Last night the U.S. Senate confirmed Stephanie Rose to be a federal judge for the southern district of Iowa by a vote of 89 to 1. Iowa Senators Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley both strongly supported Rose’s nomination. I’ve posted their floor statements after the jump.

Rose will be the first woman to serve as a federal judge in the southern district of Iowa. She was one of three women Harkin recommended for this vacancy last year. Harkin also recommended Rose for the position of U.S. attorney in Iowa’s northern district of Iowa, to which she was confirmed in November 2009.

Rose’s work on the Postville cases in 2008, when she was assistant U.S. attorney for the northern district of Iowa, sparked opposition to her appointment as U.S. attorney and as a federal judge. During her Senate confirmation hearing in March of this year, Rose disavowed any role in devising the legal tactics used against undocumented immigrants swept up in the Postville raids. The U.S. Supreme Court later invalidated the use of aggravated identity theft charges in cases similar to those of the Postville defendants. Harkin defended Rose’s involvement in the Postville cases.

The air war in Iowa’s first Congressional district is fully engaged, with four new television commercials in the last week alone. Three-term Democratic incumbent Bruce Braley started running a spot about veterans last week and went up on the air yesterday with a response to a new ad about Medicare, paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Last week Republican challenger Ben Lange launched his second tv spot, which depicts the national debt as unfair to the next generation.

More details on the new commercials, including videos and transcripts, are after the jump. Bleeding Heartland covered Braley’s opening tv spot here and Lange’s here.  

One of Republican Mitt Romney’s latest television commercials in Iowa asserts that cutting government spending and eliminating the federal deficit will create 130,000 jobs in Iowa. Meanwhile, in states with more military bases and defense sector industry, Romney campaign advertising promises to create hundreds of thousands of jobs by reversing planned cuts in defense spending.

Three days after proudly announcing the largest set of tax incentives Iowa has ever offered to a corporation, Governor Terry Branstad criticized President Barack Obama’s “penchant for trying to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.”

Hunter Oatman-Stanford’s fantastic article for Collectors Weekly on “The Top 10 Most Dangerous Ads” inspired this post. Click through to see some amazing advertisements from the last century: A 1923 paint book for boys and girls, encouraging kids to have “fun with the whole ‘Lead Family’ of products,” 1950s ads encouraging mothers to give 7-Up to young children, 1969 ads promoting sugar as a diet aid (“Sugar just might be the willpower you need to curb your appetite”), and even a 1947 ad proclaiming, “DDT is good for me-e-e!” Oatman-Stanford gives the background on the health impacts of the advertised products.

All topics are welcome in this open thread, particularly memories about idiotic things that were once widely accepted in our culture. No partisan warfare here, please: if you want to talk politics, try to focus on wrongheaded consensus ideas like Iowa’s film tax credit program or the deregulation of the banking sector in the 1980s.

P.S. – I’m not nostalgic for most of the dangerous playground equipment of my childhood, like see-saws and metal monkey bars sets over solid concrete, but I have to agree with the Retro Junk blog, those merry-go-rounds were fun.

The two major-party presidential candidates held rallies yesterday in Iowa’s key Republican and Democratic strongholds. Mitt Romney was in Sioux County, which has voted more than 80 percent Republican in past presidential elections. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in Johnson County, which has delivered big margins to Democrats who won close statewide elections in the past.

Public-sector jobs continue to decline, and private-sector job growth is not nearly strong enough to make a significant dent in the national unemployment rate, according to the latest monthly jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. On the contrary, another recession is well within the range of possibilities for the coming year. Equally worrying, there appears to be no chance of passing another government stimulus package, no matter who wins the presidential election.

President Barack Obama just finished officially accepting the Democratic nomination for president. Normally I am not a fan of his speaking style, but that was one of his best performances in my opinion–better than the celebrated “Yes We Can.” Given how well Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton did earlier this week, I will be surprised if Obama doesn’t get a bump out of this convention. However, I don’t know what the television ratings have been like this week. Far fewer people watched this year’s Republican convention than in 2008.

Any comments about the presidential election are welcome in this thread. I’ll update the post later with more links related to the Iowa delegation and other speeches in the convention hall today. UPDATE: Links and clips are now after the jump.

A bidding war between Iowa and Illinois ended yesterday, as an Egyptian company’s representative stood with Governor Terry Branstad to announce plans for a $1.4 billion fertilizer plant in Lee County. A package of state, federal, and local tax incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars will support the project, costing taxpayers more than $1 million for each of the 165 permanent jobs created.

Here’s a lede I didn’t expect to read in any newspaper: “It can be good to have a nuclear power plant nearby if you have a flood disaster.”

President Bill Clinton is firing up the Democratic crowd in Charlotte. You can’t even tell he is using a teleprompter, in contrast to Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren speech a bit earlier this evening. He is talking about President Barack Obama rather than about himself, in contrast to last week’s Republican convention speech by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

I’ve posted some Clinton-related links after the jump, along with more news about the Iowa delegation. Any comments about the Democratic National Convention or the presidential race are welcome in this thread. UPDATE: Clinton’s speech just ended; he clocked in around 45 minutes. Too long, but well-delivered.

Most people refer to today’s featured wildflower as “evening primrose,” but the name “common evening primrose” distinguishes Oenothera biennis from dozens of other evening primrose species that are native to North America. Common evening primrose blooms all over Iowa from mid- to late summer, along roadsides and bike trails as well as on prairies. Several photos are after the jump, along with a bonus picture of some berries from the nightshade plant Bleeding Heartland discussed in July.

I’ll post a new discussion thread on the Democratic National Convention later this evening. Comments on any other topic are welcome in this open thread.

The latest figures from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office (pdf) show 666,279 active no-party voters statewide, 620,868 active Republicans, and 602,636 active Democrats. That represents slightly larger gains for Democrats than Republicans since the beginning of August. After the jump I’ve posted the latest active voter registration numbers in all 99 Iowa counties, grouped by Congressional district.

Any comments about the 2012 elections in Iowa are welcome in this thread.

The Rothenberg Political Report’s latest rankings of competitive House districts does not include the IA-01 race between incumbent Bruce Braley and challenger Ben Lange. Rothenberg considers the IA-02 contest between incumbent Dave Loebsack and challenger John Archer to be “Democrat favored.” He puts the the “Toss-up/tilt Republican” label on both the IA-03 clash of incumbents Leonard Boswell and Tom Latham and the IA-04 race between incumbent Steve King and challenger Christie Vilsack. Although I haven’t seen internal polling from any of the Congressional races, I doubt that Vilsack has as good a chance of winning as Boswell. True, Boswell can’t keep pace with Latham’s fundraising. But he is an incumbent who’s represented most of the counties in IA-03 before and has outperformed the top of the Democratic ticket in previous presidential elections. He also faces a much smaller GOP voter registration advantage in his district, as you can see below.

A Polk County District Court judge ruled yesterday that the Libertarian nominee for president, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, met the conditions to qualify for the Iowa general election ballot.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan just wrapped up his event at Kirkwood College in Cedar Rapids, the first stop in a two-day swing through Iowa.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Added clips from Ryan’s rally in Adel.

The Democratic National Convention opens tonight in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a tightly-packed schedule of speakers. Broadcast television networks will show only the last hour of prime-time speeches: Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, Congressional candidate Joaquin Castro of Texas, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, Elaine Brye (a “military mother with four children serving in different branches of the armed forces”), and First Lady Michelle Obama.

O’Malley and several other possible future Democratic candidates for president are meeting with Iowa’s delegation in Charlotte this week. Details and other convention-related news are after the jump.

Voting for the so-called “failed stimulus” has become a stock phrase in Republican attack ads against Congressional Democrats. But as Bleeding Heartland has discussed many times before, the “Great Recession” would have been more devastating without the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

State budget cuts are a huge drag on the economy. Follow me after the jump for a picture that’s worth a thousand words on how a favorite conservative punching bag helped soften the recession’s impact in Iowa.

Hope the Bleeding Heartland community has been enjoying the long holiday weekend. This is an open thread. I’ve enclosed some Labor Day-related links after the jump, including an excerpt from the Iowa Policy Project’s recent report on wage theft, which “deprives low-wage Iowa workers of an estimated $600 million, deprives state and local government of revenue, and puts law-abiding businesses at a competitive disadvantage.”

Getting out the vote early was a major theme of President Barack Obama’s campaign rallies in Urbandale and Sioux City yesterday. Democratic candidates for other offices need a strong early vote as well, but there’s no sign the president is concerned about electing Democrats up and down the ticket.

Mitt Romney formally accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president last night. A surprise appearance by actor and director Clint Eastwood overshadowed Romney’s speech.