In one minute, my newly downloaded app, Merlin from Cornell University, identified the sounds of four birds: American Robin, Blue Jay, American Crow and Northern Cardinal. They are common birds in Big Grove Township yet the app is training me in how to listen for and identify bird life with which I’ve lived since we moved here. I stood on the front steps and turned it on. Briefly, it is fun.
Judging from my email traffic, yesterday was busy. I published the letter to the editor I wrote yesterday, worked on my class reunion, planned for the county convention, cleaned, and cooked. I made chili and cornbread for dinner.
My chili recipe is toned down for milder palates. Six ingredients: a diced large onion, three 15-ounce cans of organic kidney beans, three pints of tomato sauce (home canned or store bought), chili powder, cumin, and a bag of Morningstar Farm Recipe Crumbles. I usually make vegan cornbread to go with it. It isn’t like the cornbread Mother used to make but it is uniquely ours and tasty.
Overall it was a punk day, with a walk on the state park trail being the only outdoors activity. When I moved the mulch over the garlic earlier in the week, there was still frost on the ground underneath. We had a couple of days in a row where temperatures got up to 70 degrees. A few more and I will be able to dig in the garden.
We got much-needed rain this morning. Hope to get outdoors in between showers. Lots to do this cloudy day before we get into Spring.
The field of candidates for federal and state offices is shaping up after the Friday, March 15, filing deadline. Once the filings are known, it’s off we go to November! It is an exciting time for those interested in our politics.
Democrat Christina Bohannan was to file her nominating petitions for U.S. House in District 1 at the Secretary of State’s office this week. She will face the winner of a two-way primary between Republican candidates Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and newcomer David Pautsch. We won’t know the final match up until after the June 4 primary.
Democrat Ed Chabal, chief financial officer of the Mount Pleasant Community School District, filed his petitions for State Senator in District 46 on March 5. Incumbent Republican Dawn Driscoll filed for re-election in February.
House District 91 is an open race with two Republicans in the primary so far (Mayor Adam Grier of Williamsburg and Lawyer Judd Lawler of Oxford). As I posted this, Democrats were collecting petition signatures for a candidate, with plans to file before the deadline. There is a lot to learn about these candidates.
How do we learn about candidates in 2024? For me, living at the far eastern border of the legislative districts, it is all about shaking their hands and getting to know them with a short conversation. I expect civility and concern for the needs of everyone in the district. Here’s hoping we have a chance to see all these candidates throughout the districts before the June primary.
~ Published as a letter to the editor in the Hometown Current on March 14, 2024.
I threw in with a group of readers, writers, artists, and photographers when I joined Threads to replace my X account. There is a lot of discussion about books to be read stacks. You know what I mean: that pile of acquired books that grows and eventually might be read. What is the right number to have? 100? 200? More? Less? There is not a right answer. I have a completely full bookcase in one of the passageways leading to my writing room. When it’s time for the next book, I browse it like I am in a personal book store. To be read stacks got me thinking about how to select the next book.
Book selection is a hodge-podge process in my world. I diligently read at least 25 pages per day. When it’s time for the next book, sometimes I know what to pick up ahead of time and sometimes I don’t. I can be like a dog chasing a squirrel. There is little interest in being disciplined here. Less than there should be. I tend to pick recently acquired books for next.
At the same time, there are books I own I want to get to. For example, I’m building a collection of books about Florida, Virginia, Minnesota and other places important to my family history. Those are maybe 50 books organized on shelves for easy grabbing for research. Somehow those need to be worked into the rotation.
Referrals are the most important part of the process: referrals from friends, social media (Threads and Facebook mainly), from the footnotes of other books, and from what my pals on Goodreads are reading. I used to just buy those books and find a spot for them.
While I have more than a thousand books in my library to be read (maybe two thousand, who’s counting?), I slowed the purchasing process. When I find a book to read from any source, I put it in my Amazon shopping cart and remove it to save for later. That builds a reading list without buying a book. In the past, when I filled my cart, I used to just place the order. No more.
I have a Goodreads account with a few friends. The Goodreads to be read list exists yet I don’t find it as useful as the Amazon list. I use them both when I’m stumped.
When the next book is up, from any source, and I don’t have a copy, I check availability on the online catalogue at the public library. This is a new process. We are in a small community so sometimes they have it and sometimes they don’t. If they have it, I place a hold and pick it up on the next trip to town.
I keep nine shelves of more than 400 books of poetry. I use them to palate cleanse or for inspiration. There are so many unread poems they could keep me busy for a long time.
In terms of filling my life with reading, I would never have to leave the house for the 14 years left according to government life expectancy tables. Nonetheless, I want to stay current and as an avid reader of online publications I frequently encounter a new book I should read.
My bottom line is I like the hodge-podge of my to be read stack and its extensions online. With so many good books in the world, I don’t want to miss many. I don’t have enough perspective to know whether I have and a to be read stack is no answer to that problem.
Garlic is up in the garden: yield looks pretty good. Somehow building a brush pile escaped me this week so I need to get cracking on that. Many robins and other birds have arrived. Lilacs are beginning to bud. All signs are present for an early spring.
Class reunion
Nothing can sober a person like figuring out who died from one’s high school class. For my class of 1970, our research shows 42 of about 260 classmates have died. That is in line with what insurance company actuarial tables suggest should be our experience. It doesn’t make dealing with those deaths any easier. “Who died?” was the most frequently asked question at our 40th reunion in 2010 so the planning committee is front loading work to have a better answer this time.
When I work on the organizing committee for a reunion I’m more likely to attend. My main interests are finding out what people have been doing during the years since we graduated, planning the event, and catching up on news. I would not likely attend if I wasn’t on the planning committee. The event is in July, dubbed the 50th Reunion (Delayed) because we canceled during the coronavirus pandemic when our 50th would have been.
Charlatan
I finished reading Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock this week. It is a well-researched and easy to read book about early 20th Century medical practices and associated quackery. Dr. John Binkley, the charlatan, is reminiscent of B.J. Palmer, son of the discoverer of the chiropractic principle, who lived in Davenport. Palmer started the first radio stations west of the Mississippi River in Davenport and Des Moines, paraded elephants through the city streets to advertise the chiropractic principle, and had a museum called Little Bit O’Heaven at his chiropractic school. The museum had artifacts collected during his global travels. While chiropractic thrives into the 21st Century as a respected medical profession, its trajectory in the early years is tied to that of the goat-gland charlatan depicted in this book. Worth reading for this and other reasons.
State of the Union
I viewed video of the entire State of the Union Address. It took me multiple segments to get through it. Biden did an excellent job, of the kind I expect from a Democratic president. I also viewed video of the Alabama housewife (and U.S. Senator) who delivered the Republican response. They have nothing! Seriously, Biden got criticized for having a campaign TikTok account. Do Republicans not know about the numerous objections among users to federal attempts to regulate TikTok? OMG! Governor Kim Reynolds made a press release reacting to the State of the Union with a tepid response. Why did she even bother if she had nothing to say? Republicans really do want to take the country backward.
Another week and Republican state legislators stuck in my craw. Why do they hate plant-based food? In the end, all our food is based on plant life, including beef, hogs, and sheep which all eat plants.
Ty Rushing of Iowa Starting Line reported the following from Republican Rep. Mike Sexton: “If it was up to me, I believe I would outlaw fake meat in the state of Iowa, and I would make it illegal to transport it across the state of Iowa.” Perhaps someone should inform Rep. Sexton many fake meats are made from soybeans, which is a major Iowa crop. Sexton is like the guy in a bar, who two hours after the game finished is telling wait staff clearing tables his opinion about a long past and obscure referee call. Legislators are not serious people when they raise issues like this.
Diners who converted to a plant-based diet sometimes want the home-cooked flavor of a burger like those offered by Morningstar Farms and Beyond Meat. People with common sense know processed food is not particularly good for us. If the choice is eating a fast food meal or going hungry, there is no choice: stave off hunger until we can improve our diet. The traditional wisdom is “all things in moderation.” We should take it easy on processed food.
The point missing in this excerpt from life in late stage Republicanism is we, as a society, should be cutting the size of our livestock herds. In her book Not the End of the World, author Hannah Ritchie explains her beef with beef and other livestock.
Raising cattle is a very resource-intensive way to make food. Cows need a lot of food, water, emit a lot of greenhouse gases, and need a lot of land. When it comes to how much land is needed to produce a kilogram of food, beef and lamb are miles ahead of any other food.
Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie.
Globally, we don’t need to use so much land for food production, Ritchie asserts. While not impacting overall food availability, reducing livestock herds could significantly reduce the amount of agricultural production needed to feed everyone on the planet. Take away livestock, and more soy produced as animal feed could be converted to human foodstuffs. We could reduce deforestation and let some land used for livestock grazing revert to forest, grassland or other wilderness. We would all be better for this.
The thing about late stage Republicanism is it is not about logic and common sense. This is about the GOP Culture Wars. I visited our public library last week and there is an entire 30-foot row of shelves containing books about health, diet and cooking in a city of 3,000 people. The culture of food is all around us. When it becomes politicized, like Sexton made it, there are no winners. What? You want me to make my own fake meat burgers? Well fine. They will be better than tolerating the sh*t show Republicans put on every day as their party is grasping at straws. Democrats are on the cusp of something big when drones like Sexton have their say.
If you want to learn about the bigger picture of sustainability, I recommend Hannah Ritchie’s new book, which can be found here. In the meanwhile, the dithering Republicans in the State House haven’t banned your recipe crumbles… yet.
On Super Tuesday, March 5, the Iowa Democratic Party released the results of their mail-in presidential preference “caucus” that replaced first in the nation. Most news outlets did not recognize this was a thing to watch before it happened. After four attempts, Biden won Iowa, securing all 46 delegates to the national convention. I don’t recall him visiting the Hawkeye State to campaign this cycle. I’d wager he had already shaken many of the Democratic hands that marked the oval next to his name.
At the public library used book sale last weekend I bought a copy of Pete Souza’s Obama: An Intimate Portrait for a free will donation. Souza was chief official White House photographer for all eight years of the administration. Many of the photos in this 352-page book have been widely published. After returning home from the library I started reading it and couldn’t stop until I had turned every page. We are hungry for the kind of presidency Obama had. It is incomprehensible to me the country followed Obama with Trump.
Why does the Obama administration pull on my heartstrings? It’s because almost everyone I know had some connection to what they did. Friends traveled to D.C. for the inauguration. Members of my groups reported on high level meetings they attended. Nearly every Democrat I knew worked on his campaign. Combine that with the fact I met the guy in 2006, before he ran for president, and had a comfortable, personal conversation with him. Obama was as real as a politician can be. That means something and I miss it.
Obama ran into an obstacle when Republicans took the U.S. House majority in 2010. It was as if the electorate said, “Whoa Nellie,” and backed off from the work Obama was doing. I found it frustrating, as did he. Obama navigated through it as best he could. Another obstacle appeared in 2014 when Republicans took control of both the House and Senate during the midterms. In Souza’s book there is a photo of Obama and Biden working on Biden’s announcement he would not run for president in 2016.
Few Democrats I know caucused for Biden during the three times he competed when Iowa was first in the nation. When he defeated Trump in 2020, he became the kind of Democrat we missed. With his long experience in the U.S. Senate, and as Vice President, he learned how to get bills passed, and he did. He doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. As I wrote previously, “(under Biden) it is government acting as it should be and therefore if nothing seems broken, no worries. No credit for elected officials either.”
Those of us with living memory of LBJ know what it means to hit the ball out of the park in an election. When I was a kid, I expected all elections could be like the 1964 Democratic landslide. Biden hasn’t come close to what Johnson did in his first three years in office. Like with Obama, Biden’s first two years with a Democratic House and Senate were his best. We could return to that if Democrats do well in 2024. A lot depends on every Democrat activating during the fall campaign, recapturing some of the Obama essence. It seem there will be no more Democratic landslides for the time being.
Having Obama and Joe Biden as presidents has been positive. I also recognize how quickly the past fades.
I put the Obama book on the table in the living room so my spouse could spend time with it. Eventually it will go on my bookshelves until I’m ready to reflect again on those years. Despite the challenges, they were good years. There is new work ahead that requires focus. Re-electing Biden will be a formidable task. It will be worth the work if we can get it done.
Editor’s Note: If you are on social media looking to get involved in a campaign, I recommend following Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin and Resistance Live. She is on Threads and YouTube. She will get your energy level UP!
The Iowa Democratic Party reported unofficial results of our mail-in caucus. Joe Biden won with 11,083 votes out of 12,193 tallied (91 percent). Since no other candidate got 15 percent of the vote, Biden receives all 46 Iowa delegates to the Democratic National Convention. The convention process kicks off with our county convention on March 23, 2024. I am a delegate from my precinct.
Among the races to watch last night was the North Carolina Republican primary where election denier/holocaust denier/Trump supporter Mark Robinson won and will face Democrat Josh Stein in the general election. In the California race to replace U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey advanced to the general election.
There were 16 state results, plus American Samoa. Biden and Trump dominated their parties and are expected to win the nominations. This sentence could have been written before Super Tuesday. Unless your state was voting/caucusing, there was little reason to pay attention to the results. Once Iowa was called, I went to bed and read the rest of the results in the morning.
This week Greg Sargent wrote about the results of a Democratic poll which showed a small percentage of voters surveyed are familiar with Trump’s most overt authoritarian outbursts. One hopes Democrats will tune in and soon. The article suggests the electorate is tuned out at the moment.
A lot depends on the results of the general election.
About 200 cell blocks with broccoli, kale, chard, collards, celery, herbs and more on March 2, 2024.
Yesterday a large flock of pelicans arrived on the lake. It’s a sign spring is coming.
While checking the mail, someone I’ve known since we moved here in 1993 was walking their dog. We had a discussion about the weather and about my garden which is one of the largest in the area. Our consensus of two was it is going to freeze again. It is too early to start digging garden plots.
In my fourth week of indoor seed planting, things seem to be going well. Most seeds have sprouted on schedule, and despite growing indoors, are developing in a way that will make for sound seedlings. Soon it will be time to assemble the portable greenhouse and move some outside.
There was a Red Flag Warning on Sunday, which means a risk of wildfires. I will delay brush burning until the warning ends.
I got these on Saturday at the Solon Public Library Annual Used Book Sale for a free will donation.
On Saturday I went to the public library and bought three books at their used book sale. I began reading the Pete Souza book as soon as I got home and couldn’t put it down until I turned all the pages. It is incomprehensible we went from Obama as depicted in these photos to Trump. I began to tear up a couple times while reading it. I am usually more reserved.
This led me to thinking about the presidents during my lifetime and this brief rating:
Truman: Don’t recall as president.
Eisenhower: Okay for a Republican/Interstate Highway System
Kennedy: Favorable
LBJ: Vietnam/Voting rights/Medicare
Nixon: OMG!
Ford: Not Nixon
Carter: Malaise/Camp Davis Accords
Reagan: JFC!
George Bush: Reagan-lite
Clinton: +/- Neocon
George W. Bush: Bad, very bad
Obama: My president
Trump: Nightmare/insurrectionist
Biden: What I expect from a Democrat
Spring is two weeks away and the days tick by much faster than I’d like. By my count, I can expect 14 more springs during my lifetime. I plan to find enjoyment in each of them. Hopefully pelicans will be a part of them.
The week started with days where the ambient temperature reached a high in the 70s, dipped on Wednesday to the teens, then rose again the rest of the week. The expectation for first week in March is highs in the 30s and 40s, so it seems unseasonably warm.
Creamed crumbles on toast
I don’t have many meals derived from Mother’s cooking. As important as cooking has become to me, I can count on one hand the number of dishes I now make that she did, too. One of those is variously called chipped beef on toast or creamed beef on toast. Mother made this for Father as a reminiscence of Southern cooking in which he came up. I don’t use beef in our kitchen, yet I made this for breakfast one day. I use vegetarian recipe crumbles as a meat substitute.
Saute half cup of finely diced onions in two tablespoons of butter and add one finely chopped clove of garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Add dried home made hot pepper powder. Add a cup of recipe crumbles and cook until thawed from the freezer. Add two tablespoons of all purpose flour and combine everything while on medium low heat. Add one cup of milk (cow milk or oat milk, whatever is the kitchen standard) and combine. Lower the heat and cook until the mixture thickens. Toast and cut into 3/4-inch squares two slices of bread. Pour the creamed crumble mixture evenly over the toast and enjoy.
Tracking writing
I edited the first ten chapters of my book. I created a spreadsheet to track what I did and how the daily word count changed. The fact that I am now including numbered chapters is a revelation. It helps organize topics in a way I hadn’t considered. I now gather topics from different places in the narrative over a span of years under a single header. It helps reduce the amount of duplication that plagued me from the cut and paste method of composition with which I began. I am satisfied I made progress last week.
Email rabbit hole
I have email files beginning in 1999. There are hundreds of thousands of stored emails and I don’t plan to read them all. When I begin a session of email reading, I become lost for hours in a rabbit hole of forking paths. For example, the emails I wrote and received about updating the county plan for dealing with a contagious disease epidemic seem prescient in light of the coronavirus pandemic ten years later. This research will yield a paragraph, maybe two in my chapter about the coronavirus pandemic which closes the book.
What I seek the most is emails from friends and family to use in other parts of the narrative. Facts are recorded with dates attached to them and they help evoke memories of that time. The trouble I see is advancing technology may render some of those files obsolete. For now, the current version of Microsoft Outlook opens all the saved files, yet I’m anxious to go through them even if it would be better to wait until I’m writing those parts of the narrative.
Publication
I decided to publish Part I of the autobiography first. The narrative goes through finishing graduate school and taking work at the university where my spouse and I met. I was 30 years old on our wedding day: a clean breaking point for the narrative. The second part of the book will be more difficult to write because there is so much material to condense. I delay that challenge by deciding to finish part I this year, God willing.
Summary
It was a good week. Hopefully increased garden tasks can be added to my life without compromising the writing. March brings the pressure of spring and I am ready for it. On Friday, March 1, we saw the first Robin in our yard, along with another flock of smaller birds. Spring is definitely coming.
The machinery of our politics has so many moving parts it is hard to keep up. Important things are pushed from sight just because so much attention is paid to the distractions of Republicans. Here are some items that merit our attention.
Iowa Legislature
Democrats in the legislature are doing a great job of communicating Democratic policy even if Republicans have been dominant. It seems easier to track Democrats and that is attributable to their improved messaging this year compared to previous ones. We are in the minority and Democratic legislators need our support to hold the line. They need our encouragement more than ever. Thank you Democratic senators and representatives.
Godly Iowa?
It is history 101 that two primary traditions in white America, the denominational biblical tradition and enlightenment utilitarianism, worked together to contribute to the American Revolution. In doing so the civil belief system which marks American culture today was created. Do the United States operate on God’s law or man’s law? Whatever answer one asserts, it doesn’t matter to how the country was formed and has been operating since the Declaration of Independence. My State Representative, Brad Sherman, believes otherwise.
The decline in our culture is disturbing to all who understand that the foundations of freedom are based in compliance to the laws of God. We know that it will take the power of God to restore America to the godly principles and moral values that are so badly needed. But because God always uses people, we have a part to play. There are many avenues where God uses people, but one is in the laws we pass. Good government will always reflect God’s values because God is good.
Rep. Brad Sherman, God’s Law Versus Man’s Law, Jan. 19, 2024.
Sherman asserts, “The Declaration of Independence tells us that rights come from our Creator and the purpose of government is to secure those rights.” Here is the mention of God in the Declaration of Independence to which he refers:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, et. al. July 4, 1886.
Call me heathen but I can’t connect these dots. To make matters worse, this is from a man who, with all the pressing problems in the state, focused his efforts on a bill that would prohibit Satanic displays on government-owned property. Luckily for us all that bill didn’t make the first funnel, saving us time and distraction from other, more pressing problems.
Imagine my surprise when Thursday night, a press release from the governor arrived with this statement: “The right of religious freedom is endowed upon us by our creator – not government. Our founders recognized this principle, and today the Iowa House took a step forward to protect it. Twenty-three states around the country, with both Republican and Democrat governors, have passed similar laws. Now, it’s Iowa’s turn.” Republicans are out of touch with Iowans on the role of government in religious freedom.
Kids Online Safety Act (S.1409)
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which sets out requirements to protect minors from online harms, has strong bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate. Why, then, does the LGBTQIA+ community have trouble swallowing it? They, like most everyone, believe protecting minors on the internet is important. What they don’t like is they believe KOSA as it stands would inadvertently block LGBTQIA+ and other youth from accessing valuable digital content and supportive online communities.
More specifically, they note KOSA’s “duty of care” obligation, which could cause online platforms to inadvertently remove legitimate and vital content to avoid violating the law. This risk is particularly concerning in states with policies already hostile to the LGBTQIA+ community, where political actors could exploit KOSA to further their anti-LGBTQIA+ agenda.
The group LGBT Tech petitioned the U.S. Senate to amend the bill. To read the letter they and more than 70 other LGBTQIA+ groups sent to the Hill, click here.
It is hard to disagree that “striking a balance between protecting minors and safeguarding fundamental rights of expression and privacy is of the utmost importance in our digital world.” KOSA, as it stands, requires modification to do so.
Elect Democrats
A positive thing is when the Iowa Democratic Party puts people before politics, we gain supporters. Our numbers increase in a way to empower us to take back control of the state government. By focusing on how to help Democrats win elections in November we may miss a few things, yet have the big picture right. If you see something I missed, please make a comment on this post.
Journey Home 
You must be logged in to post a comment.