Category: Politics

Getting Bad and Sloppy

Tom Barton and Izabel Zaluska reporting for The Gazette:

A rush is on in the Iowa Legislature to fix an oversight resulting from a previously passed property tax reform package that could mean potentially millions of dollars in lost revenue in the coming months for some Iowa cities.

The state legislature, controlled by the alleged party of small government, has filed and passed a lot of legislation that hurts cities and their ability to make local decisions. And a lot of that legislation is sloppy, which almost always leads to unintended consequences and then rushed “fixes”. Surgical strikes these are not; instead they are broad messaging bills that also have real-world impacts.

With cities and counties in the throes of setting their budgets to take effect July 1, the error by the state has thrown the process into disarray and may cause cities, counties and school boards to either lose millions of dollar they planned on — or raise tax rates more than they wanted.

It’s not like cities throw these things together at the last minute, or wait until the legislature is back in session. At this point, cities have been working on budgets for months. Budgets, as the story notes, are due in March but there are public hearing and publication deadlines that mean they need to be finalized in January and early February, so if cities are going to suddenly see millions of dollars less than they expected, that’s kind of a big deal.

Art of the Iowa Capitol as a house of horrors by Rhaomi via Dall-e

In and Out of Character

Trump’s “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” that turned out to be a sale of licensed NFT’s when it seems interest is at best waned seems out of character for a presidential candidate. But is seems very in character for this particular former president.

There was, I think, a gap in the steaks and for-profit scam university because he had other, more valuable things to sell. But NFT sales con man is who he is.

Red Blooded

Following yet another election night drubbing in Iowa, it’s easy to feel despair.

I feel it. Not 2016 feel it, but it stings.

Iowa, as we longtime residents on the left are fond of saying, isn’t the place we fell in love with. It’s clearly bathed in red, rewarding culture warriors who run on dog whistles.

The bright side is that over the last few cycles, I’ve learned to set my expectations at absolute rock bottom so I can be pleased that maybe someone I voted for in a statewide race is clinging to a 2,000-vote lead.

A Post-Roe World

My wife and I were in our mid-30s, financially secure with good careers and a safety net, and parents of a happy, healthy 9-year-old when we first considered abortion.

We did not want a bigger family and, despite being stable and secure, were scared and uncertain.

So on a weekend, we sent our kid to their grandparents to spend the night, took a pregnancy test and got rip roaring drunk in the wash of relief that followed its coming back negative.

I booked a vasectomy following a simple conversation with my doctor and a referral to a urologist. The hardest part was figuring out paying a bill through some third-party system since my primary provider was affiliated with the Catholic Church. (You know.)

Today, we are now in the shocking-but-not-surprising place that our world is officially a post-Roe world. It hurts. It’s infuriating. It’s a lot of other things I don’t have words for.

Whatever emotional pain I feel pales in comparison to physical and emotional hurt, and entirely predictable disfigurement and death, that will come with abortion bans in Republican states across the nation.

There will still be abortions. These abortions will be more dangerous for those who cannot travel to states where the medical procedure remains legal, and our neighbors and loved ones and friends will feel less safe, less in control and less cared for, no mater their station.

Fuck these illegitimate, undemocratic, lying justices.

Jan. 6 in June 2022

Revisiting footage from Jan. 6, 2021, in June 2022, even just this was more powerful, more terrifying, than I thought it would be. Just this 10-minute clip, part of the first two-hour hearing, took me back 17 months.

I used the word “coup” then. The Select Committee used the word “coup” yesterday.

Many members of the GOP are trying to change the subject because it’s hard to see it as anything but an attempted coup.

How San Francisco Became a Failed City

Nellie Bowles writing in The Atlantic:

These are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.

Iowa City is not San Francisco, but our politics, and, I suspect, our problems, share some similarities.

The Inadequacy of the CDC

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

To paraphrase Sonny Corleone, during a pandemic we need a wartime CDC. And it’s clear we don’t have one. The institutional apparatus designed for managing ‘ordinary’ infectious diseases, researching and improving care for chronic maladies simply isn’t designed for what we’ve confronted in the last two years.

This was my takeaway from reading Michael Lewis’ The Premonition, which felt both premature and prescient when I read it, too.

In my view, public service involves two, at times competing, calls. One is to leverage expertise. A second is to advocate for the best option. The political part of public service is about making calls — often really tough ones and sometime really unpopular ones — is the face of competing demands.

We’ve put the CDC in the place of having to issue perfect decisions or do the work of political leaders by including the balance in their work.

Voters with Uncounted Ballots on Rita Hart’s Challenge Withdrawal

Zachary Oren Smith reporting for the Press-Citizen:

After filling out her ballot, Loetz said she was preparing to put it into her secrecy envelope but she’s allergic to the glue in some envelopes, so rather than licking it, used a bit of water to seal it. In the process, she said, the envelope ripped. Rather than starting over, she decided to take it to the Scott County Auditor’s Office to see if it would work. According to Loetz, she asked the elections worker if the envelope would be a problem, but says she was told it would work.

These are stories that got lost in the both-sides reporting of Iowa’s Second Congressional District: 22 people whose votes were not counted for technical reasons.

This wasn’t an attempt to steal an election like Donald Trump, who was demanding ballots from precincts that went heavily Democrat Joe Biden be tossed in bulk. Rita Hart was asking — consistently — to have specific ballots considered in a recount.

Hart was asking that voters, including those who voted for her opponent, not be disenfranchised.