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.
And you thought YouTube was good? Check out the New York Times Video section. There are great stories on all the candidates, but if you go to that link, you can see two that caught my eye. I've transcribed part of them here:
"Barack Obama's Basketball Family", an interview with Craig Robinson, Obama's brother-in-law, who coaches basketball coach for Brown University:
You can tell a lot about a guy by the way he plays basketball and I sincerely believe that. You can tell if a guy is selfish, you can tell if a guy is phony. There are a lot of different ways on the court you can tell that.
He was a pretty formidable player… he had a nice shot. He’s small for his size. He’s very thin. But he stuck his nose in there and he didn’t shy away from contact and he wasn’t selfish. It wasn’t like he was coming out there to prove to all of us that he could shoot the ball every time. I was so happy to see that because it means a lot.
The ability to admit when you’re wrong is so important in a pick-up basketball game because you don’t want to spend time arguing, you want to spend time playing. And it’s just as important in politics.
"The Rudolph Giuliani Temperament" by Michael Powell, a reporter who has covered Giuliani for the last 15 years:
Giuliani was a war-time mayor and it was war 24/7. He saw himself confronting a city that was calcified, an example of old style urban liberalism, and the only way to get through this was to blast away rhetorically and he blasted.
One of Giuliani’s favorite ways of communication was his Friday radio show… He would hold forth at great length with very little holding of back on almost anything from people complaining about parking regulations to a person who wanted to legalize the ability to keep ferrets in one’s home. He saw this as nuts and responded very much in kind.
This very much fit a style of government that was sort of seen as alternately very effective and sometimes somewhat unhinged. Yet Giuliani dines out a bit about his experiences in New York. He enjoys sort of playing the notion of Custer standing on Little Big Horn, one Republican in this Democratic and largely liberal sea.
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