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.
Although the Iowa City Press-Citizen editorial board says Democratic Rep. Dave Loebsack is no Jim Leach, they chose to endorse his candidacy – making the case that it would be wrong for second district voters to again replace a sitting Congressman with an untried challenger.
On the one hand, the editorial board compares the freshman Congressman with his veteran predecessor, who Loebsack unseated in 2006:
He doesn’t have the record of bucking his party so dramatically as Leach did over decades. But neither did Leach after only his first term. Loebsack hasn’t yet found an easy balance between his expertise as a political science professor and the partisan, sound-byte communications by which laws are made and votes explained. But it took Leach a long time to earn the right to be longwinded. And Loebsack has yet to earn the powerful committee positions that Leach both gained and lost over the course of his career.
On the other hand, the board defended Loebsack’s two-year record in Congress and criticisms lobbed against him by his critics:
But neither does Loebsack deserve the “Do Nothing Dave” caricature that his critics continue to draw around him. He has been working to ensure that his party leadership and the Bush administration understand how this summer’s floods have been “the most significant natural disaster in memory.” To this end, he has toured the district with national officials and pressed for disaster assistance as his top priority in Congress.
Regarding Loebsack’s opponent, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, the board had praise for her campaign and future in politics, but had some misgivings about her use of ideological rhetoric:
Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ unique background as a soldier and a medical doctor places her in a good position to challenge Loebsack on issues of health care, national defense and economic development. But ironically it’s Miller-Meeks’ discussions of health care — especially her repeated use of loaded language like “Canadian-style socialized medicine” — that comes across as more ideological than experience-based. We think she has a strong future in the Iowa Republican Party, but she hasn’t made the case for why she would be more effective in her first term than Loebsack has been in his.
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