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.
Conspiracy theories were the order of the day for conservative radio host Jan Mickelson Wednesday, as he dedicated his show on Iowa’s largest radio station to the discussion of urban legends with a writer from World Net Daily.
Jerome Corsi, who penned a book about the alleged plot to create a confederation of the United States, Canada and Mexico, regaled listeners with tales of a conspiracy within the administration of President Barack Obama to give up U.S. sovereignty.
“The new tactic of North American integrationists is to change the name but keep the agenda going,” Corsi said. He told listener’s that officials within the Obama Administration are prominent supporters of the “integrationist” movement.
As the St. Louis Post Dispatch pointed out last year, fears of a North American Union began with a few grains of truth and leapt to an unsubstantiated conclusion, with the Internet and publications like World Net Daily spreading the urban legend around at breakneck speed. Even Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, bought in.
Of course, North American Union claims have been widely discredited.
Next, Corsi and Mickelson turned their attention to Barack Obama’s birth certificate “controversy.”
“President Obama refuses to release his original birth certificate,” Corsi said, adding: “Hawaii claims to have a birth certificate that says Obama was born in Hawaii. I was in Hawaii, I hired a private investigator who went to all the hospitals… who were operating when Obama was born. None of them claim to have any record of Obama’s birth.”
This is an urban legend that Mickelson has returned to several times. However, multiple groups, FactCheck.org and Snopes.com among them, investigated the claims that Obama could not be president because he was born in Kenya and had citizenship in other countries, determining that he did in fact have a valid birth certificate from Hawaii. FactCheck even found a birth announcement for baby Barack Obama in a 1961 Honolulu newspaper.
Corsi is also known for co-authoring “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” a book filled with error-laden attacks on the military service record of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry; and “Obama Nation,”a book written to oppose Obama’s candidacy for president and described by FactCheck.org as “a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods.”
The end of the afternoon program was a one man tour de force of Mickelson proclaiming the 14th Ammendment to the U.S. Constitution was never legally ratified, and thus, children of foreign born parents are not citizens of this country even if they are born here.
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