“They know David Loebsack is in deep, deep political trouble because he’s betrayed his constituents. Never has a president expended so much taxpayer money in such a short amount of time to prop up a member of Congress. It doesn’t matter why he claims to be here or what he says when he’s here, Barack Obama’s actions speak far louder than words. And, what they say is that David Loebsack is very vulnerable in November,” Miller-Meeks said. “Why else would the President of the United States be compelled to visit not one, not two, not three but four cities in eastern Iowa in a month’s time?”Silly because just last weekend the New York Times rated Iowa's (and everyone's) House races and had Loebsack the safest of Iowa's three House Dems at "Solid Democratic." Even freakin' KRUSTY says:
While I can’t see Democrats getting nervous about Loebsack yet, it might have more to do with Chet Culver and Roxanne Conlin.Well, there WAS an event on tonight's schedule, but the closed door event, billed has a party for David Axelrod with no word on whether or not money changes hands, has been scuttled by the publicity.
I just think it’s an absolute waste of his time to be spending so much time in the safest Congressional District in Iowa. You would have thought if he was coming to Iowa he would have visited the 1st or 3rd CD, especially with Congressman Boswell is serious trouble.
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The owner of Baby Boomers Cafe, Rodney Maxfield, confirmed the president is supposed to stop by a private reception at his restaurant Tuesday night. Maxfield said the party is a reception for Obama advisor, David Axelrod. He said 3rd District Congressman Leonard Boswell and Governor Chet Culver are also expected to attend. He is planning on finger foods, drinks, etc. for about 100 people, which is all the place holds.Meanwhile, right about now, the GOP “Stand Up 4 Freedom rally” is underway. The RPI press release gave Steve King top billing but the fine print notes he's phoning it in. The rest of the rogue's gallery includes all four congressional candidates, party chair Matt Strawn, and two of the three Senate District 45 contenders, Randy Besick and Sandy Greiner. Does that mean the third guy, Rick Marlar, is an also-ran?
“Cooper, who is an Iowa State University psychology professor, admits he won’t be elected governor…”So, top of the Libertarian ticket, both government employees. Maybe they'll be in the running for Public Employee Of The Year next year.
“Cooper’s lieutenant governor running mate is 30-year-old Nick Weltha of Des Moines, an administrator in the Iowa Judicial Branch…”
Grub_ Loading: Error 15This is why I have emergency backup computers and a bootable CD on hand. I was able to fix my problem and get both Linux and Windows booted (it was the first time I'd booted Windows since I covered the President's visit last month. Which is really funny because Obama's a Mac and Blackberry guy.) I learned something technical, but the moral is: accept that default in the first place.
We’ve inherited the same problem as Windows: some items open a menu on left click, some open a menu on right click, some do both, some open a window, and at least one reliably disappears when you click it. It’s hopelessly inconsistent — and as long as we continue with the current protocol, it always will be inconsistent.The nuking began a year ago with 9.04 and generally has moved items to menus. This cycle they removed instant message notifications - which, since I rarely if ever IM, doesn't matter to me - and the volume control, replacing it with a sound menu.
We can’t go on like this. Nuke the entire site from orbit — it’s the only way to be sure.
"Just this year ten of the fifty current state attorneys general are running for governor: Terry Goddard (D) in Arizona, Jerry Brown (D) in California, Bill McCollum (R) in Florida, Thurbert Baker (D) in Georgia, Mike Cox (R) in Michigan, Andrew Cuomo (D) in New York, Drew Edmonson (D) in Oklahoma, Tom Corbett (R) in Pennsylvania, Patrick Lynch (D) in Rhode Island, and Henry McMaster (R) in South Carolina."But Sabato says it's a poor launching pad: "Since 1984 there have been exactly 250 state AGs, but only 28 (a mere 11%) became governor. This is precisely half the gubernatorial success rate of lieutenant governors."
Libertarian candidate for governor Eric Cooper pulled off a rare feat at a recent forum: He upstaged the major-party contenders... (Cooper) owned the audience at the Iowans for Tax Relief gubernatorial forum last Saturday. He left me wanting to know more about him.Both the speech and the column (plus this post, sure to be read by at least handfuls of Iowans) are big coups for the Libertarians, who usually go begging for coverage.
Here's a new book I need to pick up: Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made it by Michael J. Trinklein. You may recall How The States Got Their Shapes a few months back; this is the flip side.Iowa Congressman Dave Loebsack is firing back at Glenn Beck after the conservative commentator, in a recent column, referred to federal funds allocated to the National Czech and Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids as “unbelievable waste.”It seems Lonesome Rhodes dropped a reference to a $500,000 FEMA grant into this column. "What about the Serb, Croatian and Albanian exhibits? Don't we care about them?" Well, maybe we do, but they probably weren't destroyed in a natural disaster either.
Many rural Iowans feel Culver, Judge and the Legislature have ignored issues affecting family farms and Main Street economies, despite promises made by Democratic leaders and candidates.Nothing like this has happened since the 1988 constitutional amendment that ended the separate elections for lieutenant governor. Five governor-year conventions of each party have come and gone, and all have rubber-stamped the candidate's choice.
Barb’s is an unusual campaign, since the focus is not an election but on winning enough delegate votes at the State Convention in June. This weekend, Barb makes her case at the district conventions. She feels if she replaces Patty Judge on the Democratic ticket, there’s a much better chance that corporate-owned factory hog confinements, campaign finance reform, vertical integration, and big-box store development -- all issues that presently stymie rural Iowa’s progress -- will be taken seriously.
I had become a single mother when my first marriage split up in 1993. In one devastating stroke, I became a hate figure to a certain section of the press, and a bogeyman to the Tory Government. ..There's not an explicit "Vote Labour" in the piece, but notice that she managed to work in Prime Minister Brown's name specifically.
Women like me (for it is a curious fact that lone male parents are generally portrayed as heroes, whereas women left holding the baby are vilified) were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown, and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life.
An easy life. Between 1993 and 1997 I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five. For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help.
The new Labour landslide marked a cessation in government hostilities towards families like mine. The change in tone was very welcome, but substance is, of course, more important than style. Labour had great ambitions for eradicating child poverty and while it succeeded, initially, in reversing the downward trend that had continued uninterrupted under Tory rule, it has not reached its own targets. There remains much more to be done.
This is not to say that there have not been real innovations to help lone-parent families. First, childcare tax credits were introduced by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor, which were a meaningful way of addressing the fact that the single biggest obstacle for lone parents returning to work was not innate slothfulness but the near-impossibility of affording adequate childcare.
I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that (Tory leader David) Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.Just as coincidence this lands right at American tax day. Remember when Joe Biden was mocked for saying it was patriotic to pay taxes?
"No PAC or Washington lobbyist funds.Conlin kicked in $250k herself and raised the other $629,000.
81 percent of donors are Iowans.
78 percent of contributions are $100 or less."
The Johnson County TEA Party rally will be held on Thursday, April 15, 2010, from 11:30a.m. to 1:00p.m. in Iowa City. It will be located on the Pedestrian Mall, at the south end by the fountain and the Sheraton Hotel. In particular, we will be conducting the rally outside the Iowa City office of Second District Congressman Dave Loebsack.That's also next to Capanna so if you forget your tea you can get a cup there. Presumably the fountain is a convenient place to dump it.
The "Tea Party" folks are planning a Tax Day gathering at Representative Loebsack's Office Thursday, April 15, 2010, 11:30-1:00p.m. Iowa City Pedestrian Mall, by the fountain and the Sheraton Iowa City.There, a Fair And Balanced plug for both sides.
Join with others and (in a peaceful non-confrontational way) take our dialog back.
Bring signs, enthusiasm and support our President, our Congressman, and our ideals.
It is possible that the students could once again show up, but only to vote on the one issue on which they have been educated. If that isn’t the case, however, most believe that higher participation by young voters benefits Democrats.I'm still hoping young voters take the rare chance to get the drinking age issue itself on the table, but then that's me and only me. Lynda also raised the possibility that at least us lefties may have Bob Vander Plaats to vote against, which leads me to...
There will be tough contested Senate races in many of those states -- Reid's Nevada, of course, but also California, Colorado, Illinois, Florida, North Carolina, and maybe even Iowa, Washington, and Arizona. Meanwhile, we'll have hot governor races races in California, Iowa, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, New Mexico, and Florida."Maybe even" is as vulnerable as Grassley has been in three decades. And as I noted Saturday in a Register post, the upcoming Supreme Court nomination puts Grassley on the hot seat as he's forced to be a national GOP face again. To quote myself:
Complicating matters a bit more, early speculation indicates that President Obama is likely to again name a woman to the vacancy. Supporters of Grassley’s likely opponent, Roxanne Conlin, are already talking about the “Iowa-Mississippi club” (the only two states never to elect a woman to high office). So there’s that, plus Conlin’s years of legal practice vs. Grassley’s non-lawyer role on Judiciary.
12:00 to 12:30 - Congressman Bruce Braley
12:30 to 1:00 - Congressman Dave Loebsack
2:15 to 3:15 - Words from the Senate Candidates
(Republicans are) closely watching the Democratic primary in District 21, the Waterloo seat held by Kerry Burt, who pleaded guilty to drunken driving last year. If Burt is the nominee, they see an opportunity for one of two Republicans vying for the seat.There's just no way Burt stepping down is anything but good news for Dems, who avoid a nasty primary and move forward with a better candidate, Anesa Kajtazovic.
while the Democrats may lose seats, there won't be a 1994-level wipeout. There aren't as many retirements as in 1994 (where the Dems had 28 open seats), and certainly not as many retirements in unpleasantly red seats (17 of those 1994 retirements were in GOP-leaning seats according to the Cook Political Report's Partisan Voting Index - compared with only 8 facing us in 2010). There are still lots of polls, of the non-Rasmussen variety, giving the Dems an edge in the generic ballot. The DCCC has a sizable financial advantage, and maybe most importantly, the DCCC and its individual members appear acutely aware of the potential danger, unlike in '94, when they seemed to blithely sail into disaster.First of a multi-parter so stay tuned.
Council member Regenia Bailey, who has been the lone no vote against 21-only, said the move was a potentially divisive by casting blame for a larger problem on 19 and 20-year-olds.
"It's not specific to this age group, and I think they're serving as scapegoats for some of the things we can't seem to address," Bailey said.
Moving everything to the left opens up the space on the right nicely, and I would like to experiment in 10.10 with some innovative options there. It's much easier to do that if we make this change now.
This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.Not a democracy? The libertarian Linux world is still chewing on that one, but in the mean time it ain't so hard to just move the buttons yourself. So I did that. Anarchy! Aaaaaaanaaaaaaaaarchyyyyyyyyy!
The real danger is the new software model that is promoted, to the greatest degree, by Apple, and to smaller degree by companies like Amazon with its Kindle product. The software model that is more proprietary than Microsoft and others ever imagined. It controls not only the source of their own system, the protocols and (proprietary) communication standards, but also the whole software platform it delivers together with the hardware that is tightly connected with it.And one harsh verdict on the iPad itself:
Today's iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy.
Given what happened to Romney here last time — and Sen. John McCain’s ability to win the GOP nomination after finishing fourth in the caucuses — can the early front-runner run a slimmed-down Iowa campaign that lowers expectations without at the same time alienating local activists and opinion-makers?So, it seems to be a given that the Mitt won't win here. Insert my standard bit: If Romney had belonged to Huckabee's church, he would have been the nominee.
“I think he should play in Iowa, but he maybe overplayed in the last go-round,” said Branstad, who will play an influential role in the 2012 presidential caucus should he win in November.
He added: “I don’t think you want to run against Iowa, [but] I’m not saying you’ve got to make Iowa the be all to end all.”
This move is likely designed to win over mainly Democratic votes, not Republicans... Toss in Alaska (Begich), which was also partially opened, and you are looking at Louisiana Landrieu, Florida (Bill Nelson), Virginia (Warner and Webb, North Carolina (Hagan) and South Carolina (Graham). As the links embedded in their names show, they are all proponents of offshore drilling. The coastal states with Senators opposed to offshore drilling will not receive any new drilling.Note, in this context, the absence of any West Coast.
Progressive groups can get as mad as they like when the Obama administration abandons them with policy moves like these. However, since President Obama is more popular among the membership of those groups then even the leaders of those groups, it is difficult for them to effectively fight back.The President remains the party's strongest asset, and he's committed to at least the fig leaf of centrism, even though Republicans refuse to play.
Republicans simply have not lost on an issue this big in decades. Media coverage features so many breathless political ups and downs that it's easy to assume each party tastes victory and defeat in equal measure. But as a matter of ideology, these overheated fights take place between the 45-yard lines on a field that conservatives shrewdly tilted to their advantage several decades ago. That President Obama could move the debate to the 40-yard line and win is something the modern GOP has never experienced.I like this on the surface level, which Joe Biden summed up better than anyone, and on the level of this bill is a first down, not a touchdown.
