DES MOINES, Iowa -- The first candidate to announce a run for President in 2020 is on the final leg of his attempt to complete the "Full Grassley".

The term for a visit to all 99 counties was coined by former Des Moines Register reporter Jason Noble. Senator Charles Grassley has made a habit of visiting every county at least once every year. It's a tour that presidential candidates are challenged to complete before our first in the nation caucuses. By the end of this month Maryland Congressman John Delaney will complete his "Full Delaney."

Delaney is the first, and only, Democrat to announce his candidacy in 2020. He is not running for re-election this year in Maryland to focus on his campaign which he launched in July 2017.

On Wednesday he launched a five-day, eight stop bus tour that will take him to his final stops on his 99 county tour. Along the way he'll campaign with candidates on 2018 ballots in Iowa. Delaney has spent much of the last year in Iowa, spreading a message about making US policy reflect the reality of life in America in 2020.

“Lügenpresse” was branded a taboo word in Germany in 2015 by an academic panel after anti-Islam movements, such as Pegida, started using it more frequently in the presence of journalists. As in the United States, trust in mainstream media is on the decline in Germany.

The verbal attacks against journalists soon turned into physical violence in Germany. At times, media members were unable to cover the Pegida-organized protest marches without private security personnel. Some reporters who risked going in without bodyguards were beaten up. It is without doubt that the word “Lügenpresse” has an extremely ugly meaning in modern-day Germany.

Its history is even worse, though.

The term emerged way before the Nazis took over in Germany. For instance, the German Defense Ministry released a book titled “The Lügenpresse of Our Enemies” in 1918 during World War I. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, the term was coined by Reinhold Anton in 1914. In books, Anton used the term mainly in a foreign context to refer to “enemy propaganda.” It is unclear whether Anton was a pseudonym.

On Friday night, a fierce wasú hiŋháŋ, or hail storm, hit Red Cloud’s campus and a number of communities on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Wind gusts reached over 80 miles an hour, as hailstones the size of softballs ripped through windows and pulled siding and roof shingles off of housing units. As Robert Brave Heart Sr., Red Cloud’s executive vice president, said this week:

“We are so grateful that this storm hit during the summer, when our students aren’t back to school yet. But our teachers and volunteers are now returning to a campus strewn with shards of dangerous glass and boarded-up windows. Many of our buses that we desperately need to transport students won’t be usable without extensive repairs. Our community is coming together in this time of need to help assess the damage and to start to rebuild—but we truly can use all the support possible.”

Please help us ensure we’re ready to welcome our students back to campus in a few short weeks. Your support means everything to us!

I am consistently jolted back to reality, and not just by evidence on the internet, like a video that surfaced of two white parents teaching children to be “patriotic” by vandalizing a mosque. My reminders come in the form of my daughter’s answers to “How was your school today?” One recent afternoon she reported that two girls she considered friends could no longer play with her. The reason: She’s brown.

My daughter, who’s 8 now, has been called “the maid” by her white classmates. Even more devastating, in some ways, is when she absorbs the attitudes the other kids seem to have learned from their parents. The other day, she asked me why “Mexicans are so dangerous.” I had to calm the tremor in my voice before I could correct her.

I’m well aware that bigots weren’t invented on Mr. Trump’s Inauguration Day, and I know that these experiences could occur in any state at any time. But I would be naïve to believe that living through a time when racism is spewing from the lips of the president of the United States — and in a place where so many people agree with his views — was not introducing ugly attitudes into my daughter’s life. After all, in the aftermath of the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that “a wave of incidents of bullying and other kinds of harassment washed over the nation’s K-12 schools.” The organization called it “the Trump effect.”

I worry that kids with same-sex parents are subjected to similar ridicule. I think about the children who are immigrants, and I can’t imagine what they hear from their classmates when they are out of the earshot of teachers.

In interviews conducted with voters in a dozen states, Third Way says it found little concern for income inequality, something Democrats talk about a lot.

Instead, it heard anxiety about what people sense is happening in their own lives — that good jobs are vanishing; that they don’t have the right skills for a digital, globalized economy; that prospects for their children will be worse.

The think tank has put forward its own set of proposals, to deal with what it calls a “crisis of opportunity.” Among them are replacing unemployment insurance with a program that would also fund job-skills development, and vouchers to help people move to places where there are job openings; a minimum wage that would vary by region; and eliminating all tax on the first $15,000 of earned income.

None of these is likely to generate much excitement on the left. Nor are they proposals you will hear much about during this campaign season, given that midterm elections tend to become referendums on the president’s performance.

In the days after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the two people who seemed like the Democratic Party’s most obvious 2020 candidates, then-Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, hinted that Clinton had gone too far in talking about issues of identity. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman; vote for me,’” Sanders said. Other liberals lamented that the party had lost white voters in such states as Ohio and Iowa who had supported Barack Obama, and they said Democrats needed to dial back the identity talk to win them back.

But that view never took hold among party activists. Liberal-leaning women were emboldened to talk about gender more, not less, after the 2016 election. We’ve had women’s marches and women running for office in greater numbers than ever — all while emphasizing their gender. President Trump’s moves kept identity issues at the forefront, too, and gave Democrats an opportunity both to defend groups they view as disadvantaged and to attack the policies of a president they hate.

The Democratic Party hasn’t simply maintained its liberalism on identity; the party is perhaps further to the left on those issues than it was even one or two years ago. Biden and Sanders are still viable presidential contenders. But in this environment, so is a woman who is the daughter of two immigrants (one from Jamaica and the other from India); who grew up in Oakland, graduated from Howard and rose through the political ranks of the most liberal of liberal bastions, San Francisco; who was just elected to the Senate in 2016 and, in that job, declared that “California represents the future” and pushed Democrats toward a government shutdown last year to defend undocumented immigrants; and who regularly invokes slavery in her stump speech. (“We are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are Native American or your people were kidnapped and placed on a slave ship, your people are immigrants.”)

Sen. Kamala Harris has not officially said she is running in 2020, but she hasn’t denied it, either, and she’s showing many of the signs of someone who is preparing for a run, including campaigning for her Democratic colleagues in key races and signing a deal to write a book. The Californian ranks low in polls of the potential Democratic 2020 field, and she doesn’t have the name recognition of other contenders. (Her first name is still widely mispronounced — it’s COM-ma-la.) But betting markets have her near the top, reflecting the view among political insiders that Harris could win the Democratic nomination with a coalition of well-educated whites and blacks, the way Obama did in 2008.

According to a Gallup survey released on July 18, the American people now regard immigration as the single most important problem facing the country, and the share of the population expressing this view stands at the highest level ever recorded. This surge of concern crosses partisan lines: the share of Republicans and Independents who name immigration as the top issue has more than tripled during the past year, and it has more than doubled among Democrats.

Unlike most demographic projections, this one has received wide publicity and has evoked diverse reactions. A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey released earlier this week found that while 64 percent of Americans regard increasing demographic diversity as mostly positive, there are deep partisan divisions: Democrats believe that it’s mostly positive by an overwhelming margin of 85 to 13 percent, as do Independents by 59 to 34 percent, but 50 percent of Republicans regard it as mostly negative, compared to only 43 percent who favor it.

A closer look at the data reveals the sources of this cleavage. There are no gender differences, and age differences are much smaller than expected, with 57 percent of Americans 65 and older taking a positive view of rising diversity. Racial and ethnic differences are significant but not dispositive: 78 percent of both African-Americans as Hispanics see diversity as a plus, but so do 56 percent of white Americans. Much the same holds for regional differences: although 72 percent of respondents from the West and Northeast approve of increasing diversity, so do 60 percent of Midwesterners and 57 percent of Southerners.

The key drivers of partisan division are educational and religious differences among white Americans. Sixty-nine percent of whites with a BA or more have a mostly positive view of demographic diversity, compared to just 50 percent of whites without college degrees. As for religion, 52 percent of white Catholics and 56 percent of white mainline Protestants think rising diversity is mostly positive. By contrast, just 42 percent of white evangelical Protestants favor these changes, while 52 percent think they’re mostly negative. Two-thirds of whites without college degrees supported Republicans in the 2016 elections, as did eight in 10 white evangelicals.

With so much discussion about how travel and politics mix here on this page (two million people saw Wednesday's post about KGB prisons, Putin, and Trump), I’d like to share the newest version of my most important talk, produced by KCET. You’ll either love or hate this one-hour lecture. In it, I share the most important lessons learned from a lifetime of traveling out of my comfort zone. I’ll explain how, when we travel thoughtfully, we gain an empathy for the other 96 percent of humanity and come home with the greatest of all souvenirs: a broader perspective. Watch just the first 10 minutes. I dare you.

New documents show that one month before the 2016 elections, the FBI sought permission to surveil Carter Page, the one-time foreign policy adviser to the campaign of Donald Trump, because they alleged he had been recruited by the Russian government.

“The FBI believes the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [Trump’s] campaign,” the application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said.

Page is alleged in the documents to have had “established relationships with Russian Government officials, including Russian intelligence officers.”

In more than 400 pages made public Saturday as a result of a Freedom of Information request by media outlets, and first reported by the New York Times, the government laid out its case for secretly monitoring Page in a series of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- or FISA – warrants, each of which was approved by the FISA court. The documents, which include an application and a warrant for surveillance of Page, were first filed in secret in October 2016, are blacked out in the version that was made public. He stepped away from the campaign a month earlier.