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.
Monday saw the launch of Open Left, the new site by former MyDD mainstays Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers. The third partner in the project is Mike Lux, co-founder and CEO of consulting firm Progressive Strategies, a political consulting firm focused on strategic consulting for non-profits, PACs, and progressive donors.
Lux leaped to political fame in the mid-1980s as executive director of the Iowa Citizen Action Network (ICAN). Lux doubled the organization’s annual budget from $500,000 in 1984 to almost $1 million in 1987 while raising the organization’s membership from 30,000 to 75,000. After that stint, he moved on to the campaign trail, serving as senior staff in the `88 cycle, first for the Joe Biden campaign and then for Paul Simon.
Lux went on to serve as executive vice president, PAC director and chief lobbyist for the Iowa AFL-CIO, then was constituency director on both the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and the presidential transition. In the Clinton administration, he served as public liaison on the health care issue.In a mission statement, Stoller likens Open Left to the open-source software movement and takes issue with the distinction between “netroots” and more traditional organizing:
There is no divide between online and offline at this point; insiders use email and blogs, and outsider activists run campaigns and have in-person conferences. The term ‘Open Left’ is a much wider and more descriptive way of understanding the larger political dynamics at play. It is not the use of the internet that matters, it is the expression of traditional left-wing American principles on open systems that is the institutional innovation at work here.
The site seems to be starting out on the same turf as MyDD and Daily Kos, with a national focus supplemented by more local user diaries.
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