Cityview | Central Iowa's Independent Weekly

Congressman Steve King’s Greatest Hits

Western Iowa’s provocative pol trades zingers for national ink

Western Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King is a master at finding or manufacturing controversy, issuing provocative statements, and reveling in the national media attention that follows.

Most recently, King, who hails from the tiny town of Kiron near Denison, hit pay dirt with his take on the pilot who crashed a plane into the Austin, Texas, building that housed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) branch. King expressed empathy for the pilot’s views on taxes and argued that the fatal episode would not have occurred had the nation embraced King’s idea for a flat tax and scuttling of the IRS...Read More>>

Register numbers plummet, and a truly dumb idea

The numbers just get worse and worse for The Des Moines Register. The Sunday circulation of the newspaper was once around 550,000 copies. In the six months ended last Sept. 27, the Sunday circulation — including electronic editions and 3,400 or so papers sold to employees at a discount — was 204,926. That’s down 15,000 from a year before and 25,000 from two years before.

The figures for the daily Register are even worse. Once the circulation was around 250,000, but average Monday-Friday circulation was 116,876 in the latest period, down a whopping 13.5 percent from 135,057 a year before and 141,093 two years ago. And those figures are as hefty as you can make them — including 1,588 copies distributed in colleges, 2,893 sold to employees at a deep discount and 1,977 “electronic edition” copies. ...Read More>>

Dutch rocker Elle makes her American debut

The phone rang from Rotterdam, Holland. It was Elle, lead singer and guitarist from the Dutch electro-punk-metal rock band Elle Bandita. She was busy running errands, preparing for her debut American tour, so there were plenty of questions to be asked… but hers first.

“What is Des Moines like?” asked the slinky 23-year-old rocker, who plays an all-ages show on Wednesday, March 24 at the Vaudeville Mews. It’s her third American stop on a tour that begins in Austin at SXSW.

“Oh, you’ll like it,” I said. “The outsiders think we grow corn in our backyards, but we have more than 250,000 people living here who know better. We even have running water.”...Read More>>

Three meaty new places

This year National Nutrition Month began just hours after Bacon Fest served its last chocolate bacon martini. My mailbox began filling with “exciting opportunities” to interview “medical experts” touting the “health benefits” of various products. A PR agent for the Midwest Dairy Farmers sent a recipe for “healthy” double corn tortilla pork tacos. It included two tablespoons of sugar, a cup and a half of cheese and half a cup of sour cream. Maybe that’s healthy in New York City, where the Midwest Dairy Farmers get their fix of public relations expertise. Out here in Middle America, we swallow the latest nutritional science with a chaser of cynicism. We’ve actually noticed that medical experts were a bit slow figuring out that margarine wasn’t healthier than butter. Cynical Midwesterner Mark Twain derided that claim in “Life on the Mississippi” in 1876! Yet nutritional experts were still slathering their toast with trans fatty margarine 100 years later. Not my grandfather though, despite the nagging of his daughters. He liked to say that “medicine is soft science, and nutrition is the melted bacon grease of medical science.” . ..Read More>>”