Proof that officials at top-tier liberal arts colleges across the country don’t read Marshalltown Times-Republican columnist Ken Black, who recently called Grinnell College “a bastion for those with communistic tendencies,” my alma mater bumped a few spots up in the US News Rankings. (You know, the definitive college rankings that everyone is fascinated by, [...]

If you hadn’t heard, French Fries are now Freedom Fries and Iowa Voice is now the Liberty Pundit.
And I’m not really accusing Brian and our other conservative friends at that site of hating our state, but come on.  You blog about national politics, and you think having Iowa in your name is a bad thing [...]

Out of the saddle for a couple weeks, Iowa Independent’s usual liveblogger John Deeth is back to his old ways tonight, blogging from the Hawkeye Labor Council’s Democratic candidates’ forum in Cedar Rapids. Before the festivities have really even started, he delivers this succinctly accurate picture of what’s going on in caucus politics:
The [...]

And now, the post wherein I undermine whatever credibility I might have left by admitting that I watch the Hallmark Channel:
Yes, from midnight to 2AM central time each night, I allow the soothing action sequences and overt Republican undertones of the mediocre show Walker, Texas Ranger to lull me to sleep. It’s a guilty [...]

Because of what I do, I get asked a lot about how the “MSM” — I’ll call it the “traditional media” — approaches blogs in Iowa. Because I think that over the past few months I’ve developed an interesting answer to the question, and because at cocktail parties I am not always as articulate [...]

The as-yet-mostly-untold story of yesterday’s Iowa GOP Straw Poll in Ames is not about dueling bands and barbecues, of red inked thumbs or voting machine malfunctions; it is about tax policy. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won the coveted second-place spot over Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback on that alone.Brownback’s record on taxes was spotless enough [...]

All day today, I liveblogged from the Ames Straw Poll on Iowa Independent. I think/hope that I did a reasonable job. I’m pretty sure I gave Marc Ambinder and Jonathan Martin a run for their money, but we’ll see. When we were waiting for results to come, we were getting something like [...]

I’ll be on The Rachel Maddow Show live tonight at 6:30 eastern/5:30 central to give my take on tomorrow’s Ames Straw Poll with guest-host Isaac-Davy Aronson. If you are in Iowa, you can’t listen on the airwaves, but you can listen here.

Tonight and tomorrow night, the band Third Eye Blind will play concerts in Council Bluffs and Des Moines, IA, to crowds that are expected to be quite large. (Where all the people are coming from, I’m not sure.)
But that’s not the story. The story is that, according to rumors, they’ll be sporting Barack [...]

I don’t know who is paying for this (it does not have a “paid for” on it, and it does not appear to stick to Ron Paul’s campaign messaging/packaging), but someone is advertising for Ron Paul’s Straw Poll GOTV effort on the Des Moines, IA, Facebook network. One can only assume it’s also running [...]