Sen. Chuck Grassley, senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to analyze the future effects of the Democrats’ tax increase. Specifically, Grassley is wondering why the proposed hike isn’t indexed to inflation, leaving more and more Americans to fall subject to the increase each year.

“The unintended consequences could be significant,” Grassley warned.

If that scenario sounds familiar, it’s because the Alternative Minimum Tax — designed decades ago to target just a tiny sliver of high-income households — was similarly not indexed to inflation. As incomes have risen over the years, more and more upper-middle-class families have fallen into the bracket under which they have to pay the AMT. Some liberals don’t see a problem with that. But Congress, fearing a backlash at the polls, has stepped in each year with the so-called AMT patch, providing billions of (borrowed) dollars to prevent the tax from hitting those families.

The Democrats’ motivations are easy to surmise: Had they indexed the tax to inflation they would have generated much less revenue to pay for their health-care reform bill. And the proposed payroll tax increase is much less than the AMT. Still, it’s not too far a stretch to imagine that the lawmakers of the 2030s, also wanting to appease the voters, would also find it tempting to come up with the Medicare-payroll patch.

Mike Lillis covers congress for The Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

“I have heard from so many Iowans over the past few days who are rightfully concerned about the proposed location of Guantanamo Bay terrorist-detainees in our backyard,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, who has not said for sure whether he will support Latham’s bill, represents the portion of Iowa that is most near the Thomson Correctional Center, and he toured the facility with a federal task force on Monday. If the plan moves forward, the Federal Bureau of Prisons would purchase the now mostly-empty facility from Illinois and revamp it for use for roughly 100 terror suspects.

Following the facility tour, Braley, who was the only member of the Iowa delegation to participate, spoke about the experience:

“I wanted to be there on the ground myself to find out what types of security precautions are already in place,” he said during an Iowa Public Radio interview Monday afternoon. “I wanted to speak to representatives from the White House, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Prisons and Department of Defense about the security implications of this proposal and ask the tough questions that are important to my constituents in the First District of Iowa.”

“My whole point throughout this conversation has been, everyone needs to take a deep breath, listen to what the plan is, and make sure there’s an opportunity for public input so people have the chance to have their concerns addressed,” he said.

He is expected to further address the situation this afternoon on a conference call with reporters.

Latham, like most Republicans in Congress, is openly critical of the Obama administration’s proposed plans to move terror suspects from a military prison at Guantanamo Bay into the United States. The legislation proposed by Latham is one more attempt by the GOP to prohibit the suspects from being held in the country, and echoes the sentiments expressed by Republicans who represent Illinois.

In contrast, Illinois Democrats like U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and Gov. Pat Quinn view the move as an opportunity to possibly provide economic revitalization to a hard-hit portion of the state. Jerry Hebeler, who serves as mayor for the neighboring town of Thomson is also in favor, stating that the detainees “can’t be any worse than any murderer” and that the maximum-security facility was built for such a purpose.

Malcolm Huston, who manages IOWAccess, the advisory council responsible for overseeing the redesign, explained his goals in a statement:

The Web site should reflect Iowa’s welcoming and forward-thinking nature, and we think the new site does that with things like photos of Iowa, easy access to a lot of information, and the ability to share the site through other networking Web sites.  We tried to make the site more social, as opposed to the usual ‘formal’ government Web sites citizens often visit.

Keep reading for a very geeky rundown of the new site.

The new Iowa.gov (Screen capture: June 23, 2009)

The new Iowa.gov makes more extensive use of Javascript — a technology for animating and dynamically changing the contents of Web pages after they have been loaded — than its predecessor. That will make for improved browsing experiences for most Internet users — especially those with modern browsers and broadband connections — but those with slower connections and older browsers might find all of the site’s new moving parts more cumbersome.

Developers chose to use the open-source Javascript framework called JQuery, which speeds up the process of writing code but also means visitors have to download fairly large library files when they visit the site for the first time.

The new site improves its compliance with newer standards of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), avoiding as many table-style layouts in favor of Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) layouts that use “div” tags and unordered lists. (There is still one pesky table in the layout, which I think could have been replaced with CSS fairly easily, but I digress…)

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C)’s authoritative “Markup Validation Service” deems the front page invalid, but designing a Web site that is accessible to a wide range of people often requires invalid markup (as counterintuitive as that sounds, it’s true).

The total size of the front page, including images, Javascript libraries, and other files, comes in at just under 590 kilobytes. That is heftier than the old Iowa.gov (which may mean slightly increased bandwidth costs for state government), but it remains much more lightweight than some other state Web sites that have been redesigned recently. For instance, Utah.gov clocks in at more than 3.5 megabytes (nearly seven times the size of Iowa.gov) once all of it has loaded.

He challenged the other Democratic candidates on Iraq when he said: “They’ve decided to stop talking about Iraq. Their campaign strategies have shifted to other issues.  Over the last few debates and on the campaign trail, our brave troops in Iraq seem to have been forgotten.”

Richardson did not ignore domestic issues in his speech. Among other concerns, he addressed unions and labor issues; health care; education and No Child Left Behind; and global warming and alternative energy issues.

He was asked by Cornell College student Bianca Byrd about leaving Iraq too soon. She said she was worried that Iraq would “implode” if we removed troops without a plan for protecting Iraqi people and stabilizing the region.

She was happy with his answer to her question.  He said he wants to have “American diplomacy take over” after removing U.S. troops.  He explained further that:

“Iraq is not exactly helpless. They  have over 300,000 security forces; … they have a financial foundation for the future. … And then we can pay attention to what really concerns America, which is threats of international terrorism, nuclear terrorism, loose nuclear weapons, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, becoming energy independent, helping with international poverty and disease and having a foundation of having a foreign policy based on our human rights.”

More videos of Richardson’s speech are below the fold.Part of Richardson’s speech on the teleprompter

Here is more from Richardson on U.S. troops in Iraq:

Richardson was also asked about Iran and the vote on branding Iran’s Republican Guard as a terrorist organization. 

He distanced himself from opponent Hillary Clinton, saying she was wrong to vote for the resolution, but he was quick to remind the audience of his work for former President Bill Clinton’s administration.

Here is Richardson on the foreign policy challenge of Iran and the rest of the middle East:

More on Richardson’s recent Iowa events from Iowa Independent reporters John Deeth and Tom Lindsey.

 Iowa Farm Bureau Federation's district directors, Carlton Kjos, Charles Norris, Phil Sundblad, Doug Gronau, Richard Merrill, Joe Heinrich, Daniel Johnson, Calvin Rozenboom and Jim McKnight.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, shakes hands at the pancake breakfast Saturday at the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation's annual meeting in Des Moines. Grassley told Iowa Independent that the U.S. Senate will be working on the Farm Bill and the Energy Bill next week. He said he hopes some important changes can be made to the Energy Bill so it will win bi-partisan support.Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey visits with Farm Bureau members at the IFBF annual meeting.

The trade show at the meeting was full of agriculture displays and booths on Friday at the Polk County Convention Complex.
Below, four Republican presidential campaigns had booths and displays at the IFBF meeting trade show: Ron Paul, John McCain, Fred Thompson and Duncan Hunter.

 

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.

No big surprise, but many of the spouses had good things to say about food  at the Iowa State Fair. U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., tested the deep-fried Twinkies, and Michelle Obama says she and her girls ate their way all around the fair (this from the woman who made her husband quit smoking). Jill Biden fell in love with the pie on RAGBRAI. And Ann Romney got her food fix while visiting Pella.

In case you vote with your stomach, here’s a look at the mentions Iowa food received in the survey:

Jill Biden: “A few months ago when we were on the trail in Iowa – literally on a bike trail – riding a day of the RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa), we came across these amazing fruit pies during a rest break in a small town in the northeastern part of the state. Hopefully, next summer, we will be back on the trail and will track them down again.” (Link: http://www.time.com/…)Jackie Dodd: “The food is a great part of the experience! I’ve tried so many different things since going on the campaign trail.  Chris especially loved the deep-fried Twinkies on a stick at the Iowa State Fair. But I avoid foods with nuts in them because our eldest daughter Grace has a nut allergy.” (Link: http://www.time.com/…)

Michelle Obama: “In August, we spent an evening as a family at the Iowa State Fair. It was a beautiful day, and we had a fantastic time. After Barack had to go to his next campaign stop, the girls and I stayed and rode the rides into the night. We tried practically one of everything from the food vendors – corn dogs and pork sandwiches and caramel apples and funnel cakes – and we loved a lot if of it. I think next time we maybe just shouldn’t eat it all at once.” ((Link: http://www.time.com/…

Ann Romney: “One of my favorites has been the Dutch Letter pastry in Pella, Iowa, which is a cross between a cookie and croissant formed into the shape of a letter.” (Link: http://www.time.com/…)

Jackie Dodd: “The food is a great part of the experience! I've tried so many different things since going on the campaign trail, Chris especially loved the deep fried twinkies on a stick at the Iowa State Fair. But, I avoid foods with nuts in them because our eldest daughter Grace has a nut allergy.” (Link: http://www.time.com/…)

Michelle Obama: In August, we spent an evening as a family at the Iowa State Fair. It was a beautiful day and we had a fantastic time. After Barack had to go to his next campaign stop, the girls and I stayed and rode the rides into the night. We tried practically one of everything from the food vendors — corndogs and pork sandwiches and caramel apples and funnel cakes — and we loved a lot if it. I think next time we maybe just shouldn't eat it all at once.(Link: http://www.time.com/…  )

Ann Romney: One of my favorites has been the Dutch Letter pastry in Pella, Iowa, which is a cross between a cookie and croissant formed into the shape of a letter. (Link: http://www.time.com/…)