The Polk County Board of Supervisors plans to rename the Justice Center in downtown Des Moines after longtime County Attorney John Sarcone, a controversial law-and-order Democrat who is stepping down after holding the office for 32 years. The board will consider a resolution to rename the building — which houses the county attorney’s office and handles juvenile, traffic, simple misdemeanor, and small claims court cases — during its upcoming meeting next Tuesday. The plan was apparently announced at a retirement party held for Sarcone Thursday night. While Sarcone has long enjoyed institutional ..read more

On Sunday as part of a series featuring 15 “Iowans we expect great things from in the coming year,” the Des Moines Register published a long profile of Alan Ostergren, an attorney with a sordid history in local government who’s currently representing a conspiracy theorist in a dubious lawsuit against the Ankeny school district. Or, as the headline of the article by courts reporter William Morris reads, who’s “now a champion for conservative causes in court.” The profile is behind a subscription paywall — you can pay $1.06 with tax to bypass it for the month. It describes how Ostergren chose to ..read more

Three weeks ago, state senators Jake Chapman and Brad Zaun crashed a standing-room-only school board committee meeting in Johnston, where they issued an alarming threat to teachers who dare run afoul of the Iowa GOP’s whitewashed standards of educational decency: Felony pornography charges may soon follow. The meeting was reportedly convened in response to a single complaint, which came from a couple who joined the chorus of conservative killjoys across the country objecting to two critically acclaimed, too-woke teen novels: Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and ..read more

To a casual observer of Tuesday’s special election for Iowa House District 37, Republican candidate Mike Bousselot is simply a former aide to two governors with agreeably generic positions in support of public safety, job growth, lower taxes, and — naturally — allowing parents to choose whether wearing masks to school during the coronavirus pandemic is best for their own children. This impression conceals Bousselot’s central, ethically compromised role in former Governor Terry Branstad’s controversial privatization of the state’s Medicaid system. It also overlooks the fact that Bousselot’s cam ..read more

A recently formed political organization called Ames Deserves Better is taking aim at the city’s school board, continuing a fight that began in January after the district announced its plans for a Black Lives Matter at School week of action — an initiative that parents variously praised and decried as inappropriately ideological. Conservatives seized on the controversy, which was featured on Fox News and became the subject of a politicized Statehouse committee probe. It is a microcosm of the broader efforts across the country to push back against public school initiatives to raise students’ aw ..read more

“History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.” — Michel-Rolph Trouillot In Iowa City before the Civil War, abolitionist John Brown and his band once had to flee in the predawn hours because of looming threats of a pro-slavery mob. Now, in Iowa and more than a dozen other states, lawmakers are threatening educators’ ability to name the white supremacy that motivated that angry mob and still lives today. White supremacy today r ..read more

Update: According to unofficial results from the Polk County Auditor’s website, Johnson finished in fourth place among the four contenders for a seat on the Johnston City Council and will not proceed to the June 22 special election. Democrats Bryan Burkhardt and Adam Haar finished first and second, respectively, according to the unofficial results, and will face off in the election next month for the seat. There’s a special election today in the Des Moines suburb of Johnston for a seat on the City Council. The contest has received an unusual amount of attention over the past few days thanks to ..read more

Last Thursday by a 63-30 vote, the Iowa House passed a 33-page amendment to a Senate bill giving police officers a pass on certain disciplinary issues with additional measures intended to strengthen legal protections for police in the wake of heightened police brutality and calls for racial justice. The vote also came amid former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial that resulted in his conviction on all counts Tuesday. All but two Iowa Republicans who voted on the amendment, joined by eight Democrats, approved its measures that put the First Amendment, as well as the genera ..read more

Misinformation about a protest at the state Capitol last Thursday spread like wildfire across right-wing networks and social media accounts. Many of them backhandedly compared what happened to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol that resulted in multiple deaths (and was supported by some of the same people dishonestly comparing the two events). Last week’s permitted protest in Iowa was organized by a Cedar Rapids-based organization called Advocates for Social Justice. It was named “Black Lives Matter Protest — Kill the Bills,” a response to legislative proposals to increase penalties ..read more

In our recent criticism of Polk County Attorney John Sarcone’s prosecution of Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri over her arrest at a racial justice protest last May, the Informer questioned what compelled him to take the case so far even in the face of national and international outrage and with such scant evidence. We also questioned his handling of others he’s prosecuted in a similar fashion in connection with recent protests. A subsequent search through the Register archives turned up a situation with some interesting similarities — and notable contrasts — involving Sarcone’s acti ..read more