt the preferred narrative of events, current as well as past.“

— Greg C.

You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.

Iowa Starting Line

c/o COURIER Newsroom
101 Avenue of the Americas
8th and 9th Floors
New York, NY 10013

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or  from this list.