In this election year successful candidates are likely to be those who communicate clearly. Hopefully, their public comments and conversations also give us insight to the human inside. Poetry does that best especially when the poetic carries over into their speeches and writings. Many U.S. presidents have tried to work the magic. Poems survive from [...]

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Time and time again (especially following the recent responses to Tom Walker’s article in the Iowa State Daily) I hear my fellow Americans tout the long-held belief that our troops are fighting for our freedoms. By listening to the campus respond to Tom Walker, one would think that this is an undisputed fact: our troops [...]

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Bob Vander Plaats (Mr. Clappy) at Santorum’s Iowa victory speech The Iowa Republican caucuses found Mitt Romney winning in an eight-vote landslide over Rick Santorum. Not 8 percent – eight votes. Santorum’s showing was impressive and more of a win than Romney’s. The candidates packed up and left for New Hampshire, Bachmann dropped out, and [...]

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On November 2, I was dismayed when a Facebook wall post from local radio show host Ed Fallon popped up on my news feed. It displayed a video of architect Richard Gage, founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, who proclaimed that he knew the Bush administration perpetrated the worst domestic attacks in US [...]

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The Environmental Protection Agency is currently under assault by the GOP. The agency could have a third of its budget eliminated by the US House. In addition to the budget being slashed, the GOP is pushing to cut other important environmental initiatives. They include protecting the public from destruction caused by mountaintop mining, allowing the [...]

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I’ve been waiting for the apocalypse for a long time. Ever since I discovered peak oil somewhere around my sophomore year of high school, I’ve been waiting – eagerly. Nothing could be more satisfying to me than to experience the decline of Western Civilization, and especially of the United States, through a disastrous cataclysm of [...]

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Last April, I sat in a pew of an Ames Baptist church sanctuary and listened to Bob Vander Plaats rail against the evils of abortion. En route to his third consecutive failed bid for governor, the lanky, likeable evangelical stood by the pulpit and encouraged his audience to partake in a 40-day vigil outside Planned [...]

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Frederick Kirschenmann is a distinguished fellow and former director at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and supporter of Democrat Francis Thicke’s campaign for secretary of agriculture. In the six-year period from 1988 until 1994, Herman Daly served as the World Bank’s senior environmental economist. During that time he tried to [...]

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The following article was originally submitted as a letter to the editor of The Tribune on August 22 but never published (the paper had previously covered the issue, however). Soon after, the Squaw Creek trestle was demolished over a period of about two weeks. During the recent flooding in Ames I walked down my street [...]

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One does not attend the local gatherings of Republicans or Democrats (much less joint meetings) in hopes of witnessing or participating in actual disputation, even at the university level, where it might be reasonably expected. One is still required to observe, however, if for no other reason than to gain some measure of the parties’ [...]

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