U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, says the nation needed Gen. David Petraeus to think for himself and challenge Bush administration failures in Iraq — not soldier on as an “apologist” for what Harkin believes is a military-disabling and foreign policy-crippling debacle.

Harkin and U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., were the only two senators to recently vote against the appointment of Petraeus as commanding officer for Central Command, which oversees both Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Here’s one of the biggest apologists for our war in Iraq,” Harkin said in response to questions from Iowa Independent on a conference call with media.

Harkin said Petraeus either buys into a broken plan or is functioning as a blindly loyal general.“Someone like that who’s been so promotive of what we’ve been doing in Iraq, why should we reward that?” Harkin said. “Either that’s what he believes or he’s just following the orders of Bush. You might say, ‘Well, a military person is supposed to follow orders.’ Well, not necessarily. We expect more of our officers, especially high-ranking officers, to exercise independent judgment.”

“We’ve had generals who have retired because they oppose Bush’s policies in Iraq,” Harkin said. “I have a lot of respect for that because I think some of those who retired felt that militarily this was not the right thing to do and it was ruining our military.”

Harkin, a Vietnam-era Navy pilot, said his vote on Petraeus was specific to the man, not an indictment of the military or career officers. In an earlier interview he had suggested that U.S. Sen. John McCain’s military family tree has him rooting in “dangerous” ground for responding to foreign policy matters.

“I was an officer in the military so I don’t have anything against the officer corps, for crying out loud. There are a number of great officers in the military, and I’ve met a lot of them. Not only are they smart and bright, but I think they have a healthy outlook on the role of the military in terms of what we’re doing in the broader context of the world community.”

Harkin’s views of war and chain of command issues, the need to challenge authority in the military in certain situations, were formed early in his career as a young aide for former U.S. Rep. Neal Smith, D-Iowa, during a trip to Vietnam, according to his Senate bio.

As a staff member accompanying a congressional delegation to South Vietnam, he revealed to the world the infamous “tiger cages” inside a South Vietnamese prison camp at Con Son Island. Withstanding tremendous pressure to withhold the sensitive information, Tom’s photographs and detailed account of the tiger cages were published in Life Magazine, exposing a cover-up and unearthing the shocking, inhuman conditions political prisoners were forced to endure. As a result, hundreds of tortured political prisoners were released.

"We had to start making decisions about if and how we were going to keep our apes in the facilities," said Jim Aipperspach, operations manager at the Great  Ape Trust. "So, we had some tense moments."

As it turns out, life over the next few days was going to be much harder on the human species than the apes.

"They seem to hardly be noticing," said Rob Shumaker, director of orangutan research. "They just moved to a higher area, and other than a few inches of water in the building, they didn't really notice a thing. In fact, none of them even got their feet wet."

The campus' three orangutans and seven bonobos have spent the week watching boats go by where cars usually tread, as well as being surrounded 24-hours-a-day by staff frantically trying to clean up and keep the water out.

"When you look at the campus now, it looks like a giant mess," Shumaker said. "But it is actually not so bad."

Floodwaters from the Des Moines River spilled over a low spot in an agricultural levee, flooding administrative suites and leaving the 230-acre campus in southeast Des Moines mostly under water. The administrative buildings are a total loss, Shumaker said, but computers and delicate research equipment were able to be saved.

"We knew the water was coming," Shumaker said. "We certainly expect we've lost some of our appliances. At the moment, we haven't identified any structural damage. We had enough warning that we moved all our computer equipment and other essentials, so that's all saved. What we've lost really is the day to day stuff."

There were some tense moments while watching the water rise, Shumaker said, but the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines and the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha both volunteered to help out in any way they could.

"Happily, we haven't had to take advantage of that. It's this kind of event where you really learn who your friends are, and they proved how wonderful they are, and it doesn't surprise me a bit," Shumaker said.

The ape buildings, which were constructed with the arboreal tendencies of the apes in mind, are functioning as officials expected they would during times of high water on the campus. The orangutan home stands three stories, or 30-feet, high, and the 13,000-square-foot bonobo home features a pair of 25-foot towers where the apes enjoy spending time.

Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a scientific research facility dedicated to understanding the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence.

For now, it seems the worst is behind them.

"We crested at 6:15 yesterday morning," Shumaker said. "It stayed at that crest for several hours. At far reaches of the campus, we started to see it recede, so we knew by yesterday evening that the worst was behind us. We expect by tomorrow morning the water levels will drop considerably."

Photos of flooding at the Great Ape Trust:

The orangutan building at Great Ape Trust was under water.

Administrative trailers are a "total loss" after flood waters from the Des Moines River inundated the Great Ape Trust of Iowa.

The bonobo building at the Great Ape Trust. The seven bonobos inside simply moved to higher levels in the building as waters began rising.

The orangutan building surrounded by flood waters.

Staff at the Great Ape Trust rake water-soaked straw out of the orangutan building.

Great Ape Trust staff drop off food and supplies for humans and apes.

Operations Director Jim Aipperspach points to the area where water began running onto the Great Ape Trust campus.

A Great Ape Trust employee carries supplies to those working in the ape holding buildings.

Al Setka, communications director for the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, points toward the campus' entrance from a boat the staff use to get around.

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So when I finally got home, and could access the national political blogs that for some reason the Mount Vernon School District’s wireless network had blocked, what did I read?

“Obama loses one.”

It’s the latest example of national political writers just not understanding Iowa’s caucus and convention process.On Thursday, I published a comprehensive look at the math that showed Obama taking 15 delegates, Clinton winning nine, and Edwards definitely getting two, with three delegates still in play, and one more delegate possibly shifting pending deals between candidates.

But national estimates ignored things like deals between candidates and the possibility of people just not showing up, and acted as if the numbers were set in stone. Those estimates allocated two more delegates to Obama and one to Edwards, for a 17-9-3 estimate.

On Saturday, Edwards gained viability in the 1st District, where he had been two people short of viability coming out of the Mar. 15 county conventions. My estimates had listed this seat as being in question, but national reports assumed Edwards would not be viable and that Obama would gain the delegate. This is what sites such as MyDD and Democratic Convention Watch are listing as the Obama “loss.” But like the old blues song says, you can’t lose what you never had. In fact, the truly accurate Iowa numbers before Saturday were Obama zero, Clinton zero, Edwards zero.

Meanwhile, in the 4th District, a deal that Iowa Independent reported between Edwards and “another campaign” — math would indicate Clinton — failed to materialize, and Obama gained a fourth delegate which I had listed as in doubt. But national sites, pretending Edwards did not exist, had already allocated this delegate to Obama, and are failing to report it as a gain.

It was a bit more fair for national sites to list the Edwards delegate in the 5th District as an Edwards hold. However, coming out of the county conventions Edwards was only viable by one person, so I had listed the seat as in question. That was a judgment call, as opposed to the inaccuracy of reports on the 1st and 4th Districts.

Barack Obama holds the lead in endorsements from Iowa newspapers with a total of nine.  But measured by total readership, Hillary Clinton has the advantage with the backing of the state’s largest paper, the Des Moines Register.

On the Republican side, John McCain leads both in numbers and in total circulation.  Fred Thompson gains his first endorsement, from the Ottumwa Courier.

Papers and numbers below the fold.

Dem	Total	Daily	Weekly	Readership
Obama	9	6	3	247132
Clinton	4	3	1	464370
Biden	3	0	3	23190
Edwards	2	2	0	36636
Dodd	0	0	0
Richardson	0	0	0
total	18	11	7

The big one — The Des Moines Register — dropped last weekend.  But as editorial board meetings wind down, newspapers across Iowa are starting to line up behind the presidential candidates.  The Democratic side shows a Barack Obama lead, six to four over Hillary Clinton (though she got the Register endorsement).

The Republican contest is closer between Mike Huckabee and, despite his relative lack of campaigning in the state, John McCain.

Below the fold: the scorecard and details.

Dem	Total	Daily	Weekly
Obama	6	4	2
Clinton	4	3	1
Biden	2	0	2
Edwards	1	1	0
Dodd	0	0	0
Richardson	0	0	0
total	14	8	6

GOP	Total	Daily	Weekly
Huckabee	6	2	4
McCain	5	4	1
Romney	1	1	0
Giuliani	0	0	0
Hunter	0	0	0
Keyes	0	0	0
Paul	0	0	0
Thompson	0	0	0
total	12	7	5

Like this June Washington Post article, which boldly declared that "the corn price increases flow like gravy down the food chain, to grocery stores and menus." It states "the nation's unquenchable thirst for gasoline — and finding an alternative to what's been called our addiction to oil — has produced an unintended consequence: The cost of the foods that fuel our bodies has jumped. Beef prices are up. So are the costs of milk, cereal, eggs, chicken and pork. And corn is getting the blame."

Or just read the first sentence of this Newsweek International article, published last week under the ominous title "Blame It on Biofuels." The article starts off by saying: "High food prices always hit the poor hardest, and these days there is plenty of bad news. Corn prices are nearly $4 a bushel, almost double their 2005 level."

The fact is, corn prices have been trending downward for almost eight months. Today at the Chicago Board of Trade, September corn is going for about $3.25 a bushel. But consumer food prices have not followed that downward trend.

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey told Iowa Independent this week that prices farmers are paid for their crops have only a minor effect on final prices at the grocery store.
"We've seen it all through history — it seems like farm prices get blamed for consumer prices going up. We've seen that constantly," said Northey, who is a corn and soybean farmer. "But we've never seen them say that things got cheaper because of farm prices. If you look at our prices, our prices are no higher now than decent prices were back in the '90s, or back even in the '70s."

A lot of people, he said, are making excuses for higher consumer food prices and they're not being altogether honest. "They're blaming the farmer when our prices aren't at all out of line. And it's usually a very tiny portion of those final consumer prices. If you look at popcorn, you look at even meat, it's not a huge portion. And each of them have their own demand-and-supply situation."
Very few farms can pass on their costs, he explained. "They just get what is the market price for their products. There may be some of those consumer prices that increased at the same time that the corn price increased, but many of those haven't gone down the way corn's gone down since January. We had $4 corn and now we have corn in the $3.15 and $3.20 range. So let's don't blame corn or ethanol for those higher prices."

A recent American Farm Bureau Federation study showed that the value of the corn that is used to make a box of corn flakes is less than a nickel. Grain prices make a difference in consumer food prices, but according to that study, only slightly.

What is more likely to affect food prices is the overall cost of energy for production and transportation of the products — and even more significantly, as stated in that Newsweek article referenced above, rising global demand for food. As that article says, in the second to last paragraph, "perhaps the most significant factor is rising wealth, particularly in the developing world. Since 2002, the combined GDP of the 24 largest emerging markets has doubled, according to Bank of America, and per capita income has risen by nearly 14 percent a year. As families get richer, they can more regularly indulge in meat and dairy products. In China, beef consumption has gone up by 26 percent since 2000, and pork, which was already popular, rose by 19 percent." 

As reported here on Iowa Independent, corn farmers have a big crop coming this fall, and a corn shortage is not expected. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has projected that 2007 will bring the second-largest corn crop in history.