Dad wore polished black wing tips and a blue suit 24/7. He went to the Elks Lodge every day and to Mass every Sunday. He did not spit on the sidewalk. He helped to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and …

Every day is another chapter of “As the Administration Churns”, the unending saga of incompetent boobs and skeevy manospherians. In late July, during U.S. Senate hearings, Senator Bernie …

Game shows have one virtue Iowa’s open-records enforcement system does not: Winners and losers know on the spot what prizes are theirs to keep. Hendrik Van Pelt learned this firsthand.  …

Many officeholders strongly advocate openness in government. Let all unclassified information out, and good things will happen. That’s a good idea, as far as it goes. But openness alone, even coupled with advocacy proposals, falls short of progress. To close …

As an educator who’s spent years building a foundation for children, I believe that school choice is a foundational freedom that Iowans should have. Parents should be able to have more say over …

As State Auditor, I’ve been sounding the alarm on the unaccountable private school voucher program for years. Politicians who like to lie say it’s because I’m against private schools. That’s …

Those who wish me silent six feet under may be disappointed to hear that my blood test came back last week looking pretty good. Nine months following cancer surgery at the Mayo Clinic my …

Cherokee County officials devised a solar power and battery storage ordinance that prepares for 1990. Too bad it is 2026 and the locals put up a half-baked and pint-size response to a request by the …

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, a dad asked a local elementary school why the classroom maps for that part of the world still said “U.S.S.R.” The way he told it, the classroom teacher gave …

The Iowa Supreme Court typically opens its rulings on the state’s public-records and open-meetings laws by reciting that the cases start with a “presumption of openness.”  But a new …

Last week I focused my column on my dreams for American foreign policy. This week I embarked on Chapter Two, this time for our government’s domestic policy. I quickly discovered this focus is …

In America’s 250 year history, only five wars were formally declared by congress as required by Article I of the U.S. Constitution. They and the respective president are the War of 1812 (James …

An elderly man from Alta died after a vehicle hit him while he was walking in the Walmart parking lot. The driver was Latino. No charges had been filed; the incident was under investigation. …

Sad news for us old gray Panthers that St. Mary’s will throw in the towel and participate on the public school teams in any sport, Tornadoes now. Our Uncle John Murray was the coach back in the …

Pete Hegseth is trying to diminish the contributions of women in the military, and that’s putting it delicately. The ACLU was more blunt when it said, on one of their webpages, that Hegseth wants …

Novelist Charles Dickens poked his quill pen at government bureaucracy 175 years ago with his accounts about a fictionalized department he called the "Circumlocution Office.”  …

Daydreaming is a universal pastime. What would I do if I won the lottery? What far-off places would I visit? Is this the year the Hawkeyes win the NCAA football playoffs, and the St. Louis Cardinals …

Journalism has many traditions. One of the oldest is adding “-30-” after the last paragraph of a just-completed story to alert the editor of “the end.” Old-timers say it was adopted from the …

I am a citizen of the town of Larrabee. About a year ago after a trailer fire on an empty lot we had asked the current owner (who has since passed) and the city mayor at that time if we would be …

Rob Sand spent a lot more time talking open primaries and ranked-choice voting than he did water pollution or cancer during a packed town hall event in Storm Lake last week. Who needs political …