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The law in case requires treatment of what is nothing but medical waste as if it were a dead body.

Throughout the law in case, legislators explicitly removed ANY limitation of gestation time or any choice from the pregnant women on the matter - making it a law that 1-week, 2-week or 20-week abortion MUST be treated the same as a body of a grown human being.
It MUST be issued a burial transit permit and it MUST be either buried in a graveyard (i.e. interred) or cremated - at the expense of the clinic or the parent(s).
It cannot be disposed of as what it is - medical waste. As was the case prior to that law.

Furthermore, law requires informing the parent(s) of the "fetus" about "counseling that may be available concerning the death of the miscarried fetus".
Which is treating a removed cyst as if it is a dead human. And if the human is dead due to a surgery, that means someone killed it.
I.e. Abortion is murder.

Also, parent(s) are required to sign off on the "final disposition of the miscarried fetus" - i.e. the burial.
Thus, the law DOES require families to hold funerals (as only licensed funeral facilities may conduct burials of human bodies) - if they chose not to have the burial of the "fetus" taken care of by the clinic.
In which case, the clinic must bare the costs of the procedure - IF they can even find someone willing to do the "interment or cremation".
Cause while on one side there is an active campaign against anything abortion related in that state, on the other there is no money in it for the funeral homes.
For either of those reasons, they tend to refuse to provide burial services to clinics.

"We're all figuring it out," said Patti Stauffer, the vice president of policy at Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky. So far, she hasn't had much luck finding potential funeral homes and cemeteries - a lot of the businesses she's called have told her no. "It's not like we have hundreds of people that are interested in working with us," she said.

That doesn't mean implementing the law won't be logistically challenging, though. "There's going to be a lot of man hours involved," said Curtis Rostad, the executive director of the Indiana Funeral Directors Association. "I think a lot of funeral homes are going to be doing a lot of man hours to do this, for not a lot of income."

Which in practice leaves clinics with a single solution - to shift the burden of the burial of the "fetus" onto the patient.
"Fetus" must be treated as a dead body...
Clinics can't find a business partner to do it for them...
But a patient can simply walk into a funeral home with their burial transit permit and their bag of medical waste and have the "fetus" interred or cremated. Yay!

I.e. Either the parent(s) must take the "body" to a funeral home and have it buried at their own expense - OR the clinics will be forced to have parents take the body to a funeral home and have it buried at their own expense.
Or clinics can simply close. That's an option too.
Just like coat hangers and falling off a stool are an option.

Fiber along interstate 80? Uh, that happens to be the ICN, installed by the state:
http://www.icn.iowa.gov/

Somehow I (Iowa taxpayer) am not happy about that.

According to Iowa Code 804.20, the police "shall" monitor any phone calls made. The exact text is:

Such person shall be permitted to make a reasonable number of telephone calls as may be required to secure an attorney. If a call is made, it shall be made in the presence of the person having custody of the one arrested or restrained. (Source: https://coolice.legis.iowa.gov/Cool-ICE/default.asp?category=billinfo&service=IowaCode&ga=83&input=804.20)

I can't speak to legislative intent, but I wouldn't be surprised if harassment of victims or witness tampering were at least part of that conversation. If your attorney comes down to the police station, then you can chat as privately as your attorney wants. In practice, the police monitor and log all calls made such that they can later prove that they gave the suspect a reasonable opportunity to contact someone. (Failure to do so can have pretty severe legal ramifications including excluding evidence.)

The new map is here (PDF). It was adopted by 90-7 and 48-1 votes in both chambers on April 14, signed by the governor five days later. The population variance is 0.0005%, which is so small I almost don't believe it. (More details here.)

And the guidelines are here, summarized in the redistricting commission report:

1. Districts shall be established on the basis of population and shall each have a population as nearly equal as practicable to the ideal population.
2. For Congressional districts, each district shall be composed of whole counties. For Legislative districts, the number of counties and cities divided into more than one district shall be as small as possible.
3. Districts shall be composed of convenient contiguous territory.
4. Districts shall be reasonably compact in form, to the extent consistent with the first three standards. In general, reasonably compact districts are those which are square, rectangular, or hexagonal in shape, and not irregularly shaped, to the extent permitted by natural or political boundaries.
5. A district shall not be drawn for the purpose of favoring a political party, incumbent legislator or member of Congress, political party, or other person or group.
6. Each state representative district shall be wholly included within a single state senatorial district. To the extent possible and consistent with the first five standards, each Senate and House district shall be wholly included within a single Congressional district.
7. A new districting plan shall not be used prior to the primary election of 2012.
8. Each bill embodying a plan shall include provisions for election of senators to the general assemblies which take office in 2013 and 2015, which shall be in conformity with Article Ill, section 6, of the Constitution of the State of Iowa.

Lastly, note the following from the same report: "[N]o political or demographic information other than total population is taken into consideration when creating proposed redistricting plans."

The new map is here (PDF). It was adopted by 90-7 and 48-1 votes in both chambers on April 14, signed by the governor five days later. The population variance is 0.0005%, which is so small I almost don't believe it. (More details here.)

And the guidelines are here, summarized in the redistricting commission report:

1. Districts shall be established on the basis of population and shall each have a population as nearly equal as practicable to the ideal population.
2. For Congressional districts, each district shall be composed of whole counties. For Legislative districts, the number of counties and cities divided into more than one district shall be as small as possible.
3. Districts shall be composed of convenient contiguous territory.
4. Districts shall be reasonably compact in form, to the extent consistent with the first three standards. In general, reasonably compact districts are those which are square, rectangular, or hexagonal in shape, and not irregularly shaped, to the extent permitted by natural or political boundaries.
5. A district shall not be drawn for the purpose of favoring a political party, incumbent legislator or member of Congress, political party, or other person or group.
6. Each state representative district shall be wholly included within a single state senatorial district. To the extent possible and consistent with the first five standards, each Senate and House district shall be wholly included within a single Congressional district.
7. A new districting plan shall not be used prior to the primary election of 2012.
8. Each bill embodying a plan shall include provisions for election of senators to the general assemblies which take office in 2013 and 2015, which shall be in conformity with Article Ill, section 6, of the Constitution of the State of Iowa.

Lastly, note the following from the same report: "[N]o political or demographic information other than total population is taken into consideration when creating proposed redistricting plans."

The new map is here (PDF). It was adopted by 90-7 and 48-1 votes in both chambers on April 14, signed by the governor five days later. The population variance is 0.0005%, which is so small I almost don't believe it. (More details here.)

And the guidelines are here, summarized in the redistricting commission report:

1. Districts shall be established on the basis of population and shall each have a population as nearly equal as practicable to the ideal population.
2. For Congressional districts, each district shall be composed of whole counties. For Legislative districts, the number of counties and cities divided into more than one district shall be as small as possible.
3. Districts shall be composed of convenient contiguous territory.
4. Districts shall be reasonably compact in form, to the extent consistent with the first three standards. In general, reasonably compact districts are those which are square, rectangular, or hexagonal in shape, and not irregularly shaped, to the extent permitted by natural or political boundaries.
5. A district shall not be drawn for the purpose of favoring a political party, incumbent legislator or member of Congress, political party, or other person or group.
6. Each state representative district shall be wholly included within a single state senatorial district. To the extent possible and consistent with the first five standards, each Senate and House district shall be wholly included within a single Congressional district.
7. A new districting plan shall not be used prior to the primary election of 2012.
8. Each bill embodying a plan shall include provisions for election of senators to the general assemblies which take office in 2013 and 2015, which shall be in conformity with Article Ill, section 6, of the Constitution of the State of Iowa.

Lastly, note the following from the same report: "[N]o political or demographic information other than total population is taken into consideration when creating proposed redistricting plans."

A few days ago, The Iowa Department of Commerce Utilities Board put a stop to traffic pumping in Iowa. It seems that a number of small telcos like "The Farmers and Merchants Mutual Telephone Company of Wayland, Iowa" were overcharging long distance carriers for "terminating" large numbers of long distance calls that were actually shipped elsewhere. (Unlike the Internet, there is inter-company billing within the telephone system.) This service was used mostly for conference bridges and dial-a-porn. Sprint, which offers flat-rate long distance service within the US, was losing money on calls to those numbers. So Sprint blocked them and filed a complaint with the Iowa authorities.

Iowa ruled this week that the telcos were overcharging, had to stop it, and had to give the money back. Sprint also had to stop blocking, which won't be a problem once the rates come down.

The FCC is working on this problem nationally, but the worst offenders just got shut down.

I was shocked to find out just how varied the laws are from state to state regarding whether felons can vote.

In some states, your rights are restored automatically once you're out of prison and off of parole or probation. In other states, you have to get the governor to restore your rights. Where I live (Arizona), it's somewhere between those two extremes, but you definitely have to go through a process to get your civil rights restored.

In predominantly red states, there's a lot of incentive to make it as difficult as possible for felons to resume voting, mainly because felons who vote tend to vote Democrat, not Republican. (That's not universally accepted wisdom, but it is echoed in one of the articles I'll link to in a second.) On the other side of the debate, statistics show that felons who vote are 50% less likely to be re-arrested.

So, here are some articles that deal with the topic of felony voting:

From Time, Why Can't Felons Vote?

From the Washington Post, Why Can't Ex-Felons Vote?

And finally, Some Felons' Voting Rights Left Behind Bars

There are some pretty choice quotes in each of those articles, and I recommend reading all three.

As for Iowa, it seems that Governor Tom Vilsack issued an executive order in 2005 which restores voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences; prior to that, Iowa was one of the states that required ex-felons to apply to the governor's office to restore their voting rights. Digging deeper, though, it appears that this was a one-time clemency deal, and people who hadn't completed their sentences prior to July 4, 2005, are required to go through the old system or a new, streamlined (mostly automatic) system to apply to have their rights restored.