From an email by Paul Kluding, Corporate Communications Manager of Kum & Go, concerning a recent State 29 post ("E. Jack Ulate"):
It’s unfortunate that you don’t let your readers post rebuttals or comments to your rants, because I disagree with your assessment on whether or not another convenience store would receive the same type of attention as Kum & Go has surrounding Jackass 2.
You may recall several years ago that Ashton Kutcher often sported a John Deere hat while hitting the Hollywood social scene. That piece of exposure – not unlike Johnny Knoxville and the Kum & Go t-shirt – resulted in a dramatic increase in merchandise sales for the company. In fact, some say that spawned the trucker-hat phenomenon amongst the younger set, and there certainly isn’t anything unique to the name John Deere.
Hollywood exposure is Hollywood exposure, regardless of company name.
Regarding Kum & Go, here’s a little history to put things in better perspective for you:
The year was 1959. The country was in the midst of a massive transformation. Middle-class families were becoming suburban families. And with suburbs came an increase demand for cars. The Federal Highway Act of 1956 created the Interstate Highway System. People were on the move, and the entrepreneurial spirit was in the air, especially related to travel, transportation and fuel.
Two such visionaries – W.A. Krause and T.S. Gentle – set out to create a refueling destination with a sense of "convenience."
In an age where catchy company names and unique marketing phrases were not only a representation of the times – but also the difference between success and failure – the two gentlemen used the first letters of their last names to create a unique moniker to showcase the ease and convenience they instilled in a shopping experience. Thus Kum & Go was born.
That's a nice story.
It's one thing to misspell a name like Quik Trip or Kwik Shop. It's another thing to have the first part of your company's name look like a misspelling of the word CUM.
These days, many Iowa companies are changing their names to inoffensive, bland, and unsalty terms like Optiva and Veridian. I'm just wondering how long Kum & Go are going to, ahem, hold on before making a change.
As far as Jackass 2 is concerned, here's one of the funniest stunts in that film ("How to Milk a Horse"):
The scene opens with Knoxville, Steve-O and Pontius with a farmer at a ranch. They tell the audience how to "milk the horse," or obtain semen from it. They do so by mounting a stallion on a female horse, but redirecting the stallion's penis into a synthetic horse vagina, causing the horse to ejaculate into a jar at the end of the synthetic horse vagina. After collecting the semen in a jar, Chris Pontius asks if it is safe to drink and then offers to do so.
The actual ingestion of the semen was censored to preserve the film's R rating, as leaving the scene uncensored would have given the film an NC-17 rating due to pornographic content. The ingestion is actually shown on the Unrated version.
While Pontius himself doesn't vomit (though he comes close) Steve-O vomits just from witnessing the stunt. Knoxville also gags, stating that "I never puke ever, and I nearly puked". In the credits, Rick Kosick gets sick and continues with Knoxville throwing what's left of the semen at him. This also happened to Rick before during the TV show in the "Spermolympics" stunt, where Knoxville throws semen (actually water and lotion) at Kosick.
Pontius shakes his head after the stunt and says, "I'm completely ashamed of myself."
2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards stopped in Des Moines this evening for a "town hall" meeting with a crowd one security guard insisted was over 2500...
The Edwards campaign had an interesting music mix to fire up the crowd as it waited for the candidate, including songs from rapper Kanye West
I wonder what Kanye West song the campaign played.
The second verse is for my dogs working 9 to 5 That still hustle cause a nigga can't shine off $6.55 And everybody selling make-up, Jacobs And bootleg tapes just to get they cake up We put shit on layaway then come back We claim other people kids on our income tax We take that money cop work than push packs to get paid And we don't care what people say Momma say she wanna move south Scratchin lottery tickets Eyes on a new house Around the same time Doe ran up in dudes house Couldnt get a job So since he couldnt get work he figured hed take work The drug game bolemic its hard to get weight So niggas money is homo its hard to get straight So we gon keep baking to the day we get cake. And we dont care what people say My Niggas
(She gives me money) Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in Need) But she ain't messin' wit no broke niggaz (She gives me money) Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need) but she ain't messin' wit no broke niggaz get down girl gone head get down (I gotta leave) get down girl gone head get down (I gotta leave) get down girl gone head get down (I gotta leave) get down girl gone head
From the place where the fathers gone, The mothers is hardly home And the... Gonna lock us up in a...home How the Mexicans say we just tryin to party homes They wanna pack us all in a box like styrofoam Who gave Saddam anthrax? George Bush got the answers Back in the hood it's a different type of chemical, Am and Hammer baking soda Raised they own quota Writin when our soldiers ran for the stove cuz-- Cuz dreams of being 'Hova went from bein a brokeman ta bein a dopeman Ta bein a president look theres hope man This that inspiration for tha mos and tha folks man, Shorty come and see if mama straight overdosin. And this is the soundtrack, This tha type of music you make when you round that-- Crack music nigga, That real black music nigga.
I'ma get on this TV, momma I'ma, I'ma break shit down I'ma make sure these light skinned niggaz Never ever never come back in style Told 'em I finished school, and I started my own business They say, 'Oh you graduated?' No, I decided I was finished Chasin' y'all dreams and what you've got planned Now I spit it so hot you got tanned Back to school and I hate it there, I hate it there Everything I want I gotta wait a year, I wait a year This nigga graduated at the top of my class.. I went to Cheesecake, he was a motherfucking waiter there
N-now, th-th-throw ya motherfuckin hands GET EM HIGH All the girls pass the weed to ya motherfuckin man GET EM HIGH Now I ain't never tell you to put down ya hands KEEP EM HIGH And if ya losin yo high than smoke again KEEP EM HIGH
Iowa’s Big Four provided Bob Knight 45 wins along his long and successful journey toward becoming the winningest men’s basketball coach in NCAA Division I history.
A win by Texas Tech against Nevada-Las Vegas in today’s 8 p.m. game results in the 880th of Knight’s career, one more than the record he shares with former North Carolina legend Dean Smith.
Knight, whose coaching career started in 1965 at Army, has 35 wins against Iowa, nine against Iowa State and one against Drake.
Yes, ol' Bobby Knight sure kicked the ass of most Iowa teams over the years.
My favorite Bobby Knight moment was from 1985 during the Purdue game. The infamous "chair tossing" incident:
And you can't beat then-Indiana player Steve Alford's quote about Knight:
Former President Gerald Ford was remembered in North Iowa Wednesday as a strong but gentle man who put love of country over personal political gains.
Ford visited Mason City on Aug. 11, 1986, 10 years after his presidency, to campaign for Fred Grandy, the television actor who was seeking his first term in Congress.
Grandy was most famous at that time for his portrayal of “Gopher” on the hit TV program “Love Boat.”
Ford reminded Grandy and the audience that “a sense of humor does not preclude a sense of responsibility.”
In the audience that day was Tom Latham of Alexander, a young Republican who represents North Iowa in Congress today.
“I had the chance to visit with President Ford that day. He was very warm and cordial. One thing I remember is that he asked me about my work and seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say,” said Latham.
“I consider him to be a courageous man. When he pardoned President Nixon in 1974, he gave up any hope of winning the presidency in 1976.
“He put the country and the well-being of the citizens above his personal goals,” Latham said.
Tom Latham is full of shit. What is that guy smoking?
Last I looked, Ford actively ran for re-election in 1976 and lost to that Jew-hating, dictator-loving Peanutbrain from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, THE worst president ever and somebody who I wish would just hurry up and join Ford in the grave.
Who was Ford's main opponent in 1976? Ronald Reagan:
Reagan and the conservative wing of the Republican Party faulted Ford for failing to do more to assist South Vietnam (which finally collapsed in April 1975 with the fall of Saigon) and for his signing of the Helsinki Accords, which they took as implicit acceptance of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe. Conservatives were also infuriated by Ford's negotiations with Panama to hand over the Panama Canal.
Reagan began to openly criticize Ford starting in the summer of 1975, and formally launched his campaign in the autumn. Although Ford narrowly won the New Hampshire primary, Reagan won primaries across the nation, resulting in the closest primary season in American history. Reagan, who was unable to gain a majority of superdelegate votes or overcome fears that he was too inexperienced and too conservative, withdrew from the race at the end of the Republican Convention in Kansas City, but was permitted to address the delegates—virtually overshadowing Ford's own speech
Back to the column in the Glob Gazette. It's so dorky. Even the headline ("Gerald R. Ford inspired North Iowans and utilized their talents") is lame. And the facts are incomplete:
Not long after Ford became president in 1974, he began looking for a way to rally Americans to help fight inflation.
His administration developed what came to be called the “WIN” program — an acronym for “Whip Inflation Now.”
Online sales of Kum & Go T-shirts, ball caps and mugs got a big boost after a company shirt showed up briefly on actor Johnny Knoxville in the movie “Jackass Number Two.”
The West Des Moines-based chain of convenience stores had been selling a couple logoed items per day on its website (kumandgo.com) until the movie came out in September.
Since then, the average has jumped to 10 a day, said spokesman Paul Kluding.
With the release of a video of the movie this week, Kum & Go is selling a copy of the new Jackass video and a Kum & Go T-shirt on the web site for $30.
Actor Knoxville wears a black Kum & Go T-shirt in a movie scene where he tests Embassy security machines that shoot high-speed projectiles at suspected offenders.
I doubt there would be any interest if Johnny Knoxville was wearing a t-shirt that said "Casey's General Store" or "Kwik Shop" on it.
But when you start talking about a mainstream business that has an alternative spelling for baby batter, man juice, spunk, jizz, gentleman's relish, baby gravy, and cock snot, then you've got an obvious winner.
My issue is with the examples that reporters use in their stories. How is it that reporters are always able to find the biggest losers to exploit?
I remember a couple of years ago when the Quad City Times used a woman by the name of Miranda Charbonneau as an example in series of stories exploiting minimum wage workers. Charbonneau was a complete piece of shit as a human being, but the news series didn't mention any history about her. Likewise in the recent Dorman-penned story, the reader gets no more detail about the person other than what is offered (she has computer skills, lost her job, took out two car-title loans, and moans about why the US doesn't have socialized medicine).
Back to the criticism of the recent Dorman story, Common Iowan uses a quote from To Kill A Mockingbird to make me look bad:
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.
What's wrong with expecting people to keep a job, save for emergencies, not resorting to borrowing money via loanshark car-title loans, or complaining about not getting their health care for "free" even though these bums never do bother to pay their bills? Should I not be able to criticize somebody who can't manage their money or their life worth a crap?
GED recipient and former $368,000-a-year CIETC head Ramona Cunningham with Senator Tom Harkin at the dedication of the "Tom Harkin Learning Center" at CIETC offices in October 20, 2004.
Mainstream Iowan comments this morning on a Des Moines Register article concerning Democrat Tom Miller's attempt to block public access to Vilsack-appointed flunky Jonathan "I'm Gay" Wilson's attempts to overbill the whitewashing of the CIETC scandal.
What do you call this? Raping the taxpayer in the ass without a condom? And then trying to cover it up?
Like a lot of Iowans, Deb Walker has heard Democrats promise over and over again to swiftly raise the state’s minimum wage when they take over the Statehouse next month.
The Des Moines woman said she supports the idea of raising the state’s wage floor from $5.15 per hour to $7.25, although it’s been many years since Walker worked for wages in that range.
She has a two-year college degree and a long list of computer skills. But Walker recently lost her customer service job and is wrestling with the difficulties of a growing but cruelly unpredictable economy.
She took out two car title loans to pay for car repairs. The interest rate eclipsed 250 percent, she said.
And like more than 260,000 Iowans, Walker doesn’t have health insurance.
“I’ve got some medical issues, but basically you’re just out there,” said Walker, who recalled a trip to Canada several years ago where she encountered that country’s national health care system.
“Why don’t we have that here? Why do we have people who don’t have health insurance?” Walker said. “That’s just not right. We’re one of the richest countries in this world. Why can’t somebody do something?”
I don't know where to begin with this.
What's this "cruelly unpredictable economy" BS that Dorman interjects into the story? The unemployment rate in Iowa is something like 3.4% and, last I saw, anybody who could turn on a computer was guaranteed a relatively decent paying job.
It's funny how reporters always seem to find the dumbest of the dumb. Anybody who's taking out two car title loans to pay for car repairs doesn't have their shit together. These people never have a job. No savings. No credit. No home equity to tap. No retirement fund to take a loan from. Nothing to sell. No assets whatsoever. And how much could a couple of car repairs cost? On a beater, that's going to be $1000 at the most.
Finally, if Canada's health insurance system is so great, why doesn't Deb move there? Just change countries. Adios, eh.
"Almost every state is addressing this. I can't think of one that doesn't have some sort of urban management system," said Willie Suchy, who specializes in deer control for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. "It's important because without some sort of control, deer populations will grow, and they'll grow quickly."
...Based on Suchy's estimates, the number of deer in Polk County would be almost four times larger without the controlled hunts, which Suchy said are likely to continue indefinitely to maintain a safe population level.
"At some level, deer are just fine. At a higher level, deer are kind of a problem. And at an even higher level, deer are intolerable," he said.
Suchy said deer begin to affect vegetation when they reach a concentration of about 15 to 20 per square mile. In urban areas, where more emphasis is placed on deer-human interaction than ecological effects, Suchy said a concentration of up to 35 deer per square mile is a comfortable goal for population control.
This is why Willie Suchy and everybody else at the Iowa DNR needs to be fired.
These government idiots want the urban deer population at levels 133% above what the DNR considers a problem with household gardens. Talk about mismanagement!
Iowa's deer population needs to be brought down least 90%, to pre-1980 levels. Back in 1980, Iowa had around 55,000 deer. Today, it has somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 of the over-sized rats wandering around the state.
John Carlson's Dec. 3 column lambasting the Iowa Department of Natural Resources for Kevin Kelly's deer problem was very one-sided ("Deer Shootings Lead To Day in Court"). The DNR is doing a tremendous job at keeping the population in check. I saw less doe in the field this year.
It seems as if Kelly didn't give many other options a chance and began to simply blast away. He complained about the depredation license and didn't try it. If he has enough money for lawyers and legal fees on his mission to discredit the DNR, then he has enough to buy some deer fencing.
Does Kelly let hunters onto his property? If not, then he's like many other areas in Iowa that become deer havens. He can give me a call any time. I can help him with his problem and get some choice meat for the freezer. Sounds like he shoots first and asks questions later.
- Kent Chapman, Indianola.
Nice sucker punch, ass wipe.
Iowa DNR head Jeff Vonk is from Indianola. What do you want to bet that Kent Chapman knows Jeff Vonk?
According to a poll from The Research 2000 Iowa poll released by KCCI, 22 percent of Iowa Democrats say they would vote for Senator John Edwards and Senator Barrack Obama if the 2008 Democratic caucus were held today.
Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack came in third with 12 percent of the vote, while New York Senator Hillary Clinton came in fourth with 10 percent of the vote.
Meanwhile, on the Republican end of the spectrum, if the 2008 Republican Caucus were held today, Sen. John McCain would come in at number one, with 27 percent of Iowa Republicans polled saying they would pick him. Next came former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani with 26 percent of the vote, while conservative Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney came in third with 9 percent of the votes.
I can't imagine that either party is happy with any of these names.
On the Democratic side, Edwards couldn't win his "home" state in 2004, Black Hussein Obama is all hype, Vilsack is a joke, and everybody loves to hate Hitlery.
On the Republican side, I can't imagine any konservatives would be interested in Insane McVain or Mayor Rudy, much less the robotic-looking Man From St Ives wearing the special underwear.
Inevitably, the Republicans in Iowa usually get to choose from a preacher or two. You know, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, or Alan Keyes. I think 2008's Republican ticket should also include Sex Preacher Joe Beam:
For 15 years, Joe Beam preached the word of God. Now in God's house, he preaches about good, hot Christian sex.
"I get questions about oral sex, pornography, foreplay, everything you can imagine. People ask and I blatantly answer them. Some Christian people are amazed that my answers are what they are because its not what they've been taught all their lives,"
...Minister Beam covers many taboo issues in his seminars that many Christians have become accustomed to being ashamed of.
For example, said Beam at one seminar, the Bible actually says nothing about the use of vibrators and in fact, he encouraged the audience to play games with each other, with or without mechanical aids. "There's nothing in the bible that says anything about masturbation," he said.
A 49-year-old man was found dead after a fall from the parking garage at Harrah's Casino in Council Bluffs.
The man's body was found about 3 am. Sunday.
A police report lists the preliminary cause of death as severe head trauma.
The report indicates the man may have jumped from the top of the parking garage. The investigation is continuing.
Iowa should have a state constitutional amendment forcing casinos to put safety nets around any building higher than 10 feet. That will solve problems like this one.
Kwanzaa is rooted in the Swahili word "kwanza," meaning "first fruits." Many blacks have celebrated the holiday since its founding in 1966 by Maulana Karenga.
In 1966 Ron Karenga created Kwanzaa while in California, as the leader of the black nationalist United Slaves Organization (also known as the "US Organization"), in order to give African Americans an alternative holiday to Christmas. He later stated, "...it was chosen to give a Black alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society."
...An additional "a" was added to "Kwanza" so that the word would have seven letters. At the time there were seven children in Karenga's United Slaves Organization, each wanted to represent one of the letters in Kwanzaa. Also, the name was meant to have a letter for each of what Karenga called the "Seven Principles of Blackness". Kwanzaa is also sometimes spelled "kwaanza"...
...In 1967, a year after Karenga proposed this new holiday, he publicly espoused the view that "Jesus was psychotic" and that Christianity was a white religion that blacks should shun.
It's amazing how much schools push Kwanzaa. If you have kids, you know what I'm talking about. For a "holiday" that nobody celebrates, it sure has a grip on lefty institutions, although it's probably because of the all the "diversity" bullshit. And never mind the racist origins.
I'm sure if the pedophiles came out with a "holiday" as an alternative to Christmas, you'd probably see it included in all the alternative propaganda and media by lefties. Except that you can't mention Christmas anymore.
"This unfortunately reminds me of when Hitler began rounding up the Jews for no reason and locking them up," Democratic Party activist Carla Vela said. "Now they're coming for the Latinos, who will they come for next?"
Maybe Santa Claus! That name sounds sort of Mexican, doesn't it? At least the "Santa" part does.
Via Greg Alan's blog, this is from the subscription portion of the Cedar Rapids Gazette:
Presidential candidate Tom Vilsack’s suggestion that ‘‘no one in their right mind’’ would fund an indoor rain forest in Iowa came as a surprise to the project’s supporters who previously counted on his support.
Among them is Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who secured a $50 million grant for the $180 million project if matching funds are raised.
‘‘My, oh my, it sure makes a difference in your opinion of this project if you’re running for president instead of governor of Iowa,’’ Grassley said in an e-mail to The Gazette on Wednesday.
The $13 per person "high tea" service and $12 bagel breaks will be gone from the January directors meeting of the government's legal aid program for the poor. And the meeting will be held at the headquarters conference room rather than the upscale hotel used in the past.
After criticism from Congress and the program's internal watchdog and several articles by The Associated Press, the Legal Services Corp. has decided to temper the expensive tastes of its top officials while poor clients are turned away for lack of money.
Internal memos, provided to the AP voluntarily by a Legal Services official, made clear there would be no more $70 lunches and $14 "Death By Chocolate" desserts at board meetings...
...After the outcry over its spending, the program decided to impose the same expense limits that apply to federal workers. Three members of Congress expressed outrage at the extravagance: Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, and Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyo.
"It looks like the Legal Services Corporation learned its lesson," Grassley said in a statement. "I hope $14 cookies and limo rides around town are a thing of the past."
There are still tears in my eyes. I've been laughing so much at this.
I wish I could put a laugh track on this blog. It would be going for about 4 or 5 minutes after that highlighted quote above by Grassley.
So much for Chuck Grassley's recent reach-around with Vilsack.
You know what? Everybody has been talking about how Steve King ought to challenge Tom Harkin in 2008. Forget that. I think Steve King ought to wait until 2010 and then kick Chuck Grassley's filthy, phony, pork-ridden, deficit-creating RINO ass out of the Senate forever.
Tom Harkin may love illegals and dictators, but at least you know where he stands. But when it comes to Chuck Grassley, you never know when you might need to change his diaper.
And now, folks, here's some YouTube action from just a couple months ago:
Update 12/22/06: From a longtime reader, here's the complete text of the story by reporter James Lynch that was published in the December 21st edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazette:
Presidential candidate Tom Vilsack's suggestion that "no one in their right mind" would fund an indoor rain forest in Iowa came as a surprise to the project's supporters who previously counted on his support.
Among them is Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who secured a $50 million grant for the $180 million project if matching funds are raised.
"My, oh my, it sure makes a difference in your opinion of this project if you're running for president instead of governor of Iowa," Grassley said in an e-mail to The Gazette on Wednesday.
In the past, Grassley said, Vilsack has championed the project.
Tuesday night, however, the two-term Iowa governor, who is seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, used the Department of Energy grant as an example of bad budgeting.
"With all due respect to those who support the rain forest, it's nuts that it got $50 million" from the federal government, Vilsack told more than 100 people at a Vilsack for President gathering at the Waterloo Public Library.
The money was made available only because Grassley chairs the Senate Finance Committee, Vilsack said.
"So he got $50 million for a project that no one in their right mind would fund," Vilsack said.
Although Vilsack's supporters applauded, Earthpark supporters were surprised and somewhat puzzled because of the governor's past support for the project, now slated to be built in Pella.
Early this year, Vilsack told The Gazette the state is ready and willing to participate in its development if Earthpark developers can show "significant" private investment.
In fact, the federal grant is contingent upon securing matching private funds, Earthpark Executive Director David Oman said. If Earthpark can't raise $50 million by December 2007, the $50 million federal grant reverts to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Earthpark, Oman said, is much more than a rain forest, and Vilsack's comments "suggest that, in this instance, he is looking at it in a one-dimensional way."
"This project is well-known, but, at times, not well-understood," he said about the plans for a 4-acre indoor rain forest, 600,000-gallon aquarium, exterior prairie and wetland exhibits and environmental galleries.
And, ironically, Oman said, the project is all about one of Vilsack's priorities: championing renewable and alternative energy technology.
The building "will deploy and demonstrate alternative and renewable energy technology, and timing couldn't be better than in an era of $70 a barrel oil," Oman said.
Vilsack for President spokesman Jeff Link told The Gazette there's no questioning Vilsack's commitment to clean energy technology.
"Green technology is a priority of the governor's, and he has done a lot on the issue without spending $50 million on a rain forest," Link said.
Pella and neighboring communities have shown support for the project, as have labor unions that see it as a "job-creation engine," according to Oman.
He also cited support from Democrats U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin and U.S. 3rd District Rep. Leonard Boswell, who has been "extraordinarily supportive."
Referring to Vilsack's prior support, Grassley referred to the governor's comments championing the project in a Los Angeles Times story.
"Gov. Tom Vilsack applauds the project for sending `a strong and bold message that we're doing something different - and better - than the rest of the country,'-" according to the March 1999 Times story.
Vilsack's remarks Tuesday probably reflected the debate about Earthpark and the use of federal funds that occurred before the November election, Link said.
Vilsack's successor, Democratic Gov.-elect Chet Culver, was highly critical of the project as an example of the wasteful federal spending. The so-called earmarks, where members of Congress earmark federal funding for projects in their home district, became an issue in Culver's race against U.S. House Budget Chairman Rep. Jim Nussle, a Manchester Republican.
"If anything, the debate that occurred in the fall about this issue has done as much as anything to further his thinking on it," Link said.
Funny how there's nothing in the Waterloo Courier (the town where Vilsack spoke), much less the Des Moines Register.
And look at Chuck Grassley. He has to point to a newspaper article over 7 years ago to show Vilsack's support of the project. That was long before David Oman failed to raise a single dime of private money beyond Ted Townsend's $10 million initial pledge.
Also, if Oman doesn't get his matching funds by December 2007 (and forget figuring out how to pay for the entire project...), who's going to pay backthe $2.9 million Oman's already spent? Does some reporter want to ask David Oman or Chuck Grassley that question? Or is everybody too scared? Waaaa waaaa waaaaa, let's worry more about $12 bagels and private plane-pool flights for Regents to Iowa City that cost a few hundred bucks per. Let's not go after fauxscal conservative and porker Chuck Grassley and that con artist David Oman. Oh, no. Won't do that. Not in Mossback Iowa.
Iowa's gas-station operators are not burning a path to take advantage of new state incentives to help install pumps that offer motorists fuel blended with 85 percent ethanol -- a product they say is a slow seller due to a low number of flex-fuel vehicles.
Iowa Economic Development Board members were told today that 24 grants totaling about $650,000 have been awarded so far under a $13 million program that provides state matching funds for deploying pumps to dispense E-85 or bio-diesel fuels. The incentive program was designed to help the state eventually meet a statewide renewable fuel standard.
Dawn Carlson of the Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Stores of Iowa said there is reluctance to make a commitment of capital and space for the specialized pumps right now because of low and miscalculated demand factors.
"This legislation that was enacted this year was based on some false facts. There are not 100,000 flex-fuel vehicles in the state of Iowa, there are only 55,000 flex-fuel vehicles. So we've got a lot of growing to do yet before that demand for E-85 increases," she said.
"We've got people that have put in E-85 already who have taken it out because people aren't buying it," Carlson added.
I don't know if I buy the Sporer's partisan swipe against all Democrats, though.
Sure, we all know that Vilsack dreamed of importing 310,000 illegal, wage-killing, slave laborers into Iowa on behalf of the Democrats' non-union campaign contributors. And we know how Tom Harkin has a permanent hard-on when it comes to granting illegals amnesty, Social Security, and god knows what else of yours.
Still, there are other Democrats with some brain matter left in their heads, such as Dave Loebsack:
Loebsack says the best way to do so is clamp down on the employers who hire illegal immigrants. People follow job opportunities, the thinking goes, so removing the jobs alleviates a large part of the problem. Loebsack wants to create stiffer penalties for employers who knowingly hire people who are in the country illegally, including criminal penalties.
As Governor, Culver will focus on the root of the problem by holding companies accountable for hiring illegal immigrants when they could be hiring Americans at higher wages. Culver would enforce tough civil and criminal penalties for companies hiring illegal immigrants. Those companies would also be denied state tax breaks and state assistance.
“Throughout this campaign, I have been crystal clear: illegal is illegal,” said Culver. “I believe we need to start by by holding companies that hire illegal immigrants accountable with tough penalties – something Congressman Nussle has not just failed to do, but voted against repeatedly. In the Culver-Judge administration, we will enforce our immigration and employment rules to the fullest extent of the law – including deportation as required, and ensuring that illegal immigrants are not receiving taxpayer-funded services to which they are not entitled.”
If Culver and the Democrats in the Iowa Legislature can put in place reasonable penalties against companies like Swift who knowingly employ illegals, that would be a good start, wouldn't it?
The University of Iowa paid nearly $2,900 for two members of the Iowa Board of Regents and the board's executive director to fly from Des Moines to Iowa City and back four times for meetings involving the U of I's failed presidential search, records show.
The flights were provided in March, April and May by a company owned by the husband of one of the regents, Teresa Wahlert of Waukee...
...Steinke rode with Wahlert on all four flights. Regents President Michael Gartner of Des Moines flew with Wahlert twice.
If you do the math it's not that bad of a deal.
If each Regent drove by themselves to Iowa City, they would have been reimbursed 44.5 cents per mile by the IRS in 2006. From Des Moines to Iowa City, it's about a 230 mile round trip or just over $100 a person. Without plane-pooling, all these automobile trips would have individually totaled over $1000, not including any other deductions or reimbursements they might be entitled to for staff, drivers, or man-servant.
And you do have to take into account that a Regent isn't going to be some Joe Blow working the killing floor at Swift in Marshalltown. They're all bigwig execs to one degree or another. And if Wahlert's hubby has a plane to rent, big deal. As long as he's not charging $20,000, who cares?
What in the hell is this? Does the U.S. Department of Homeland Security not know the difference between poor people working to support their families and terrorists who bomb our people and destroy property?
Please leave our people alone. They are working hard so we as a nation can eat good and inexpensive food. These immigrants are doing jobs nobody else wants.
The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday.
Dubuque native Brent Appel's children helped him don a black judicial robe Tuesday as Iowa's 106th Supreme Court justice and then paused for a group hug.
Appel's five children -- including his 3-week-old son in the arms of wife and state Sen.-elect Staci Appel, D-Ackworth -- joined dozens of colleagues, associates and friends to watch the 56-year-old Des Moines attorney be sworn in by Gov. Tom Vilsack.
Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa wrote Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff today to say he is “appalled” by the process used to detain and deport workers in raids earlier this month at six Swift & Co. packing plants, including one in Marshalltown...
...It has been “almost impossible” for lawyers and members of the clergy to gain access to workers who were detained, and workers were taken to other states without being granted access to lawyers, Harkin said.
In the comments section is the following:
I don't believe this article is saying Tom Harkin is for illegal immigration. It stated that he is for immigration reform. What he is talking about here is the maltreatment of human beings.
Maltreatment? Are you kidding me? Next thing you know, they'll be talking about torture.
So when America needed more hi-tech workers, Harkin was against it. But he's for letting millions of unskilled illegals come to America to work as slave laborers for the food processing giants.
I don't understand how partisan Democrats can continue to vote for Tom Harkin. You'd think a pro-Union fella would be against illegal immigrants who kill wages, allow slave labor conditions to prevail, and wreck industries. It honestly boggles my mind.
The Iowa Renewable Fuels Association (IRFA) Dec. 18 announced that Iowa consumers have four new locations to fuel up with homegrown E85 – Harlan, West Point, Dunlap and Grinnell. Iowa now has 55 stations offering E85.
All four stations received funding through the Iowa Values Fund Renewable Fuels Infrastructure Program, which is managed by the IRFA, to install the E85 equipment.
A total of $325,000 per year was allocated to help expand the availability of both E85 and biodiesel.
Entities wishing to install E85 or biodiesel retailing sites or biodiesel blending terminals can now apply for grants through a new $13 million Iowa Department of Economic Development infrastructure program.
That's $13 million down a rathole.
There are 980 people living in West Point, and just over 1100 in Dunlap. How many E85-compatible cars do you think are in those areas? Maybe a handful? And how many of those people are going to be long-term customers of the heavily-subsidized hooch? Probably not many.
I can't imagine that there would be many customers in Harlan (pop. 5200). Maybe a few in Grinnell (pop. 9100). Certainly not enough to justify the millions of dollars wasted on E85 pumps.
According to the prices reported in this E85 forum, it's not even worth putting a tankful in your car thanks to the 25% to 30% decrease in mileage performance.
A Scott County, Iowa District Court dismissed on November 27 a speed camera citation mailed to a Colorado man because the city of Davenport was unable to prove its devices were accurate. On Friday, Davenport faced another court challenge to its photo ticketing which has so far generated $234,000 in profit.
The November ruling was heard as a civil matter which lowered the burden of proof for Davenport. city only had to provide "satisfactory and convincing evidence" that William Wayne Greenfield had driven his 1993 Ford van 49 MPH in a 35 zone on May 18. A Davenport Police "community service officer" -- not a sworn policeman -- testified that he issued the citation in question without reviewing the ticket generated by private vendor Nestor.
Officer Christopher Anderson testified regarding the alleged violation in the photograph and how the device worked. When asked how the number "49" appears on the citation, Anderson replied:
"That's more of a technical question in what I would be able to answer, I believe. -- It is integrated into -- the camera and the laser system are integrated, and that's where the information comes from. How exactly it gets there I don't know how."
Under further questioning, Anderson admitted he relied on Nestor to tell him the 49 MPH speed displayed on the ticket was accurate. The court concluded that absent any evidence that the speed camera produced an accurate reading, he could not find Greenfield guilty and ordered Davenport to pay the court costs.
Also, in the Des Moines Register, is a story about how a Scott County judge is going to rule on Davenport's red-light cameras early next year. I'd be surprised if that was overturned.
Governor Vilsack, the first Democrat to announce he's running for president, has found an unlikely ally of sorts -- Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. Grassley says he did not watch Vilsack's appearance Monday night on a national cable TV show as he forgot about it, but Grassley says Iowa's outgoing chief executive certainly has a good shot at becoming the nation's leader.
Grassley says "He's not known very well now. He could become known. I remember Jimmy Carter wasn't very well known when he ran for president but he lived in Iowa for two years, got 20-percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses and it catapulted him into being president." Grassley says Vilsack has gotten some bad press since he recently declared his intentions to seek the White House, press Grassley says Vilsack doesn't deserve.
Grassley says "I keep reading in Iowa newspapers about how this is a problem for him or that's a problem for him. I would simply say to those newspapers, 'Why don't you lay off the guy? Give him a chance to campaign for six months and then make a judgment about whether or not he's got a chance to be president.'"
Grassley clarifies his political position and says he does -not- want Vilsack to win in 2008. Grassley says "I want somebody that's more conservative to be president but I still think that we as Iowans ought to be proud that we've got one of our own that's running for president and one that is a candidate for president who has some presence as he appears, which means that, maybe over a period of time, people will learn to love him."
What the hell is Chuck Grassley talking about here? None of this makes any sense. Is it time to change his diaper?
Here's a letter in the Quad City Times with a lot of comments that is worth looking at. It's about how WKBF in the Quad Cities switched from a Far Leftoid talk show format (Air America) to Christian/Christian Talk.
Commercial lefty talk radio always seems to fail, but lefty newspapers still seem to make money despite the diminishing returns. Although with newspapers like the Des Moines Register, they have a virtual monopoly on the Central Iowa market.
It's fun to think about such things, even if it probably doesn't make economic sense. A "moderate" daily newspaper for Central Iowa would certainly be a money-burner, although it would kick Gannett in the nuts over time and piss off the constantly-angry far leftoids, which would be fun to see.
Recently, during a washingtonpost.com chat, a reader in Orange, Calif., asked: “What about Vilsack? He’s an experienced governor/executive, wins as an underdog at the ballot box, after being ignored by the press. He’s Midwestern, he’s a centrist, and he isn’t Hillary Clinton. Are you not mentioning him in the MSM (mainstream media) because he hasn’t got the money of Hillary Clinton?”
As it happened, just the previous week I had interviewed Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack for the ninth or tenth time in the last few years and was planning to write about him soon...
For example, Vilsack. Here are a few things to know. He is retiring voluntarily this month after eight years as governor of Iowa. As governor, Vilsack has pressed a progressive agenda, emphasizing education, health care, energy conservation and economic development. Like Clinton, he was a leader in the bipartisan National Governors Association.
As the current chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, the caucus of Clinton moderates, he has worked with some success to bridge the gap with organized labor, whose leaders often saw the DLC as their bitter rival in intraparty debates. With union support at home, Vilsack helped heal that division.
Progressive agenda = stacking State boards with assholes like Michael Gartner or non-Iowans like Ruth Harkin.
Emphasizing education = teacher pay fell to 40th under Vilsack; can't get a University of Iowa president picked
Health care = Zee State Politburo and his buddies at Wellmark denied all requests for new hospitals not in downtown Des Moines
Energy conservation: Ethanol, ethanol, ethanol.
Economic development = taxpayer-financed corporate welfare
Mercy Medical Center has rejected a suggestion that it voluntarily let state officials judge its plan to build a West Des Moines hospital...
...Mercy Vice President Joseph LeValley said Monday that his company will stick with its intention to build without permission from the Iowa Health Facilities Council. The council is set up to judge whether large medical projects are economical or would needlessly inflate health care costs. But Mercy intends to use an exemption that has allowed other hospital companies to sidestep the council when replacing facilities within a county...
Mercy has asked the Health Facilities Council to confirm its interpretation of the rules. The state's largest health insurer, Wellmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield, has filed a formal objection. Wellmark says that under state law, all new hospitals should require approval from the council.
There's much more to this story, and it's rather complicated. (Mercy closes, builds a new hospital in WDM. Lutheran closes, builds a new hospital in WDM. Broadlawns closes, moves to the old Lutheran building after renovations.)
Surely the Politburo still doesn't want to allow any hospital from building a new facility where the patients are moving and living. What about the poor and the indigent and the drug addicted and the illegals without health insurance?!?!?!?!? Zee central planning committee must keep health scare in downtown Death Moans at all costs.
Some Iowa church leaders are upset with how an immigration raid was handled earlier this week...
...Church leaders said they are angry with the way federal immigration officials handled the raid and denied detainees legal counsel and access by clergy...
Hundreds filled Grace United Methodist Church on Sunday night for a vigil. The faith-based community came together for a common cause, to support families of those detained in the illegal immigration sweep.
"People who were feeling the kind of anguish and pain, the issues of family and separation, could not -- at least early on -- receive appropriate legal counsel," said Bishop Gregory Palmer of United Methodist Church.
"The decision to keep our governor, our governor-elect and the city mayor in the dark speaks of a federal arrogance which is dangerously trickling down," said the Rev. Jean McCarthy of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa...
..."If you understand the fact that we are all brothers and sisters, then we all should work for a just and equitable immigration policy," said Rev. Walter May of the Lutheran Church of America.
Where are the "Separation Of Church And State" types when you need them?
In 2004, Kimberly's husband, Jeff, a member of the Marine Reserves, and her sons, Ryan and Justen, active-duty Marines, all were in Iraq at the same time.
Jeff, a Des Moines firefighter, made it home from that deployment without injury. Ryan, now 23, was caught in a hellish firefight in Ramadi in April of that year and wasn't so lucky.
"Ryan was shot in the leg," she said...
...Justen, now 21, was injured by an improvised explosive device attack in that first deployment...
Then came word Justen has been ordered on a third seven-month deployment to Iraq and is scheduled to leave with his unit early next year.
This woman, who describes herself as a "pissed-off mom," vows to make sure it doesn't happen.
She's just one woman trying to influence a sprawling military bureaucracy to do what she believes is the right thing for her family. The way Kimberly sees it, she has no choice.
"This is something I have to do," she said, sitting on the edge of a couch in the family's comfortable new home south of Norwalk. "I'm not anti-military, and I'm proud of my husband and sons and their service. I'm not political. I'm not going to stand in front of the White House with a sign, screaming at the president. I just know that sending Justen back over there is morally wrong."
She also knows that her sons enlisted together of their own free will, without coercion, in July 2003. Yes, it was over her objections - the truth is, she begged them not to go - but they wouldn't listen. They'd played football and wrestled in school. They had jobs. And the way they saw it, they had a duty.
"They both said, 'Mom, this is something we have to do.' They knew they'd be sent to Iraq, but they were ready to go.
I still believe that people want to read something other than "soldier dies" and "mom is pissed off at war" stories. This shit's gotten so old. And you know you're being manipulated by the media when they print this sort of crap without talking to the husband or the sons. It's just pure propaganda that tries to constantly sway public opinion.
Reaction in the comments section is overwhelmingly negative.
You know, I remember in March and April of 2005 when the Register, especially Rekha Basu and Dick Doak, wrote negative stories about Wal-Mart having 845 employees (out of 17,000) in Iowa who still qualified for Medicaid. Even though I'm sure that most of the employees who still qualify under the government's rules are mostly 70-and-80-something door greeters working a few hours a week, the reporters didn't bother with researching who was getting the benefits.
Contrast that with the pro-illegal advocacy agenda of the Des Moines Register. You don't see Jennifer Janeczko Jacobs doing a story about how the illegals cost Iowa and Federal taxpayers dearly. There's no stories about the tax returns that aren't filed. No stories about all the money coming from Title 19. No stories about how these illegals don't pay their medical bills. No stories about how they don't have car insurance. No stories about how their non-English speaking children flood our schools and take up value education time and money from the legal children who can speak English. No stories about the gang activity. No stories about all the meth and pot imported from Mexico. No stories on the lives of citizens who have had their identity stolen from Mexicans. No stories about the strain on the criminal justice system.
No way. You're not going to hear those stories in the Des Moines Register in their quest for another Pulitzer Prize.
What representation of Catholicism is a Single Mom who has 5 children? Why doesn't the priest tell her that she should not continue to have children without a father.. absolutely disgraceful.. How about the Register reporting on the amount of Medicaid and Food Stamps she received based on her three illegal alien Anchor Babies...Stealing from American Taxpayers...while praying the Rosary...the Church is gravely misguided here. God help us.
Illegal immigration is a problem because liberals cry 'foul' everytime a conservative wants to solve the problem. I do agree that many Republicans cave to the PC pressure by liberals (this article is an excellent example), but remember...democrats won't even try to solve the problem. Why? No problems=no votes for democrats. DEMOCRATS LOVE UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS.
"Undocumented workers contribute more in taxes to our social services than they consume." Ahh, trying to blow a little smoke? Want to talk about the tens of billions of overall cost to this country? Want to talk about the recent bogus Texas state study where even after trying to skew the numbers their bottom line showed a net deficit? Want to talk about the thousands of Americans killed by illegals every year? That's a cost I'd like to see reduced. Want to talk about the number of illegals in prison for committing crimes other than simply being here without papers?
Oh, man. What a doozy the Register picked as their poster child for the evilness of the federal government finally getting off their collective dead asses and upholding our laws. This should get every law-abiding citizen of this country off our dead asses and do something. This is a woman who snuck across the border 14 years ago and still doesn't know English? Continues to have anchor babies with no father in sight? This is their poster child? And her behavior is going to get her a green card. Isn't that nice. The longer she flouts our laws, the more chance she has of staying here. That is counter-intuitive to me. I am so disgusted at the Register right now for trying to feed us their b.s. right on the front few pages.
The Register waves the bloody shirt as well as any leftist fishwrap in the nation. Sensibe Iowans have to endure this tripe disguised as "journalism."
I would also make this observation. Yes, Ms. Mendoza was detained. We all get that. But, again, in spite of the wailing at the Register et al, she apparently got some level of due process, even though she is not a citizen of this country, state or city. The article even named the attorney. Through the efforts of that attorney, who discussed the matter with ICE management; Ms. Mendoza was returned to her family. This doesn't sound like she was exactly in the hands of the gestapo as many would have us believe.
I am not surprised to see that the DMR has yet again printed another "heart wrenching" story about the illegal aliens.I can't help but notice that this woman has been in this country, the USA for over 13 years and still cannot speak English nor could she understand the language.There has been no mention of the childrens father in this piece so I wonder how many fathers do these children have?How many of them are being taken care of by Title 19?How much money have the legal citizens of the USA spent to take care of this woman and her children during her nearly 14 yr stay in this country? This woman is just one of thousands who are in this country illegally and obviously have no intention whatsoever of becoming a "legal" citizen,if she had started the legal paperwork 14 yrs ago she may have become a permanent citizen by now,but this way the DMR has yet another story to reach out to the liberal goody two shoes and make their hearts break. But this reader is not crying nor feeling sorry for them. This reader says "Its about time something is done !!! Kudos to ICE and everyone associated with ICE !"
GED recipient and former $368,000-a-year CIETC head Ramona Cunningham with Senator Tom Harkin at the dedication of the "Tom Harkin Learning Center" at CIETC offices in October 20, 2004.
The CIETC scandal and the legal battle over who will repay $1.5 million misspent by the agency is costing taxpayers an average of $1,200 per day in legal fees...
Newly disclosed reports from the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium show that since March, the Des Moines job-training agency has been billed for almost $300,000 worth of legal fees. The vast majority of those costs are tied directly to the CIETC payroll scandal and the resulting overhaul of the agency.
I could quote more, especially Jonathan "I'm Gay" Wilson's $210 an hour meter that's currently running at the behest of Tom Vilsack, but we already know how FUBAR the whole CIETC thing is and will continue to be.
And from the Register's comments section:
How can they do this? This money should be coming out of the pockets of the CITEC board members, not the taxpayers. I'd like to thank our government for ripping us off again. Good luck getting your sales tax raise.
As I've said before, the unemployment rate in Iowa is something like 3.6%. Why is CIETC even needed? Other than to pork our the Federal deficit, employ a bunch of inbred Democrat losers, and now enrich the pockets of lawyers.
Oh yeah, and fuck taxpayers in the ass. Maybe that's why Vilsack appointed a homo lawyer for the job.
ESPNU is showing the Iowa/Drake men's basketball game tonight. Drake is up 14 just after the start of the second half.
Wouldn't that be something else if Dr Tom's team won against the Hawkeyes, a team Drake has never beat? Especially since Steve Alford was hired (at around a million dollars a year) to replace Dr Tom (who was pulling down about $250,000 a year back then) and his substantial winning record at Iowa, a record Alford has failed to match.
And I still remember Bob Bowlsby, the asshole former Athletic Director at Iowa, trashing Dr Tom after hiring Alford.
So what did Dr Tom do? He took a couple years off, accepted the Drake job, and turned around the program. The Bulldogs even beat Iowa State a couple weeks ago.
Dr Tom announced recently that he'll be retiring soon. It would be great payback for the Bulldogs to beat the Hawkeyes.
Update: Don't miss the Hawk Central forum for this game!
"He was real, and he was Iowa," said Kathie Swift, a retired fair official. "If he said something, people didn't have to wonder whether it was a good project. They believed him."
Perhaps that's because so many had performed in front of him. Of all his accomplishments, Riley's most lasting legacy will likely remain the statewide talent search he began 47 years ago.
Several generations of Iowa dancers, singers and musicians competed for a chance to reach the State Fair stage. For years, Riley hosted competitions in school gymnasiums in every Iowa county, racking up 15,000 miles a year on his car.
Some of those performers, like Simon Estes and Carrie McDowell, went on to professional careers, but Riley saved his most encouraging words for those who tried year after year without winning anything.
Many kept in touch as they grew older and had children of their own. They sent photos and invited him to weddings.
Ten years ago, when Riley celebrated his 50th year at the fair, former performers traveled to Des Moines to toast him. They described his influence on their lives.
From Dennis Naughton, who won first prize in 1966 with a ventriloquist act: "He's one of the four or five most important people in my life. In my mind I can close my eyes and see him with a microphone in his hand. There are so many people who learned not to say no to themselves because of him.
Never a contestant, I was one of the thousands of Des Moines kids who watched eagerly when the Talent Search competition was on KRNT in the 60’s. Those performers were my Iowa Generation’s American Idol as we cheered and commented on who we like and who deserved to go on. And when my neighbor down the street, Jeff Jeffries (playing Lady of Spain on the accordian, no less), won, the whole East Side was delirious with pride. I continue to watch the finals on TV every year. I doubt that there is any state in the country who was blessed with a Bill Riley the way that we were. We were lucky to have him with us for so long. Thank you, Riley family, for sharing him with all of us.
I remember mostly the baton twirlers. Inevitably, the gal who twirled a flaming baton highest in the air would win. That was the best.
U.S. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana has decided not to run for president in 2008.
Bayh, a Democrat, had been spending considerable time and money exploring his chances in Iowa. He said he determined that his chances of winning weren't good enough to continue with his campaign.
"At the end of the day, I concluded that due to circumstances beyond our control the odds were longer than I felt I could responsibly pursue," Bayh said in a statement Saturday morning. "This path -- and these long odds -- would have required me to be essentially absent from the Senate for the next year instead of working to help the people of my state and the nation."
Out of all the prospective Democrats, I thought Bayh looked the best on paper: He's been a governor, so he's got executive experience. He got elected to the Senate in a Red State. He's a legacy, so he's connected. Bayh's been known to be more of a fiscal conservative. And he voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act. Stuff like that. And even though Indiana is a northern state, I think he'd have a lot better chance in the South than, say, John Edwards, who couldn't win his own state in 2004. Bayh would certainly do better in the South than Hitlery, where they hate her Yankee ass.
It's also good to hear him jab the other prospects by admitting that running for POTUS takes up time from the day job. That hasn't stopped Hitlery, Hussein Obama, the Waitress Sandwich, Mr Hairplug, or the V from playing hookey.
...Al Green will be the headliner for the "One Iowa Gala" to be held at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City on Thursday, January 11th. He'll share the stage with a few other Iowa musicians. Actor Tom Arnold, an Iowa native who attended the University of Iowa, will emcee the event.
Wait a second, I screwed that up.
That picture above is Al Green, the professional wrestler. Not Al Green, the singer.
Rep.-elect Bruce Braley, D-Ia., said he has called for greater enforcement of immigration laws, but the Bush administration needs to make sure the law is enforced not just against individuals but also against employers. "Until employers realize that they will be held accountable for hiring undocumented workers, we will continue to have a problem with illegal immigration in the United States," Braley said.
Companies, especially large ones like Swift, should fear employing illegals because of the threat of massive fines.
You know how I've been talking about the Register's outrageous pro-illegal bias concerning the ICE raids at the Swift plant in Marshalltown? I'd really like to find a story about legal Americans, especially non-Hispanics, who work at this plant, and discover what their opinion is about all the illegals working there.
The actions of the federal agency triggered complaints from church leaders, advocates for immigrants and community leaders that the U.S. government is violating human rights by moving many of the workers out of the Midwest before they could talk with lawyers, pastors or their families.
The Register has recently started allowing comments on stories published on their web site. Here's a sampling of today's:
Woke up this morning to read about the latest world and national events. But golly gee what do have: More "let's beat a dead horse" stories about immigration produced by the law breakers best friend your Des Moines Reg. How many pages of this rag are constantly wasted with the weepy-woe-is me articles about how the big bad govt. is trouncing your right to commit illegal acts. Stop the indoctrination already. Come on let's face it- THEY BROKE THE LAW.
Liberal Americans and papers like the DSM Reg are nothing but enablers for this kind of activity. I love how the Registers crack team constantly does its best to sugar coat the problem. As if its a "civil right" to come here illegally. Thats a new one to me.
Funny how all these people are supporting the criminal invaders.
The only thing that is shocking about all of this is that it is news. Because of the federal government's unwillingness to act on the illegal immigrant problem over the last 20 years, they do these sporadic things and the Register gets up in arms about it. Most of us are saying "it's about time" and "do it more often".
If I stole someone identity with malice,and got caught I would expect the full force of the law.The feds are doing the right thing they only have a couple million more to go.
"If you don't understand the rules, then you end up in Mexico," said Michael Said, an immigration lawyer. {Well Mr. Said, that's where they belong to begin with! So what's the problem? I see none!}
Ms. Sanchez. Your comment on these actions are "flagrant violations of civil rights." Civil Rights?? What civil rights???????????? These illegals that were arrested have NO civil rights. They entered our country illegally. Period! They have no rights, they are not U.S. citizens. If they were U.S. citizens, then they would have rights. Comprende??
There really hasn't been much in the way of comments agreeing with the Register's coverage or being on the illegals' side. Does that mean anything? I think it means that the Register's circulation will continue to decline as their pro-illegal bias turns more people off.
Common Iowan talks about a comment on the DM Register's web site with regard to the wages the meatpacking industry pays. Read that first.
OK, now that you've read it, here's my take:
Some want to boil the meatpacking wage issue down to "Republican corporate greed", which is a non sequitur as far as I'm concerned. If you want to ignore the inflation problems in the 1970s, high unemployment, record fuel prices (inflation-adjusted to 2006, they were a lot higher then compared to today's dollars...), union wage demands, and the recession of 1981-1982, then go right ahead. It's a little bit more complex, historically, than just blaming Gordon Gekko.
And anyway, all that doesn't matter. Far lefties simply want to grant illegals everything: amnesty, a driver's license, voting rights, free health care, in-state college tuition, ESOL education, low-priced broadband internet, free condoms and dental dams, taxpayer-paid sex changes, and who knows what else. Even if Swift paid $30 an hour, the far lefties would want the illegals to stay. That much will always be true.
What do you do about the situation as it is now? Swift clearly knew about the impending raid. They got off their ass and did background checks on their illegal alien employees and got rid of a whole bunch before the Feds moved in. That's not something to be applauded; that's something to be fined heavily.
If Swift faced a $100,000+ fine for every illegal alien employed by their company, they'd change their hiring practices. Wouldn't they? These raids can't be cheap to manage.
Consumers should also be aware of what companies hire illegals. When you see the Swift name on a product, or any subsidiary, you should avoid all their products. Same with the DeCoster's and their eggs.
If you have to pay more for meat or dairy products produced by companies that don't resort to employing illegals, it's probably cheaper in the long run than all the taxes you have to fork over so Swift and DeCoster can have illegal slave labor.
You should also avoid any politician who accepts donations from these companies. If you voted for Patty Judge, you're basically supporting what Ed Fallon called "influence pedding" after she accepted $10,000 from the DeCosters. And he's right.
By the way, if you want even more information on the meatpacking industry's wages this REAP site has a lot of data.
Regardless of your own view of the conflict between the University of Iowa faculty and the Iowa State Board of Regents -- but especially if you are unsympathetic with the position of the faculty -- the single most important document for you to read is Shelly Kurtz, President, UI Faculty Senate, "Statement on the Resolution of No Confidence in the Leadership of the Board of Regents," December 12, 2006. Given the significance of this document, I want to thank President Kurtz, and The Daily Iowan, for making it available.
The amount of pro-illegal propaganda shoveled out by the Des Moines Register concerning the recent raid on illegals at the Swift meatpacking plant in Marshalltown has been staggering.
Whether it's the "Fuck you" picture taken above, which is reminiscent of how CNN, the AP, and Reuters employ reporters or photographers who actively side with the enemy in Iraq, or the idiotic "9/11 moment" quote by that stupid Mexican teenager, you know that's just the beginning.
Today there's another story on the raid's impact of "the kids" - a topic that seems to be extremely coordinated by the mainstream media. Read newspaper coverage in other towns and other states, even national media coverage, and you'll see "the kids" come up as a constant topic.
Bad for consumers: Should either of those situations happen, packing plants would reduce their slaughter rates, and the prices paid to farmers for their livestock would fall, Lawrence said. Consumers could then be forced to pay more for meat as supplies tighten.
Bad for producers: If demand is slowed because plants don’t have the work force to deal with the animals, then that will affect prices for producers before it impacts consumers.
Impact on Swift: The company, which is the third-largest processor of beef and pork, says it slaughters 11 percent of U.S. hogs and 16 percent of beef cattle. Six of the company’s seven U.S. plants were affected by the raids. Not touched was a hog plant in Louisville, Ky. The company resumed operations at the six plants after the raids on Tuesday but a spokesman would not say how much Swift’s capacity had been reduced.
Where are the stories in the Des Moines Register about people who have had their identities stolen?
What about innocent people who have to clean up messes for years after some illegal Mexican buys a person's Social Security number and uses it in order to get some low-wage meatpacking job in Iowa?
How about stories of how these breeders burden our state with importing massive amount of pot and meth, how they clog up our court system with drunken and criminal behavior or gang activity, how they stress our education system because none of their kids can speak English, and how they steal social service help from perfectly legal Iowans who need it?
It's OK to denigrate Wal-Mart because they employ a large number of 70-and-80 somethings as door greeters or in particular departments on a limited part-time basis - so limited that some of these seniors still qualify for Medicaid. The Register can promote the Democrats' bitching and moaning about this, but they remain totally silent on how much money these illegals cost Iowa taxpayers every year.
After reading the hate-filled writings from State 29, the Real Sporer, and comments at the Des Moines Register website, I am convinced that there will never be the much needed in-depth discussion on how to best solve the immigration issue.
State 29 has posts today called Taco Hell and Stupid Mexicans, while Sporer asks What is paving the surface on the road to Hell?. A comment by a reader on the Des Moines Register website said this is just want the Mexicans want. A free ride back to Mexico in time for Christmas and then they can cross the border and be back up here in January...
...Comments like these that are filled with hate won't get us anywhere. All this does is show how ignorant you are.
Who's ignorant?
Most of these Mexicans are here illegally. Many of them have purchased or obtained identity information and Social Security numbers that have been stolen.
You ever had your identity information stolen, Common Iowan? I've known a couple people who have gone through this. It's hell.
And why are the far lefties defending illegals? You'd think that they would be the first to rail against industries that exploit what I call imported slave labor.
You far lefties bitch about Wal-Mart not paying a decent wage, but what about non-union packing houses like Swift? Wal-Mart employees are stocking shelves and running cash registers, they're not killing hogs, mopping up blood, and removing entrails all day long.
Finally, doesn't it concern you that these people are able to get across the border, travel up to Iowa, find a job, and live amongst us? How hard is it going to be for a Muslim terrorist to do the same thing?
That's a key bit of advice some Iowa Democrats have for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) as she entertains a dozen fellow Hawkeye Staters today to get their take on her presidential prospects.
Clinton and her crew are notoriously disciplined, known for running a tight ship, sticking closely to their message and getting the word out to surrogates with remarkable efficiency.
But in Iowa, home of the first-in-the-nation 2008 contest, Democrats told the Daily News the former First Lady will have to let her hair down and get her feet dirty if she wants to do well.
"I don't know that you can win in the Iowa caucuses and be a control freak," said former Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Gordon Fischer. Fischer is a fan of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is already in the White House race.
For more comments, visit Gordon's blog: IowaTrueBlue.
The president of the nine-member board that governs the University of Iowa says he will not succumb to what he describes as a poisonous atmosphere in Iowa City and leave his post.
The U-of-I Faculty Senate and Iowa City-area legislators have called for Board of Regents president Michael Gartner to resign over the break-down in the search for a new university president. "I don't think that this Mardi Gras atmosphere adds anything to it," Gartner says. "It's almost like a lynch mob some days and that's not good."
Gartner, the owner of the Iowa Cubs baseball franchise in Des Moines, says he intends to serve out the remaining four years of his term on the Regents. "If I resigned I think that it would set the system back for another 20 years. I'm not particularly enjoying my life right now...
...Gartner says he's not bothered by campus critics who have complain about his management style. "I don't understand where they've seen my management style...Most of those critics have never seen me or met me," Gartner says. "There's kind of the herd mentality going on at the moment, or piling on, but that's o.k. That's what freedom is all about: say what you think even if what you think is not based on fact or informed opinion."
What a self-obsessed, arrogant, drama queen Michael Gartner is.
Michael Gartner's been the head of the Iowa Board of Regents for about a year and a half. He thinks his resignation is going to set back the Board of Regents twenty years?
What a temper tantrum. His resignation at the end of the Vilsack regime would be a vast improvement. Let Chet Culver pick somebody less arrogant and more respected.
A former president of the Iowa Board of Regents today offered a scathing review of the current board and portrayed the bungled search to find a new University of Iowa president as a disaster waiting to happen.
Republican Marvin Pomerantz, a Des Moines businessman who was regents president from 1987 to 1993, and again from 1995 to 1996, said Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack should not have appointed Michael Gartner board president.
“It’s a policy-making board. Mike engenders conflict where ever he goes,” Pomerantz said in a meeting with Des Moines Register reporters and editors. “Mike is brilliant. He’s got a lot of great ideas, but he’s not a great leader. I would get down to fundamentals. There’s a lot of separate agendas over on that board right now.”
The mood was somber and agitated among Mexican students who streamed into Marshalltown High School this morning.
Mexican students? Are they studying Mexico?
Ohhhhh, no, strike that. They're actual Mexicans. They're not residents of the United States. They don't identify with being American. And most of them don't have valid papers in order to be Americans.
They might, and quite likely, have forged documents using somebody else's Social Security number in order to secure employment after entering our country illegally.
“When 9/11 came along, everyone remembered it,” said Isis Diaz, 14, and a freshman. “I think everyone will remember this.”
How stupid do you have to be to utter such a ridiculous comparison?
You want to be hated in this country? Keep saying shit like this.
Diaz said many people she knows have already left the state, on their way back to Mexico.
Good!
Come back to the United States when you can enter our country legally, not be carrying any pot or meth, learn our language, respect our government, and not steal some dead grandmother's Social Security number in order to get a job.
Des Moines' property tax rate would drop by about $1.85 per $1,000 of taxable value, according to an estimate from Allen McKinley of the city's finance department. After various tax breaks are factored in, the owner of a $100,000 home would save about $84 a year.
The savings, however, would be offset by the $160 that same person would pay in higher sales taxes, according to Mike Lipsman of the Iowa Department of Revenue and Finance.
The vote also would not freeze property assessments, which have climbed steadily for most homeowners, or prevent cities from increasing their property tax rates.
See that asshole in the picture above? His name is Hector Angel, and he's flipping off the US Government for enforcing immigration laws. He's your typical Mexican trash.
A plan that was yanked from November’s ballot asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax in Polk, Dallas and Warren counties will return in a special election July 10, advocates of the plan announced today.
The plan, known as Project Destiny, is backed by the Greater Des Moines Partnership and touted as a way to inject almost $75 million each year into 47 city and three county governments.
Great news! We've got eight months to kick Project Density to death!
How stupid do these business "leaders" and politicians think people are, especially in the Des Moines area? Property tax "relief" is always a lie.
I predict that this will go down to defeat. 80% against, 20% for. It wouldn't surprise me if the final vote is worse than that.
I can't wait for the cheerleading campaign to be rolled out by the morons at the Des Moines Register, although judging from the comments on today's story it's already dead in the water.
I’ve followed presidential nomination politics closely since 1980, extremely closely since 1984 (motivation: I was doing a humorous speech on the primaries in intercollegiate speech competition and needed to keep my jokes up to date), and from a front row seat as an Iowa party activist since 1990. Apply salt in grains or blocks as needed.
This is my first attempt at an ongoing series about the Iowa caucuses. The idea is mostly to focus on the kind of stuff the locals know but the national folks miss. This first time, though, my in-state perspective is just in the anecdotes.
First question: Do the caucuses REALLY matter? How important are they in terms of overall impact on the nominating contest, the presidency, and history? Here’s a look back, categorized and countdown formatted (with apologies to Casey Kasem). In the process of writing, I surprised myself and changed my own number one.
If you're an Iowa politics anorak, you'll definitely want to read the whole thing. It's a great list.
"It's a controversial law, but the public at large still believes the 2,000-foot rule provides some added protection," said state Sen. Keith Kreiman, a Bloomfield Democrat
Mason City had a Sex Offender Review Committee that asked law enforcement and corrections officers about the law. They all said it didn't work.
Even the author of the law, Lance Horbach, regrets it.
Does that qualify Keith Kreiman as a moron? I think it does.
What offended me even more about the Register's story is that the online edition shows a picture of Trena Gage and her mother. That's probably the worst example you could use. Trena's daughter, Jetseta, was taken away from the family home by Roger Bentley - a "family friend" whose brother, James Bentley, had sexually abused the 10 year old for three years (and "dated" the mother). Jetseta was later raped and murdered by Roger Bentley.
The 2000 foot residency law has absolutely NOTHING to do with the Jetseta Gage murder.
And I still don't understand why Trena Gage and her fat-assed mother aren't rotting away in a prison. That's where they belong for exposing that child to such monsters.
Let's see ... the anti-smoking lobby wants an increase in the cigarette tax. And last week, the road lobby started making post-election noises about an increase in the gas tax. The education lobby wants more money for teachers and a statewide sales tax for schools to pay for construction projects.
This week, it's the greens who are agitating for more. They're talking of raising the sales tax — or at least dedicating a part of the existing sales tax — for environmental projects. Things such as more, or higher, fees for using state recreational facilities and higher license fees are also part of the discussion.
It seems the Democratic sweep in November has tickled the spending passions of every group that gets money from government.
Even though the perception is that Democrats love to raise taxes, so do Republicans.
Didn't Republican Governor Terry Braindead get Iowa's sales tax upped from 3% in the early 1980s to 5% by the time he left office in 1998? Yes, he did.
I'm hoping that Iowa Democrats revive the 25% additional tax on dildos and vibrators they wanted a couple years ago. If that happened again, it would probably be the only story I'd cover for months.
[Greedy lawyer Roxanne] Conlin says Microsoft overcharged the average customer between $10.50 and $57.
And those amounts are from 1994 to 2000 for Word, Excel, and other Microsoft Office products.
I remember I paid over $3000 for a computer system in 1994 and it didn't have MS Office on it. A few months ago, I paid $799 after rebate for a new system that was about a hundred times more powerful. The old computer had a 420MB hard drive and a 15" CRT monitor. The new one has a 300GB hard drive and a 19" LCD monitor. I can go out and download Open Office and have basically the same functionality as Microsoft Office's apps, except they're free. Same thing with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Even if I had bought MS Office in the mid 1990s, what would it have mattered if I was "overcharged" $10? Did people not get value out of their software? Nobody said "Buy Word over Word Perfect" with a gun to their head.
Do you think I was overcharged for my $3000 computer in 1994? In retrospect, it sure seems like it. But at the time, it was the going rate for that kind of spec'd machine.
None of this makes any sense. Unless, of course, you're a greedy lawyer.
Why isn't Roxanne Conlin out suing Rod Aycox and Loanmax? Do you think Aycox overcharges the average (poor) customer between $10.50 and $57 for each car-title or payday loan they process? You can bet on that.
Microsoft Corp. attorneys began opening statements Monday in a class-action lawsuit, which claims the company unfairly shut out software competitors and cost Iowa consumers more than $330 million in software overcharges...
...Roxanne Conlin and Richard Hagstrom, attorneys for the group of Iowa businesses and individuals that filed the lawsuit in 2000, wrapped up their opening arguments Monday after talking to jurors for about 20 hours over six days...
...Jurors must determine whether Microsoft broke Iowa's competition law and that its actions made consumers pay more for software than they would have otherwise.
If jurors determine that is so, they must assess damages for Iowans who bought Microsoft word processing, office productivity and spread sheet products since mid-1994.
Conlin and Hagstrom say their experts will show damages of at least $330 million.
This has to be one of the most ridiculous lawsuits ever in Iowa.
At best, you'll get about $40 while Roxanne Conlin and her greedy lawyer friends get millions.
Radio Iowa's Dar Danielson covered this morning's Board of Regents meeting from the Regents office in suburban Des Moines. Three of the nine members of the board were in Iowa City. The rest joined by phone. At one point the telephone connection to the Iowa City location dropped off. The rest of the members started talking among themselves and one joked that they needed to figure out the "line of succession" since Regents president Michael Gartner was in Iowa City. One of the Regents still on the line suggested that the University of Iowa Faculty Senate president was next in line, and there was quite a bit of laughter.
After the guffaws died down, a Board of Regents staff member in Urbandale cautioned the board that the rest of the locations were still on-line -- including the Urbandale location where the press was listing in to the conversation.
This blog has featured Ms Hansen's mentally ill writings in the past.
Thankfully, Kofi Annan is finally leaving the United Nations. Too bad it's not in a body bag. He's a war criminal, a thief, and a sexual harassment enabler. He's as crooked as anybody unaccountable could be. Now he can count all the millions he stole. Good riddance. I hope a car bomb finds him soon enough, but those kinds of people have been Annan's best friends over the past decade so I doubt anything like that would ever happen.
A trio of Democratic legislators and Attorney General Tom Miller today said they are optimistic the newly elected 82nd General Assembly will take steps to curb predatory lending practices that prey on Iowa consumers.
Lawmakers told a Statehouse news conference they hope to pass a package of reforms that caps the interest rate at 21 percent that can be charged for car-title, pay-day and other short-term loans that often are issued to low-income Iowans.
State Sens. Joe Bolkcom, D-Iowa City, and Roger Stewart, D-Clinton, and incoming House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, said they believe Senate-passed legislation will be able to clear the House next session now that Democrats control both chambers
They also believe Gov.-elect Chet Culver will accept the changes having expressed support during the campaign.
"Elections have consequences and I'm hoping that one consequence of November's election is that Iowans will be less likely to be victimized by outrageous interest rates and fees," said Bolkcom. He indicated possible changes might also extend the time frame by which consumers have to start paying interest on such loans from 14 days to 31 days.
Miller said some Iowa consumers currently are getting charged interest rates that can top 300 percent, even after putting up their cars for collateral. "Iowa is in the back water on this," he added, noting that many other states have laws barring predatory lending practices.
McCarthy said he can assure Iowans that the issue will get debated in the House this coming session and he expects reforms to pass with bipartisan support.
The governor has agreed to allow the task force investigating claims of racial discrimination in state hiring to look at previous complaints and to hire an independent investigator, the NAACP announced this morning.
...[The head of the Iowa NAACP said Vilsack] agreed to look at the state’s current and past hiring, promotion and retention practices. In addition, he said, they’ve agreed to hire an “individual outside of Iowa state government with highly regarded civil rights expertise” to be the independent investigator to help the investigation...
...The move came after The Des Moines Register reported about claims of racial discrimination within state government. The Register found that the state has paid out about $850,000 since 2000 to nine people in lawsuits claiming discrimination at Iowa Workforce Development, the Department of Human Services or Department of Transportation.
Well, oh well, I wonder who this "individual outside of Iowa state government with highly regarded civil rights expertise" is going to be? Maybe car-title loan pitchman, liar, and former presidential candidate Al Sharpton?
How long will taxpayers be paying whoever it is? And what sort of recommendations do you think he or she will have concerning past perceived injustices? What do you want to bet that it will involve a lot of taxpayer money?
I don't know about you, but somebody who applies for a different job every 26 days is not the kind of person I'd want in my organization. Doesn't matter whether they're black, white, brown, purple, or green.
If Bill Clinton were still president, it's highly unlikely that the United States would be fighting a war in Iraq. Under Clinton, the United States almost certainly would have a hefty budget surplus instead of being trillions of dollars in debt. This country would not have alienated much of the world. Clinton's strong environmental measures would still be in place, not undone by the current administration.
If Bill Clinton was still president, the US would probably not be fighting a war in Iraq, but Israel would still be under constant terrorist attack from Saddam Hussein-paid Paleostinian suicide bombers. Israel would probably be threatened with missle launches from Iraq. North Korea would certainly be working with Saddam Hussein to ramp up Iraq in the nuclear department. The French and war criminal Kofi Annan would still be taking their cut of the Oil-For-Food-And-Swiss-Bank-Accounts deal. Hussein and that Holocaust denier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would be fighting about something or other.
Oh, and the World Trade Center buildings? Those would still be gone. As much as the rabid and deranged Bush-haters never want to admit it, 8 months of George W. Bush did not turn the world against the United States. They always act as if the Oklahoma City, Khobar Towers, and USS Cole bombings never happened.
I guess people like Walt Shotwell have to do something in retirement, but you'd think research would be something an old, jaded reporter like Shotwell would do before firing off another cranky letter to his former employer.
John Carlson did an excellent job in his Dec. 3 column on the deer eating the trees and livelihood of Kevin Kelly ("Deer Shootings Lead to Day in Court"). The real problem is that the Department of Natural Resources does not get it.
I saw the first deer on this farm on Thanksgiving evening of 1945 when helping my father and older brother do the evening livestock feeding. With us that evening was my father's older brother, born here in 1897. None of us, all born here, had ever seen a deer on this farm before that evening. And we were all mesmerized by the doe leaping the fences in the north feedlot.
Well, what a few years have done. Now we see deer every day and risk our lives and property driving the rural roads of Adams County. Because of intense overpopulation, the deer are getting smaller in size. Dead deer carcasses are everywhere, especially along the arterial highways. I have been astounded by the number of deer carcasses, in various states of decomposition, in the road ditches along Highway 34 west of Corning. If a farmer left dead livestock out to decay he would be charged. Water running through those dead carcasses eventually arrives at streams and rivers, and any contamination in those waterways will be blamed on livestock producers.
We have way too many deer in Iowa, and the DNR can't seem to figure that out. They seem to be too busy trying to run the livestock industry out of Iowa. In short, the DNR has no credibility, no respectability and certainly (and worse) no accountability. It is time to change faces in that department, starting at the top.
- Ralph E. Neill, 5th generation Adams County farmer, Corning
While victims of disaster and activists seeking special favors for the "disadvantaged" are paraded about as heros, tree farmer Kevin Kelly actually fits that label. ("Deer Shootings Lead to Day in Court," Dec. 3.) His quest for justice in the protection of his property from deer should be viewed as a start for the rest of us to return to the values that built this most prosperous of nations.
Every citizen should be outraged that Kelly is charged with a crime for shooting deer to protect his livelihood. It shouldn't be difficult for the Iowa Supreme Court to decide how far we can go to protect ourselves from deer. That line is called a property line.
- Fritz Groszkruger, Dumont
I contend that all of this is because a bunch of DNR bureaucrats want to run government like a business. And they've done a piss poor job of it.
"When you shoot them, they are our deer, but when you hit them with your car, they are your deer," Vonk said with a nervous chuckle at a meeting.
Ha ha ha, isn't that funny? What a dickhead.
Fuck you, Jeff Vonk. Tell that joke to the families who have had loved ones killed due to deer-vehicle accidents over the past 25+ years. What an asshole.
GED recipient and former $368,000-a-year CIETC head Ramona Cunningham with Senator Tom Harkin at the dedication of the "Tom Harkin Learning Center" at CIETC offices in October 20, 2004.
Lifting the tariff on imported ethanol could be good for Midwestern producers of the fuel additive, Sen. Tom Harkin said Thursday.
The Iowa Democrat said proposals in Congress next year could ease the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff to facilitate shipments of imported ethanol into Southeastern states. Doing that could create a demand for ethanol that can be filled later with domestic ethanol as production increases, he said.
"An argument can be made that (importing ethanol) might actually be beneficial to the producers in this country," Harkin said.
Oh dear god, is Tom Harkin serious? That would completely screw everybody who has invested in ethanol plants around the midwest; many of whom are farmers. Lift the tariff, get all that cheap Brazilian ethanol imported, and the midwestern industry evaporates.
Wasn't the point of ethanol so that the US didn't have to be so dependent on foreign fuels?
I haven't been the biggest fan of all the corporate welfare injected into the ethanol industry. E85 has been nothing but a disaster, except of course for Ford and GM trying to get around the CAFE standards. Without the tariff on imported ethanol, along with the massive taxpayer subsidies through tax breaks, the hooch industry in the US would be significantly smaller.
Back to the story:
White House advisers recently recommended lifting the tariff to facilitate the sale of 85 percent ethanol. The tariff is set to expire next fall unless Congress extends it. The duty is intended to offset the 51-cent-a-gallon tax subsidy provided to ethanol.
"Tampering with the tariff ... is unnecessary and ill-advised," said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Ia., on Thursday released a letter to President Bush, saying "now is absolutely the wrong time" to end the tariff as the Midwestern ethanol industry grows.
Congress needs to extend the tariff.
Removing the tariff would have consequences not unlike the Iowa Legislature banning the Touchplay slottery machines. But instead of Bill Krause and a bunch of other owners of these machines losing their shirts, you'd have thousands of family farmers and investors going bankrupt. It would fuck Iowa for decades.
A request by Iowa state Board of Regents executive director Gary Steinke for information about key people involved in the University of Iowa presidential search is being called an intimidation tactic and inappropriate by faculty leaders and one regent.
Steinke asked Nov. 6 for salaries and course loads of search committee vice-chairpersons Francois Abboud, also a distinguished faculty member in the Carver College of Medicine, and Katherine Tachau, also a UI history professor. In addition, the same information was requested about Faculty Senate president and law professor Sheldon Kurtz, who served on the campus advisory committee.
"It is not a proper use of power. It makes me angry that they would be so petty," Tachau said. "(Regent President) Michael Gartner used that info to malign me to the student government."
Steinke did not return late telephone or e-mail messages Friday. Gartner did not respond to an e-mail request.
"Our first instinct was that it was to intimidate or malign us," Tachau said. "When people see how many courses we are teaching they never think we are doing enough work. The immediate response is that if it could happen to (a tenured faculty member), it could happen to anyone.
"It has a chilling effect."
An e-mail was sent by associate vice president Donald Szeszycki to an administrative assistant about 8 a.m. Nov. 6 requesting information on Kurtz and Tachau. The subject for the e-mail says in capital letters "(Board of Regents) info request -- quick turnaround requested (30 minutes or less)."
In part of the message, Szeszycki states, "I just received an information request for the fall 2006 teaching loads for Shelly Kurtz and Katherine Tachau. I need to know the courses they are teaching and the credit hours each course carries. Please do not share this request with Shelly and Katherine at this point. BOR want this information pronto."
The regents had a closed session telephone conference at 10 a.m. Nov. 6.
Regent Bob Downer questioned Steinke about the matter Wednesday. Steinke told Downer an unnamed legislator requested the information.
"I did not think any legislator would be that interested in this the day before the mid-term election, and would need a 30-minute turnaround," Tachau said.
Downer said the request was "not the appropriate thing to be done."
Now reluctantly working for Dateline NBC in Rome, Kent's foreign stories were being butchered and dropped altogether and Kent wanted to know why. In his attempts to find out what was happening, Kent wrote several letters to Don Browne, vice-president of NBC news. He was becoming an ever-present thorn in the side of one of the world's largest corporations.
Fed up with Kent's persistent requests for some justification as to why his stories were being dropped, David Verdi, under the orders of Michael Gartner, assigned Kent and his team to Zagreb and then to move immediately into Bosnia.
It was an extremely dangerous assignment. Twenty-seven journalists had been killed in Bosnia the year before. Kent and his team were sent in without bullet-proof vests and helmets. They were provided with no translators or guides, no first-aid gear, no maps and no background files. Kent refused the assignment. NBC's own policy book stated that all hazardous assignments were purely voluntary. Kent also had a contract with NBC which stated that reassignment from Dateline could only be to the senior European posts at NBC's Nightly News.
He was sent letters from Michael Gartner, threatening him with suspension. Kent was eventually suspended and fired. Gartner wasted no time in launching a publicity campaign claiming that Kent had been suspended for refusing a legitimate and safe assignment-to Zagreb, Croatia with no mention that Kent had been assigned to go into Bosnia.
Kent's case never went to trial, but the book takes on a dramatic turn from the world theatre to the boardrooms of NBC where Kent tells his story through depositions. Here, the various people involved in the Kent vs. NBC case tell their side of the story to the defendant and the plaintiff (and their lawyers) under oath.
If the book up until this point is fascinating, it reaches the realms of the un-put-down-able in these later chapters. In just under 75 pages, the upper management of NBC comes tumbling down. An organization, when called to account for what appeared to be lies, irresponsible decision-making, compromised news reporting and sensationalistic tendencies, simply cannot defend itself. Many of NBC's executives come across as-for lack of a better word-morons. Kent's case seems so strong from the beginning that it is hard to believe his opponents manage to run a network.
David Verdi, who was responsible for assigning Kent and his partner to Bosnia, admits that he doesn't know the Serb capital of Bosnia or the Muslim capital. He also admits that no equipment was available to Kent when he was assigned to go into Bosnia. More digging revealed that, contrary to Gartner's claims in the press release denouncing Kent, there was never an assignment to "peaceful Zagreb." (Ironically, Kent ended up in Bosnia anyway, filming an award-winning documentary sold, in part, to the BBC and CBC.)
From beginning to end, it is clear that Kent is in the right and NBC is terribly, terribly wrong. Kent initially asked for $25 million plus a full apology. The cash settlement Kent received remains confidential...
Johnson County Democrats are calling for the resignations of the leaders of the state Board of Regents following the upheaval over the search for a new University of Iowa president.
The Johnson County Democrats Central Committee passed a resolution last night asking Gov. Tom Vilsack to ask for the resignation of Regents President Michael Gartner and President Pro Tem Teresa Wahlert, Johnson County Auditor Tom Slockett said.
The resolution, brought by UI political science associate professor David Redlawsk, also asked the state for an investigation of regents leadership and possible violations of the state's open meetings law, Slockett said.
State Sen. Bob Dvorsky, D-Coralville, a former member of the central committee, told The Gazette today he would like to see all nine regents offer their resignations to the governor.
"And then it would allow Gov.-elect (Chet) Culver to look at those and kind of start from" scratch, he said.
Governor Tom Vilsack (also a Democrat) appointed all of the members of the current Board of Regents, didn't he?
This has got to be a huge "no confidence" vote against Tom Vilsack, more than anything else. I'm sure it will help keep Vilsack down to fourth or worse position when it comes to the Iowa presidential caucuses, if he even makes it that far. These people don't forget where the buck stops.
If reports are true that Chelsea Clinton and her boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky are considering marriage, the father of the groom won't be able to attend the wedding until he is released from prison in November 2008.
Ed Mezvinsky, a former Iowa Congressman, is serving a seven-year sentence for fraud after getting caught up in a series of Nigerian e-mail scams.
Initially, Mezvinsky became the victim of "just about every different kind of African-based scam we've ever seen," federal prosecutor Bob Zauzmer told 20/20 for a report to be broadcast this evening.
But then, says Zauzmer, Mezvinsky began to steal from clients and even his own mother-in-law to raise the money to try yet another scheme.
That's funny. I had forgotten about Ed Mezvinsky, who occupied the old 1st district seat in the mid 1970s. Those Clintons sure do attract a lot of crooked scumbags, don't they?
Strong-willed, outspoken women don't do very well in this state. They're regarded as arrogant know-it-alls. But women who are soft-spoken and deferential aren't seen as leadership material.
We like women who are family-minded. If they're too career-driven, we think they put ambition before families, which we don't regard as attractive in a woman. That implies a woman's kids have to be grown before she ventures into a political bid. Fathers, however, are free to pursue political careers no matter how young their kids.
And we tend to blame women for their husband's failings.
Our attitudes have created a Catch 22 for women. We set an impossible standard for them that we don't hold men to. They're either too nice or too confident, too close to their spouses or not family minded enough. And if they have to run for office only after their kids are grown, they're left out of the political pipeline.
I base these observations partly on how I hear both women and men talk. We're ready to fault women for not being perfect, while giving men a pass.
The University of Iowa's entourage can spend as much as $1.35 million on the school's trip this month to San Antonio's Alamo Bowl...
...Meyer said travel arrangements are not finalized. She said about 600 people will attend the Dec. 30 game as part of Iowa's travel party.
Wait a second. I fucked up the Title and the Body of this post. I should have linked over to this story instead.
Oh well, nevermind. What does it matter anyway? Let's celebrate $4 million Ferentz's 2-6 record in the Big Ten Conference. Give the fucker a raise, too.
Various Democrat blogs around Iowa (Madman, Political Forecast, Common Iowan, and Drew Miller) have a Hot / Warm / Cold classification for their level of interest in particular presidential nominees.
Of these four, the only one I can agree with is The Madman's. The rest all have Al Gore as HOT, which shows how jaded they are.
Interesting thing: Hillary comes off as mostly cold in almost all of the picks.
The Madman's list is intriguing, mostly because he goes to the trouble of explaining why he put so-and-so where he did.
I don't understand why the others picked Evan Bayh as COLD. The guy's been a Governor and a Senator. Bayh doesn't have the baggage of being a failed nominee or failed candidate in the past. He doesn't have huge negatives and enjoys tremendous popularity in his home (Red) state. He may be slightly retarded, but that surely trumps bitchy, angry, or being an empty suit, right?
John Miller of Boone has lost his battle to keep the letters “F NADER” on the license plates of his 1966 Chevrolet Corvair.
A state administrative law judge has sided with the Iowa Department of Transportation, which contended the “F” was shorthand for a crude, four-letter word aimed at consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
Nader wrote a 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” that criticized the safety features of many American automobiles, citing General Motors’ sporty Corvair as an example and damaging its reputation.
Miller said Wednesday he didn’t agree with the ruling, but he had no plans to appeal the decision to revoke his license plates.
“The car is sitting in my garage with the plates still on it, but yes, the plates will be coming off,” Miller said. “I’m not bitter; this has been a good chuckle for me.”
Miller, 51, who enjoys restoring old Corvairs in his spare time, has four of the 1960s-era, rear engine cars at his home in Boone. He had the “F NADER” plates on the vehicle for five years before an Ames man complained in May to state officials, who subsequently asked Miller to surrender the plates.
Krusty has a post today fretting about the free distribution of the Plan B "emergency contraception" pill by Planned Parenthood Of Greater Iowa.
I know it's a bit illogical when it comes to their core beliefs about life, but konservatives ought to support the distribution of such baby-killing abortifacients.
Why?
It's more likely that trailer trash, welfare recipients, liberals, Democrats, loose woman, ho's, and college chicks experiencing the thrill of a bareback hot beef injection are likely to abort future generations of taxpayer-dependent human debris.
After all, studies have shown that legalized abortion has reduced crime.
A Minnesota woman who claimed last week that she witnessed the murder of Mason City television anchorwoman Jodi Huisentruit 11 years ago recanted her story Wednesday, investigators said.
Investigators were unable to substantiate details from the woman's story that when she was 13 years old she saw six men kill Huisentruit and then cut up her body and burn the remains...
..."It boggles my mind why someone would go to all that trouble to come up with such a preposterous story and feed it to the media in bits and pieces," said Gary Peterson, the assistant news director for the Austin, Minn.-based KAAL-TV.
It boggles my mind that the news media doesn't have a big enough bullshit detector to know when an obvious liar is talking to them.
State policy must be more welcoming to immigrants if Iowa and two other Midwest states are to thrive economically, a trio of experts said Tuesday.
“We need people in Iowa, and we need them now,” said Mark Grey, director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration and a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls.
Grey joined with colleagues from Minnesota and Nebraska to write a report, “Immigration’s New Frontiers: Experiences from the Emerging Gateway States,” sponsored by the Century Foundation, a think tank based in New York City. Davenport native Jim Leach, longtime congressional representative, is a foundation director...
...The fix for many of Iowa’s economic problems could come by making the state a more welcome place for newcomers, Grey argued. This could be accomplished by passage of the Dream Act, which would give immigrant students a pathway to college in the state and repeal of the state’s “English only” policy...
...Positive factors for immigrants in places such as Nebraska and Iowa include plenty of lower-level jobs and a lack of racial history such as found in Southern states, Gouveia said.
So let's recap:
* A bunch of lefty Democrats and intelligentsia types want illegals to flow in Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota in order to work jobs with low pay.
* The children of these low-paid illegals should be able to attend in-state universities at in-state rates, regardless of their citizenship status.
* English-only laws are a bad thing.
* Black people in the south don't like illegals coming in and taking their jobs away, so the only good kind of diversity is that which doesn't piss off black people.
Isn't it funny how Democrats are in favor of importing wage-killing and crime-increasing slave labor from Mexico, but they're also the first ones to suck off the union thugs at a moment's notice? I've never understood all that.
Federal officials are asking the state of Iowa to pay back $3.5 million misspent on the state-run health insurance program for children of working families.
The program, Healthy and Well Kids in Iowa, or Hawk-I, serves uninsured children whose families are ineligible for Medicaid despite near-poverty income levels. Hawk-I uses a mix of state and federal money to pay for the children's health insurance coverage.
The program is managed by a private contractor hired by the Iowa Department of Human Services.
The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently reviewed the program in an effort to determine whether all of the money spent on Hawk-I meets state and federal guidelines.
The agency sampled 114 cases that were handled between 2000 and 2002. It was determined that in more than one-third of those cases, guidelines were violated...
...The violations occurred because the contractor had ineffective quality control and the Department of Human Services had limited oversight of the work, the inspector general found.
The state agency had only one worker reviewing Hawk-I eligibility, and some of that worker's findings were not shared with the contractor for a year or more.
Yes, I know that Iowa Child changed their name to Earthpork.org or whatever it is these days, but I had to highlight that David Oman and his band of con artists is letting the IowaChild.org domain expire after having it since 1997. That's a stupid thing to do. Only spammers or pornographers will grab that domain on the aftermarket. Might as well spend the $10 a year and keep it redirecting over to whatever they're going to call it in the future.
Iowa's economic development leaders said Thursday that they want lawmakers to re-establish a state destination program like Vision Iowa, develop a plan for recruiting, retaining and retraining workers, and allow cities to use eminent domain powers in urban renewal areas...
...Addressing criticism that programs like Vision Iowa tend to favor large cities, [David Roederer, executive director of Iowa Chamber Alliance] said incentives shouldn't be determined by size, "but determined by the vision of the community and local support to pull it off."
I remember during Vilsack's veto of anti-Kelo eminent domain legislation (which was later overridden by the Iowa Legislature) that every larger city in Iowa with a chamber of commerce sided with him and embraced civic thuggery. All these unelected, hoity-toity chamber members wanted to preserve a city's ability to condemn perfectly good property and give it to their lawyer friends or some out-of-state developer in order to build more strip malls and crap like that.
More important is that everybody should already know that David Roederer is about as big of a Republican in Iowa as it gets. He was the chairman of the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign.
So do you think Roederer is acquainted with David "Con Artist" Oman and former Gov Robert "Filthy" Ray and Senator Chuck "Weasel" Grassley?
Gee, ya think?
Can you figure out where I'm going with this?
You've got to love part about how incentives shouldn't be determined by size. What do you think Roederer is talking about there? It can only be one thing: A source of funding from gambling casinos for David Oman's Earthpork project.
Let's stop these Republican thieves and liars from further ripping off the public.
Wow! First year men's basketball coach Ben Jacobson's UNI Panthers came back from double-digit points down to beat the Iowa Hawkeyes 57-55 in Iowa City tonight. It's the first ever road win for the Panthers in Iowa City.
Bye bye, Steve Alford!
The Panthers also beat Iowa State, now coached by Jacobson's former UNI boss, Greg McDermott, in the past week.
Jacobson becomes the 21st head men's basketball coach in UNI history dating back to 1900. He has signed a five-year contract with a base salary of $150,000, plus a bonus and incentive package.
The Iowa men's football team will be wishing the Alamo had a basement
Yes, Iowa qualified for a bowl with their 6-6 overall record, but they were only 2-6 in the Big Ten. Now they're going to get killed by Texas in the Alamo Bowl.
...As a result of a seating-chart snafu, fans who bought tickets from an online broker before Nov. 28 could be sitting in a sea of Texas orange and white.
Lori Nelson researched 10 to 15 different vendors right after the bowl announcement to get the best seats for the best price. The Hawkeye fan ended up buying from TickCo.com.
But while on eBay, she noticed a seller touting Iowa-side tickets on the opposite side from hers. He said he verified the information with the Alamo Bowl, and other ticket vendors had their passes mislabeled.
"I think other Hawkeye fans have done the same thing," Nelson said. "They're going to have a rude awakening when they're sitting with the Big 12."
You say you're not from Texas Man as if I couldn't tell You think you pull your boots on right And wear your hat so well So pardon me my laughter 'Cause I sure do understand Even Moses got excited When he saw the promised land
That's right you're not from Texas That's right you're not from Texas That's right you're not from Texas But Texas wants you anyway...
...They're OK in Oklahoma Up in Arkansas they're fair But those old folks in Missouri They don't even know you're there But at a dance hall down in Texas That's the finest place to be The women they all look beautiful And the men will buy your beer for free And they'll say that's right you're not from Texas
That's right you're not from Texas That's right you're not from Texas But Texas wants you anyway
That's right you're not from Texas That's right you're not from Texas That's right you're not from Texas But Texas wants you anyway
So won't you let me help you Mister Just pull your hat down the way I do And buy your pants just a little longer And next time somebody laughs at you You just tell 'em you're not from Texas
That's right you're not from Texas That's right you're not from Texas But Texas wants you anyway
That's right you're not from Texas That's right you're not from Texas That's right you're not from Texas But Texas wants you anyway
If anyone still believes the changing of the guard in Congress will curtail the annual pork-barrel raids or end the practice of earmarking special expenditures for the home district or state, they should take note of a recent story in The New York Times, “As Power Shifts in New Congress, Pork May Linger.”The headline writer erred in using the qualifier “may,” when a more definitive “will” would have been better.
The story reiterated what seasoned Washington watchers already know: that the plundering will continue apace under Democrats, all the good government rhetoric aside. Pigging out on the pork is, and always has been, a bipartisan affair, with logrolling being the order of the day...
...“I happen to be a supporter of earmarks, unabashedly,” said Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who will likely chair the Appropriations Subcommittee for Labor, Health and Human Services. Harkin takes pride in the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s funneled through the Department of Defense for breast cancer research.
“Now, was that bad?” Harkin asked the Times. “If you left it to the Defense Department, they never would have done it.”
That’s probably true, because the Defense Department’s primary function is fighting and winning wars, not curing breast cancer. There are more appropriate federal agencies for conducting such research, but the Defense Department became a conduit for Harkin’s earmarks because of the senator’s committee assignments.
Harkin declines to use the term “earmark.” He prefers the euphemism “congressional directed funding.”
But whatever one calls it, it’s a scandal — and one that isn’t going to end with Democrats in charge of Congress.
Harkin complains about the size of the deficit on his web site. The hypocrisy just boggles the mind.
The state Board of Regents is a dysfunctional board with a top-down management style that creates and feeds distrust at the University of Iowa, faculty leaders told The Gazette today.
That fundamental management flaw must be fixed for the relationship between the board and the UI community to be productive, the faculty said.
``I think a president has to be given conditions in which to succeed,'' Katherine Tachau, UI professor of history, said. ``So the big solution is a change in the way the board operates and that presumably means a change in the board leadership.''
Tachau was one of four UI faculty leaders who met with The Gazette editorial board today. The others were Dr. Francois Abboud, Steve Collins and Faculty Senate President Sheldon Kurtz.
Tachau and Abboud were the vice chairs of a presidential search committee that recommended to the regents four candidates to succeed David Skorton, who left the UI in June for the presidency at Cornell University. That search was tossed into limbo after a 6-2 regents vote on Nov. 17 to reject the four candidates, disband the search committee and restart the process. That decision set off a furor on campus.
Wal-Mart boasts that its new $4 generic drug program is disrupting the market, attracting new customers to its stores and starting the nation on a road that will ultimately squeeze billions of dollars from prescription drug spending...
...The $4 drugs might work best in attracting new Wal-Mart customers among the 46.6 million people in this country without health insurance.
“I was never a customer of Wal-Mart,” said Frank Ganci, 74, a retired independent contractor who lives in Ridgefield, N.J. He has no drug insurance, despite being eligible for it under Medicare, because he considers the monthly premiums too high.
Mr. Ganci said he recently paid $12 for a month’s supply of three generic drugs at the Wal-Mart in Secaucus — atenolol for a leaky heart valve and two blood pressure drugs, hydrochlorothiazide and lisinopril.
His drugs had cost him $110 at his local pharmacy last month, he said. More than half of that was spent on a name-brand drug, which his doctor switched to generic atenolol so that he could buy it under the Wal-Mart program.
The $4 prescriptions have turned him into a Wal-Mart shopper, Mr. Ganci said. “If they don’t make up the money on prescriptions, they’re going to make it up on my clothes and food purchases.”
Customers who spend their pharmacy savings elsewhere within Wal-Mart are a sign that at the very least, the company’s $4 generic drug program could be serving as a loss leader that stimulates other sales.
But Wal-Mart has insisted from the outset that it will make a profit on the $4 drugs, which are typically not the most advanced generic substitutes for name-brand medications. The list of 331 drugs, for example, does not include simvastatin, the generic version of Zocor, which is the leading alternative to the popular cholesterol drug Lipitor.
“It can only be in our program if it is profitable,” said Bill Simon, Wal-Mart’s executive in charge of the drug program. “That’s why we do not have the newer, more expensive conversions” — generic versions of name-brand drugs...
... Wal-Mart said earlier this week that in nine other states — including California, Minnesota and Pennsylvania — it had taken 55 drugs off the $4 list and was charging $9 for them in deference to state regulations that prohibit pricing below cost if doing so could drive competing stores out of business.
“These states have low-cost laws, and we wanted to be in compliance,” said David Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman. While the laws vary, Mr. Tovar said, the $9 price seemed to comply with them all.
That's funny.
California, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania are all mostly controlled by Democrats, no?
Maybe Iowa's Democrats can create a set of "low-cost laws" aimed at forcing Wal-Mart to increase the price of medication on their cheap generic prescription drug list. That'll show everybody who's the boss!
A woman who claimed to have witnessed the murder of Jodi Huisentruit has been interviewed by a Minneapolis television station.
The woman, who was called Cindy in the interview, said six men cut up, burned and disposed of Huisentruit’s body during a 36-hour period in 1995.
Television station KMSP TV, Fox News 9, aired the report Sunday night.
The woman, who lives in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, told reporter Bill Keller that she was taken to a barn 20 minutes north and west of Mason City.
The woman, a 13-year-old runaway at the time, said she thought the men were taking her to the location to party.
But when she entered the barn, she heard a scream and turned to see a woman empaled on a hook. “I backed myself into a corner,” she said of her reaction to what she saw.
“The killing of Jodi and disposing of her took 36 hours,” the woman said in the interview...
...She said that she was afraid for her life as the men told her that if she said anything, the same thing would happen to her.
I've never heard such a huge amount of bullshit in my life. Six men killed her? And who would bring a runaway minor along to view such a thing?
I'm not familiar with KMSP-TV, a Fox affiliate in the Twin Cities, but one look at their web page reveals numerous "news" stories like this one about Paris Hilton.
Why do the so-called "media" constantly run stories about Paris Hilton? After all, she's only famous for being a cocksucking whore.
I think it's safe to assume that if a "news media" outlet will constantly run stories about cocksucking whores like Paris Hilton then they'll run any old bullshit lie that will do nothing but further upset the friends and family of one of Iowa's most publicized disappearance cases.
State officials are set to take a fresh look at the issue of making Iowa driver's licenses available to immigrants who are not authorized to live or work in the United States.
Gov. Tom Vilsack on Friday ordered the creation of a New Iowans Policy Task Force to made recommendations to the 2007 Legislature that address "public safety issues surrounding the lack of a comprehensive identification system."
The ticklish issue has bounced around the Statehouse.
A bill that would have paved the way for undocumented people to get driver's licenses died in the Senate Transportation Committee during the 2005 legislative session.
Supporters contended that it is a matter of public safety to have people licensed to drive and in a position to get car insurance, rather than having them on the road with no license or no insurance.
Critics contended that granting driver's licenses to undocumented people poses a security risk and rewards an illegal act - that act being their entering the United States without permission.
Earth to Democrats. This ain't gonna fly. They're here illegally. What part of illegal do you not understand?
This is just a way for Democrats to get more illegals on voter rolls with Motor Voter. I can't imagine that this would ever pass the Iowa Legislature, but you never know.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who has known Leach for decades, ruefully recalls Leach's warning on Iraq.
"How far ahead he was," Grassley said. "That year -- he was probably three years ahead of everybody else. Even the president is now going to a re-analysis of what we are doing in Iraq."
What's Grassley saying here? That Jim Leach was correct to be against the Iraq War?
Earth to Chuck, Jim Leach lost. Sure, he lost to another anti-war candidate, but he lost.
If the war is so unpopular, why did a Bush administration critic and anti-war type lose his seat in Congress? And what's Chuck Grassley doing supporting Leach's loser position? Perhaps Chuck Grassley wants to cut and run, too.
When I filled out the paperwork and sent it back to Des Moines in September, I expected that I could go into any place that sold licenses and be able to get my deer tags with no problem. However, upon attempting to do so earlier this week, I found that I was not in the system for which I spent time filing the paperwork. So, I came home from the courthouse, went online to the DNR's website, and registered, including my tax parcel ID number (Dad's farm). I then went back to the courthouse, reported my finding, and gave them a copy of my registration just in case. The worker at the recorder's office said this kind of incident had been happening for the last several days as landowners/tenants streamed in to get their tags, thinking the paperwork they had filled out would be processed, only to find they had to deal with registering on-line (something not all Wayne Co landowners/tenants are savvy with).
My guess is there is a stack of papers somewhere in Des Moines collecting dust until some minimum wage temp gets done entering them in the system at 40 words per minute. Meanwhile, dear season is upon us.
Another new stipulation of the DNR is that when a deer is killed, it must now be registered with the DNR within 24 hours of the kill. On each tag there is a code that one must call in via a toll free number. The system will then provide a confirmation number that must be written on the tag (now on the leg of a dead deer, by the way) so the DNR, if they desire, can check to make sure the deer's death was properly reported. Like it will go in some mass obituary or something...
My cousin Chris, a member of our hunting party, scored a kill on a 2 pt buck today, and thus attempted to navigate the DNR's phone system to register his deer. While he was able to get into the system, it replied to him that his entries were not valid, and then hung up on him, even though he was doing everything the friendly voice on the other end told him to. Brilliant.
So, there you have it - government bureaucracy invades the timbers and fields of The South of Iowa and brings with it a unique form of control and inefficiency. Now all we need is a DNR officer driving 1/2 mile back into our property to see if we have our tags in order...something a private citizen would call trespassing but they call "doing their job".
...Like it will go in some mass obituary or something... = that killed me.
Kevin Kelly has never been shy about shooting the deer that chew up his trees, and he doesn't care who knows it.
After all, trees are his business. He has tens of thousands of seedlings and larger walnuts and oaks, thousands more spruce and pine, and hundreds of Christmas trees.
"You ought to see what the deer do to these trees," said the 54-year-old owner of Kelly's Tree Farm near Tipton. "In the springtime when the little trees start to leaf out, it's just like candy for the deer. I can't put up with it if I want to have a business."
So Kelly, like a lot of farmers in Iowa who pack rifles on their tractors and combines, started shooting the animals as the size of the deer herd increased.
"The DNR won't control the herd," he said, referring to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. "They see their job as protecting the deer, not me or my property. I decided I had to protect me and my property. So I shoot a few every year when I see them eating the trees."
The difference between Kelly and those who try to control deer from the cab of a combine is that he is not quiet about it.
He wanted to get caught. Heck, he insisted on being caught. And prosecuted.
"This deer problem needs to be resolved, and a court is the place to do it," said Kelly, whose property has been in his family nearly 100 years. "I guess I'm as good a guy as any to get it into court."
He shot a deer in 2004, called a DNR conservation officer and said, "Come and get me." He said an officer stopped by and even took Kelly's picture with the deer, but no charges were filed.
So he tried it again in 2005. Shot a deer. Called the DNR. Asked to be charged. Again, no response from the state.
Kelly did the same thing earlier this year. On June 2, he shot one of the deer that was chewing up his trees and made the call. Charge me or I'll figure it's OK, he said.
It wasn't. A DNR officer went to Kelly's farm and took his picture with the dead deer. Kelly gladly signed a confession and three months later was charged. He faces fines, including a $1,500 assessment to "replace" the deer he shot. He goes to trial in March and can't wait.
"I'm protecting my property, nothing more, nothing less," he said. "Any farmer would understand. I know the DNR has its rules and regulations. I have the Iowa Constitution and the Supreme Court on my side."
Kelly said he will prevail because of a 1915 Iowa Supreme Court ruling that dealt with what he believes is this very thing...
It's about time somebody challenged the Iowa DNR in court. They have mismanaged the deer population in Iowa over the past 25-30 years, leading to numerous deaths on the roads and financial loss on the part of drivers, homeowners, and now businessmen like Kevin Kelly. And for what? So Bo Jackson can come to Iowa and shoot a big ass buck?
See what happens when you run government like a business? Revenue from deer tags and "tourism" is much more important to the bureaucraps at the DNR than people's lives or livelihoods. It's the same sort of crap Iowa had with those Touchplay Slottery Machines, when you think about it. It's just endless greed.
A war with a "foreign devil," like Saddam Hussein, may serve the purposes of a leader that desires to control the thinking of his people, but a bogus threat to their security does not assist that people in their effort to find a better way for themselves and the neighbors with whom they must live.
"They hate us and want to destroy our way of life" is not uttered by George W. Bush to encourage a brave consideration of the successful sharing of our planet with others. It is propaganda set to inflame the emotions and block a wider search for a better course.
Wow! Somebody sure is backed up in the old sphincter department!
But you've got to give him points for trying. Unlike most Bush-hating moonbats, Sam Osborne actually proposes a solution to the war in Iraq:
I suggest that we turn the larger responsibility for the Iraqi problem over to the people that face it most directly, the Eastern Arab World, and non Arab neighbors that share boards with Iraq.
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Kuwait? Is this Sam Osborne guy completely nuts? What about the 26.7 million people who live within those League Of Nations/UK-approved borders? Don't they get any say?
In my years, all I've seen is that most Arab "neighbors" hate each other. They're only bound together by their love of that child fucker Mohammed and his filthy, gutter religion of violence for small-minded goat fuckers and various other female oppressors. That, and they all hate the Jews and want them exterminated from the planet. You know, like Hitler did.
The Pittsburgh trip was a break in what had been an intense political schedule, beginning Thursday with his announcement speech in Mount Pleasant and Friday's marathon of media interviews and meetings with activists in New Hampshire, the leadoff primary state.
He toured the house on Murray Street, showing his adult sons, Jess and Doug, for the first time the backyard where he played ball and the third-floor attic where his mother would hole up during alcoholic episodes...
Vilsack, 55, also confronted the side of his youth few of his friends knew about as he toured the city's East End where he lived in progressively more modest homes during his mother's fight with alcoholism and his parents' separation.
"That white building right there with the red top, that's the Pittsburgh Athletic Club," Vilsack said, looking out the van window on a drive around the city. Vilsack, a prominent name in Pittsburgh then, would meet his friends at the club for lunch and to bowl on weekends, he said.
"One day I went in and I ordered a cheeseburger and a cherry Coke and the guy said I couldn't do that. He said, 'You're no longer a member here,' " Vilsack said. "My father had to explain to me he had to sell the membership to pay for my education. It was an embarrassing day for my father."
...However, Vilsack's father struggled to keep the family real estate business afloat in the 1960s. Vilsack has also said his mother beat him at times before she made the decision to leave home and quit drinking.
Vilsack has incorporated the story of his adoption as an infant and his family's problems into his remarks as he has traveled as a presidential prospect and now an underdog candidate.
What sort of bowling alley forces people to buy a membership in order to purchase a cheeseburger and cherry Coke there? That doesn't make any sense. Was it the sort of country club thing for working class stiffs in 1960's Pittsburgh?
I also don't understand why Vilsack seems to dwell on his being adopted as a somewhat negative thing. That's how it always seems to be presented. Perhaps it's latent guilt that his birth mother wasn't legally allowed to abort him. Who knows? His parents were his parents, adoptive or not.
I'm more interested in Vilsack's decision to join the in-law's law firm in Mount Pleasant during the 1970s, along with his subsequent political career following the murder of Mayor Ed King by a disgruntled citizen during a council meeting in 1986.
You know things get bad when people begin booing strippers...
...So, the Suicide Girls came out and bored us to tears. I missed most of that spectacle, as I tried to take a nap instead.
Then a 1/2 hour went by...and then another 15 minutes...and Friday turned to Saturday...and then another half hour went by...still no Axl. Sitting by the entrance/exit of the floor (which was 1/2 full when the show started, and about 1/2 of those people left by the time Axl took the stage)...the amusement came in watching people, decked head to toe in GNR gear, walking out, shouting profanity and giving Axl the bird.
Unfortunately, my group and I decided to leave after Axl's second song...it was 12:48am Saturday morning, some of us had to work the next morning...we all expected Axl not to show up until 11:30, but 12:40am is ridiculous and rude. Axl did not sound healthy, and most of his vocals were drowned out by guitars.
Knowing full well that Axl is unpredictable, I guess the fans who stayed should be happy that he even showed up, but we all should have banded together and left Axl hanging...as he did to us for 6+ hours.
Perhaps the worst and strangest concert I have ever attended.
2nd District:Having to choose between two Democrats is tough, but I give my endorsement to Dave Loebsack for a number of reasons. First, he's a political science professor. When was the last time a poly sci major did anything except teaching or working some shitty cube job completely unrelated to his/her major? Second, Loebsack wants to enforce the laws already on the books when it comes to illegal immigration. Third, Jim Leach has been in Congress for 30 years. It's about time he found another line of work. I hear there may be a job teaching political science opening up soon in Mount Vernon.
When his 30 year career in Congress ends in January, U.S. Rep. Jim Leach said today he'll likely accept one of many job offers from colleges on the East Coast and Iowa...
...Leach said he'll likely land in academia. He acknowledged a string of offers from the University of Iowa and other colleges in the state as well as such prestigious East Coast schools as Harvard, Princeton and Georgetown.
So how phat will Jim Leach's Congressional pension be? He was there for 30 years, so it's got to be huge.
You know, I'm not in favor of paying a former elected official any sort of pension. They always find a way to cash in, don't they? Plus, Leach might leave Iowa to find work at some fancy Ivy League skool. He ought to forfeit all of his pension just for that.
If you can't stick around the state you represented in Congress for 30 years after being defeated, you certainly shouldn't get paid by the taxpayers for doing jack shit except trading on your name and former rank.
Then there's this further into the story:
``I think Iraq will be the principle legacy of this administration,'' said Leach. ``It is quite possible that this will go down as one of the great blunders of American history, possibly the largest.''
Just like Vietnam was the legacy of President Johnson — despite big accomplishments he made on civil rights and other issues — Iraq will dominate the history of the Bush administration, Leach said.
``I personally think it is much more difficult than the Vietnam situation, with far greater consequences,'' he said.
Leach argued that the American presence in Iraq is now viewed as an occupying force, with consequences throughout the Muslim world.
I don't which university or college will hire Jim Leach, but they should consider drug testing his ass during the hiring process. The man has had his lips wrapped around a crack pipe or some Arab terrorist's cock for way too long if he believes this.
You'd think moving south would result in less snow, but not so yesterday and last night. Here in Overland Park we got a good 8 inches of snow, but just east of here some places got 16 inches. The funny thing is, if you travel just north of the KC airport they got little more than a dusting. The streets were plowed all night and salted, plus the sun is out, so that helps. You can get a look at things via the Overland Park Traffic Cameras, which have both still images and motion video. They're nice.
Speaking of cameras, although of a different sort, Davenport has a shitload of money coming in from their red light cameras. This is from the Quad City Times ("City reaps windfall from cameras"):
Flush with more than a quarter-million dollars in fines from speeding and red light-running motorists captured on camera, Davenport elected officials are thinking of plowing the windfall back into the police department.
Aldermen discussed a budget amendment Thursday that would add one police officer, create a juvenile crime unit, fund the VIPs volunteer program and allow overtime for targeted neighborhood enforcement, all using revenue generated from traffic cameras.
"I would like to thank the pro-camera for the following; no one is doing a right turn on red anymore at any intersection for fear of getting a ticket. The end result is increased congestion on the streets which is a safety hazard."
"These camers are not about public safety, they are all about the money. Rember when the cameras first came in Chief Bladel told us the money would be used for driver safety training? These cameras are just another tax so this city can spend more money for frieght houses, skybridges, hotels for a casino that wont be there, so called artwork downtown, flower pots and planters and people to water them each day. "
I don't know about you, but I can't recall the last time I saw somebody run a red light at a major intersection. I'd remember something like that.
Maybe Davenport drivers are just dumber than, say, those in Clive.
Clive's stoplight camera system has failed to yield significant revenue for three months, but city officials laud the system's positive effect on driving behavior.
Half of Clive's six traffic cameras were profitable during October, a marked increase over prior months, when only one camera made money for the city.
The three cameras generated a total of about $4,200 last month above lease fees- the largest amount generated during any one month so far - but revenue from two of those cameras will go toward debt accrued during previous months when the cameras failed to make their quota.
Revenue is still well short of initial estimates provided to city officials by the cameras' operator, Arizona-based Redflex Traffic Systems Inc.
Based on Redflex's studies of the intersections, the cameras were expected to bring in $85,000 during each of the early months. Redflex said that was a conservative estimate.
So far, Clive's take has been an average of about $2,500 each month, based on data provided by the Clive Police Department.
Clive City Manager Dennis Henderson budgeted $150,000 of revenue from the cameras for this fiscal year. The money is intended to help pay for hiring more police officers and for the Clive Fire Department's switch in September to 24-hour staffing of its primary fire station, which is expected to cost an additional $300,000 annually.
At current pace, the cameras will make about $28,000 this fiscal year.
This is what happens when you let a bunch of stupid politicians run government like a business.
Clive voters should throw out most of their city council in the next election and fire their city manager.
Also, what is with the tone of this story? Does the Des Moines Register think that red light cameras should be profitable? No way. Revenue projections for red light cameras should always be zero when you think about it from the public safety angle.
How is it that Gov. Tom Vilsack can find men to commute life sentences for but not women?
Surely there is a woman in our prison system who is equally worthy of a commutation - someone who has been truly rehabilitated, or whose case and prosecution is highly questionable.
These commutations can give hope and cause for life examination.
Isn't that what our prison system is suppose to be about?
- Rodger Routh, Ankeny
I can think of a couple of cases for Vilsack to consider:
Dixie Shanahan's first husband beat the shit out her for years. She filed reports, but later took them back; a sadly typical situation for an abused woman. Then, one day, Dixie announced to her husband that she was pregnant with another child. Her husband was angry, beat her up, beat her stomach, dragged her around by the hair, pointed a loaded shotgun at her, and was going to force her to have an abortion. Eventually, Dixie Shanahan shot her husband in the head and left his body to rot in a bedroom for a year. Most normal people would say that Dixie Shanahan probably had some mental problems as a result of being in an abusive relationship. Shanahan rejected a deal and was tried, convicted, sentenced to 50 years in prison and wouldn't be eligible for parole until 2039.
Same thing with Tracey Dyess, who was sexually abused for most of her childhood and who later, while still a minor, set a fire in her house that accidentally killed two siblings. Her sentence was a travesty. You should also read Rekha Basu's fairly recent column on the Dyess case, which is one of the rare instances I agree with her.
If Tom Vilsack leaves office without commuting the sentences of Dixie Shanahan and Tracey Dyess, it will be a significant injustice to women, particular those who have suffered from spousal abuse and childhood sexual abuse.
