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The high cost of being cheap

The Iowa Legislature is at it again, trying to eliminate publication of legal notices in newspapers. And it will cost Iowa’s citizens way more money than it saves. Republican sponsors say it will save money for cities and counties, but as editor Art Cullen noted in his editorial last week, scrapping public notices will keep Iowans in the dark about the public’s business. Legal notices are the minutes of city council and board of supervisors meetings, the bills that they pay, the people that they hire and other official actions they take. They are the notices that alert you if a ...

E.L. Doctorow

Since I seem to lack the resilience to bounce back with any speed to my previous pre-cancer, healthy condition of medium-to-high energy, and have been forced into what you might call a palliative existence, it has left me ample time to read and write. I am thankful that, although my body may be failing, my mind is as active as ever, probably over active. When I find an author I like, I like to read all or most all of that author’s works. Thanks to Kindle, for a few bucks and the touch of a finger, this is possible without leaving my recliner. When I was still living and working in ...

Democrats done with democracy

Last month, Susan Rice showed herself to be one face of the ugly left authoritarianism so prevalent in today’s Democrat party. Gateway Pundit quoted her letting the wicked cat escape the bag. “When it comes to elites, you know, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media...it’s not going to end well for them,” she recently told a podcaster. Not, Rice elaborated, “for those that decided they would act in their perceived very narrow self-interest, which I would underscore is very short term self-interest, and, you know, take a knee to ...

Are Trump’s mass deportations leading to state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing?

For the past 14 months, Americans of all political persuasions have witnessed how Trump’s ICE-related actions have involved aggressive detention and tdemonization of immigrants and minorities. Historians have not observed this large-scale scope of discrimination behavior since 1953-1955 when President Dwight Eisenhower (R) deported ~1.3 million Mexicans from America. Actions by Mr. Trump and personnel within the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and ICE have widely been condemned as racist and ethnic cleansing in orientation. Knowing Americans have witnessed ICE agents kill two ...

Fix what’s broken at home so we can defend ourselves abroad

In 2024, for the first time in almost a century, the United States spent more financing its national debt than it did, as a percentage of GDP, on national defense. In 2024, interest on our national debt expenditures came in at 3.1 percent of GDP and defense spending at 2.9 percent. This has been the case through this year, although it’s too soon to say what the picture will finally be for 2026. But it’s very close. Hoover Institution scholar Niall Ferguson notes that this is an ominous sign. He quotes what he calls Ferguson’s Law, after 18th century Scottish political theorist ...

This was a man focused on rights and rainbows

The offices of the Des Moines Register’s opinion staff were mostly empty when my telephone rang late one afternoon about 15 years ago. The guard at the lobby security desk said two men were there and hoped I had time to meet with them. I said sure and invited them up to our office on the ...