Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Iowa Republicans have proposed that the state sell (or lease) the Iowa Lottery to IPERS, the state’s public employee retirement fund.
In part, the proposal is meant to give the GOP a foothold in 2010, when they will claim that any possible plan to lease the lottery to private interests was a result of massive campaign contributions from the prospective buyers. But perhaps Republican leaders should remember a lesson of the 2006 campaign, in which they accused Culver of putting retirees at risk for thinking creatively about how to use IPERS funds.
That year, Culver was running for governor, and he suggested a plan to use IPERS’s venture capital funds, which amount to a small fraction of IPERS’s total holdings, to support businesses in the state of Iowa.
Then-Congressman Jim Nussle, Culver’s opponent, used that relatively inconsequential proposal to foment a storm of confusion among former and current public employees, who are typically a reliable Democratic constituency. It got so bad, Culver had to post a special letter and factsheet on his campaign’s web site in an attempt to reassure voters that his plan would not jeopardize anybody’s retirement, and he did his best to stop talking about the idea on the campaign trail altogether.
Nussle, of course, wanted to keep talking about it. He ran a damning 30-second television ad that seemed to work, if only for a short time before bigger issues again became the focus of the campaign. The ad closed with these words:
Politicians should keep their hands off of your retirement money. On Culver’s plan, newspapers say it best: ‘…pension funds are not the chips to gamble.’
GOP legislators might want to think back to those days and remember how easy it was to stoke the fears of older Iowans at the prospect of IPERS becoming a political football. Even if the scare tactics rely on factually incorrect arguments, they can work.
And even if this proposal to sell the lottery to IPERS never comes up again after this week, it could go into the Democrats’ files as a good issue for a surprise direct mail attack in the days before Election Day in 2010.
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