The Polk County Elections office (2309 Euclid in Des Moines) is open now for early voting in person for Iowa SD-16. Hours are 7:30 am to 3:30 pm. You can also vote early there on Monday, Dec 29 from 8 am to 4:30 pm. It takes only a few minutes! Election is Dec 30; polls will be open 7 am to 8 pm.

What these people are doing to the power of calling out real antisemitism, in an incredibly dangerous time of surging global antisemitism….man, it is just so worrisome

"You don't seem like you're from Iowa." (translation: you don't sound dumb) Heard versions of that many times in college and beyond.

Just posted: Chuck Isenhart @chuckisenhart.bsky.social served with Josh Turek @joshturek4iowa.bsky.social for two years in the Iowa House. Here he makes his case for "one of the most thoughtful and diligent legislators" as a candidate for U.S. Senate. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/26/j...

New post: Jill Norton wrote about Irish history, her family's experiences at Iowa Irish Fest, and how this event came to happen every summer in Waterloo. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/26/c...

Early voting in person is available at the Polk County Elections office (2309 Euclid in Des Moines) on Saturday, Dec 27 from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm, and on Monday, Dec 29 from 8:00 am to 4:30 pm. It takes only a few minutes! Polls will be open 7 am to 8 pm on Tuesday, Dec 30.

ICYMI, the stunt Bari Weiss pulled this week really touched a nerve for me. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/25/o...

I always check these famous quotes in guest author submissions. Many of them have no support. E.g. Einstein didn’t say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

DOGE was A LOT less likely to cancel contracts from companies that donated money to Republicans than companies that donated to Democrats.

As a Jew, it’s fun watching the administration post Christian nationalist messages while also saying they are doing everything they can to curb antisemitism.

Here’s the U.S. government being officially religious in a country with no official religion.

The blatant selling of pardons is perhaps the clearest instance of criminal conduct authorized by SCOTUS. Pardons are a quintessential "official act." So, even when Trump takes a bribe to issue one, he is presumably above the criminal law.

"an internet witch hunt" Every single named person in this article who spread ugly lies about the Brown shooting, even putting an innocent student in danger, is a Republican. One is even a top DOJ official. This NYT headline makes it seem like it was an everybody problem. It was not.

I need to talk about what happened at CBS News this past week. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/25/o...

Pope Leo said in a Christmas Eve sermon that the story of Jesus being born in a stable because there was no room at an inn should remind Christians that refusing to help the poor and strangers today is tantamount to rejecting God himself. For @reuters.com

A report from three organizations, analyzing data from Kansas and Arizona, posits that citizenship laws are costly, error-prone and disenfranchise voters. Plus, citizenship is already a requirement to vote nationwide. via @kansasreflector.com

New post by Ralph Rosenberg: The real lessons Democrats should learn from the fractured GOP coalition www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/24/t...

Surprise for me: no Iowa state agency sent me public records I requested weeks ago on Christmas Eve. It has happened before! #firstworldproblems

The University of Oklahoma fired an instructor for failing a student who wrote a reaction paper without having read the text she was supposed to react to. By definition she failed to satisfy the requirements of the assignment—which she publicly disclosed before the decision to fire the instructor.

Exactly and more. When I was a student blue book exams were the dullest; they felt actively anti-intellectual. Research papers were the deep pleasure and substance of learning; I wouldn’t be a writer or a professor now without them. But they’re most vulnerable to the LLM plague,

It's a weird world when dutifully regurgitating a bunch of carefully curated information that the world's richest man gave you is "fearless journalism," but reporting on how the government is kidnapping innocent people and sending them overseas to be tortured is "not moving the ball forward."

Hilarious: Sen Chuck Grassley claimed to be "shocked" that Trump's Treasury Dept "would change what was studied for a while and suggested. It didn’t meet the ideology of this administration...” They're canceling projects left and right! What upset Grassley: laurabelin.substack.com/p/congress-w...

New post: Kurt Meyer weighs in on the federal prosecution of "the Sandwich Guy" and popular discourse surrounding the case. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/24/h...

Randy Evans: Too many people stand up for First Amendment freedoms only for those who think, speak, or act in conformity with their own views. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/23/t...

Dennis Hart and I covered lots of ground on "KHOI's Capitol Week." The show will never take up more than 30-minutes of your time, & I always write a recap. A bunch of stories about Senator Chuck Grassley in here, plus some campaign and state government news: laurabelin.substack.com/p/congress-w...

Btw this is one of the biggest reasons why it’s not as easy as people think to start up independent newsrooms or just be an indie journalist on substack. If you are actually holding powerful and rich people to account, you WILL need legal representation. Not a matter of whether but when

On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. But is still led to cuts that closed offices, canceled programs and deprived people of food, medicine and other aid. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

"Jew hatred is real, but today’s anti-antisemitism isn’t a legitimate effort to fight it. It’s a cover for a wide range of agendas that have nothing to do with the welfare of Jewish people. All of these agendas [...]endanger the principles and institutions that have actually made this country great"

New post by @douglaswburns.bsky.social: Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and his orbiting panelists relentlessly mocked the weight of a rural band teacher and Democratic candidate for the Iowa legislature in a viral national broadcast last week. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/22/f...

You can listen to tonight's 30-minute show about Iowa politics on any podcast platform or smart speaker now: "KHOI's Capitol Week" Tomorrow I'll send the audio file & a detailed written recap on my free email newsletter: laurabelin.substack.com

"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"

Such a revealing comment: "Megyn Kelly said she had been generous to Shapiro in the past 'because I know that he’s losing subscribers—a lot.'" People like Kelly who don't believe this stuff but also don't want to lose money/clout by denouncing conspiracy theories are worse than Owens.

Bill Clinton releasing a statement saying 'release the Epstein files, you cowards' was not on my bingo list.

In a few minutes, Dennis Hart (filling in for Spencer Dirks) and I will be live on KHOI Radio to talk about the week in Iowa politics. 89.1 FM in the Ames listening area or online: www.khoifm.org (will be on podcast platforms later as "KHOI's Capitol Week")

iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.

Folks, you can’t have Christian Nationalism without the antisemitism. It’s a central tenet of the ideology. The fact some of these Jewish Heritage folks are just realizing this is wild to me.

Affordability is not a f***ing hoax.

Strong reader response to Jon Muller's analysis (with receipts!) of Iowa's impending budget crash. "It’s going to hit a wall in FY 2029 or FY 2030. It’s not really a question of how far they can fly the plane. It’s about how badly the plane crashes." www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/18/f...

Thank you, @laurarbelin.bsky.social, for publishing this! I expected something disheartening from UI's new center... I didn't realize it'd be this bad. Or that they'd say a soup of feminism and social movements is supposedly destroying higher ed. (?!)

New post: Early this month, greg wickenkamp attended a panel discussion at the inaugural event of the University of Iowa's "Center for Intellectual Freedom." A reflection on what he heard there: www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/21/o...

60 MINUTES CORRESPONDENT: “Our story was screened 5x and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” #CBSNewsMAX #BariWeiss www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

In the summer of 1950 most US newspapers ran an AP story about how race had become the main issue in the upcoming Georgia governor's race. Segregationist Herman Tallmadge, governor from '47 to '55 and then a Senator until 1981 made a name for himself by refusing to "apologize for being a white man."

NEW: Rep. Cory Mills owns a defense company that appears to have been illegally exporting weapons to Ukraine—while Mills sits on the committee with oversight of those sales. This has gone unreported and for a long time unknown in Congress. My latest here: sollenbergerrc.substack.com/p/george-san...

He didn’t have any faith in Kash Patel’s FBI?

I covered Russian politics in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Sometimes people would ask how worried we should be about Putin. I would say he's a danger to people in his own country and maybe neighbors, but was pragmatic and wouldn't pick fights with the West. I've never been more wrong about anything.

Who's up late? I’ve sometimes wondered: is there anything President Trump could do that Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird would find objectionable? This week we learned the answer is yes. You'll never guess what crossed the line. www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/21/f...

Meanwhile Iowa Republicans removed HPV & the HPV vaccine from the mandatory sex ed curriculum in 2023. It's not clear how many Iowa school districts have removed that material from their middle school and high school sex ed classes, but probably thousands of kids are not learning about this option.

New post by Jason Benell @jastiger.bsky.social: Do rural Iowans even care about themselves?

The Interfaith Alliance of Iowa invited me to speak at their Crossroads luncheon yesterday. I spent about 20 minutes previewing the legislative session and the 2026 elections in Iowa, and took questions for the rest of the time. Link for anyone who wants to watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuNv...

Even for Fox, this is low. @douglaswburns.bsky.social wrote about Gutfeld and panelists fat-shaming a public school band teacher who is running for the Iowa House (in a very tough rural district). @yrfatfriend.bsky.social @michaelhobbes.bsky.social theiowamercury.substack.com/p/fox-news-g...