The Register could not confirm the FBI informant’s identity, but the paper quotes activists who say that they believe it was a man named “Jason.” I can confirm now that the man suspected by activists of informing to the FBI is Jason Munford, who gave a fairly sincere-sounding presentation early last year at the University of Iowa about becoming a conscientious objector.

The Iowa Independent’s Adam Burke interviewed Munford on camera at the time:

In January of this year, Munford contacted the Iowa Independent via a YouTube message. Citing threats that he considered serious, he asked us to take down the video. (We declined.) Munford also firmly denied the allegations that he was an FBI informant:

A few months ago, I was falsely accused of giving sensitive information from an anarchist group to the FBI, that resulted in charges against members. Because of the threats I received and such due to those claims, I’ve been forced to move and I’m changing my name and taking other steps to protect myself. In the comments on the video from my talk, a lot of people have reconnected the claims against me to a video record of my appearance.

In the Register’s story, activists say that Munford admitted to them that he had informed to the FBI — a fact that the paper could not confirm. Here’s the relevant reporting from that story:

Political activists [Robert "Ajax"] Ehl and [David] Goodner said they believe they know the identity of the FBI informant who spied on the Iowa City protesters.

They say it was a young man from Michigan named “Jason” who claimed he was a U.S. military conscientious objector. He told people he had been discharged from the Air Force after he objected to being deployed to Iraq.

The man hung out with Iowa City activists for months, sharing beers and meals with them while expressing solidarity with their political beliefs.

Goodner and Ehl said “Jason” later admitted that he provided information to the FBI in exchange for money.

“It is my understanding that he just took money because he was unemployed,” Ehl said.

Looking back, the surveillance in Iowa City may have begun as early as the fall of 2007, Goodner said. He and three others from Iowa City traveled to St. Paul for a meeting with the RNC Welcoming Committee. A few weeks later, “Jason” started coming to their meetings in Iowa City.

If Munford was an informant, it remains unclear whether information he provided led to arrests or disrupted protests. The Iowa City activists told the Register that only one member of their group had been arrested in connection with protests in St. Paul, and that the charges against that person were subsequently dropped.

The crowd — on TV and in the bar — was on her side. Then, 10 minutes in, Palin swung hard with her right. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer,” Palin said, “except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Bar-goers seemed to gasp in unison.

This Palin lunging at Sen. Barack Obama on national TV was not the irresistibly likable, maverick governor they had come to know.

Read the rest of McGann’s story, which illuminates both Palin’s career and the political climate in Alaska, here.

Iowa’s role is not directly addressed under the Republican rules adopted Monday, since the caucuses are a non-binding straw poll.

Like the Democrats, Republicans appointed a commission to study calendar reform. This is the first time Republicans have deferred final calendar decisions to a post-convention body. The big difference is that the GOP has required its commission to keep New Hampshire and South Carolina first in the primary calendar. The Democrats have given their commission a clean slate.

Another difference from the Democrats: The Republicans made their rules stick, enforcing the 50 percent delegate penalty that it imposed on Michigan and Florida for jumping ahead in the schedule. Democrats initially punished those states by taking away all their delegates, but first gave back half, then all, the delegates.

Republicans also punished New Hampshire and South Carolina for jumping ahead. Democrats in those states changed their dates, too, but only in order to keep their place in line.

The GOP commission “pushes back the calendar and it slows it down — and that’s a big gift for us,” Tom Rath, a New Hampshire delegate and member of the convention’s Credentials Committee, told the Associated Press.

Republicans had hoped to push the process back even more and put New Hampshire and South Carolina in late February 2012 with other states starting in March. But the McCain campaign chose not to fight that fight, and it’s now expected that the early states, including Iowa, will vote in January 2012.

That might have a ripple effect into the Iowa Democratic caucuses, as historically the Iowa parties have prioritized keeping the caucuses on the same night. In late 2007, Iowa Democrats seemed to be leaning toward a Jan. 5 caucus until the Republicans trumped them with a Jan. 3 date. The Democrats then quickly followed suit.

Michael Barone reports that the bipartisan effort is now happening on the national level, with Republican National Chairman Mike Duncan and Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean talking on the issue.

The calendar process will likely be driven by the party that loses the presidential election, since it’s likely that the incumbent president will face a smooth, low turnout renomination.

They’ve set the bar low on exactly the item where the bar should be high: a speech. There’s absolutely no question that Palin will come off, at first impression, as articulate, intelligent, and impressive. (And, as Joe Biden might note, ‘clean,’ unless she’s been field dressing a moose beforehand.)

She’ll get rave reviews, I can hear them now: “A home run, Palin hit it out of the park.”

Of course she will. That’s the one thing we know she can do.

But that first impression is exactly the wrong test. The Palin problem isn’t in the meeting, it’s in the getting to know.

And she’ll certainly be able to memorize the talking points in time for the Oct. 2 debate with Biden, where the bar is set so low that they’ll try to call it a tie if she manages to avoid the Dan Quayle “you’re no Jack Kennedy” moment. (That’s my quick answer to the question “do running mates matter?” Remember, Lloyd Bentsen was on the losing side of that election.)

No, the real test won’t be a set speech or a structured debate — it’ll be the first press conference, when she gets to extemporaneously, at length, with followups, explain her views on Alaska neo-nationalism and why she tried to get the Wasilla librarian fired, along with many other issues relevant and irrelevant. (Leeeave… Bristolll… Aloooooone!)

My guess is she’ll do exactly ONE of those, then get shipped off to small media markets in GOP base states. Which is what she’s there for.

A parade of speakers in St. Paul, including Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a Hispanic businessman, an Arizona educator, and President Bush (speaking from the White House via video link) hailed the prospective nominee John McCain for his courage as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, his 26 years in Congress, even his decision to adopt a child from Bangladesh.

Partisan rhetoric was, for the most part, muted. “John McCain doesn’t speak the language of service. He has lived a life of service,” said Bachmann, presumably in reference to the too-eloquent Democratic nominee Barack Obama. In a clumsier swipe, President Bush averred that if McCain’s North Vietnamese captors could not break his resolve, the “angry left” could not either.

The crowd of 20,000 people responded with rapt attention and the occasional standing ovation, even as the last two speakers of the evening worked hard–Bush loyalists might say too hard–to distinguish the nominee from the man he hopes to succeed.

Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson noted with a hint of admiration that the party’s new standard bearer once dated a stripper. (The TV cameras mercifully spared us Cindy McCain’s reaction to her husband’s taste in female company.) Thompson reminded the Republican faithful that young Congressman McCain bucked Ronald Reagan on the wisdom of sending U.S. troops to the Middle East, an observation that seemed to send a ripple of unease through the crowd. And Thompson described the federal government, run for the last eight years by the already-forgotten incumbent, as “wasteful and too often incompetent.” No one was heard to object.

The solution to the “nightmare” of contemporary Washington, said lapsed Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman, was John McCain. Among the Arizona Senators’ many accomplishments, Lieberman explained, was his hostility to “corrupt Republican lobbyists”–some of whom were no doubt itching to exit the premises in search of strippers unfamiliar with public service. Lieberman added kind words for the various legislative accomplishments of Bill Clinton, the former Democratic president who warmly endorsed Obama just a week ago—and the confused crowd responded with applause.

To be fair, it has not been an easy convention for the GOP rank and file. On Monday, Republicans who pride themselves on traditional family values had to learn to scratch the phrase “illegitimate child” from their vocabularies, lest they be taken as less than loyal to prospective vice president (and grandmother) Gov. Sarah Palin. Last night, they began to learn another lesson: that McCain’s campaign slogan, “Country First,” also means “We got no brand.”

Jefferson Morley is National Editorial Director of the Center for Independent Media.

Republicans gathering in the Xcel Energy Center for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Photo courtesy of the 2008 Republican National Convention and Reflections Photography.

Under the agriculture section, the platform talks about food versus fuel concerns and states that the “U.S. government should end mandates for ethanol and let the free market work.”

The move is a major change from the 2004 platform, which supported expanding the use of ethanol as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil and increase revenue for farmers. It’s also a move away from the Bush administration’s views on ethanol towards those of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain.

Iowa’s Republican leaders disagreed with the move but shied away from being overtly critical of the platform and the party’s presidential candidate.

“I assume the platform was presented and voted up and down without discussion and ethanol was not discussed separately,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley in a conference call with reporters yesterday morning. “If we were going to have $140-a-barrel oil our whole life, we may not need mandates. But if we didn’t have mandates, we wouldn’t have the vibrant energy business we have right now.”

Iowa’s elected Republican members of Congress were not delegates to the convention, and thus did not have the opportunity to vote on the platform plank regarding ethanol. Many speculated, when it was announced that congressional Republicans would not be delegates, that it was because they disagreed with McCain on farm policy and ethanol subsidies. That rumor was quickly quelled, with Grassley specifically saying it was in order to allow more Iowans to be a part of the political process. Now, with the ethanol mandate portion of the platform in place, the speculation has begun again.

However, Republican officials would not address that rumor.

“[U.S. Rep. Tom] Latham believes that this industry is too young to embrace such a policy statement,” said James Carstensen, the Republican congressman’s chief of staff, in a statement. “He has always been a champion of ethanol, biodiesel and other biofuels as they are vital to the economic growth and security of Iowa while also helping to accomplish America’s energy independence by lessening our dependence on foreign oil.”

Other Midwestern Republicans were not so timid in their criticism of the platform plank.

“It’s proof that Republicans are not always right,” South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune told The Associated Press. “On this one, they just got it wrong.”

The renewable fuel standard was expanded in the 2007 energy bill to require a total of 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be blended into gasoline by 2022. However, the law gives the EPA the authority to waive portions of the law at its discretion.

In May, McCain joined 23 other Senate Republicans in sending a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking it to consider waiving ethanol mandates.

In August, U.S. regulators rejected a request from Texas Gov. Rick Perry to halve the ethanol mandate, which he blamed for driving up the price of corn and making it more expensive for farmers to feed their livestock.

“This item in the platform is not anti-ethanol, it is anti-federal mandates on the states, which is a traditional conservative viewpoint,” said Steward Iverson, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa in a statement from the convention.

The party adopted the platform Monday, one of the few formal actions taken on a day when the convention was scaled back because of concerns over Hurricane Gustav.

Under the energy section, the platform states that America “must continue to develop alternative fuels, such as biofuels, especially cellulosic ethanol, and hasten their technological advances to next-generation production” and says that “because alternative fuels are useless if vehicles cannot use them, we must move quickly to flexible fuel vehicles.”

With Iowa expected to be a presidential battleground state this November, many wonder whether the anti-ethanol mandate plank in the national party platform will hurt McCain’s chances of winning Iowa.

Tim Hagle, associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa and faculty advisor to the school’s College Republicans, said the content of the platforms from either party haven’t been all that important for quite awhile.

“They are essentially statements of the party base of things they would like to see done or principles followed — at least for those participating in the process,” he said, adding: “More often than not such planks are used to try to create a ‘gotcha’ moment along the lines of, ‘Candidate So-and-so, your party has plank X, but you’ve said Y on the issue. How do you reconcile that difference?’ On the whole, the process of creating the party platform is a good exercise in grassroots democracy, but it’s certainly not critical to a candidate.”

Grassley said that he disagrees with that part of the platform because without the mandates he believes there wouldn’t be the investment in ethanol that there has been to date.

“We get 5 percent of fuel for our vehicles from renewables, and if we didn’t we’d be getting 5 percent more from foreign oil,” he said. “It would be sending billions of dollars more to Arabs, and I just don’t think that’s good economic security. It’s not national security, it’s not good foreign policy.”

Despite disagreeing with McCain and his party on ethanol, Grassley said McCain is still mostly right on energy policy, so he will continue to support him.

“I may have disagreements with Sen. McCain on other issues as well if you go through the platform. I might find one or two other things to disagree on,” he said. “But he supports expanded drilling, which I think is a bigger energy issue than where he stands on ethanol.”

By days end, more than 150 people were jailed, some windows were broken and some tear gas was fired, but nothing close to the fears many in the region had.

Iraq Veterans Against the War march near the Xcell Energy Center, home of the 2008 Republcian National Convention.

Iraq Veterans Against the War continue their protest march, which started early Monday morning at the Minnesota state capital.

Police march to block off streets in anticipation of anti-war protesters.

Ant-war protesters dance to Madonna's "Like a Virgin" at the completion of their march through downtown St. Paul.

An anti-war protester tries to hand literature to counter protesters at the completion of the first of three protests.

The third of three (and by far the biggest) anti-war protests makes its way through downtown St. Paul.

A young protester joins in the fun.

A woman poses with a police officer in full riot gear while her husband takes her picture.