Although new regulations, drafted by the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission, were passed during the 2009 session, Gene Tinker with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources said lawmakers could propose changes to the initial legislation based upon his agency’s proposals.

Existing rules limit application of liquid manure on frozen ground from Feb. 1 to April 1 as well as on snow-covered ground from Dec. 21 to April 1. Exemptions are provided for farmers facing unusual circumstances, such as weather or storage-capacity limits, so long as the DNR approves the emergency plan. The legislation was supported by the Iowa Farm Bureau in lieu of more stringent rules presented by the state environmental commission that did not provide emergency exceptions.

Iowa suffers from some of the worst water quality in the nation. High levels of ammonia pollution in the spring all across Iowa have been traced back to manure application on frozen and snow-covered ground.

The law does not apply to manure from open feedlots or dry manure. It applies to confinement (totally roofed) facilities with liquid manure that have 500 or more animal units. Generally, 500 animal units translates to 1,250 finishing hogs, 5,000 nursery pigs, 357 mature dairy cows, or 500 steers, immature dairy cows or other cattle. Snow-covered ground is defined has soil having one inch or more snow cover or one half-inch or more ice cover.

“Under those conditions, producers can only apply in emergency situation, defined in the law as unforeseen circumstances beyond the control of the producer such as a natural disaster, unusual weather conditions, or equipment or structural failure,” Tinker said. “They need to notify the regional DNR field office before they apply, and they can only apply to fields that are identified for emergency application in their manure management plans and have a Phosphorus Index of two or less.”

Producers and others who once supported the legislation are concerned that farms could be required to own or build storage  facilities capable of holding 100 days of manure before an emergency exception could be taken. Such a storage requirement was not included in the approved bill, but could be a regulatory requirement under the DNR’s administrative authority. The facilities that might be most negatively impacted by the legislation and the proposed administrative regulations are those Iowa properties that built prior to 1995 and have not been required to have a manure management plan. Such producers are not only likely not to have the now needed storage facilities, but are also likely to have not identified fields for manure application in relation to potential run-off and other environmental concerns.

Tinker has held five meetings around the state to gather comments from producers and other interested parties, and will hold a final meeting on Feb. 1 at North Iowa Area Community College in Mason City. Those who wish to comment, but cannot attend the final meeting should submit their statement to gene.tinker@dnr.iowa.gov or The Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Wallace State Office Building, 502 9th St., Des Moines, IA 50319. Comments can also be faxed to (515) 281-8895.

Photo by DawnVGilmorePhotography, Flickr Creative Commons

“I am committed to fully closing it, once and for all,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday. “We will do so in our conference committee with the House, whose bill already closes the gap.”

Left unmentioned, however, was how they plan to pay for that promise without unraveling a friendly deal struck earlier in the year between the pharmaceutical lobby and Democratic leaders in the White House and Senate. Though the House bill does indeed close the coverage gap, known disapprovingly as the “doughnut hole,” lower-chamber leaders chose to offset that provision by allowing states to negotiate drug prices for millions of low-income seniors, which is prohibited under current law. Such negotiations would save the government tens of billions of dollars, but would also undermine the deal with Big Pharma.

The decision to kick the issue to the conference negotiations, rather than taking it up on the Senate floor, could lead to a clash between Democratic leaders in each chamber over whether the government should be empowered to use its bulk-buying advantage to secure lower prices for both the government and the nation’s lowest-income seniors — something House leaders support, but Democrats in the Senate and White House oppose because of the pharmaceutical deal.

Senate Democrat leaders have already shown zero willingness this year to break the agreement with Big Pharma, under which the nation’s largest drug companies have pledged up to $80 billion to subsidize health-care reform over the next decade in return for assurance that Democrats wouldn’t seek further concessions. Fearing the industry’s opposition to the underlying reform bill, Senate Democrats, behind Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., have already shot down several proposals in recent weeks that would have broken the deal — including legislation making it easier for Americans to buy their prescription drugs from abroad, as well as the very provision that the House used to close the doughnut hole.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, joined a bipartisan group that voted in favor of the Senate drug-import bill.

That means that Democrats, if they intend to keep that deal intact, will be forced to find additional money to close the doughnut hole — estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost the federal government more than $42 billion over the next decade. That’s no simple task for Democratic leaders who have already struggled to find offsets for legislation tickling $900 billion. So far, they’re giving no clues how they might do it.

“It’s something that we will have to deal with in conference,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley wrote in an email this week.

Karen Lightfoot, spokeswoman for Rep. Henry Waxman, (D-Calif., a long-time champion of the controversial offset provision, echoed that uncertainty Tuesday. With the Senate bill not yet finalized, she said, it’s too early to begin speculating about conference specifics.

The doughnut hole has been controversial since Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, called Part D, was rammed through Congress by the Republican majority in 2003. Under that benefit, the government pays 75 percent of seniors’ drug costs up to $2,700, when patients must begin paying full price. After those expenses hit $6,154, the government picks up 95 percent of the tab, meaning the doughnut hole is $3,054.

The gap has created serious health concerns. Indeed, in 2007 roughly 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries reached the doughnut hole, of which about 15 percent stopped taking their prescriptions as a result, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

As part of their $80 billion deal, drug makers agreed to cover half the cost of name-brand drugs for seniors stuck in the doughnut hole, beginning in 2010. The House bill builds on that foundation, cutting the doughnut hole by an additional $500 per person in 2010, and incrementally shrinking the gap further until 2019, when it would close altogether.

The controversy is not over the proposal itself, but how it’s funded. House leaders decided to allow states to negotiate prescription prices on behalf of the nearly 9 million seniors who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid — the so-called dual eligibles — as they do for regular Medicaid patients. Such a system allows the states to use the bulk-buying advantage of the large Medicaid pool to negotiate lower costs on prescription drugs.

Prior to enactment of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, dual eligibles also got their drugs through Medicaid. With passage of Part D, however, drug purchasing for duals shifted to Medicare, which was explicitly prohibited from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies. As a result, the government currently pays about 30 percent more for dual eligibles’ drugs under Medicare than it would under Medicaid, according to a 2008 study from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, then chaired by Waxman.

Indeed, it was Waxman, now chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, who inserted the dual-eligible provision into the House bill.

Some upper chamber lawmakers have tried to do the same. During debate over health reform in the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., proposed a similar amendment. The proposal would have no effect on the drug coverage of dual eligibles, but simply shift which federal program would pick up the tab. Nelson said it would save the government $106 billion over the next decade.

The Finance Committee killed it, 13 to 10.

“We have to find some other time, some other way [to close the doughnut hole],” Baucus said after voting against the measure. “The White House did reach an agreement.”

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

(Photo courtesy Recovery.gov)

So when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed early this year, adding $6.2 billion to the federal weatherization program, Iowa officials realized the state would see a dramatic increase in funding. And the additional $80 million for the state means another 10,000 Iowa homes could benefit from the program.

But the huge influx of funds has some worried that federal, state and local agencies will have trouble allocating them and conducting sufficient oversight. Because the money must be spent quickly, the worry is that there could be waste or fraud, and because the massive funding increase cannot possibly be matched with an equal hiring increase, many predict there simply won’t be enough hands on deck locally to oversee the program’s expansion.

In Iowa, the program is administered by a small state agency called the Division of Community Action Agencies, which is part of the Department of Human Rights.

The division administrator, William Brand, said the federal recovery act has strict guidelines to avoid waste and fraud. And while his agency has only been able to add four new members to their staff of five to help with inspection and oversight, local agencies that operate the program have been able to hire additional staff as well.

“Local agencies have to assure to us that they are going to follow the rules, and we require a monthly program report for work that has been approved,” Brand said. “Our agency also does onsite monitoring to go through their books to go through receipts, payroll records, all sorts of records to make sure everything is in compliance.”

The state also does random on-site inspections at homes that are weatherized to ensure quality work is being done.

Money for the weatherization program goes directly to the Division of Community Action Agencies, which in turn funnels the money to 18 nonprofit agencies around the state — in Polk County, for instance, the agency is government run. Those agencies handle the application process and the initial energy audit of the homes.

When it comes time to do the actual work on the home, some local agencies hire local contractors to do all the work on a competitive bid process. Others do some of the work themselves.

“Local agencies are responsible for reporting all their expenditures of funds on a monthly basis,” Brand said. “Each local agency must also contract with an independent auditing firm, and the results of audits are provided to us for our review.”

Some worried the state and local agencies wouldn’t be able to ramp up fast enough to match the increase in funding. But for the first time the weatherization program had to comply with the federal Davis-Bacon Act, which says the local prevailing wage must be paid. That delayed dispersal of funding through the summer, while the U.S. Department of Labor determined county-by-county prevailing wage levels across the nation, giving local agencies some time to train new staff and implement oversight regulations.

“We’ve been gearing up for a while on this,” Brand said. “It’s a very accountable system.”

A looming deadline

The money must be spent by March 30, 2012, something Brand said won’t be an issue.

“We’ve got such a long waiting list, we know the money will easily be spent,” he said.

Aiding in that effort is the fact that income levels for qualifying families were raised from 200 percent of poverty level to 300 percent. Homes are prioritized based on energy consumption and whether young children, the elderly or the disabled live there.

“Those homes go to the front of the line,” Brand said.

A report released earlier this year by the nonpartisan Iowa Policy Project found that families who were able to participate in the weatherization program saw the share of their family budget dedicated to energy cost substantially reduced.

“It literally is a great economic stimulus program, because it will create jobs, put more work in the community for contractors and will result in energy efficiency that helps low-income families who are strapped with high energy bills,” Brand said.

Jon Murphy, director of the Office of State-Federal Relations and co-chairman of Iowa’s Recovery Act task force, said another benefit of the additional funding is that it clears the way for families in the future to get assistance that otherwise would have been left out.

“Unfortunately in Iowa, we have a long line of people who have been waiting for the weatherization program to come to them,” he said. “This helps clear a lot of those people off the queue.”Whil

HR 3221, also known as the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, would support early childhood education and provide for “green” school building renovations. The most contentious provision of the bill, however, would end government-subsidized loans in the private sector and replace them with direct government funding. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that removing the subsidies will save taxpayers $87 billion — monies that Democrats say can then be used to increase education grants to low- to moderate-income Americans.

According to U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Waterloo), the impact on Iowa will be enormous. His office estimates that the legislation will invest more than $726 million in Iowa over the next 10 years to increase the annual Pell Grant from $5,350 in 2009 to $5,500 in 2010 and then to $6,900 by 2019. The 1st District, which Braley represents, is estimated to receive $82.5 million.

“This bill makes federal grant money more accessible and reliable, and allows young people to graduate with less debt,” Braley said. “This is a huge step in the right direction to make higher education more affordable for Iowa families.”

Despite a highly-lauded and bipartisan amendment being attached to the legislation that removed federal funding for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Republican support did not materialize for the full legislation. U.S. Rep. Tom Latham (D-Ames) and U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Kiron) both voted against the legislation, even while King issued a press release in favor of the ACORN attachment.

According to Latham, the bill represents “an unprecedented government power-grab.”

“College students and their families ought to have choices when looking for ways to fund a college education,” he said. “This bill virtually forces students to rely solely on the federal government for student loan options. It threatens choice of — and access to — higher education funding.”

The bill has also received opposition from banks and other private institutions such as Sallie Mae and Citigroup that currently serve as middle-men in government-subsidized student loans — an industry currently estimated at $92 billion. Although the companies work directly with students to provide school loans, the government guarantees up to 97 percent of the loans that are made under the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, which is slated for sunset under the new legislation. The lenders, who will now begin lobbying Senate members for alternative plans, warn that loss of the program will mean loss of jobs in their sector.

U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-Mount Vernon), who supported the bill, was instrumental in the inclusion of “green school” and workforce development initiatives into the bill. Loebsack believes the provisions will encoruage greater collaboration between industry, college and workers to strengthen overall workforce development.

“The workforce development provisions will help connect community colleges to industry leaders — so that our students are receiving the most up-to-date and highly in demand skill set and our businesses are getting new corps of workers equipped to meet their current needs. By bringing everyone together, these provisions can grow and save entire industries while empowering our workforce to advance into the 21st century,” Loebsack said.

The legislation passed the U.S. House on a predominately party-line vote of 253 to 171. Although Pres. Barack Obama has already signaled his approval, members of the U.S. Senate will still need to pass their own version of the legislation.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Indianola), who now serves as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, issued a press release shortly after the House vote in praising the legislation. His intention is to present a similar bill this fall.

Co-sponsored by Iowa Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley, the “cash for clunkers” legislation is designed to boost car sales during a bleak period for the auto industry. It also aims to reduce the amount of cars on the nation’s roads with poor fuel efficiency.

Car owners could get a voucher worth $3,500 if they traded in a vehicle getting 18 miles per gallon or less for one getting at least 22 miles per gallon. The value of the voucher would grow to $4,500 if the mileage of the new car were 10 mpg higher than the old vehicle. The House approved the bill 298-119.

“The passage of Cash for Clunkers legislation will help boost our economy, save families money, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Braley said in a statement. “Cash for Clunkers is a common-sense idea that can have a big impact on the economy, reducing emissions and saving American jobs by jumpstarting the auto industry.  I hope the passage of this bill today is a sign that this program will start benefiting families and American workers as soon as possible.”

Discussing the bill with the Iowa Independent earlier this year, Braley pointed to Germany, which passed a similar incentive and saw its auto sales jump 20 percent.  (While no one disputes that the bill would be a boost to the ailing automobile industry, it is debatable whether it will be a net positive or negative for the environment.)

When Macke retired in 1994, Dayton Hudson, the parent company of Target, had annual revenue of more than $19 billion.Accolades for Macke, who died at age 69 last weekend from complications associated with Parkinson’s disease, poured in from around the nation — from friends with Carroll ties to leading lights in business, such as Warren Buffett’s attorney, Ron Olson, the cable business news channel CNBC, to a in a feature obituary in Tuesday’s New York Times – which had front-page display on the newspaper’s Web site.

Bill Evans, the longtime Carroll educator now retired in Phoenix, Ariz., said in a phone interview that he’s known many accomplished Carroll natives.

“Macke was on the top of that pyramid, wasn’t he,” Evans said.

Macke’s brother, Jim Macke of Carroll, 11 years younger, said Kenneth serves as a role model for the extended Macke family — that his drive and success were contagious.

“He had that personality, an exceptional personality, that just radiated,” Evans said.

That factored into Jim Macke’s first mental image of his brother after hearing of the death.

“There was a major magazine with his picture on the cover,” Jim Macke said. “I saw that. He has pictures with the presidents and Buffett. He ran in a pretty unique circle.”

Kenneth Anthony Macke was born in Carroll on Dec. 16, 1938, a son of Leonard and Carol Macke. His father worked for years for wholesale distributor Farner-Bocken, and his mother, a homemaker, died at age 36 when Macke was a junior in high school.

A multi-sport star in the 1950s at Carroll High School, Macke was one of the best athletes to hail from the city, according to Evans. He earned a scholarship to Drake University where he cut an unusual figure for quarterback in that period: 6-1 and 230 pounds.

That made him probably the largest quarterback in Division 1 football then, said Evans. At the time, Drake played schools like Iowa State and Colorado and Oklahoma State.

“He played linebacker on defense,” said college roommate and lifelong friend Ron Olson, a Manilla, Iowa, native now living in Pasadena, Calif. “There weren’t too many quarterbacks who played linebackers.”

Evans, a Drake basketball star who went on to mentor generations of kids in Carroll, recalled talking to the Drake coaches about Macke.

“He’s not going to run 100 yards in the fastest time or make open-field plays,” Evans said. “But I guarantee once you have him on your team, he’s going to be a leader.”

Olson recalled the old-school practices of the 1950s in which two players competing for a starting job would be thrown into a pit, with the one emerging getting the spot.

“That was pretty tough going,” said Olson, who played halfback.

He remembers a strategy the two Drake friends employed to surreptitiously hydrate themselves at practice as coaches wouldn’t let players drink water in an effort to toughen them.

Olson and Macke would bury lemons in the field the night before, dig them out when coaches weren’t looking the next day and chomp on the fruit for the fluids.

Evans and Jim Macke said Kenneth Macke had an opportunity to play in the Canadian Football League but opted for the world of business.

Macke joined Dayton’s in 1961 as a merchandise trainee and began a 33-year career in retailing, rising through the ranks to head merchant positions at Dayton’s and Target. In 1976, he was named president and CEO of Target and in 1977 was named chairman and CEO. During his tenure, Target grew from 49 stores in nine states to 137 stores in 16 states and became the corporation’s top profit-maker.

In 1981, he was elected president of Dayton Hudson Corporation and in 1983 became its CEO.

Macke’s first job was as a 15-year-old shoe salesman in Carroll, working for the late Max Reed at Anderson’s Shoes.

“Max Reed had a tremendous influence,” said Jim Macke. “[Kenneth] learned how to deal with customers.”

During the decade he was chairman and CEO of Dayton Hudson, the company grew from 350 stores to 909 stores in 33 states and revenues more than doubled to over $19 billion. Macke was instrumental in the major acquisitions of Ayr-Way, FedMart, Gemco and Gold Circle/Richway; and in the consolidation of the department stores.

Ann Barkelew, a Macke friend and the vice president of corporate communications for Dayton Hudson for more than a decade, said Macke was proudest of helping shape strategies for the company’s three largest divisions: Target’s growth and move into California, the Northwest and the southeastern United States; the acquisition of Marshall Field’s; the successful defeat of an attempted takeover of Dayton Hudson, and working with and mentoring employees. During that time, the company was named “America’s Best Managed Company” by Forbes magazine.

“He was always very sensitive to being sure that everyone got taken care of,” Barkelew said. “Whenever I would go shopping at one Macy’s, the suit guys would come up and say, `How is Ken?’”

Barkelew said she staffed Macke for analyst speeches in New York City and helped coordinate his popular appearances on “The Today Show” before Christmas to talk about the retail scene and trends for the shopping seasons.

“One of my great challenges was beating him to the local NBC station,” Barkelew said.

Macke’s commitment to provide opportunities for women and minorities brought national recognition to Dayton Hudson as being among the 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, 100 Companies Providing the Most Opportunities for Hispanics and 50 Best Companies for Hispanic Women.

Barkelew said women and minorities thrived under Macke’s leadership, not because he had specific diversity goals in mind, but because he looked to hire the best people without regard for race or gender.

“He just did it,” Barkelew said. “He did not go about it intentionally.”

“The truth of it is he didn’t think about it that way,” said Boake Sells, the president and COO of Dayton Hudson from 1983 to 1987. “He just hired the best people and supported them.”

Added Sells, “He was very down to earth. He never ever was a big shot. He was the kind of guy who people loved.”

Macke was named by many publications and groups as one of America’s best managers.

Olson, the former roommate, went on to be highly successful in his own right, graduating from Michigan Law School, earning a fellowship to Oxford University and working for the U.S. government in civil rights during the heady days of the 1960s. He’s now an attorney in the Los Angeles area with investment icon Warren Buffett as a client. Additionally, Olson serves on the board of directors of specialty regional insurer Berkshire Hathaway.

“People tend to classify people as either heart people or head people,” Olson said. “Well, Kenny was both.”

Through the years, Olson, and Macke shared western Iowa roots with success on larger professional stages.

“I think there’s a lot of what we grew up with in western Iowa,” Olson said. “Part of it is just as simple as you learn how to work. That’s an important aspect of anyone’s career. You learn how to work, and you learn how to respect people. Growing up as he and I did, you really didn’t have a sense of anyone being rich or poor. You didn’t have to have someone validated by some fancy credential. It’s a place of very few excesses. I think that’s wonderful.”

Sells, a Fort Dodge native, recalled playing basketball against Macke and Carroll High School in the 1950s. In one contest, CHS won 62-60 — a score Sells remembered instantly when asked during a phone interview from his home in Naples, Fla., where he remains involved in business through venture capital pursuits.

“The only reason I remember that score is because Macke remembered it,” Sells said. “Macke and I played basketball against each other once. Carroll won, and he never let me forget it.”

Opponents on a high school court for a night, Sells and Macke worked closely during some of Dayton Hudson’s best years.

“One of the most defining parts of Macke is as a merchant,” Sells said. “He could walk into any store and just stand in the front of it and start telling you what was right or wrong with it.”

For his part, Macke served as a trustee of Drake University and was a director of the Walker Art Center and the Urban Coalition of Minneapolis. In 1989, he chaired the United Way annual campaign, breaking all records for annual fund drives and, in 1993, chaired the board of the Greater Minneapolis United Way.

He served as a director of General Mills, Carlson Companies, Unisys, First Bank, The Pillsbury Company, McGlynn Bakeries and Duckwall.

After his retirement, he moved to the Napa Valley in northern California and continued to mentor and invest in retail entrepreneurs.

“My dad was a born merchant” said his son, Jeff. “He was passionate about showing respect for every customer who walked in the door by giving them superior service and a clean place to shop. It sounds simple, but most brilliant ideas in retail are. By running the nicest stores in the discount world, Target clearly defined its niche and became one of the best companies in America. My dad absolutely loved working on Target and walking the aisles `undercover’ at every opportunity. Dad’s influence remains an inescapable part of the Target experience. I feel it especially when I go with my kids and tell them how `Grandpa helped make this place.’”

When he retired in 1994, Kenneth Macke told The New York Times that it was time to get off the corporate treadmill. “I have spent my entire career marching to a calendar,” he said, adding, “My fondest wish is that I will have the willpower to do nothing.”

No 8,895 (57%)
Yes 6,606 (43%)

The student vote proved decisive, as 46 percent of the vote came in on absentee ballots.  In a reversal of normal city election trends, two-thirds of the absentees were from 18  to 24 year old voters.  The overall absentee vote (there’s no age breakdown available within the vote tally) went 74 percent no.  The student absentee drive was capped by a week of satellite voting on campus that drew 2,900 voters.

About 700 mailed absentee ballots, mostly from students, remain unreturned.  It’s unlikely many will come back and it’s not enough to reverse the outcome.“The students stepped up,” said Atul Nakhasi, mocking the name of student anti-alcohol group the Stepping Up Project which favored the ordinance.  Nakhasi headed the student vote no group, the Student Health Initiative Taskforce, whose name the Iowa City Press-Citizen effused to print because of the rude acronym.  “The students said we matter.  The students said we will decide this election. We did!”

Under the city charter, the city council cannot now reverse the decision of the voters for the next two years. 

Iowa City sent a mixed message in the council races themselves, re-electing unopposed incumbents Regenia Bailey (who opposed the 21 only measure) and Ross Wilburn (who supported keeping the younger crowd out of the bars).  In the contested at-large race, where voters chose two candidates, vote no supporter Matt Hayek came in an overwhelming first.  But newcomer Mike Wright, a 21 only supporter, won in second place.  Hayek and Wright defeated newcomer Terry Smith, who was supported by the vote no group, and 12 year incumbent Dee Vanderhoef, a 21 only supporter who finished last.

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.

A review of where the most presidential candidate appearances have taken place seems to confirm the notion that Iowa will be a key battleground for both Republicans and Democrats in 2008.  Iowa has had over 1,200 candidate appearances since January, more than double the number of the next-most-traveled state, New Hampshire.

Despite all of the attention, an overwhelming number of Iowans have not settled on a candidate to support.  Although many are leaning for one candidate or another, private campaign polls show that up to 80 percent of caucus-goers predict that they could change their minds about the race between now and January.  Polls have tended to show either a Clinton or an Edwards lead in recent weeks, but generally no leads are outside the margin for error.  And a Newsweek poll released today shows a narrow lead for Obama among likely caucus-goers, so it isn’t time to write any of the top three off.

Among the so-called “second tier,” Gov. Bill Richardson and Sens. Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, have all built momentum in Iowa of late.  Richardson has kept himself in double digits in Iowa polls, Biden has racked up an impressive number of state legislative endorsements, and Dodd has transferred more resources here, claiming to have almost 60 staffers on the ground.

The biggest surprise of the week came from Edwards, who announced that he would accept matching funds from the FEC for his campaign.  FEC rules will prevent him from spending as much money on media in Iowa as he might have otherwise, although campaign manager David Bonior told me he expected the state-by-state spending caps would not be an issue.  Still, Obama and Clinton are likely to spend significantly more than Edwards here.

On the Republican side, many presidential candidates were invited to a dinner hosted by the socially conservative Iowa Christian Alliance, known for carrying significant influence in the Republican caucuses, Saturday evening in Des Moines, although only one obliged.  Former Sen. Fred Thompson will be making his first appearance in front of the group.

But Rudy Giuliani wasn’t invited.  Steve Scheffler, organizer of the event and kingmaker among Republicans in the state, said “I think a lot of our base would rather wander in the wilderness for eight to 12 years than to vote for [Giuliani].”

Finally, the celebrities have also started coming to town.  “Sexy plumber” James Denton, star of the ABC series Desperate Housewives, is making a swing through Iowa for Edwards this weekend, and The Last King of Scotland’s Forest Whitaker will campaign on behalf of Obama next week.

While the turbine is producing power at the fair, it's also sending a message to visitors from out-of-state that Iowa is serious about renewable energy. The turbine was dedicated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday with Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, who said that as people from all around the globe descend upon Des Moines to enjoy the fair, "they are able to see one more reason why Iowa is great — renewable energy."

Culver noted the fact that in the past two years, three of the five major wind energy manufacturers, Acciona, Siemens, and Clipper, have chosen Iowa as the place to establish their North American production facilities.

There are currently more than 1,000 wind turbines in operation in Iowa, capable of producing more than 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 250,000 homes, Culver said.
The new MidAmerican Energy wind turbine at the Iowa State Fairgrounds was dedicated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the fair on Tuesday. Pictured are, from left, MidAmerican president Greg Abel, Iowa State Fair manager Gary Slater, Iowa Gov. Chet Culver and Lt. Gov. Patty Judge.

The wind turbine at the fair begins producing electricity any time the wind starts blowing at 11 miles per hour or more. It attains maximum power output when the wind speed hits 34 mph.

The tower itself stands 133 feet above the ground, and each of its three rotor blades are 64 feet long.