In my four and a half years of being a Marshall County supervisor, I am finding the public has some confusion as to what my role and responsibilities are in county government. The journey starts with the election process of winning the primary in June prior to the November election. Marshall ...

Recent events in Marshalltown, Ames and Oskaloosa have again brought child sexual abuse into the spotlight. Our hearts break for the children directly impacted in each of these cases, and the impact on their families, peers, schools, and communities. There is hope. What happened in these ...

America has a crisis of empathy. That crisis isn’t expressed as lack of charitable giving: Americans give approximately seven times what Europeans do to charity per capita. And it isn’t expressed as an unwillingness to spend on a governmental level: The United States currently spends more ...

Icouldn’t believe it. I’d been watching some young “punkins” growing on the vine in our garden. They started out as a bloom, and then matured into tiny pumpkins. I was looking forward to an orange, happy fall. Then one morning I checked on the baby pumpkins, and they had fallen ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued more guidance, this time to put our masks back on indoors with potentially unvaccinated people because you might transmit the virus to them. And those unvaccinated people are the ones crowding the hospitals. They are a danger to ...

In the summer, boys dress for the warm weather, but girls dress hardly at all. Most high school guys are in baggy shorts, while many of the girls are wearing shorts so short that parts of their rear end remain exposed. The “distressed” versions — with rips and ragged hems — are often ...