Three things are on my mind now and for the remaining 31 days until the general election.
In case you missed it, last Wednesday was the closing day of the fund raising quarter. I had to tell Mary Peltola, Sherrod Brown, Eugene Vindman, John Ossoff, and James Talarico no. What money I had to donate went to Josh Turek this week.
Democratic victories continue to be in the air, yet Iowa can be cruel that way: teasing us with leading polls and then snatching the actual vote from us. We must keep doing what we can to encourage friends and neighbors to vote, all the way until election day.
By now, everyone heard the news about a possible steel mill in Lee County, Iowa. Mesabi Metallics Company seeks to create a vertically integrated process to take specialized iron ore pellets from their mine in the Minnesota Mesabi Range to a new steel mill where they will make products that haven’t been well defined at this point. If true, the company plans to spend some $15 billion in the start up. They have had failed projects in Kentucky and Arkansas thus far.
Two things about the proposal.
KWQC in the Quad Cities investigated in Lee County and reported there is no evidence that a large steel mill is coming. No permit requests, no land purchases, no financing. The president’s statement, “They’ve already started building,” was a lie. The announcement was an attempt at a Hail Mary pass to save Iowa Republicans in the midterms. Republicans like Judd Lawler in House District 91 are already using this in their midterm campaigns.
As Ed Tibbetts wrote on his substack, comparing the announcement, with its inherent uncertainties, to the Republican record:
There is no uncertainty, however, about the dismal economic record Iowa Republicans have produced over the past 10 years. Their policies have failed working families, job seekers and college-educated young people, who find their prospects here so meager they grab their degrees and leave Iowa as fast as they can.
Will Iowans be duped by this announcement and vote Republican? If they have been paying attention, I doubt it. That’s the problem in 2026 politics. People aren’t always paying attention.
The third thing is artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported, “Linn County Planning and Zoning Commission decided this week to seek more information before deciding whether to recommend the county approve or deny Alliant Energy’s application to build a natural gas power plant northwest of Fairfax near the Linn Benton Road.” The plant would provide 720 megawatts of backup electricity generation to meet growing regional energy demand. One of the potential customers is expected to be regional data centers which serve artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has too many moving parts for me to say much meaningful about it. It is a fact that more than one billion people globally use a stand-alone AI chatbot at least monthly. That’s not to mention AI embedded in search engines, software, and emails, which would bring the tally to nearly 1.5 billion. The horse is out of the barn on its use, and likely on its regulation, despite statements by Anthropic, OpenAI and others to the contrary.
Using a chatbot can be free and easy, and it provides pragmatic and useful solutions to problems. For example, I was having problems with the mower deck on my yard tractor. I explained my experience to the chatbot, and it provided a step-by-step troubleshooting procedure. After following it, I was soon back to mowing the lawn.
Pragmatic solutions to common problems are pitted against the problems about which we read in the news. For example, in late September, independent security researchers discovered that autonomous AI agents had gone rogue, probing and hacking several government websites. There should clearly be consequences for that. I expect the AI discussion will be another distraction from the midterm elections.
For now, we must maintain eyes on the prize and do everything possible to change our government through the best way available to regular folk like us: help Democratic candidates win the midterms.
