The Iowa Republican reports that Sioux City businessman and social conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats could raise $200,000 for his gubernatorial campaign at an event hosted by Chuck Norris at his ranch outside Navasota, Texas. A fleet of private jets carrying the roughly 40 Iowa attendees is reportedly en route. The price is $5,000 per couple — probably not including the cost of getting there.

Norris endorsed Vander Plaats in a syndicated column last June.

Perhaps more notably, Vice President Joe Biden will still headline the dinner (as far as we know). That will put him pretty far outside the Washington beltway as the Senate’s health bill is finalized.

The New York Times reported Sunday that Rose’s confirmation has been the subject of growing controversy:

Eleventh-hour criticism is arising over President Obama’s nomination for United States attorney in northern Iowa of a prosecutor who had a leading role in the criminal cases against hundreds of illegal immigrants arrested in a May 2008 raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.

[...]

Ms. Rose, a senior assistant United States attorney in the office she has been chosen to run, has also garnered support from criminal defense lawyers in Iowa, including at least 11 lawyers who defended immigrants from Postville. In those proceedings, “she exhibited a level of competence and ability that would be hard to overstate,” the lawyers wrote in a letter in April.

But some defense and immigration lawyers have said that felony identity-theft charges against the immigrants were excessively harsh, that immigration lawyers were not given adequate access to their clients, and that improper contact took place between prosecutors and one judge. They contend that possible civil rights and ethical violations by prosecutors should have been investigated.

The Wall Street Journal’s legal blog is also watching the story.

Will these concerns be enough to prevent Rose’s confirmation? Probably not. Though the national attention the story is receiving may be new, the complaints from her critics are not. If they were going to prevent Rose from getting the job for which she’s been nominated, it likely would have happened by now.

Though each Iowan seems to have his or her own ideas for how money should be cut from the budget, few blame the Democrats for overspending on their key priorities over the past few years.

In all, majorities support Democrats’ expansion of health insurance coverage for children, spending on public schools, repairing roads and bridges, raising teacher pay, and developing renewable energy. A plurality supports expanded free preschool.

On most budget items, pluralities of Iowans agree with the idea of cutting everything by an equal amount, except when it comes to health insurance for low-income residents and the Iowa State Patrol, which majorities say should be spared from cuts. This seems to conform to Gov. Chet Culver’s decision to make an across-the-board budget cut now and use the beginning of the legislative session next year to restore some funding for key priorities.

That said, Iowans have mixed feelings about the decisions that have been made to cut the state budget. Though only 19 percent of respondents said they were “Very Confident” or “Mostly Confident” about the budget-cutting decisions, 44 percent were “Just Somewhat Confident.” 35 percent were not confident.

(Incidentally, it seems strange that this question had three positive responses and just one negative response. These responses may fit people’s opinions best, but they also can also be confusing to interpret. The Register story itself seems to add up “Somewhat Confident” and “Not Confident” to demonstrate a disapproving majority, but “Somewhat Confident” doesn’t sound very disapproving to me. It was the closest thing to a middle ground that pollsters offered, and it implies slight approval, not disapproval.)

You can read the Register’s write-up of the poll here.

The project would create a central location for people to store the college credits they have received from multiple institutions. Colleges and universities then essentially would bid for the opportunity to enroll students for the completion of their degrees.

The study is being funded by a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Marijuana (Photo: Wikipedia)

Several states have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes, and other states, including Iowa, are considering it.

Prompted by a court decision, the Iowa Pharmacy Board held public hearings on the subject across the state this year, and they could issue a recommendation to the legislature for further action on marijuana policy before the 2010 session begins.

The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette caught up with patients who are using the substance and were willing to speak openly about it, even though their actions could result in criminal charges and even jail time:

“It allows me to get up every day and function as a mother,” said Lisa Jackson, 43, of rural Crawfordsville, who has the long-term pain syndrome fibromyalgia.

[...]

Jackson and Jimmy Morrison, 23, of Muscatine were among those who testified in favor of allowing medical marijuana.

They said they struggle to get out of bed, and smoking marijuana helps.

Morrison said he suffers from anxiety and bipolar disorder and smoking marijuana about three times a day helps him manage his illnesses.

“My productivity has gone up so much, people don’t even know,” Morrison said. “I run a painting business, and I’m a media director at a church,” says Morrison.

The Iowa Democratic Party launched a Web site over the summer to promote criticism of each Republican candidate for governor, and they added Branstad to the list after he resigned as president of Des Moines University to focus on building a campaign.

The Democratic party also paid for advertisements through the Google AdWords ad network that ran on many political news sites, including the Iowa Independent. The ads say, in large, red, letters, “Terry [loves] taxes,” with a 1980s-style stencil depiction of the former four-term governor’s face. It links to a page that lists tax increases that happened under the Branstad administration. For Iowans who read political news, they were an almost constant presence on every Web page they visited.

Web ad from Gov. Terry Branstad (Screen grab: 11/13/09)

Now, Branstad’s campaign is fighting back with a Web advertisement of their own. In theirs, Branstad appears in front of a podium wagging his finger next to large text that says, “Proven. Tested. Ready.”

The ad uses messages pretty common to establishment-supported Republican campaigns. In 2000, then-Gov. George W. Bush used the tagline “Proven. Tested. Ready to lead America.” at the end of television advertisements.

That’s the closest to an exact copy I could find, but there are more: In 2007, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney ran an ad called “Tested, Proven” in Iowa. In 2008, former Nebraska Gov. and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns used the phrase “Proven. Tested. Trusted.” as his catchphrase in a successful bid for U.S. Senate.

In terms of political strategy, there’s no doubt that this one is “Tested.” Arguably, it has also been “Proven.” But is it “Ready”?

Either way, the ad shows that the Branstad team knows they need to define themselves to Internet users before the other side does it for them.

Online ads are not incredibly expensive, but to ensure that Branstad’s ads appear rather than Democratic attacks, the campaign is forced to ‘outbid’ all other buyers for the same space. Google typically charges buyers money each time a visitor clicks on their advertisement on Google’s site or a third-party Web site like the Iowa Independent, and they pay third-party Web sites a portion of the revenue that generates. Each time a page with a Google advertisement loads, the system decides which advertisement to display based on the highest price each advertiser is willing to pay for it.

That means that the Iowa Democrats can continue to offer higher prices for displaying their ads, forcing Branstad to raise his bids, and vice versa. All in all, over the course of months, a bidding war could cost each side a few thousand dollars — and make lots of Web site owners happy.

And for the record, no matter how many times I see excessive punctuation in campaign ads, it bothers me every time.

He skipped his son’s wedding.

As the Sioux City Journal’s Bret Hayworth reports:

“It was not a hard decision for me to decide then that I had to be in Washington, if that was the time the vote was coming up. But it was still hard, if you know what I mean,” King said.

The reaction in the room?

“No one in this family asked me to reconsider. They all said, ‘We know that you will do what you have to do,’” King said. “So I call it full-family support and full understanding. As I said, the best thing that I could give them would be to preserve the freedom that I was born into and be able to pass that along to any children that they will be blessed with.”

The council was authorized in 2007, and the four non-voting members from the legislature serve two-year terms, appointed by the head of each party’s caucus in each chamber. They, along with 23 voting members appointed by Gov. Chet Culver, are responsible for issuing recommendations to help Iowa combat the challenges of climate change.

Watts’s position on the council is noteworthy because he has been an outspoken critic of measures to combat climate change for years. During the 2008 legislative session, for instance, he helped to distribute a book to every member of the legislature that claimed that global warming was natural and irreversible, denying evidence that humans have an impact on climate change. Last February, Watts signed on to a letter written by the American Environmental Coalition, a conservative group founded by evangelicals that calls global warming a “hoax.”

Tom Beaumont caught up with all of the Republican candidates for governor in 2010, and this is what he found:

Only former Gov. Terry Branstad, the best-known of the GOP prospects, declined to propose specific cuts. Instead, the four-term governor who announced two weeks ago he would “fully explore” running for governor said he would appoint a commission to study reorganizing state government and promote recruiting employers to the state.

All other members of the Republican field urged adoption of a series of cuts, including negotiating with unions to cut salaries, as suggested last spring by Republicans in the House, the body’s minority party.

Branstad’s tack is, as expected, above-the-fray and overly general, because he’s the frontrunner. But next to all of the other GOP candidates’ specific budget-cutting ideas in the Register story, his unwillingness to name specifics is a bit jarring.