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.

Local leadership is non-existent, Buttry contends, and Gov. Chet Culver and legislative leaders proved they are not much better when they decided not to call a special legislative session shortly after the flooding.

They feared that making state money available would mess up our chances for federal aid. Or maybe a swift state response, accompanied by strong leadership demanding a swift federal response, would have underscored the urgency of the problem.

Instead, nearly eight months after the floods, the Legislature last week approved less than 1 percent of the need.

Culver today signed a $56 million flood relief package. In a press release last week, Culver said more than $1.5 billion in state and federal aid has gone towards rebuilding Iowa since last summer. Officials estimate the total damage from the summer flooding and tornadoes at $8 billion to $10 billion.

Buttry also takes issue with Iowa’s senate delegation.

Senators Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley have more than a half-century of experience combined in the U.S. Senate. What good is that experience if they can’t deliver better federal aid more swiftly than they have following the worst natural disaster in their state’s history?

Is $97,000 a lot of money? In most of Obama’s Illinois and just about all of Iowa, the answer to that is “yes,” which makes Obama’s position on the question of whether to raise or lift the cap on Social Security taxes more reasonable to Hawkeye State voters than the New York shape-shifting of Clinton.

As it stands, the first $97,500 of a person’s annual income is subject to the Social Security tax. Obama supports lifting that to shore up the future of the system while Clinton went with the nostalgia card, suggesting that she could resurrect the macroeconomic picture that prevailed under her husband and cause the Social Security problem to disappear without hard choices. She suggested that popping the cap would hurt middle-class Americans and argued that in some parts of the nation (namely high-priced New York City which she represents) $97,500 isn’t a lot of money. It would be interesting to hear her make that argument in Audubon County, Iowa, where the average home is worth half that much: $49,000.

In the CNN Nevada debate on the University of Nevada Las Vegas campus, Obama said only 6 percent of Americans make more than $97,500 and added that Clinton’s use of numbers amounted to a Republican-style manipulation.

“This is the kind of thing I would expect from Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani,” Obama said in perhaps his sharpest frontal political assault on Clinton.

Obama joined U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, a longtime member of the Judiciary Committee, as having the most solid answers on a question related to appointments of judges. Biden showed a clear understanding of the process, and has the scars from decades of fighting the culture wars on center court — Supreme Court justice hearings in the Senate.

But Obama’s answer connected more. A former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, Obama said he wanted to look for candidates who aren’t ivory-tower academics but rather people who understand the vulnerable.

Obama also earned significant points with the Hispanic community for supporting drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants — a controversial issue on which his chief rivals either disagree with him or have heavily nuanced positions.

After watching Obama, Clinton and former U.S. Sen. John Edwards dust each other up in top-tier skirmishing, Biden, the Delaware Democrat and venerable senator, appeared as the steady old hand, perhaps the man you’d give the ship’s wheel to this instant.

“Who among us knows what they’re doing?” Biden asked.

Well, you …

Biden’s answers had the usual thoroughness, touches of Senate-speak, to be sure. But he stopped himself short when the penchant for long-windedness seemed about to take hold. Obama had nearly double the amount of “talk time” as Biden, so in a sense the comparison of the two senators in the debate format is fantastically unfair.

In the arena of international affairs, Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, exhibited his superior stature on the issues, noting that he had spoken recently with key figures in troubled Pakistan, even before President Bush. Biden also refused to pander on the issue of merit pay for teachers. Who decides whether a teacher is meriting? It makes more sense, said Biden, the husband of a teacher, to base increased pay on whether a teacher obtains advanced degrees.

North Carolinian Edwards barreled ahead with his populist message — and people in Nevada, based on the crowd reaction, appeared to be in a buying mood. He ripped Clinton for being a defender of a “rigged” and “corrupt” system, and while acknowledging that he, too, has changed positions over time (such as on the aforementioned drivers’ license question), he said Clinton seems to take seemingly two-faced positions in real time.

“There’s a difference between that (changing one’s mind) and saying two contrary things at the same time,” Edwards said.

And thinking about key pockets of voters, you have to give labor to Edwards tonight. He noted that with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress in the 1990s, the working class saw health care killed by big business but the passage of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Strong stuff from Edwards — and we know labor is listening. You could almost call the debate for him using this calculus alone.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson stylistically had a better-than-usual debate perfomance. But for Richardson this comes down to one answer. He said that in some siutations human rights are more important than American security interests — perhaps a good turn of phrase for an ambassador to the United States but a major opening for Rudy or Republicans to run with in a general election — and something Hillary Clinton may have to consider if she looks to Richardson as a running mate as is widely speculated. Even in the middle of western Iowa one could hear the wheels turning in the heads of conservative consultants on this one.

Richardson had a no-nonsense answer on drivers’ licenses for immigration, which came as he articulated a comprehensive immigration reform package. With federal policy failing, states have no choice but to pick up the slack and attempt stopgap measures like the drivers’ license proposal.

“My law enforcement people said it’s a matter of public safety,” Richardson said.

Clinton started the night with a misfire — joking that her pantsuit was made of asbestos, presumably so she could handle the heat. Asbestos jokes aren’t funny to Iowans over 30, who had to go to schools in rundown buildings.

Clinton’s strongest moments came in explaining the role of gender in the campaign.

“People are not attacking me because I’m a woman,” Clinton said. “They’re attacking me because I’m ahead.”

Clinton had a strong answer on how to handle tainted toys from China: have a third-party investigator go over there. But she was effectivley backed into a box on the question of potential war with Iran because of her vote to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Obama and Edwards continued to hammer her on that, and her nuanced explanation seemed lacking, giving rise to her opponents’ strategy to postion her as the most hawkish of the leading candidates on the Democratic side. Clinton did offer a detailed answer on this in an interview a few weeks ago with Iowa Independent.

Where Chris Dodd is concerned my biggest thought on his performance is connected to something Dr. Steven Kraus of Carroll observed the other night at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner: Dodd, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, and Obama clearly have respect for each other.

Dodd is simply a classy senator who can answer questions with reliable competency. Conventional thinking is that the Southwest will determine the 2008 election and that a Richardson vice presidential nomination makes sense because of this. But Dodd is fluent in Spanish as I saw firsthand when Lorena Lopez of La Prensa and I conducted a joint interview with him. If Obama gets the nomination Dodd complements him in a number of ways as a running mate — including his ability to campaign in Spanish.

And yes, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, also stood on the stage.