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.
The presidential campaigns for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum are each out with new web video advertisements, both slamming President Obama‘s handling of the economy.
The Romney video, “Mitt On The Road: Allentown, PA,” features a discussion by the candidate with Allentown Metal Works, a now closed plant that Obama visited a year ago while on a regional tour to tout his economic stimulus package.
“Now the President says, ‘Just give me more time,’ and, ‘It could have been worse.’ It couldn’t have been worse for the people who worked here at this plant. For them, this is as bad as it gets,” Romney says in the ad.
View the Romney ad:
The Santorum offering also begins with images of derelict buildings. The campaign indicates that the ad provides a preview of Santorum’s economic vision, which is expected to be unveiled in Iowa next week as part of the candidate’s “Courage to Fight for American Jobs” tour.
Voice-over at the beginning of the ad states “America is facing one of its greatest economic threats since the Great Depression.” Showing images of international dignitaries and locations, the ad states that this threat “isn’t coming from OPEC, or China or Russia — it’s coming from Barack Obama.”
Watch the Santorum ad:
Both ads come on the heels of an Obama visit to the Quad Cities where he highlighted high-tech American manufacturing as critical to the U.S. economy, and built upon an earlier roll-out of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership.
Although many U.S. manufacturers have shut their doors since 1990, since the beginning of 2010, manufacturing has added almost a quarter of a million jobs — the best period of manufacturing job growth in over a decade.
Outside of voter influence efforts being made by the 2012 candidates, the tone of the dispute over the American economy echoes television advertisements currently being aired in Iowa by third-party groups.
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