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Don Pardo, what has Hendrik Van Pelt won?

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. In February, the Guttenberg man won a case before the Iowa Court of Appeals when the judges affirmed a ...

The truth about the Save Our Bacon Act

Iowans need to realize they are being misled by the anti-Proposition 12 Save Our Bacon (SOB) bill being hawked by Iowa's US senators, and particularly by Second District Congresswoman Ashley Hinson. (The current US House of Representatives version of the Farm Bill includes the Save Our Bacon Act, which would obstruct state laws regulating animal housing standards -- including those set by California's Prop 12 – but also endangers other state level laws and regulations. The US Senate is currently debating whether to include it in their Farm Bill draft.) A recent op-ed by Iowa Pork ...

Protecting Iowa public schools and tax dollars

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 not true at all.  What I am against is waste, fraud, and abuse of Iowa tax dollars, and ...

School choice: A fundamental freedom

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 where their kids go to school and more say over where their tax dollars are spent. The Democrats ...

No price too high for evading back-to-school shopping

In the pantheon of parental duties, shopping for school supplies stands alone. At the tripart crossroads of "least enjoyable," "most expensive" and "least negotiable," it is an intrinsic part of life in late summer, and it has been since I was a kid in the Cretaceous era. I remember it much ...

Ordinance 15321

Elected officials tend to fall into two groups: the “delegates” and the “trustees." Delegates follow the wishes of their constituents. Trustees act on their own judgement, regardless of constituents’ wishes. The City Council passed a four-month data center moratorium on July 13, with ...