The company also plans to eliminate positions in offices in California and New York, and it will move 10 jobs from those states to Des Moines to cut costs.  According to the company, the cuts are necessary in light of declining advertising revenue.

“He’s got a perfect right to have that seat and be seated,” Grassley said.

Elk Run Energy Associates, an affiliate of LS Power, announced Tuesday that it will forgo further development on the proposed 750-megawatt Elk Run Energy Station. The project, one of two new plants proposed for Iowa, lost financial partner Dynegy Inc. on Jan. 2.

The Waterloo plant was one of two controversial coal plant projects in Iowa.  The second, in Marshalltown, received permission from the Iowa Utilities Board to move forward last April.

“Newspaper ethics tend to do better about direct ripping off the competition,” Buttry writes. “Plagiarism is a career capital offense, so if we can’t advance a story or find the same sources to duplicate it, we reluctantly attribute.”

Buttry’s post is frank and honest, but he left one option off his list of common newspaper practices: skipping over a story entirely if there’s no way to write it without crediting another news organization.  That’s a pretty common one, too.

It may be true that in the world of traditional journalism, newspapers are better at citing original source material than broadcast media, but in my experience, most of them are bound by an arcane set of rules designed more to promote their commercial interests than to pursue the truth or inform their audience.

The news business is becoming less and less profitable all the time.  If there were any actual commercial benefit to avoiding citations of other news outlets, I would have a hard time faulting anyone for it.  But what good do they derive from it?

When the Des Moines Register cites the Cedar Rapids Gazette in print, do they lose subscribers?  Advertisers?  The two newspapers serve two distinct media markets, more than a hundred miles apart.

What if local TV newscasts cited the Register each time they cribbed a newspaper story?  They might sound funny having to cite the same source for nine out of the ten stories they feature, but it is unlikely that businesses are going to stop running television ads in favor of print ads, or that somebody will turn off the tube and curl up with a day-old copy of the newspaper to get their news.

I could ask the same hypothetical questions about whether there are legitimate reasons to avoid crediting nonprofit, online-only news outlets that regularly break news stories, but I’m done tilting at windmills for the day.

The Iowa Independent has been credited in print and on the airwaves by the Washington Post, the BBC, National Public Radio, and FoxNews (just to name a few), but to the best of my recollection, our name has never been uttered in the pages of the Register or in any local TV newscast.  If we ever do get local publicity (for which we are sincerely grateful), it is usually in the form of a novelty story about this new hobby called “blogging” — nothing that actually validates our work as journalists.

After a year and a half editing this site, I’ve made my peace with how the world works.  I can see the Iowa Independent’s footprint in the work of other local journalists even if casual readers, listeners, and viewers never will.

Which of the three topics do you think the photo applies to — sex, floods, or politics?

According to the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

“Three of my cousins just passed away in Gaza,” Imam Ahmed Elkhaldy, 34, of Cedar Rapids, said on Monday. “They were killed during the night when they were sleeping (by an Israeli weapon that) destroyed half of the building.”

Elkhaldy, president of the Muslim American Society’s Iowa Chapter, said his cousin, a physician, was the father of the other two of his relatives who died.

Elkhaldy said that before he could discuss prospects for peace or roots of the conflict, the current humanitarian crisis would need to end.

“As we are talking … and as the reader will be reading, people will be killed in Gaza by our own weapons,” Elkhaldy said, referring to arms supplied to Israel by the United States. “What I care about right now is that there are innocent people under attack.”

According to the story, Harkin pushed through an exemption for the sewage treatment plant so that it could receive federal funds even though it would only serve Agriprocessors and not the surrounding community.  Most of the sources quoted seemed to agree that the meatpacking plant, which was by far the biggest employer in Postville, would not have survived without the exemption.

The money, nearly $8 million, came from an environmental program from which Agriprocessors normally would have been disqualified. The grant and loan were used to build a sewage-treatment plant that serves only the meatpacker.

The environmental program, run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is designed to help small towns improve their sewage systems. The new sewage-treatment plant is technically owned by Postville, but it doesn’t serve the town’s residents. Department administrators say that fact usually would have prevented it from receiving money from the program. But Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, used his influence to exempt the project from those rules in 2004.

Harkin was reelected by a wide margin last month, and, should he decide to run again, he does not face another election until 2014.

The real story is not that Harkin helped the plant secure funding for the sewage treatment plant, but rather that the funds included a loan that Postville finds itself unable to pay back.  The Iowa Independent’s Lynda Waddington wrote about that three weeks ago, when Sen. Chuck Grassley said he would push to extend the USDA loan’s payment terms to make the debt more manageable for Postville.  “You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” Grassley said at the time.

There are also the very real environmental concerns that made the sewage treatment facility necessary in the first place, and those are still not completely resolved.  In October, a cow’s skull, a hide, and two dismembered legs were found in the plant’s wastewater lagoon, though the Iowa Department of Natural Resources did not assess a fine at the time.

According to KCCI:

Former Dallas County Sheriff Brian Gilbert turned himself in at the Dallas County Jail on Sunday.

There was a warrant for Gilbert’s arrest on a charge of first-degree harassment and third-degree harassment issued on June 11.

Court documents show that Gilbert called Janice Gruver “stating that he would come to Iowa and put a bullet in Kris’s head (referring to Kris Johnson a friend of Tina Gilbert) and Tina Gilbert’s head (defendant’s ex-wife and daughter of Janice) and be gone without anyone knowing it.”

In 2006, a jury found Gilbert guilty of stealing a bundle of cash amounting to $120,000 after a highway traffic stop resulted in a drug bust, but the former sheriff did not serve any jail time.

A subsequent report by the State Auditor found additional irregularities in handling and storing evidence, and there have also been allegations of misconduct surrounding the Dallas County jail during Gilbert’s tenure as sheriff.

(In the interests of full disclosure, after Gilbert left office, there was a special election in January 2007 to replace him.  I did some campaign work for Dan Brickner, the Democratic candidate who ultimately lost that special election to current sheriff Chad Leonard.)

Though Vilsack’s appointment does not completely preclude a bid for the U.S. Senate, it probably precludes one in 2010.  A campaign against Grassley would have to start early — likely within the next six months — and the President-elect probably got an assurance from Vilsack that he would not skip out on his new job so soon.

A lot of Democratic insiders seem to think that Vilsack was their party’s only hope against Grassley in 2010.  They might be right, but that is no reason to offer an unconditional surrender.

The U.S. Senate race will be at the very top of the ballot in two years, and Democrats should have learned the lesson of 2004 by now: Running a laughable candidate against Grassley can cost you the “straight ticket” votes you need in other races.  If Art Small had lost to Grassley by only 300,000 votes instead of the nearly 600,000 votes he lost by that year, don’t you think Sen. John Kerry could have gotten the paltry 10,000 votes he needed to win statewide?

Gov. Chet Culver could face a tough race for reelection in 2010.  He could do without the added weight of another landslide victory for Grassley holding him down.

So let’s take a look at the Democratic bench.

Most of the big name Democrats in Iowa politics are likely to sit this race out, unwilling to launch a losing battle against such a behemoth.  But there are a few possible candidates who would see little political downside to running a respectable-but-unsuccessful campaign to unseat Iowa’s senior senator.  (As far as I know, none of the individuals listed below has expressed an interest in running, but each could conceivably lose to Grassley by less than 10 percentage points.)

Christie Vilsack, wife of the incoming Secretary of Agriculture, has indicated that she will continue some of her work in Iowa when her husband starts his new job in Washington, D.C.  She has always been at least as popular statewide as her husband, and, after years of appearing and raising money on behalf of Democrats and liberal organizations across Iowa, she has a thick Rolodex of favors to call in.

Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal might have bigger hopes for his political future, but if he is content with his seat in the State Senate, he could run against Grassley without giving it up, since his term lasts until 2012.  Because he represents a district in Western Iowa, he should have better name recognition there than most Democratic candidates.  And because of his work for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, he has a national fundraising network to tap.

Former Congressman and Economic Development Director Mike Blouin, who was Tom Vilsack’s unenthusiastically anointed pick to replace him in 2006, is keeping a relatively low profile these days.  But if the 2010 election is about the economy, he might have enough expertise and political acumen to hold Grassley to a tight race.  His 2006 runningmate, Dr. Andrea McGuire, might also be an interesting case if she can survive the 2010 Democratic primary.

Liberal gadfly and former State Rep. Ed Fallon, who has lost two high-profile Democratic primaries over the past four years, would be an interesting choice to run against Grassley.  Fallon has fairly strong statewide name recognition, and if he played along with the Democratic establishment enough to communicate a coherent message on behalf of his party’s whole ticket, he could lose by less than 10.

State Sen. Jeff Danielson had a political near-death experience in this year’s election, but he could still be a formidable candidate.  His biography is pitch-perfect (think “Navy,” and then think “firefighter”).  Under the right conditions, he could put together a coalition that would swamp his opponents out of the Democratic primary.  And he probably would not embarrass himself in the limelight.

There are also a few lesser-known state senators who have the ambition and energy needed to run statewide.  Tom Rielly, a moderate from conservative-leaning Oskaloosa, might be the strongest general election candidate among them.  A race like this would lay the groundwork for higher ambitions down the road.

Any names I missed?

In addition to defending his plan to cut the state’s budget in light of economic woes, Culver confirmed he would likely run for reelection in 2010, he begged off a question about Postville, and he agreed with the idea of raising the compulsory school attendance age to 18.

The program airs tonight at 7:30 and again on Sunday morning at 11:30.

Update: The Register’s Jason Clayworth emphasizes a different part of Culver’s interview, in which he said that the state should consider taking on debt.  I wasn’t there, but it sounds like that’s probably the big story based on what Culver said.