Category: Off topic

Erin Murphy and Maya Marchel Hoff in The Gazette:

 Iowa announced on Monday that it will return to a federal summer food assistance program, while tying the program’s $40 per month per child to Iowa’s new healthy foods initiative.

The announcement came on the same day a report made available to The Gazette showed Iowa’s program in 2025 fell well short of reaching the number of children that the federal program would have.

Last summer’s Healthy Kids Iowa replacement program for Summer EBT required families to find time to locate and show up to distribution sites during limited hours and local pantries and other volunteers to set up, staff and market these pop-ups, which only had pre-packaged boxes of food, which is a lot to put on overburdened people and organizations.

It’s bad enough that, of the 220,000 Iowa children eligible, the replacement program managed to serve less than a third of them. What’s worse is that was exactly what the State of Iowa expected.

Amanda Watford writing in the radical prison abolitionist rag (checks notes) Iowa Capital Dispatch and States Newsroom:

When Yraida Faneite was on trial for drug-related charges, the judge had to halt proceedings at one point because her period was so heavy that blood was running down her legs.

The same struggle followed her into a federal prison in Florida after she was convicted. For about a decade, officials allowed her only a small ration of menstrual products, and she couldn’t afford extra pads from the commissary. She bartered with other women. On her worst days, she tore up her own T-shirts and used them as makeshift pads.

When she told officers she needed to see a doctor and couldn’t safely continue a mandatory kitchen shift, she said, she was placed in solitary confinement. She eventually found out that her heavy bleeding was caused by cysts.

Incarceration is inhumane, and this is also inhumane.

Craig Meyer for USA Today:

The bowl system around which the college football postseason has been built for decades has encountered a bit of a problem this year.

It’s having trouble finding teams that want to participate.

College teams that have declined playing in a post-season bowl game:

• Notre Dame (10-2)
• Iowa State (8-4)
• Kansas State (6-6)
• Florida State (5-7)
• Auburn (5-7)
• UCF (5-7)
• Baylor (5-7)
• Kansas (5-7)
• Rutgers (5-7)
• Temple (5-7)

College bowls were supposed to be a reward for teams and fan, then everyone wanted one and not enough people wants participate in the consolation prize, not even some 5-7 losers and even if it comes with a $500,000 fine.

Brooklyn Draisey for the Iowa Capital Dispatch:

There wasn’t much debate among panelists and audience members, with the group seeming to agree that the root of the problems facing higher education comes from liberals and the ideas they bring with them.

The Crimethink infrastructure is here.

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See also: Clara Reynen’s field report from Day 2.

Previously here: Destroying the Economic Engine to Own the Libs

Alex Skopic for Current Affairs:

When Chuck Grassley was born in 1933, Hitler and Stalin were both still alive, and the chocolate chip cookie had not yet been invented. When he was first elected to the Iowa state legislature in 1958, segregation and Jim Crow were still in full effect, and would be for another six years. When he became a U.S. senator in 1980, it was part of the “Reagan Revolution” that created the Republican Party as we know it today—and Grassley was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, who reportedly gave him “an eight out of ten for his voting record.” One of his first big decisions in Washington was to vote against the creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983, although he insists he was just concerned about the expense of giving federal workers another day off. Simply put, this guy has been in Congress forever, outlasting six successive presidents. Now, at age 92, he visibly struggles to read statements on the Senate floor—but that hasn’t stopped him from filing the paperwork to run for yet another term in 2028, when he’d be 95. More likely, if the actuarial tables are anything to go by, he’ll follow in the footsteps of Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Gerry Connolly, and simply drop dead in office one of these days. 

A damning indictment of Sen. Grassley, the Democratic Party and our entire political system.

Nate Rogers for The New York Times:

Greg Ginn would really rather not be doing this. The co-founder and only constant member of Black Flag, the Southern California band that came to define hardcore punk in the late 1970s and ’80s, hadn’t given a formal interview in 13 years, savoring what he called a media “retirement.”

In April, he rebooted Black Flag with three new bandmates, which was not exactly notable for a group that requires a color-coded chart to keep track of its former members. But this time stood out because the collective age of those musicians — the singer Max Zanelly, 22; the bassist David Rodriguez, 21; and the drummer Bryce Weston, 22 — was less than that of Ginn, 71.

Fucking weird, dude.

Iowa City’s best City Councilor, Laura Bergus¹, is doing a regular podcast, Not Quite Quorum, with fellow Councilor Oliver Weilein. But last week he was off touring Canada. So she had some “local government expert” slub on for a short episode.

We covered the amazing Sycamore Greenway, water quality, city news feeds, sunsets, neighborhood sounds and animals, and bike infrastructure.

Take a listen and subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

1. She’s my wife, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less true. ↩︎

Cara Buckley, “reporting from a bus in Iowa City,” for The New York Times:

Iowa City eliminated bus fares in August 2023 with a goal of lowering emissions from cars and encouraging people to take public transit. The two-year pilot program proved so popular that the City Council voted this summer to extend it another year, paying for it with a 1 percent increase in utility taxes and by doubling most public parking rates to $2 from $1.

Ridership has surpassed prepandemic levels by 18 percent. Bus drivers say they’re navigating less congested streets. People drove 1.8 million fewer miles on city streets, according to government calculations, and emissions dropped by 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. That’s the equivalent of taking 5,200 vehicles off the roads.

Iowa City’s fare free buses have been a big success. Popular and an easy win. The program started as a two-year pilot and was recently granted another year. Are we ever going to just say “yeah this is a thing we do”? This graf suggests not this big win isn’t something the City of Iowa City considers a core service:

Darian Nagle-Gamm, the city’s transportation director, said that the unknowns in federal and state funding, along with proposed property-tax changes, meant that the city would most likely have to review the program every year. But there was eagerness for fare-free buses to stay, she said. “The transit system is one of the greatest tools communities have to combat climate change and reduce emissions,” she said. “You can make a pretty immediate impact.”

Of course there are questions about the budget ever year, but it sure is maddening that things like free buses, which are a success and directly align with the City of Iowa City’s strategic plan, get put in the category of something to revisit every year while, um, other things we spend millions of dollars on every year go forward without question (at least until recently).

The year-by-year assessment is a little bit disconcerting since the long-wished-for Sunday service was approved by the City Council and then implementation was delayed and then everyone seemed to forget.

The Onion:

Out here, we prefer settlin’ disputes the old-fashioned way, by addressin’ the harmful impact of a crime head-on, then determinin’ what can be done to repair that harm while holdin’ the person who caused it accountable for their actions. Lemme tell ya, we don’t take kindly to strangers whose idea of restitution relies solely on dehumanizin’ punishment.