Hillary Clinton has just made her first public appearances since resigning as Secretary of State, and I am enthusiastic about her presumed candidacy; it’s making me dream of Iowa. I long to go there to work on electing the first woman president.

I watched Barack Obama there last November at the final stop of his final campaign, just before midnight on the chilly evening before election day in Des Moines, the crowd of 20,000 strong doing call and response along with our president. “Fired up!” “Ready to go!”

This is not post-racial America, despite what some would try and have us believe. This is still racist that-nigger-messed-up-the-country America and I am crying from true joy to think that 20,000 mostly white folks are out there in Iowa — in Iowa! — for our president. For Barack Obama. For a black man. A black man! (I don’t believe that Iowans are any more likely to be racist than the rest of us, but the heartland of America is not the first place that jumps to mind when I think of racial progress.)

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The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that Bachmann went to Des Moines earlier this week to meet with lawyers for Barb Heki, the woman behind the lawsuit, who alleges that senior Bachmann staffers stole the contact list for a network of Iowa home-schoolers.

From the Star-Tribune:

The campaign has previously called the use of the list “inadvertent,” a view that Heki and campaign whistleblower Peter Waldron, a Florida pastor, have disputed publicly. Campaign officials eventually negotiated a $2,000 payment to rent the list from the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators (NICHE).

Heki said she was blamed for misappropriating the database and was removed from the nonprofit’s board. One of the counts in her suit alleges libel and slander.

Former State Sen. Kent Sorenson, who chaired Bachmann’s campaign in Iowa, has been accused of stealing the list, and is also being investigated for possibly accepting improper payments for his work on the campaign.

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Rep. Tom Shaw, a Republican, said that the bill was meant "to maintain the balance of power” between the different branches of government in the state. "We’re just holding them responsible for their decision, for going beyond their bounds,” he said.

The Iowa Gazette reports:

The justices “trashed the separation of powers” with their unanimous Varnum v. Brien decision and implementation of same-sex marriage without a change in state law banning any marriages expect between one man and one woman, added Rep. Dwayne Alons, R-Hull.

Their amendment to House File 120, the judicial branch budget bill, would lower the salaries of the four justices on the seven-member court who were part of the unanimous Varnum v. Brein decision to $25,000 – the same as a state legislator.

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One of the best things about Ramin Bahrani’s bracing farmland thriller “At Any Price” is its refusal to condescend to the Iowa farm family at its center by depicting them as nobler, more innocent and less sophisticated than other people. Many people who see this movie will be understandably focused on Zac Efron’s intense performance as Dean Whipple, the family’s handsome but embittered youngest son who yearns to be a stock-car driver. But for me the breakthrough in “At Any Price” comes from 59-year-old Dennis Quaid, cementing his character-actor renaissance with what may be the nastiest role of his career.

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“Some of the speculation that has come out is that yes, it was a foreign national and, speculating here, that it was potentially a person on a student visa,” King, R-Iowa, told the National Review's Robert Costa. “If that’s the case, then we need to take a look at the big picture.”

“We need to be ever vigilant,” King continued. “We need to go far deeper into our border crossings. . . .We need to take a look at the visa-waiver program and wonder what we’re doing. If we can’t background check people that are coming from Saudi Arabia, how do we think we are going to background check the 11 to 20 million people that are here from who knows where.”

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She thought this drainage ditch was another creek and made a run for it (I put her back on the leash):

One stop came in lovely Newton, Iowa, the childhood home of Charles Murray – I won’t hold that against Newton -- as well as Maytag headquarters. We had Sunset Park to ourselves in a cold rain:

So, at one point I broke down and listened to Rush. You know, even the paranoid Sean Hannity sounds a little jauntier. Rush actually seems depressed. He was inveighing against Michelle Obama comparing herself to Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old Chicago girl killed in gang violence in January. Obama’s speech was incredibly moving; NPR played long clips of it and she sounded as though she was fighting tears; listening to her, so was I.

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" I didn't run on jobs and the economy," King told CPAC, adding that he "stood on life and stood on marriage," unlike some of his colleagues in the House. "A bunch of people who have backed away from these challenges don't realize that I'm still here standing."

"Our job is to step up and defend our values and the full spectrum of constitutional conservatism," he said.

King is thinking about a run in 2014 to replace retiring Sen. Tom Harkin.

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"When somebody writes a background check law that doesn't prohibit me from giving my grandmother's .410, that she shot [chickens] with, to my grandson at the Christmas tree in my house without" getting the federal government involved, "then I'll take another look at it and perhaps have another opinion. Meanwhile, I don't want them to interrupt Christmas at the Kings'."

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From earlier:

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said that Karl Rove's plan to target far-right conservatives in the primaries, like potential Iowa Senate candidate Rep. Steve King, is "a fool's game because you can’t actually predict some of the things that go on.”

“Listen, I don’t think our platform is the issue,” Priebus said, Radio Iowa reports. “I think a lot of times it’s some of these biologically stupid things that people say, you know, that I believe caused a lot of the problems.”

He continued: "Personally, as an RNC [Chair], I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe the party should pick winners and losers in primaries and I think it’s, historically, if you look at it, it’s a bit of a fool’s game because you can’t actually predict some of the things that go on.”

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King hasn’t announced yet, but has said he’s leaning toward a run. It’s enough to concern Steve Law, the president of the Karl Rove-affiliated American Crossroads, which has made it its mission to help non-Tea Party Republicans win GOP primaries. "We're concerned about Steve King's Todd Akin problem," Law told the New York Times. "This is an example of candidate discipline and how it would play in a general election. All of the things he's said are going to be hung around his neck."

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More than 135 groups took out an ad in the Des Moines Register, telling Cuomo that "America is looking to you” and calling for "not one well" to be drilled. "Don't allow a single fracked shale gas well in New York," says the ad. "This is your chance to be a national leader on climate. Your choice now will be remembered forever."

Cuomo is considering lifting New York's moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, a process that involves drilling into shale rock and pumping it with chemicals until it splits open, so that natural gas can be extracted.

Cuomo joked in response to the ad, “I’m not going to read it because I’m not going to be in Des Moines," the New York Daily News reports.

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In a September 4 affadavit, obtained by the Iowa Republican and published last week, Bachmann's Iowa adviser Eric Woolson accuses former State Sen. Kent Sorenson, also the Iowa chairman of Bachmann's campaign, of stealing the list of contact information for the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators (NICHE) from another one of Bachmann's staffers, Barb Heki.

NBC News reports:

The list was the at the center of a flap late in Bachmann's presidential run, when a powerful Iowa home-school network called “NICHE” complained that its collection of contacts for thousands of home-school families had been mined by the campaign and used to expand its fundraising.

At the time, the campaign called the emails a "mistake."  The campaign agreed to pay NICHE, a 501c3 nonprofit, several thousand dollars in order to keep the group compliant with federal elections law.

But in his affidavit, Woolson says he approached Sorenson on the same day the fundraising emails were sent, and was told the list had been stolen.

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King is a potential front-runner in the 2014 Republican primary to replace Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who is retiring. In an email obtained by the Des Moines Register, King told supporters that "I’m under attack and I urgently need your help to fight back." He added that he has not made a decision about a run, "but already Karl Rove and his army have launched a crusade against me."

"I’m no stranger to outlandish attacks like this," King wrote. "They said I couldn’t win in 2012 — the entire political machine was against me — but I soundly defeated my opponent by 8 percentage points. So let me be clear. Nobody can bully me out of running for the U.S. Senate, not even Karl Rove and his hefty war chest."

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The Associated Press reports:

Justices rejected a discrimination lawsuit filed by Melissa Nelson, who was fired by Fort Dodge dentist James Knight in 2010.

Nelson had worked in Knight’s office for 10 years. She and Knight eventually started texting outside work about personal matters. Knight’s wife, who also worked at the office, found out and demanded Nelson’s firing.

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“I think the straw poll has outlived its usefulness,” Branstad said of poll, which is 33 years-old and has traditionally been used as a dress rehearsal for the Iowa caucuses. “It has been a great fundraiser for the party but I think its days are over.”

The Wall Street Journal points out that even Bachmann aside, the poll has only correctly predicted the winner of the caucuses twice: Bob Dole in 1995 and George W. Bush in 1999, though only Bush went on to win the election.

“You saw what happened the last time,” Branstad said. “I don’t think candidates will spend the time or money to participate in a straw poll if they don’t see any real benefit coming out of it.”

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Coralville Police Chief Barry Bedford says the deer used doors that open automatically to get into a Kohl's store.

He says the fawns stayed in the store's vestibule, but their mother made it into the store and headed toward the back.

Police say employees opened up some back doors and the doe exited. The two fawns turned around and used the automatic exit doors to leave the store.

No injuries or damage was reported.

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Both states have a policy called merit retention, where voters can decide whether to keep or vote out judges at the end of their terms.

In Iowa, Justice David Wiggins won retention, despite a campaign by social conservative groups to push him out for his ruling to strike down a ban on gay marriage in 2009.

The Des Moines Register reports that Bob Van Der Plaats, head of Iowans For Freedom, the group behind the campaign, said that although Wiggins kept his seat, it was by a small enough margin that he shouldn't be celebrating. “I think the courts understand that people of Iowa still have a voice if they chose to go outside their constitutional boundaries.”

In 2010, Van Der Plaats and other conservative groups succeessuflly ousted three of the other seven judges who had ruled  unanimously on the gay marriage law.

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Released on Wednesday, the video has tallied over 1.5 million views. Throughout the campaign Romney has refused to discuss his religion in depth. No doubt that was a conscious decision but it carried the risk, in the digital age, that something he had said in the past would define it for him.

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“I want to get them the resources that are necessary to lift them out of this water and this sand and the ashes and the death that’s over there in the East Coast and especially the Northeast,” King said, Radio Iowa reports. “But they need to come with a plan on how to spend it.”

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