Mike Huckabee’s caucus campaign manager takes over Bob Vander Plaats’ gubernatorial campaign.

Bob Krause makes his Daily Kos debut.

The Democratic Governors Association’s big fundraising numbers could be good news for Gov. Culver. The Republican Governors Association’s bigger numbers could be bad news.

Twice as many people (two) spoke at budget hearing Monday than showed up last week’s “public” hearing.

Iowa Catholics take aim at payday lending.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, a Democratic presidential hopeful, won’t be campaigning today in Iowa, New Hampshire or any of the other early states. He won’t be hosting a fundraiser or on a conference call with campaign staff. Today, Dodd will stand on the floor of the United States Senate, for hours if need be, to defend the Constitution and make good on a promise.

If necessary, Dodd will launch a filibuster to ensure telecom immunity is not a part of the re-authorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill. Dodd has promised to start talking and not stop until he either loses a cloture vote or Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, refuses any bill that contains retroactive immunity for the telecom corporations that provided unmitigated access without warrants to the current White House administration’s program of domestic wiretapping.

Fellow Democratic presidential hopefuls Sens. Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have said they will support Dodd’s filibuster; however, calls into their Iowa press offices yielded conflicting answers. Obama’s press office said that the Illinois Senator will not be traveling to Washington, D.C. today to participate in the filibuster. Representatives with the New York Senator said that, at this time, they were unsure if she would be traveling to the Beltway to participate. A request for information from the Delaware Senator’s campaign office in Iowa has gone unanswered.

“There were many who said that they would stand with Chris Dodd as he stood up to the President and for our national security, but they are not there today,” said Hari Sevugan, Dodd communications director. “And that’s disappointing because now is a time for leadership that doesn’t just talk about change but acts on it.”

Dodd has postponed all planned campaign events in Iowa for Monday and Tuesday and is also prepared to offer an amendment that strips the retroactive immunity provision from the underlying bill. If that and other routes fail, Dodd will begin the filibuster.

“Last fall the American people gave this Congress a mandate to change the direction of the country and restore America’s security by ending the war and restoring our Constitution and standing in the world,” Dodd said. “Unfortunately, time and again, Congress has been unable to fulfill that mandate. But our country can no longer afford to continue down that road; we need to restore the Constitution, protect our civil liberties and ensure that no one is above the law. It’s time for us to stand up and lead; not just say ‘enough is enough,’ but act on it.”

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold and Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy will support Dodd during the filibuster. Representatives in Tom Harkin’s office said the Iowa Senator remains undecided on if he will join the filibuster. An inquiry left with Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office has not been returned.

To close debate, opponents of the filibuster will need to gather 60 votes. This means at least 10 Democratic Senators will need to join with Republicans in order to bring an end to Dodd’s filibuster.

Because Dodd will need material to read while on the Senate floor — during a filibuster he will not be allowed to stop talking or take a break — both Crooks and Liars and firedoglake are taking comments that will be forwarded to Dodd’s Senate office and, if necessary, read on the floor. Comments may also be left on the Chris Dodd for President website. In addition, several blogs have teamed up to show their support of Dodd and his efforts to launch the filibuster.

In addition to his reading, Dodd will be able to take “questions” from others, but such questions are limited to 20 minutes. It is believed that Kennedy and Feingold will be participating in this exercise.

Senator Dodd was the first presidential candidate to speak out against the FISA legislation that was passed out of the Intelligence Committee, announcing that he would place a hold on any bill that reached the floor including retroactive immunity, and would filibuster that bill if his hold was not respected. Dodd began urging Senators on the Judiciary Committee, who would have the chance to consider the measure as well, to oppose the immunity provision. The Committee later passed out a bill without the retroactive immunity. Unfortunately, that bill is not the one considered on the Senate floor.

“You don’t demonstrate leadership in the footnotes of a press release, or parroting responses from focus groups,” said Dodd’s Director of Media Technologies Tim Tagaris in an email to supporters. “Leadership is demonstrated through action.”

In honor of Roggow’s service and sacrifice, Gov. Chet Culver has ordered all flags in the state to be flown at half staff on Friday, Dec. 14. Services, beginning at 11 a.m., will be held at the Grace Lutheran Church in Le Mars. Surviving members of Roggow’s family will be presented with a POW bracelet, a bronze plaque, a grave marker, the American flag and a videotape of his memorial service.

“It finally gets to the point where all questions to Norman’s disappearance have been answered and our family is grateful to now have closure as he finally returns home,” Myron Pingel of Cherokee, a second cousin of Roggow’s, told The Sioux City Journal.

The POW/Missing Personnel Office in the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C., announced Oct. 24 that the remains of five servicemen, including Roggow, had been accounted for and would be returned to their families for burial with full military honors.Roggow was one of five Navy personnel whose E-1B Tracer plane was reported missing Oct. 8, 1967, while returning to the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany. Records indicate that radar contact with the aircraft was lost approximately ten miles northwest of Da Nang, Vietnam, and adverse weather conditions hampered immediate search efforts.

Three days later, the plane wreckage was located by a search helicopter on the face of a steep mountain in Da Nang Province but the challenging terrain and hostile forces in the area prevented a ground recovery.

Roggow was a member of the Brook Country School class of 1959, the last class to graduate from the rural school located north of Aurelia. He is survived by three sisters, Connie Fraser, Marva Hanson and Diane Roggow, and a brother, Curtis Roggow.

The Hillary Clinton campaign arranged for local media to spend more than 30 minutes in a question-and-answer session with the Democratic presidential candidate at Sam’s Sodas & Sandwiches in downtown Carroll on Saturday.

The media session took place after Clinton spoke to an estimated crowd of more than 600 people at Northwest Park.

Clinton, a U.S. senator from New York and former first lady, fielded four questions from Iowa Independent contributing fellow and Daily Times Herald writer Douglas Burns. Below is a transcript of the exchange.

Iowa Independent: Senator, Fortune magazine has an interesting story out about how women are finally starting to mentor other women. Having read your book “Living History,” you had a very good mentor in Marian Wright Edelman.
Your numbers are really good with certain demographics of women. Your biggest applause line today was with women, when you talked about 90-year-old women coming up to you.

But I have to say over the last eight or nine years, some of the most vicious comments I have ever heard in covering politics have come from other women about you. Why don’t women do a better job of mentoring and supporting other women, and why do some women have this almost irrational hatred of you?

Clinton:  I’m not completely sure. I know that when I started running in New York there were a lot of stories like that, that women wouldn’t support me and that certain kinds of women, professional women, would not support me.

But what I found is that over the course of the campaign, that began to recede, and that’s what I’m finding over the course of this campaign.

I don’t know all the reasons for it. I mean some have to do with what people have heard about me or what they think about me and their own lives and their own political leanings. But I don’t really think about that a lot.

I think my job is to get out every day, meet as many people as I can, say what I would do as president, and I really believe that I will pick up more and more support, and that seems to be what’s happening around the country.

Iowa Independent: Senator, a couple of days ago I covered your colleague Sen. Joe Biden, who was in a smaller community outside of here (Lohrville). (Former) Sen. (John) Edwards has obviously been campaigning around here, too. And both of those gentlemen have raised concerns that they have with your vote in identifying some of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as terrorists.

Biden spent a good deal of time on it and suggested that you hadn’t learned your lesson from the first vote on Iraq and that you were complicit in setting the stage to give President Bush carte blanche to start another war.

It’s something we printed. Out of fairness to you, do you want to comment on that and defend yourself?

Clinton: I have the highest regard for him (Biden). He’s a good friend and colleague, but I think that’s a misunderstanding of what we voted on.

We had 76 votes, including people like (Sen.) Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and (Sen.) Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who did not vote in 2002 to give the president authority but who believe that this is a necessary action to force the Bush administration to actually engage in diplomacy.

There is nothing in that resolution that in any way provides authority [to declare war], and I think if you read it, that’s clear.

Obviously, people don’t trust the Bush administration. I don’t trust the Bush administration. But the idea behind it was to state the obvious, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard supports terrorism like Hezbollah. They have supplied weapons and advisers to people fighting and killing Americans in Iraq, and we have very few diplomatic options available to us other than sanctions, which we’ve got to figure out how to get more countries to agree with us on.

It’s ironic because many of the people who are criticizing this vote have previously signed on to either identical legislation that calls them a terrorist organization or said something along the same line.

I think what we need to do is take a deep breath and say, “Look, if your goal is to get the administration to engage in diplomacy with Iran,” which is my goal, “then it makes sense to give them some leverage.”

Giving them the leverage of being able to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, I think, makes sense in a diplomatic context.

If I were in the White House right now, I would be having negotiations with Iran. I wouldn’t ask them to give up their nuclear ambitions before they came to the negotiating table, because that’s what the Bush administration has done. That means there will never be any negotiations.

There is in the resolution, which you remember is a non-binding resolution passed by one House, there is language from (Defense) Secretary (Robert) Gates saying that this will help us move to diplomacy.

I understand why people don’t trust George Bush but distrust him … don’t confuse what we voted on with the premise of distrusting George Bush and Dick Cheney.

I sent out a mailing to a lot people with a letter explaining what I voted for, with a long quote from Dick Durbin who basically said, “Would I have ever voted to give George Bush any kind of leeway for going to war? Of course not, that’s not what this is about.”

So I just think we ought to just stick to the facts. I can understand some of the rhetorical attacks and the deep-seated distrust we have of Bush, but let’s not confuse one with the other.

Iowa Independent: If you look at the numbers on the people who are serving in Iraq, rural America as you know is serving a disproportionate share of the burden there.

We’re all one or two degrees of separation away from a number of people who are friends or family serving there.

The numbers of people from rural counties are staggering.

Do you have any thoughts on Iraq in many ways being rural America’s foreign war? Are we just more patriotic out here in rural America, or do we have less opportunities that are forcing our young people to seek those options instead of college?
 
Clinton: I don’t know all the answers. I think some of what you said probably has some truth to it.

When you see Norman Rockwell up on the wall there (pointing to a picture on Sam’s wall) when we think about small-town America, we think of really deeply rooted patriotism, a desire to serve, helping out your neighbor, answering the call. And so I’m sure that is a very strong feeling in a lot of young people growing up, that they want to be part of that, that they want to make a contribution.

There’s a great history of patriotism and service in rural Iowa. People know about fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers. I think there’s a sense of tradition as well.

I don’t know all the reasons but now that we have an all-volunteer military, people make those decisions for all kinds of personal objectives. Some do it to get education money. Some do it to see the world. The thing I worry about is, with an all-volunteer military, the whole country is not involved. This war has now gone on a very long time. It’s the longest war we’ve ever fought with an all-volunteer military, so I think it’s important that the rest of the country do its part, and we haven’t been asked to make any sacrifice.

As you say, you know people who know people who know people. Many of my friends have sons and daughters serving. I’ve had two members of my staff leave to go and enlist, so I see it all the time, and I do a lot of work with veterans, with active duty Guard and Reserve, and I just regret that the president didn’t seize the opportunity after 9/11 to summon the country to service. Then I don’t think it would be quite so out of balance as to where people are coming from, where the sacrifice is really rooted as it appears to now.

Iowa Independent: On Sept. 12, 2001, I think most Americans assumed that by Oct. 20, 2007, there would have been another major terrorist attack on our soil. We were just expecting that it was imminent. It hasn’t happened.

In your estimation, why hasn’t that happened? Has the Bush administration maybe done some things that are good to prevent it, or was the threat exaggerated from the beginning?

Clinton: Well, as a senator from New York, I don’t think the threat was exaggerated. The terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. They attacked our embassies. They attacked the USS Cole. They have since 9/11 attacked in Spain, Morocco, Great Britain, Indonesia, India.

They’ve attacked many other places. They’ve attacked American targets, and I think there are lots of reasons at work here.

If you read what bin Laden has said, which I have, unfortunately, been required to do, he may have gotten what he wanted by pulling us into the war in Iraq. He wanted to sort of suck America into a war in the Muslim world.
So they may have figured that they’ve made some progress, that they’ve used that as a recruiting tool, a training ground. There certainly is evidence that they have been vigorously recruiting and training that we know from Great Britain, Germany, other places.

They’re also very patient. Just because we haven’t been attacked doesn’t mean that they’re not engaged in doing whatever they can to bring that about.

After they attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, a lot of people, including Rudy Giuliani who put his police headquarters back in that area, would have thought, “Well, OK, fine.” They were determined to go back to the same place because they feel that sends a signal.

We have done some things better than we were doing. I’ve been deeply involved in trying to make sure that New York City got what it needed to protect itself.

But I don’t think we’ve done enough, and I think that there has been an increase in the potential recruits to this cause of extremism, jihadism against the West, that is a result of how we handled our response.

Terrorism has been around a long, long time. It goes back thousands of years. [In modern times,] Europe was subjected to it during the ’70s and ’80s. You had the IRA in northern Ireland and in the course of the 30 years of troubles there, approximately the same number of people died as in one day with us on 9/11.

We just have to remain vigilant, and we have to be aware that in the globalized, interconnected world, it is very easy, and a lot of the devices that are used to kill our young men and women in Iraq are easily transportable. There is nothing fancy about them. We’ve got to figure out how to be smarter.

Law enforcement officials recently completed a project to install locks on tanks of anhydrous ammonia in all of Iowa's 99 counties.

An anhydrous ammonia tank lock was demonstrated today at a press conference with state officials in Des Moines. Tracy Gathman, general manager of Two Rivers Cooperative in Pella and a representative of the Agribusiness Association of Iowa locks up the tank.

Anhydrous ammonia is a farm fertilizer that is commonly distributed all across the state, but it also happens to be one of the chemicals needed to illegally manufacture methamphetamine.

County sheriffs in rural Iowa have struggled for years with the problem, as thieves would steal the ammonia from farmers and agribusinesses. Then when they were finished with their clandestine labs, meth cooks would often dump their by-products in rural road ditches, leaving a toxic mess for Iowa taxpayers to clean up.

Those problems are now in decline, as statistics announced today show an 89 percent drop in the discovery of meth labs since 2004. Figures released today from the Iowa Department of Public Safety's Division of Narcotics Enforcement indicate that approximately 1,500 meth lab incidents were recorded in 2004. This year, the state is expecting that figure to drop to about 160.

The installment of nearly 24,000 tank locks on anhydrous ammonia tanks across the state was funded primarily through the Community Oriented Policing Services Meth Hot Spots program, money secured by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin in his work on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Harkin said that while the tank locks have been an important tool in reducing meth lab activity in the state, it has been a coordinated series of steps including tank locks and other efforts that have stopped meth labs from operating in Iowa. "Locking up these tanks is a simple and inexpensive, yet critical and highly successful step in curbing the production of meth in our state," said Harkin.

Harkin also noted another successful meth-fighting strategy that can be credited to scientists at Iowa State University. Researchers have created a calcium-nitrate additive that is now being mixed with anhydrous ammonia, rendering the ammonia much less useful to meth cooks.

Add these efforts together with new controls on pseudoephedrine, another drug that is used in the meth-making process, and the result is far fewer meth labs in Iowa.

Harkin also emphasized the need to work to reduce the demand for methamphetamine through family- and jail-based drug treatment programs, specifically in underserved areas.

Harkin was joined today at the state capitol by Rep. Leonard Boswell, Lt. Gov. Patty Judge and other state officials in discussing the success of the crackdown on meth-making.

Boswell is the co-chair of the House Meth Caucus, a group working in Congress to find more solutions to the problems associated with methamphetamine.

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey also applauded the efforts in Congress to secure funding for the tank lock program. "It's a voluntary program, but it takes dollars," said Northey. "It's so tough to make real progress, but this is real progress. As a farmer, I feel great about having a safer product out there."

Iowa Public Safety Commissioner Gene Meyer said that the reduction of meth labs has allowed resources to be diverted to other drug-trafficking problems. Cleaning up a meth lab is an expensive and dangerous task.

"For every pound of methamphetamine that is created, there are six pounds of toxic waste," said Meyer.

Lt. Gov. Judge said that Iowans are now safer thanks to the coordinated efforts of agriculture retailers and county sheriffs, and she thanked Harkin and Boswell for their work in Congress.

Iowa Independent visited with Monroe County Sheriff Dan Johnson, who has seen the meth problem grow throughout his years in law enforcement.

"Yes, these programs have been very successful in stopping meth labs," said Johnson, adding that there has been a significant drop in the amount of meth labs found in Monroe County. He credits the controls on pseudoephedrine as being the most important step in curtailing meth production.