Nothing like being a citizen of Iowa, where the political ads are non-stop. Millions of dollars are being spent on lies, misinformation, and a whole lot of missing context. It is infuriating.

The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) a hard-right PAC founded by the barely there Senator Mitch McConnell has been racking up lots of dumb air time. One of their attack ads on the centrist Democratic candidate for Iowa revolves around Veterans. This add has a narrator that is quoting as saying “…Marine Corps Veteran…” complete with a Corpse pronunciation. The rest of the ad doesn’t matter. If you can’t pronounce Marine Corps correctly, the rest of your message is lost… They are just trying to make a disabled man who is the son of a Vietnam Veteran that was exposed to Agent Orange, anti-military. It fails pretty epically.

Next SLF tries to paint this very same centrist Democrat as a hard-left extremist socialist liberal, because he feels immigrants should have an easier path to citizenship. They use their racist propaganda claiming they are criminals with pictures of the Venezuelan gang. Then they add the following trope regarding federal monies being spent on child sex change surgeries. LOL, sex change surgeries occur only when the subject is an adult. Any prior gender-affirming care must follow specific ethical protocols and parents must give consent. Nothing like using irrational fear without context…

So this Democratic candidate hasn’t been a stellar state politician as he has missed many votes while raising cash for his Senate campaign. His opponent has missed her fair share of votes within the House of Representatives. She has also performed less work than previous congresses as her Speaker keeps sending people home to avoid hard votes. Oh, she also voted to suppress the Epstein files, yet her party tries to project the democratic candidates as child abusers… Lack of context… use fear… repeat… I don’t understand how people can be so ignorant in their bias… Oh vey…

Onto the Republican candidate for Senate. Her family’s financial wealth has ballooned in the four years she has served in DC. Some reports have the financial gain at $8M. Most of this was made through tax breaks, dividends, and stock purchases. This candidate says she sold all of her stock in 2021 and has worked to pass legislation to ban insider trading by congressional legislators. Maybe she did sell the stock in her name. Maybe she didn’t. I know she is married, and there is nothing stopping her from telling her husband to buy stock with their money. Which is a sneaky back alley tactic to avoid the, “I bought stock… argument…” I had better end-arounds in high school to avoid detentions than this play-by-play for a Senate candidate. Really? You want us to believe there is no hanky-panky??? Your senior senator took advantage of $45 million dollar agricultural payoffs during Covid… please save us the grief… or your lack of context…

Our extreme liberal socialist candidate for District one is actually a centrist Democrat. She has been lambasted for wanting to defund the police, and has been accused in an attack ad by the Muscatine County Sheriff as a radical leftist. The bill she voted against in the Iowa legislature was a pension bill. That hardly defunds policing… It just forced jurisdictions to cover pensions rather than the state covering everything… the bill passed if memory serves… Lack of context…

The Republican candidate for House District one tries to pass off her medical degree as an equivalence of how Medicare and medical care should work. The candidate served as a nurse in the National Guard and her medical degree is in Ophthalmology. Does she have some medical expertise? Sure. As an eye doctor. Is she an expert in all things legislative or the economics of health care? No. She is simply a messenger of the industry to pass legislation that will make them more money. Her donors are all large pharmaceutical and insurance companies… lack of context…

In these two races, Iowa is screwed over. Our choices are Hard-Right Capitalist fascism or Centrist Democrats who actually fall into Reagan conservatism. None of the four have legislative pedigrees worthy of their offices. One of the four is a lawyer. The two running for Senate majored in broadcast journalism and history. Neither are significantly experts in political policy. They are messengers serving a party, rather than people… Lack of Context…

Our governor’s race in Iowa is a mess too. We have a resident of Kansas running on the “Iowa first, Mantra,” for the Republicans. (He owns property in Belle Plaine, IA.) He doesn’t live there. He flies back to Kansas to see his wife and children. Our Democratic candidate is a lawyer who serves as state auditor. The Republicans hate him so much that they changed the law so he couldn’t check their misappropriation of tax dollars to private enterprise. This candidate is also afraid of the transgender people. Statistics only work for him in tax monies. They don’t work for him when it encompasses people. Neither candidate wants to be the governor that serves all the people of Iowa, just the ones they like. Oh, the first candidate has yet to really tell the truth… He lies like a rug.

Our state has a budget deficit as the Republicans have cut taxes to the extreme without replacing the revenue with other sources. One local wealthy farmer who serves as a representative to the Western part of my county wants to cut property taxes by an additional $490 million. I’ve asked him how he is going to replace the revenue, and have received no reply. Meanwhile, as the taxes got cut, my vehicle license fee went up 40% to cover the revenue lost by their previous tax cuts. Yes, my six-year-old car was over $100 more expensive to license than the five-year-old car. I think this farming legislator just doesn’t want to pay taxes. It would be a shame if the bridges in his township fail, due to lack of infrastructure maintenance… aka… a lack of property tax revenue for the township to keep the bridges near his fields at 80k weight limits or higher… Lack of context…

I’m just so tired of the selfish idiots playing out their verbal war of lies and deception and trying to call it governance for the people. My property taxes are half of what they were in Illinois and that was ten years ago. I own property, those taxes pay for infrastructure and services for my city, school district, township, county, state services… My income taxes pay the rest… My property tax is capped as I have a homestead exemption due to my age. It would be the same way if I lived in Illinois. In Illinois, I knew that 55% of my property tax bill went to public schools. My public school gets far less here in Iowa. Income Taxes are supposed to make up the remainder of that bill. They end up being funneled to tax credits for data centers, private school vouchers, and other neoliberal money making ventures… Their lack of context just keeps misappropriating money.

I’m thankful, I don’t have to hear the Illinois political ads… at least… …so it goes…