Climate change is at the root of high food prices. Drought on the Great Plains, from the Dakotas down to Texas, is driving cattle producers out of business. The pressure has been building for …

Hey Boomers! How many of you remember Iowa’s old-style license plates that began with the number for each county according to its alphabetical order? So license plates on cars registered in …

Iowa’s official state motto is, “Our liberties we prize, our rights we will maintain.” The right to live our lives freely and truly our own is under attack. I’d love to see some “Iowa …

You would think a school district readily knows its A-B-Cs. nnNot the Des Moines Public Schools — at least not when informing the public what its 6,600 employees were paid during the academic year …

As if your TV set were not inundated by enough political ads these days, you can expect a whole other set of them soon. The new load, probably coming your way after Labor Day, will try to …

Rob Sand falsely states, “As it stands, the private school voucher system requires no accountability over how tax money is being spent. There are no audits to check.” The Students First Act …

There are places that disappear from maps but never from memory. For me, Storm Lake’s baseball fields and diamonds are among them. When my family moved from Aplington (then population around …

I am elated! Six months of surgery and rehab will be over soon, in about two more months of rehab. My left knee replacement in January and my right knee in June have been a temporary life-adjusting …

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 …

The Senate Agriculture Committee failed to pass its version of the five-year farm bill last week because of an argument over nutrition funding. Majority Leader John Thune, R-SD, instinctively blamed …

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is drawing major attention both in Storm Lake and around the world. Superhero movies are certainly no longer in their heyday, but the Wall-Crawler maintains his unique …

We’ve been in Michigan for the last few days. Over the weekend we were in Benton Harbor for a wedding, then took a side trip to the Upper Peninsula to visit famed vacation getaway Mackinac Island. …

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 …

Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor, said in a recent news story that most folks don’t support a statewide moratorium on new data centers. Really? I think he’s flat-out wrong. …

We constantly read about drive by shootings, snipings and other gang-related crimes. These are not big city problems; they are everwhere. This is in contrast to the 30s when gang warfare was mostly a …

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 …

Iowa was at the forefront of creating a mobile driver’s license, and now that option is transitioning. The state was one of the first to offer citizens the ability to place their driver’s …