In a speech delivered on the farm where he grew up, Branstad promised to create 300,000 new jobs, grow median household income to more than $40,000, and to see population growth all of Iowa’s 99 counties, all by the year 2000.

From Henderson’s report:

None of those goals were accomplished by the turn of the century. Branstad left office in January of 1999 and by then the state was a little less than halfway to his job creation goal. Just 52 of Iowa’s 99 counties saw population growth during Branstad’s last term in office. But Iowa nearly reached Branstad’s third goal. Median household income in Iowa was just under $40,000 by 1999.

Henderson posted the audio from Branstad’s 1994 campaign kick-off here.

In the wake of allegations of misconduct surrounding the state’s film tax credit program, Gov. Chet Culver said there needs to be a review of all tax credits that the state offers.

Henderson found a report by the Iowa Department of Revenue showing each of the tax credits and their potential cost. The programs range from credits to encourage the sale of biodiesel to credits for disaster recovery housing projects.

A list of all the credits offered, and the ones that have been repealed, is on Henderson’s blog.

Sen. Rich Olive, D-Story City, said the legislature may look at all of the state’s tax credit programs in order to ensure taxpayer money is being spent properly.

From Radio Iowa:

“The worst case scenario is exactly what happened and we need to make sure that does not occur any further with any of the tax credits that we give out,” Olive says.

Key questions need to be asked, according to Olive, such as whether the job creation promises made by those getting state tax credits are being met.

“Then, of course, the second step is to make sure that we’re not spending those dollars on Land Rovers or Mercedes — that we’re actually doing this the way the legislation is set up and the way the rules are set up,” Olive says.

Republican legislative leaders wrote a letter to House Speaker Pat Murhpy, D-Dubuque, and Senate President Jack Kibbie, D-Emmetsburg, asking that the Legislative Oversight Committee look into the program.

The committee is made up of Democratic and Republican lawmakers from both the House and Senate.

When the Iowa Independent launched version 2.0 more than a year ago, we were Iowa’s only major news site built on the open-source Wordpress blogging platform. Since then, other prominent news organizations have followed suit, including the (Cedar Rapids) Gazette and Radio Iowa.

Wordpress, which was created in 2003 and is maintained by a community of programmers, has become popular because of its user-friendly control panel and its virtually-infinite customizability. It is open-source and completely free, written in the popular Web programming language PHP.

The Gazette launched its new Wordpress site in the middle of the summer, using a modified template purchased from WooThemes.com. Radio Iowa’s relaunch happened this week, using a pre-designed template called Thesis. (The theme running on the Iowa Independent is a completely custom design.)

The Wordpress platform is by no means a silver bullet, and it takes a fair amount of work to keep it running in high-traffic environments. In the days after the Gazette’s switch to Wordpress, the site experienced downtime or debilitating errors for minutes (and even an hour) at a time. When traffic spikes for the first time for Radio Iowa’s new site, it could have similar problems. We certainly did when we were first getting things situated on our server. It’s unavoidable.

But the switch to Wordpress portends a promising trend among mid-sized news outlets. Rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on customized, proprietary software to run their sites, organizations like the Gazette and Radio Iowa are finding that excellent Web sites are virtually free. It still costs money to host a site and to design its template, but those costs are tiny compared to the cost of a large IT staff.

This means that even in a business climate where online advertising costs much less than offline advertising, news Web sites don’t have to cost more money than they bring in.

Open-source software like Wordpress is perhaps the only hope journalists have of developing a sustainable online model, with low overhead and easy-to-use controls that don’t take years for writers to master. It’s encouraging that more news outlets in Iowa are using it.

Bill Salier, who ran unsuccessfully for the right to challenge U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin in 2002 and later chaired Tom Tancredo’s Iowa Caucus campaign, told Henderson that Grassley “isn’t even close to the same conservative” he was when he was first elected. When asked if Grassley would face a primary, Salier said that while that’s unlikely it isn’t a completely ridiculous notion.

Do you think he’ll face a primary?

“There is a certain amount of angst for folks when they look at running against somebody who is an icon in Iowa, having been there so long and, you know, he wins by tremendous percentages in the general,” Salier replied. “But if anybody was ever vulnerable to a primary who is an icon, itwould be Chuck Grassley now…People become more and more and more incensed the more they start to pay attention to how far he has drifted.”

Salier said Grassley’s tepid response to the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Iowa’s ban on same-sex marriage could be the tipping point for social conservatives.

In an interview with the Des Moines Register, Grassley declined to comment on whether he believes the Legislature should pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

“You better ask me in a month, after I’ve had a chance to think,” Grassley, the state’s senior Republican official, said after a health care forum in Mason City.

The anger at Grassley has slipped onto the conservative blog TheIowaRepublican.com, which is run by former Republican Party of Iowa Political Director Craig Robinson. In a post Friday, former state House candidate and conservative radio personality Jamie Johnson pointed to an incident last year to show anger brewing at Grassley.

Last fall, after voting for President Bush’s $850 billion bank bailout, Grassley received an icy reception at the Iowa Republican Convention. It was especially noticeable because he spoke after U.S. Reps. Tom Latham and Steve King, both of whom had voted against the bailout, and both of whom received standing ovations.

“It was apparent to everyone,” said a middle aged delegate from Linn County. “Chuck’s not used to that. He’s usually the star, but I’m afraid his star is fading.”

While the scene Johnson depicts may have taken place, some of his facts are confusing. If he is referring to the Republican Party of Iowa’s convention, it was held July 12, nearly three months before the bailout vote.

Grassley is up for re-election in 2010. A recent Des Moines Register poll shows him with a still healthy 66 percent approval rating, down from 75 percent in January.

The point of the legislation would be to properly respond should the Iowa Supreme Court rule that the state’s Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. If that is the case, same-sex marriage would be legal in Iowa and the language in laws would have to reflect that.

According to Henderson’s blog:

I just interviewed McCoy at the statehouse, and he concluded with this statement:  “I think it’s a good bill and it’s something that shouldn’t be controversial. We should just be thinking about how this is all going to work once Iowa becomes a Mecca for gay marriage.”

I immediately asked a follow-up question: “Will Iowa become a Mecca for gay marriage?”

“Well, that’s what [Iowa Family Policy Center President] Chuck Hurley says,” McCoy replied, adding. “I think it’d be good for the economy.”

McCoy, who is the Iowa General Assembly’s only openly gay Senator, introduced the bill last week.

Culver said he expects millions of dollars to come into Iowa from the federal government, money that can be used to repair damage from this summers natural disasters, update the state’s crumbling infrastructure and put Iowans back to work.

According to Culver, as many as 4,000 new jobs are created with every $100 million that’s invested in infrastructure projects. “I’m optimistic that we could be talking about literally thousands and thousands of new jobs statewide related to both the federal and state infrastructure initiatives, so that’s encouraging,” Culver told Radio Iowa. “That’s pretty much what any economist will tell you — you’ve got to put people to work and create jobs during a recession — and that’s exactly what I plan on doing.”

Both The Des Moines Register’s Jason Pulliam and Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson were listening in, but when it came time to write a story, both came to very different conclusions about what it is the two Democratic mayors actually were saying.

The Register’s headline said “D.M., C.R. mayors ask Grassley to back Obama on economy,” and opened with “The top elected leaders from Des Moines and Cedar Rapids have called upon Iowa’s congressional delegation to support President-elect Barack Obama’s economic recovery plans.”

At Radio Iowa, the headline was “Mayors of Des Moines, Cedar Rapids praise rather than rebuke Grassley,” and opened by explaining that the conference call was set up to bash Grassley but the mayors ” seemed conciliatory.”

While both stories make it clear the mayors are supportive of Obama’s plan and think Grassley should support it, Radio Iowa’s focuses almost entirely on how the two Democratic mayors seemed to want to avoid getting into it with Iowa’s senior senator and highest ranking Republican. There was no mention of “seeming conciliatory” in the Register’s account, as a much more combative tone was presented.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette and Associated Press accounts are very similar to The Register’s and probably a lot closer to what The Campaign for Jobs and Economic Recovery Now, the organization that set up the conference call, were hoping for. It’s up to the reader to determine who is right (or who they trust) since the audio of the call is not available on the group’s Web site, but it’s always nice to see events coverered differently by competing media and it’s another example of why a more diverse media landscape is always better.

The company, called TransUnion, found that Iowans carried just $4,300 worth of credit card debt in the third quarter of 2008, compared to $5,300 for the average American.

Ezra Becker, a consultant with TransUnion, told Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson that Iowa is doing much better than most states.

“Debt from third quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008 for the country rose at about 6 percent, whereas for Iowans it only rose 2.5 percent.”

Becker guessed one of the reasons for the lower debt in Iowa is much more stable housing prices.

Cigarette makers agreed in 1998 to pay up to $2 billion to Iowa over 25 years. In 2002, the state sold off the rights to most of those payments for about $500 million in immediate cash. The plan then was to funnel the money into a standing fund whose earnings would pay for anti-smoking campaigns, cancer treatment and other tobacco-related expenses. But the state hit hard budget times, and legislators dipped into the fund for other needs, critics say.

Former Republican state Sen. Jeff Lamberti of Ankeny help put together the deal for the trust fund. Lamberti says there was talk of the tobacco companies going into bankruptcy to avoid paying some of the settlement, so the lump sum deal made sense.

“The model was good other states were doing it. I think in hindsight the thing we’ve learned is if government has an unrestricted pot of money to spend they will spend it and that’s unfortunate because I think the model was the right model for us to do,” Lamberti says.

American Cancer Society lobbyist Cathy Calloway said the idea that cigarrette companies were going to go bankrupt was always “preposterous.” She now worries about finding funding for tobacco prevention and programs to help people stop smoking. Her group opposed the 2002 sale of future payments.

Sen. Jack Hatch, D-Des Moines, said the money had to be used to fund rapidly increasing health care costs.

“So this is going to happen, it’s not that were spending the money wrong we just don’t have enough of it to spend,” Hatch says.