Here is the Spencer Daily Reporter:

Hubler has concerns about portions of the Republican Party platform that discourage federal support for the ethanol industry. He also doesn’t agree with King’s positions on illegal immigration and the War on Terror.

“We don’t have any national energy policy,” he said. “We don’t have a policy that tells us what we’re really doing in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The economy is in the tank. Congress and the President have just not paid attention.”

The challenger would like to discuss those issues with his Congressman but Hubler questions whether King will agree to debates.

Here is The Gazette:

King flirted with running against U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, but decided against it. He said a race for governor is still possible.

“I have an obligation to have a statewide network in place so that a decision can be made,” King said. “If I don’t reach out, if I don’t build a fundraising network, if I don’t build a campaign team, then the question is already answered for me.”

Steve King (R-Iowa) last week shared his personal knowledge of exploration of the North Shore of Alaska. In 1970, King went to Alaska as part of a group hired by an Iowa-based company contracted to build roads for the construction of the Alaska pipeline until efforts were halted by litigation. Mixed in with colorful anecdotes (“When I was signed up they had to pay us $9.75 an hour, which was great wages back in 1970… because the rules then were there was no gambling, no alcohol, no guns and no women. I guess they knew that any combination of those four could cause trouble”) was a detailed, first-hand rebuttal of the absurd argument Pelosi is putting forth claiming drilling will take 10 years to produce results.

King explained, “Back in 1970, environmental extremists filed lawsuits to block the development of the North Slope of Alaska and then, as they went through this litigation, Don Young, when he was elected to Congress, introduced the legislation that cleared out all of the litigation that had stalled all of the development of the North Slope of Alaska oil fields from 1970, ‘71 and ‘72 and most of the way through 73… From the time that Congress cleared the litigation, in 35 months they had oil running from the pipeline ready to load on tankers at Valdez. And that’s after having drilled the wells, set up the collection tubes, built the terminal at Dead Horse, mile post zero at the head of the Alaska pipeline on that end, built 854 miles of pipeline down to Valdez where they built another terminal where they could load tankers and 600 miles of right of way [roads] that I was signed up on to build. All of that happened in 35 months.”

In an Oct. 30, 2002, story, Iowa journalist Chuck Offenburger talked to King about the Alaska experience.

Let’s go back to his own college years, I told him as we began our chat. What was he studying at Northwest Missouri State in Maryville, Mo.? When did he decide to quit, and why?

“Well, I was a math major, but I switched to biology and what I really wanted to become was a forest ranger,” said King, who had graduated from Denison High School in 1967. “In the second semester of my junior year, I sent out letters seeking employment that would give me some experience as a forest ranger.”

He learned most western states were hiring only their own college kids, so he took a construction job in his home area in that summer of 1970. He started making good money as he moved from common laborer to blow torch operator to truck driver to an operator of end-loaders. It was enough money that going back to college became less attractive for the young guy.

Then he learned about a construction opportunity on the Alaska pipeline. He was told he could do six-month tours working up there, with all expenses paid and a promise he could bank $50,000 per tour.

“I figured I could do two tours, have $100,000 in the bank and get a good start in whatever I wanted to do,” King said.

About that same time, he got engaged to the high school girlfriend that is now his wife of 30 years, Marilyn, a kindergarten teacher in the Odebolt-Arthur schools.

So for Steve King, back there in the summer of 1970, it was goodbye college, hello life.

But a court injunction stopped the Alaska pipeline project for a time. Finding himself “on hold for about two years,” King began working in road construction and pipeline construction in Iowa and Kansas, driving bulldozers and big earth scrapers.

“By the way, if you had been chained to the reactor at Three Mile Island when it started its reactivity, you would have gotten about the equivalent dose of an X-ray,” King said earlier this week in Council Bluffs. “And that was all. So the safest energy we have is nuclear.”

The effects of Three Mile Island and its role as rallying cry for the anti-nuclear movement are being debated nearly 30 years after the emergency.

In a career as a nuclear engineer that has spanned that time frame, David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, says his assessment of the effects of the meltdown is a far cry from King’s dismissiveness.

“From what I’ve studied I would not volunteer to be chained to the reactor the next time that happens,” Lochbaum told Iowa Independent.

According to Dickinson College’s exhaustive Three Mile Island project, at 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, due to equipment failure and operator error, a partial nuclear core meltdown of the TMI’s Unit 2 reactor, the worst nuclear plant emergency in United States history, occurred.

Lochbaum says there is firm science behind the belief that cancer rates increased around the plant in the years after the accident.

“it seems like a little bit more than an X-ray,” Lochbaum said.

He cited a report by by Dr. Steven Wing, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health.

Here is the Dickinson College Web site section on that study:

He (Wing) and colleagues conclude that following the March 28, 1979 accident, lung cancer and leukemia rates were two to 10 times higher downwind of the Three Mile Island (TMI) reactor than upwind.

A paper Wing and colleagues wrote appears in the January issue of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, scheduled to appear Feb. 24. They first presented their findings last July at the University of Portsmouth in Portsmouth, United Kingdom, at the International Workshop on Radiation Exposures by Nuclear Facilities.

“I would be the first to say that our study doesn’t prove by itself that there were high-level radiation exposures, but it is part of a body of evidence that is consistent with high exposures,” Wing said. “The cancer findings, along with studies of animals, plants and chromosomal damage in Three Mile Island area residents, all point to much higher radiation levels than were previously reported. If you say that there was no high radiation, then you are left with higher cancer rates downwind of the plume that are otherwise unexplainable.”

Lochbaum said he didn’t want to question King’s motives but the 30-year nuclear engineer said the comment King made in Council Bluffs falls in line with “the industry’s propoganda.”

Even with talk in political campaigns about more nuclear energy Lochbaum doesn’t see it happening because of the expense associated with building a new plant — which hasn’t been done since Three Mile Island.

Friday, August 15, 2008
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
King to host Sioux Center Town Hall Meeting
American State Bank – enter through West entrance (town hall meeting is downstairs)
525 North Main Avenue
Sioux Center, Iowa

4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
King to host Sioux City Town Hall Meeting
Main Library 529 Pierce St. – Gleeson Room
Sioux City, Iowa

Tuesday, August 19, 2008
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.
King to host Council Bluffs Town Hall Meeting
Iowa Western Community College Aviation Center
211915 Cessna Avenue
Council Bluffs, Iowa

10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
King to host Red Oak Town Hall Meeting
US Bank, Community Room
323 Reed St
Red Oak, Iowa

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
King to host Creston Town Hall Meeting
Supertel Inn and Conference Center
800 Laurel St.
Creston, Iowa

4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
King to host Denison Town Hall Meeting
Cronk’s Restaurant
812 4th Ave. S.
Denison, Iowa

Friday, August 22, 2008
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
King to host Spencer Town Hall Meeting
Spencer Library Meeting Room
21 E 3rd St
Spencer, IA

11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
King to host Storm Lake Town Hall Meeting
City Council Chambers
620 Erie St.
Storm Lake, Iowa

Here is the Washington Times:

Thirty-one members of Congress on Wednesday asked President Bush for an “immediate review” of the convictions of former Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who were sentenced in 2006 to lengthy prison terms for shooting a drug-smuggling suspect in the buttocks as he fled back to Mexico.

“Should you be unwilling to pardon Agents Ramos and Compean, as some of us have advocated, we ask that you then consider commuting their sentences to time served,” the Republican lawmakers said in a letter.

(And he gives Iowa Independent a shoutout!)

Here is Cullen in the Storm Lake Times:

Our thanks go to Iowa Independent, a website that noted Rep. Steve King’s strong support of the “widow penalty,” which says that an alien who marries a US citizen shall be deported if that citizen dies within two years of the marriage and the alien has not yet been granted permanent residency.

King argued from the floor of the US House that doing away with the widow penalty could bring undesirables into the United States.

He said:

“A soldier, man or woman, could get drunk in Bangkok, wake up in the morning and be married, as will happen sometimes in places like Las Vegas or Bangkok, be killed the next day, and the spouse who was a product of the evening’s celebration would have then a right to claim access to come to the United States on a green card.”

That’s quite a hypothetical that assumes soldiers are a bunch of black-out drunkards, as Iowa Independent noted. But, the Indepdent goes on, how would King know since he dodged the draft with a student deferment in college and then quit college when the threat of draft had passed.

The fact is that 160 widows face deportation because their spouses died within two years of marriage. Since our immigration bureaucracy is so inept, there is no practical way to get permanent residency papers completed in that time.

So King would just ship them back.

There is an alternative to this knucklehead. His name is Rob Hubler, a retired Presbyterian minister who would be a tremendous congressman. He would not have the nation think that Western Iowans are a bunch of paranoid, heartless hayseeds living in fear of stray Romanians.

But maybe we are. Prove us wrong in November.

Here is Price on his blog about King:

He said “that whatever duty calls, that’s what I will do. But I’ve made no decision yet. I go to bed at night without it on my mind. And I get up in the morning and it’s not always on my mind when I wake up.”

For all of his bluster and posturing, what has U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, actually accomplished?

The Sioux City Journal researches this question in some detail.

In terms of legislation, King has been successful with one bill he’s sponsored: getting Christmas recognized as being, well, important to Christians.

Of the 44 bills King has sponsored according to www.GovTrack.us, three have made it out of committee and only one has been acted. The piece of legislation? House Resolution 847: Recognizing the importance of Christmas the Christian faith.

But don’t despair — King says he’s had some success blocking what he believes to be bad legislation or funding choices.

King said the extended 2007 funding debate for reauthorization of the federal State Children’s Health Insurance Program was a key moment. The measure was initially written for an increase of $35 billion, but was scaled back before being signed by President Bush in December.

King took to the House floor last fall with a sign that said the SCHIP acronym should instead stand for “Socialized Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents.”

“I do believe if you took me out of the equation, there would have been a different (funding) result,” King said.

And in the priority debate raging between U.S. Highway 20 and U.S. Highway 30 — with 30 having the most traffic and the clear lead in economic development in its corridor — King has proven to be an advocate for 20 at the expense of 30.

The cost for expanding U.S. 20 from two to four lanes over 90 miles from Moorland to Moville is estimated to cost $520 million. King has specified his $35 million is for portions west of U.S. Highway 71 in Woodbury, Ida and Sac counties.

“It’s a given that Highway 20 will be completed all the way to Sioux City,” King said. “I believe I have given every effort to keep my word on those two (infrastructure) things. Both of those things will get done.”

King said as he’s served in Congress, he’s broadened the infrastructure funding list to Interstate 29 interchanges in Council Bluffs and Sioux City, along with the Outer Drive expansion in Sioux City.

Nowhere in the The Journal story does King mention U.S. 30 — something those who live along that federal route may want to consider when evaluating the congressman.