Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo: Hamilton Nolan BURLINGTON, IOWA—There’s a very nice visitor’s center on the river here. Right by downtown. They’ll tell you everything about Burlington, including the fact that it’s about to flood. That visitor’s center was totally empty on Thursday, even though the national press corps was just two blocks away. We had much more stupid…
Illustration: Angelica Alzona (GMG) SOMEWHERE IN IOWA—Here is what happened, right before everything began to go to hell: It was June of 2015. The president was Barack Obama. I was a reporter for Gawker.com, a thriving independent media outlet. The 2016 presidential election was a year away, and the campaign season had just begun in…
An underground pipeline that runs through multiple Midwestern states has leaked an estimated 138,000 gallons of diesel fuel, according to the company that owns it, Magellan Midstream Partners. Clay Masters of Iowa Public Radio reported diesel leaking from a 12-inch underground pipe was initially spotted in a farm field in north-central Worth County, Iowa, on…
Iowa Feature On a cold, clear night in January 2008, when Iowa Democrats selected Barack Obama over a white woman and a white man in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus, the moment felt transformative. If voters in this overwhelmingly white, rural state could cast their ballots for a black man as president, then perhaps it was…
.entry-header Terri Lynn Rote, a registered Republican, is accused of submitting ballot at two different early voting stations, the Des Moines Register reports. Rote told Iowa Public Radio that she was afraid her first ballot for Donald Trump would be changed to a vote for Hillary Clinton. “I wasn’t planning on doing it twice, it…
Monday in Iowa, caucus-goers throughout the Hawkeye State will make their choice — and the 2016 presidential election, which has already dominated the news for the better part of a year, will finally begin. The start is almost finished; so if you’re still breathing, congratulations. You may make it out of this thing yet. Now, traditionally,…
No one questions the legality of the permits, but some officials worry about public safety. Cedar County (Iowa) Sheriff Warren Wethington has been teaching his daughter, Bethany, to use firearms. A brain tumor left Bethany, 18, partially blind, but he believes that once she becomes of legal age to purchase firearms, she should not be…
Let me be the first commentator to state explicitly what many Democratic insiders fear and many of the most progressive activists in the party yearn for: There is a very real prospect that Senator Bernie Sanders wins an outright victory in the Iowa caucus and pulls off one of the most stunning upsets in modern…