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How I lost my house without knowing about it

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A suspicious laggard sauntered up the steps outside my house at 409 N 9th St carrying a piece of paper and a blue roll of masking tape. He plastered a homemade eviction notice onto my front door. The stranger didn’t represent the sheriff or any government official: rather the note appealed to the authority of a Waterloo-based lawyer, soliciting on behalf of a mysterious entity, ACC in Des Moines, who claimed to be the new homeowner. I took the crooked note about as seriously as I would’ve an old letter from Ed McMahon or an email from a Nigerian prince. But, later that day, when out ...

District 53 Newsletter from Rep. Dean Fisher

Columnists

We continued with a heavy debate schedule this week as we approach the second funnel date where our House bills must be passed to the Senate. On Wednesday of this week, the Environmental Protection Committee that I chair and the Health and Human Services committee held a joint meeting so that we could hear a report from the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa. This was an interim report on their research into the drivers of cancer in Iowa. This research project was funded last year by the legislature so that we could gain science-based insight into this horrible disease ...

Democrats done with democracy

Columnists

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 ...

The high cost of being cheap

Columnists

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

Columnists

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 ...

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

Columnists

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 ...