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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The primacy of the Iowa Caucuses is Chet Culver’s top priority, but (1) should it be? And (2) does it matter what Culver’s priorities are?
On the first question: being chronologically first isn’t sufficient; and, taken to the extreme, it could be a bad thing. Idaho could decide to hold its primary tomorrow, and [...]

Most media types don’t get the Ames Straw Poll in the least. They describe it as an election, as a test of candidate strength, as a predictor of how the Iowa Caucuses would turn out if they were held today, etc. Almost every detail you have heard about it on cable news is [...]

Congressman Ron Paul’s R-LOVE-ution is on the air with a 30-second TV spot that, according to the Register, will run in Sioux City, Des Moines, and Cedar Rapids. The ad, which is better than Tancredo’s but worse than everyone else’s, highlights Paul’s record on fiscal policy, emphasizing that he has never accepted his Congressional [...]

About a month ago, I heard Ron Paul’s campaign staff pledge that they would get 10,000 of their supporters to the Ames Straw Poll during their alternative event next to the ICA/ITR Republican Candidates Forum, from which Paul was excluded. Then it was revealed — on Paul’s own official Straw Poll site — that [...]