I know I said it wasn’t worth critique any longer, but a double byline story carrying this clickbait hed is outlandish.
If you have to print this, maybe just run the number? At least they got in published the next day, I guess.
Author: Nick Bergus
We Are All We Have
Like any sane person, I’m distressed and overwhelmed living in a world that is a whirlwind of terrible things: rising fascism, the dismantling of democracy, our neighbors being stripped of their civil rights, the social safety net being sold for parts, hostility towards science, etc.
As we look around for help, it’s increasingly clear: there is no one but ourselves.
In this swirl of a grim reality moving at breakneck speed from bad to worse, I have found taking a deep breath, overlapping my sphere of concern with my sphere of influence and focusing on the people around me has been empowering and calming. As our federal, state and local governments continue to let people slip through cracks or be increasingly unable or unwilling to address ongoing crises, others are continuing to organize.
Iowa City Mutual Aid is one such collective working to meet the survival needs of the people whom our systems continuously fail. They work to support the most vulnerable: supporting unhoused people, writing letters to incarcerated queer folks, a community garden, emergency needs as they arise and more.
If you’re angry and looking for a way to help, please consider giving — and consider making it monthly to empower their work to help people and build community. (Des Moines Mutual Aid is their fiscal sponsor and donations are tax deductible.) Funds go to keep people in their homes, support international students getting their visas pulled and needs across our community.
Everyone Wants Something for Free
Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican from Wilton and son of Iowa GOP chair Jeff Kaufmann, according to Tom Barton in The Gazette:
“With assessment letters coming out, Iowans have been louder than ever with their concerns about property taxes. Iowans have expressed their concern, rage, and fear about unpredictable increases and their ability to afford staying in their homes. We are working to provide real relief to Iowans and their families, make Iowa a competitive state to live, and deliver a property tax overhaul that focuses on property taxpayers.”
First about those letters: they are required to be sent around the same time as the propaganda about tax rates despite not having any impact on a property owner’s tax liability until 18 months from now. Shocker everyone is mad about their largest asset appreciating in value. Wait. What?
Look, everyone dislikes taxes, but they sure do love parks, libraries, roads, sidewalks, safe buildings, emergency medical attention and their homes not being on fire. The GOP plan might fix the former, but it will absolutely not have a positive impact on the latter.
I Assure You
You have met someone who is transgender, and they were a person who deserves to live authentically and be loved just like you.
“Joyous”
So much joy after all the recriminations of the campaign. Grassroots movements , and welcoming people in, matters.
Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act: Notes on Preserving the American Republic
Josh Marshall has a sobering post at Talking Points Memo in which he quotes Lee Bollinger from an interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education:
We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orbán and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.
“Failure of imagination” is a nice way of saying “people who shouldn’t be are in denial of what’s happening.” I’d point to Chuck Schumer’s failure to hold the line this past week.
Back to Marshall:
That is what is happening. And we’re in the middle of it. As semi-familiar as the words and concepts are, we all collectively need to concentrate on that statement. It’s neither a future possibility nor an accomplished fact.
That is, as John Connor says in Terminator 2, there’s no fate, and we can’t act like there is.
Trump and his administration, with the help of the Republican Party, while dismantling the federal government, are also simultaneously attacking other nodes of power outside of government: the government. Obviously higher education, but also, and here’s where Marshall goes deeper, the law firms that are necessary for private actors to work within the legal system.
A free society exists not simply because there are limits on the power of the government. The state may have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. But it does not have a monopoly on power. It’s free because there are multiple nodes of power — cultural, economic, social — in the national space. Universities are one of those. The private sector economy is another.
We each need to resist in our own spaces and places.
We’ve got a huge job on our hands and there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed. But the first step of acting is knowing exactly where you are. People who are thinking in terms of Viktor Orbán are not surprised by each successive move. It’s actually pretty textbook. How it all shakes out comes down to the decisions countless private actors make. It also means supporting institutions that are meaningfully supporting free society. That doesn’t have to be a matter of performative spectacles. At its most essential, it means not changing behavior.
This is war, and we need to observe, orient, decide, act faster than those we oppose.
Iowa City Man tells UI Police Detective to ‘Leave my Family Alone’ After Harassment
Oops, sorry. The Gazette’s headline is “UI police detective tells Iowa City man to ‘leave my family alone’ after harassment.”
Headlines frame stories — in the age of social media, are all many people read — and, unlike the Daily Iowan’s piece, this frame only tells the story of the prosecution and the police.
The ledes of the two pieces tell two very different stories. Compare the two. Here’s Trish Mehaffy’s from The Gazette:
A University of Iowa police detective said an Iowa City man created a social media profile of him using personal information, including his spouse’s name, and used “hateful discriminating language” that he would never use.
The first three paragraphs are all from the detective’s “victim impact statement.”
Meanwhile, here’s Emma Jane’s lede in The Daily Iowan:
Daniel Kauble was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation and six months of suspension — meaning he will serve jail time if he violates probation — for operating a parody account on X, formerly known as Twitter, impersonating University of Iowa Police Department detective Ian Mallory.
Simply regurgitating police reports, court filings and victim impact statements is stenography, not journalism. I don’t care how you feel about this series of events, acknowledging Kauble’s Twitter account was a parody is key to understanding what’s happening here, and “satire” or “parody” do not appear in The Gazette story.
(The Press-Citizen, if it ever covers this, will do it at least a week late with a clickbate headline such as “Who Harassed a UIPD Detective?” but it’s not worth criticizing.)
Iowa City Man Sentenced for Police Parody Account
Emma Jane writing for The Daily Iowan:
Kauble’s initial charges — one count of third-degree harassment, one count of identity theft under $1,500, and one count of tampering with a witness or juror — stemmed from an account he created on Feb. 8, 2024, one day after [University of Iowa Detective Ian] Mallory testified as a witness in a criminal trial.
That criminal trial was one where Mallory and Johnson County Attorney Rachel Zimmermann Smith targeted trans and non-binary people who were among the 100 or so protesting an anti-trans speaker (the protester in this trial, Tara McGovern, was acquitted). Mallory was testifying because he surveilled the charged protesters, again all trans and non-binary folks, over months.
According to the criminal complaint, Kauble used Mallory’s personal information without his knowledge or consent to create the X account @IanMallory4Iowa. He created posts mocking Mallory and criticizing his handling of the case in which he had recently testified, the complaint states.
The State of Iowa prosecuted a private citizen for a satire account criticizing an officer of the state using public records.
I think of Dan Kauble as a performance artist whose uses mockery and absurdity to criticize those in power. His greatest hits, as I remember them, are:
- Awarding Iowa City’s city manager a “Worst City Manager” trophy during public comment
- Bringing a ladder and a sign to get into the Iowa City city manager’s Zoom background while meetings were being held remotely due to COVID
- Handing the Johnson County Sheriff a remote control MRAP during discussions of its actual value beyond a toy. This episode is made better by Sheriff’s Brad Kunkel’s on-camera reaction.
To be clear: Kauble pleaded guilty, though we don’t know his reasons why, but this feels like the very reason the First Amendment (RIP) exists.
There’s a Word for That
Each County Auditor in Iowa is required to mail property tax notices ahead of the taxing authorities’ budgets (and therefore tax rates) approval. The form of the notice is required by law.
From Johnson County’s online information about these notices:
The tax statement you recently received from Johnson County attempts to calculate and illustrate the county’s share of property taxes to be levied on your property. The percentage increase for the upcoming proposed FY 2025/2026 budget year assumes that your property’s assessed value will increase by 10% over the current year’s assessed value. This is an assumption the State of Iowa built into this statement and is a decision which Johnson County has no control.
The actual average increase in Johnson County assessed property value for the FY2025/2026 property tax calculations is as follows:
The State of Iowa’s frame is misleading at best. The actual adjustments range from 0.4 to 1.2 percent, and “most properties in this category will have no increase in their assessed values unless improvements were made to the property.”
There’s a term for purposefully misleading information to support a particular political stance produced by the state: propaganda.
We Need Democrats, Not Decorum-crats
Jason Benell writing at Bleeding Heartland:
Nowadays they seem to care more about appearing a certain way than addressing what their opposition is doing.
Republicans everywhere have zero qualms about being terrible. About lying. About dismantling safety nets. About stripping human rights.
Meanwhile, Democrats are worried about flag burning, not saying “fuck you” and other decorum to the point of alienating allies. It was enough for me to say fuck this.