Our “effective” Democratic leaders in the Iowa House and Senate have pushed through the Livestock Odor Research and Air Modeling Study. The Senate passed the bill late last night.

Leigh Adcock of the Iowa Farmers Union explains why this is a “seriously flawed piece of legislation”:

Research has already been done on cost effective ways to mitigate odor.  Included are better siting methods, and the use of biofilters and covers on lagoons.  Iowa’s taxpayers should not be required to fund another round of studies on proven technologies when the legislature has not shown any willingness to act on the information already gathered from previous studies.  Instead we should require producers to implement what we already know.

Minnesota has enacted ambient air quality standards that limit hydrogen sulfide to 0.05 parts per million and is working on limiting ammonia emissions.   Missouri, Nebraska, and Colorado regulate sulfur emissions and emissions of other types.

[…]

Ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, two odor causing gases emitted from confined feedlot operations, are known to cause serious respiratory problems.

The bacteria found within particulates emitted from livestock operations create lung inflammation that leads to non-allergic asthma.  Twenty-five percent of those who work in confined feedlot operations have some form of respiratory disease, 10% higher than the United States working population as a whole.

Rekha Basu’s latest column for the Des Moines Register showed how many times the Iowa legislature has blocked action to alleviate the pollution caused by CAFOs.

Most of her examples come from the years when Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislature. It is discouraging to see that the livestock industry continues to trump public-health and environmental concerns even under Democratic control.

In the Iowa Senate, some lawmakers including Joe Bolkcom (D, Iowa City) offered good amendments, but those were rejected on a voice vote, so that we don’t even have a record of how individuals voted.

I do have the breakdown of how senators voted on the final version of the odor-study bill, and I’ve put that after the jump. It was not a party-line vote. If your senator voted against this waste of taxpayer money, please give him or her a call to say thanks.

I’m trying to dig up the final vote for the Iowa House as well and will update this diary with that information when I find it.

If I were an adviser to Governor Culver, I’d tell him to veto this bill. It’s the right thing to do on the merits. We simply don’t need more study of this problem. Spending $23 million over five years on more study wastes our money and kicks the can down the road. Using state funds to implement the measures that are working in other states would be a wiser use of taxpayer dollars.

The odor-study bill is a far cry from what the governor proposed to the legislature concerning this issue in January.

Finally, a veto would be cheered by environmentalists who are disappointed that the governor hasn’t made it a priority to push for local control over the siting of CAFOs (also known as agricultural zoning at the county level). Culver has said he is for local control, but he didn’t put much muscle behind that during the 2007 or 2008 legislative sessions.

Noneed4thneed noticed that Steve King (who represents Iowa’s fifth district in Congress) spoke at the GOP’s second district convention last weekend. He wonders whether King might be weighing a run for governor in 2010:

http://commoniowan.blogspot.co…

All I can say is, may it be so.

I’ve been hoping that King would get bored with being in the minority party and retire from Congress. In all likelihood the GOP would hold on to the seat, but maybe they would elect someone less embarrassing.

If Chet Culver running for an open governor’s seat beat a Congressman from eastern Iowa by 100,000 votes, I’m guessing that as an incumbent running against a Congressman from western Iowa, Culver would win by 200,000 votes or more.

This morning I saw a friend who is an Edwards delegate to the third district convention coming up this Saturday. He was complaining that he’d received no direction from the Edwards campaign, or from prominent Iowans for Edwards, about what he should do.

Before the county conventions in March, the Edwards campaign did almost nothing to shore up support from delegates elected on January 3 at the precinct caucuses (besides an e-mail from Roxanne Conlin and Rob Tully that went out two days before the county conventions, urging delegates to stick with Edwards).

Today Lynda Waddington reported at Iowa Independent that

Yesterday, Iowa delegates that are pledged to Clinton and those who remain pledged to the suspended presidential run of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards received a full-page, full-color reminder of the upcoming Democratic district conventions.

Click the link to see the visual of the mailer, but here is a key excerpt aimed at the Edwards delegates:

“John Edwards ran his campaign with compassion and conviction and lifted this campaign with his deep concerns for the daily lives of the American people. He and I both put forth universal health care plans, not because it was easy, but because health care for every man, woman and child is vital to giving every American family the opportunity for the American dream.

Together, let’s make universal health care a reality. I would be honored to have your support at your Congressional District Convention.”

It will be interesting to see if this works. At the county conventions, most of the Edwards delegates who switched moved toward Obama. I know of some like my friend who favor Clinton, though, partly because the Clinton health care plan is closer to what Edwards proposed.

One of the worst rulings the Roberts Court has handed down was in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. The five-member conservative majority ruled that the plaintiff lost her right to file a discrimination complaint related to unequal pay because she didn’t file the lawsuit within 180 days of the first discriminatory action by her employer.

Never mind that Lilly Ledbetter didn’t know for many years that she was being short-changed by her employer, which was paying male colleagues substantially more for doing the same job.

The U.S. House passed a bill seeking to remedy this egregious ruling last July. The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

would put into law a clarification – wage disparity based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability is not a one-time occurrence. Every discriminatory paycheck represents an ongoing violation. Employees would still have 180 days to challenge the discrimination, but from the last check, not the first.

You would think everyone would recognize the value of this bill. Does it make sense for the courts to grant legal immunity to employers that manage to keep their discriminatory behavior a secret for many months? Or does it make sense to allow employees to file a lawsuit within 180 days of the time they have learned about the violations?

The U.S. Senate took up this bill today, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama took time off from the presidential campaign to go back to Washington and vote for it.

But John McCain skipped the vote. Though 56 Senators voted in favor, Republicans were able to block it with a filibuster. McCain confirmed today that he would have opposed this bill if he’d been in the Senate chamber:

“I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems,” the expected GOP presidential nominee told reporters. “This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.”

Right, he’s “all in favor” of equal pay–he just doesn’t want women who are denied equal pay to be able to seek legal remedy for that discrimination.

Clearly wage discrimination doesn’t bother McCain nearly as much as the idea that we might have more women filing lawsuits against employers who have been cheating them for years.

If you know any women who might lean toward McCain because they think he is a reasonable moderate, let them know about his stand on this issue.

The Polk County Democrats forwarded via e-mail an open letter signed by many well-known Democratic attorneys, including Polk County Attorney John Sarcone, prominent plaintiff’s attorney Roxanne Conlin, superb defense attorney Alfredo Parrish, Iowa Democratic Party chairman Scott Brennan, and past IDP chairman Gordon Fischer.

I agree with them that Polk County needs to renovate its courthouse, which is unsafe and inadequate in many ways.

I will be voting yes on April 29.

From Local Party Activists:

BUILDING FOR JUSTICE VOTE YES ON APRIL 29TH

TO OUR DEMOCRAT FRIENDS:

Our courthouse is the last bastian of direct democracy.  It is the place where any citizen with any complaint can have their issue heard and resolved.  It is also the place where criminal justice is delivered.  Access to our courthouse is the cornerstone of our republic.  Access requires a safe and secure environment, free from intimidation.  

Our Polk County Courthouse is more than 100 years old.  It is overcrowded, unsafe, and without adequate security.  The condition of our courthouse negatively impacts the delivery of justice and access guaranteed to all.

We must do something now.  A plan to fix our problem will come before the voters on April 29th.  Please join us in supporting the courthouse referendum.  The project has been carefully studied.  It is reasonable and sensible in scope, it fully restores and utilizes our historic courthouse, and solves our problem now and for future generations.

Let’s come together as our community did over 100 years ago to solve this problem and create a legacy for generations to come.  Justice deserves nothing less.

Vote “YES” on the Polk County Courthouse Referendum on April 29th.  For further information visit: wwwbuildingforjustice.org.

Marc Beltrame

Ray Blase

Scott Brennan

Roxanne Conlin

Guy Cook

Gordon Fischer

Tom Henderson

Bill McCarthy

Al Parrish

John Sarcone

Tom Whitney

Ed Fallon’s campaign put out a press release yesterday challenging Congressman Leonard Boswell to agree to debate him. I’ve put the whole release after the jump, but here is a key excerpt:

Fallon has received invitations to eight debates and has accepted them all. “Unfortunately,” Fallon said, “Boswell has declined debate invitations from WHO Radio, the League of Women Voters, and Women for a Stronger America. Some of these groups have issued multiple invitations since February and have yet to receive any response from the Boswell campaign.”

“Clearly, with our economy in shambles, skyrocketing gas prices and no end in sight to the Iraq War, voters want to know how Boswell and I differ in our plans to address these and other pressing issues,” Fallon said.

Debate organizers have told Fallon’s staff that the Boswell campaign insists the Congressman is too busy in Washington to participate. “That’s puzzling,” Fallon said, “since the Congressman made time for the Drake Relays Parade this weekend and appears able to attend many fundraisers. I think in this case, actions speak louder than words.”

I contacted Boswell’s campaign to find out if he had indeed cited his busy Washington schedule as an excuse not to debate Fallon.

Press secretary Betsy Shelton e-mailed me today to say, “We are currently working with KCCI and the Des Moines Register to see if we can find a date that is mutually acceptable.”

Here’s hoping the candidates will debate at least once or twice before June 3.

Fallon’s press release also responds to recent direct-mail pieces from the Boswell campaign highlighting Fallon’s support for Ralph Nader in 2000. Click “there’s more” to read the whole thing.

The Polk County Democrats sent out an e-mail request from the Iowa House Democrats. Someone who will be managing a Democratic House candidate’s campaign is coming to Des Moines for training next week and will need housing in Polk County the nights of April 29 and 30.

If you have a spare room or fold-out couch for a campaign manager next week, please call Mehgan Lee Operations Manager/Deputy Finance Director for the Iowa House Democrats:

Work: (515) 974-1702

Her cell phone number was also in the e-mail, but I’m not going to post that on a public blog.

Looks like Hillary is winning this thing by about 10 percent, 55-45 with 94 percent reporting.

If you just consider Pennsylvania’s demographics, that isn’t too surprising. However, we’re coming out of a month in which she was massively outspent by Obama, and the media narrative has been that she is unlikely to win the nomination now.

The official memo from the Obama campaign notes that Clinton failed to make significant gains in the pledged-delegate count. True, but what does it say about Obama that he couldn’t close the deal despite spending more than his opponent and having generally more favorable media coverage?

As a memo from the Clinton campaign pointed out earlier today, Obama spent a lot of money on negative advertising and negative direct-mail pieces in Pennsylvania. He still couldn’t make the sale.

I like the way Todd Beeton (a Clinton voter in the California primary) reacted to the spin from Obama-leaning analysts at MSNBC:

I have to say I was amused to hear Keith Olbermann announce with child-like glee at 8:01pm that the race was too close to call and how that had to make the Clinton campaign nervous. The subtext of his enthusiasm was clearly shadenfreude that Hillary Clinton was going to underperform expectations. I thought to myself: where the hell has he been? Time after time exit polls overestimate Barack Obama’s performance, not to mention that on election nights past, namely Feb 5th and March 4th, neither California nor Ohio, solid Clinton wins both, was called for her right away either. And sure enough, 93% in and she’s still up by the magic 10%.

Then just a few minutes ago, Keith asked an uncomfortable Tom Brokaw whether it is wise for Hillary Clinton to be Bush to Obama’s Gore in Bush v. Gore.

Riiight.

Seriously, at what point are these guys going to start holding their own candidate accountable for why this thing is still going on instead of complaining that Hillary is competing in contests that she is winning.

But Todd, didn’t you know that the Clintons are evil, and everything bad that happens to Obama is orchestrated by them?

I am glad that Clinton didn’t listen to the Obama fan clubbers who demanded that she drop out a month ago. There was record-breaking turnout today in a state that has not influenced the nominating process in recent history. Oh yeah, and Democrats made huge gains in voter registration in a critical swing state this past month.

In other news, a Democrat almost won a special election in Mississippi’s deep-red first Congressional district. Looking like a great year to be a Democrat!

My husband dumped this in the recycling bin today, thinking it was the same mailing we got from Congressman Leonard Boswell’s campaign yesterday. But no, although it uses the same color scheme and the same “scary font,” this is indeed a separate mailing emphasizing Ed Fallon’s support for Ralph Nader in 2000.

I’ve transcribed the piece that arrived today after the jump.

The Madison County Democrats are leading the way with the first 4th District Congressional Candidate Forum!

This forum is open to the public.  Press and Bloggers are encouraged to attend.

I sincerely hope to meet many of you there!

Best Regards,

William J. Meyers

An action alert went out on the Iowa Sierra Club list this morning:

From: Lyle Krewson

Subject: HF2688 up for Senate debate

The Senate Majority Leader  gave the list of bills for today. It includes HF

2688, the Odor Control Bill–please contact your State Senator now!

We do have amendments being offered but no amendments were included during

House debate last week.

ACTION NEEDED:

We need you to contact your State Senator to vote NO on HF2688. Below is a

sample email that you may personalize–always be sure to include your name

and mailing address on an email to a Legislator.

You may find your Iowa State Senator by going to this weblink and using your

address or 9-digit ZIP code: http://www.legis.state.ia.us/F…

If you wish to call your State Senator, the switchboard # is: 515-281-3371.

The rest of the alert, which includes more details about this bill and some talking points for you to use, is after the jump.

What’s going to happen in Pennsylvania today?

Markos predicts a Clinton victory by 8 percent and more than 200,000 votes:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…

Obama supporter poblano backs up his similar prediction with some interesting analysis:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com…

If Obama keeps this one close (within 5 percent), it will be viewed as a blow to Clinton. If she crushes him like she did in Ohio, it will not be enough to win her the nomination, but it will increase doubts about Obama’s ability to close the deal with Democrats. He massively outspent Clinton over the past six weeks in Pennsylvania.

I think Clinton will win, but not in a blowout: 53-47.

Put your predictions in the comments section.

Tuesday, April 22:

Trash Pick-Up on the Downtown Streetscapes & Trails in Des Moines, 1-4 pm. This clean-up event is organized by Operation Downtown, Des Moines Parks and Recreation, and Riverfront Development Authority. For more information on how you can make a difference or to request a reservation form, email ParksVolunteer@dmgov.org or call (515) 208- 0277.

Earthapalooza at the Iowa City Public Library, 6 pm to 9 pm (Details are at the end of this post.)

Grinnell College student rally at the South Forum Lounge, 7 pm (Ed Fallon will be there.)

Wednesday, April 23:

Democracy for America brings back “Night School”:

Join us as we kick off the 2008 semester with Writing a Field Plan on Wednesday April 23 starting at 8:30pm Eastern.

Our special guest trainer will be Helen Strain, from the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood. Helen will provide expert advice and answer your questions as we outline how to write a campaign blueprint for victory: The Field Plan.

RSVP now: www.dfalink.com/fieldplan

I’ve put more details about that event after the jump.

Thursday, April 24:

Green drinks at the Mars Cafe, 2318 University Avenue in Des Moines, starting at 5:30 pm (Ed Fallon will be there.)

House party for Ed Fallon at Chet’s Firestation, 1041 8th St. in Des Moines, starting at 7 pm. “If you want to join us, call or email Jamie at jamie@fallonforcongress or (515) 822-4284.”

Saturday, April 26:

Sustainable Ecological Economic Development (S.E.E.D.) Mid-Term Conference at North High School in Davenport, 9 am to 4 pm. I’ve put the press release about this event after the jump.

House party for Ed Fallon at the home of Rachel Tone and Bob Schulte, 726 Polk Blvd Des Moines, 5 pm to 7:30 pm. “Come join us for live piano music with Sam Salamone and wine/cheese. Also for every $50 donation you will get a raffle ticket and a chance to win door prizes of the hosts’ art and jewelry! RSVP Jamie at (515) 822-4284.”

Note: I can’t find details about house parties or other campaign appearances on Boswell’s campaign website, but if someone can point me to a place where I can find those, I will start including them in my posts about upcoming events.  

I’ve mentioned before that it’s scandalous for the Washington press corps to cover for John McCain’s legendary anger management problem after the way they collaborated in making Howard Dean and Al Gore look angry and unstable.

Washington Post reporter Michael Leahy wrote this long article on McCain’s temperament for the paper’s Sunday edition. Read the whole thing. It begins with an anecdote about McCain blowing up at Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley in 1992, and Republicans who know McCain share many other stories as well.

One of the most appalling discusses McCain’s behavior after an election-night victory party for Arizona Republicans in 1986:

After McCain finished his speech, he returned to a suite in the hotel, sat down in front of a TV and viewed a replay of his remarks, angry to discover that the speaking platform had not been erected high enough for television cameras to capture all of his face — he seemed to have been cut off somewhere between his nose and mouth.

A platform that had been adequate for taller candidates had not taken into account the needs of the 5-foot-9 McCain, who left the suite and went looking for a man in his early 20s named Robert Wexler, the head of Arizona’s Young Republicans, which had helped make arrangements for the evening’s celebration. Confronting Wexler in a hotel ballroom, McCain exploded, according to witnesses who included Jon Hinz, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. McCain jabbed an index finger in Wexler’s chest.

“I told you we needed a stage,” he screamed, according to Hinz. “You incompetent little [expletive]. When I tell you to do something, you do it.”

Hinz recalls intervening, placing his 6-foot-6 frame between the senator-elect and the young volunteer. “John, this is not the time or place for this,” Hinz remembers saying to McCain, who fumed that he hadn’t been seen clearly by television viewers. Hinz recollects finally telling McCain: “John, look, I’ll follow you out on stage myself next time. I’ll make sure everywhere you go there is a milk crate for you to stand on. But this is enough.”

McCain spun around on his heels and left. He did not talk to Hinz again for several years. In 2000, as Hinz recalls, he appeared briefly on the Christian Broadcasting Network to voice his worries about McCain’s temperament on televangelist Pat Robertson’s show, “The 700 Club.” Hinz’s concerns have since grown with reports of incidents in and out of Arizona.

We need to educate Americans who think McCain is a reasonable moderate about this side of his personality.

Also worth reading is Elizabeth Edwards’ latest blog post on McCain’s inadequate health care plan.

After she criticized his plan this month, McCain went on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos to call her criticism a “cheap shot.” Elizabeth Edwards had noted that McCain benefited from government health care coverage his whole life, but McCain pointed out that he didn’t have access to good health care while he was a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam.

If McCain was hoping she would feel too bad to respond, he’s out of luck. She points out some important facts:

Sen. McCain noted that he was not receiving government health care for the six years he was in captivity. That is true. But it has nothing to do with my point – which is that the problem with Sen. McCain’s health care plan is not how it affects us — but how it affects the tens of millions of Americans with preexisting conditions who, unlike Sen. McCain and myself, do not have the resources to pay for quality health care.

That is not a cheap shot, it is a potentially life and death question for tens of million of Americans. And it is a question Sen. McCain must address.

McCain’s health care plan is centered around the idea that we’d be better off if more Americans bought health coverage on their own, rather than receiving it through a job or government program. But maybe since he has never purchased insurance in the individual market, he does not know the challenge it presents for Americans with preexisting conditions.

A recent study showed that nearly nine out of every ten people seeking individual coverage on the private insurance market never got it. Insurers will disqualify you for just taking certain medicines because of the possibility of future costs, including common drugs as Lipitor, Zocor, Nexium, and Advair. People who have had cancer are denied coverage and those who get cancer run the risk of simply being dropped by their insurer for any excuse that can be found. And insurers make it a practice to deny coverage to individuals in high risk occupations, such as firefighting, lumber work, telecom installation, and pretty much anything more risky than working in an office.

Read her whole post. She also has a go at McCain’s strange suggestion that he might create a “special Medicaid trust fund” to help cover people with preexisting conditions.

We should go after McCain now–not wait for the Democratic nomination to be settled.

Last month, while writing about Iowa getting an “F” grade for its open-records law, I commented:

The Register’s editorial board writes a lot about open-records law, and I give them credit for that. Unfortunately, under Gannett’s ownership, the Register hasn’t devoted nearly enough resources to solid investigative reporting.

I wish the editors were assigning more reporters to dig into the information that’s already publicly available.

Former Register editorial page editor Gil Cranberg develops that thought in an op-ed for the independent weekly Cityview, which asks why journalists did not uncover wrongdoing at the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium (CIETC):

The “CIETC scandal” was truly scandalous – as we’re reminded by the trials that kicked off last week – but it’s a mistake to blame it on a lack of “transparency” or to make it a poster child for Senate File 2378. The overpayments to CIETC executives were hiding in plain sight. The state auditor found them, and made a fuss, without having to issue subpoenas. For all of the ink spilled about CIETC I’m not aware of any that was used to explain how and why the press missed the huge overpayments until many months later when the auditor cried foul.

Sure, it helps to have strong laws to let the sunshine in. But inexperienced citizens can only do so much to uncover wrongdoing. If sunshine laws are to be effective, they have to be implemented by a press with the staff and space to make people sit up and take notice.

Unfortunately, the press is deep into retrenchment mode. Notice how page widths have narrowed? That means less space for news coverage. It’s the rare paper that trumpets how many fewer reporters, copy editors and editors it has, but loss of staff is unmistakable.

In the same issue of Cityview, the author of the “Civic Skinny” column delights in noting that the Des Moines Register just got shut out of the Pulitzers again,

as it has been every year since 1991. What’s more, alack, no Gannett newspaper won a Pulitzer – or was even a finalist this year.

If you want to win a Pulitzer, it helps to put some resources into investigative reporting.

I still don’t have any information about Congressman Leonard Boswell’s internal polling, and six weeks before the June 3 primary, there are still no public polls on this race. However, it’s notable that the Boswell campaign has sent out a negative direct-mail piece focusing on Ed Fallon’s support for Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign.

My husband and I received the latest mailing today. Most of the text is in a bizarre font, in which the letters are not aligned properly and each letter looks as if a tiny piece has been broken off or torn away. The effect is to make the text look unstable, somewhat like a ransom note.

I know nothing about graphic design and have no idea what this kind of font is called. For lack of a better term, I’m calling it the “scary font” in this post.

After the jump I’ve described the visuals and transcribed the text of this mailer.

Every four years, the Republican Party sets out to brand the Democratic presidential candidate as an out-of-touch elitist, and it’s frustrating how well this strategy seems to work for them. I am old enough to remember how they made Michael Dukaksis, the son of middle-class Greek immigrants, out to be more elitist than George H.W. Bush, the son of a senator who grew up in a very privileged environment, attending elite private schools from a very young age.

Progressive Media USA is trying to turn the tables by releasing this web video about “The Fabulous Life of John McCain”:

I have mixed feelings about this strategy. I don’t think we want to say don’t vote for McCain because he married a wealthy woman and has multiple fancy residences.

On the other hand, it is pretty damning to watch video clips of McCain advising struggling Americans to work a second job or skip a vacation, when we’ve just learned that McCain has an American Express “black centurion” card, which is apparently reserved for people who spend more than $250,000 on it each year.

I also like the clip of McCain answering a question about our economic problems by saying, “A lot of this is psychological.” The video closes by asking viewers how McCain can solve our problems if he can’t understand them.

What do you think about this video and/or the general strategy of trying to brand McCain as a super-wealthy elitist?

Every once in a while on one of the national political blogs, a supporter of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards will assert that Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses by busing in thousands of ineligible voters from out of state.

As any regular reader of this blog knows, I am no fan of Obama, and I’ve strongly criticized some aspects of the Iowa caucus system.

But I have yet to encounter any serious observer of Iowa politics who believes Obama won Iowa by cheating. I have been talking to many volunteers for the Clinton and Edwards campaigns in Iowa, and a few staffers, while researching a future diary on how those candidates might have beaten Obama here. Literally no one I’ve talked with has claimed that Obama did not legitimately win the caucuses.

No doubt there were some people from out of state who fraudulently registered to vote here on caucus night. I’ve heard that may have been a particular problem in some areas of Scott County. But I haven’t seen any evidence that the Obama campaign orchestrated any fraud, and there’s no way the cheaters were numerous enough to account for Obama’s margin of victory here.

If you don’t believe me, read this story from the Des Moines Register: Caucuses drew few ineligible voters:

The Register review of voter registration data from all 99 counties reveals a low rate of new voter applications filled out on caucus night by people whose addresses later could not be verified.

Only 1.5 percent of the new voter identification cards mailed to voters who registered on caucus night were returned to county auditors as undeliverable. That’s an indication that the vast majority of new caucus-night voters had a bona fide address in Iowa.

State officials say the low error rate is impressive, especially since caucus-night turnout vastly exceeded expectations and overwhelmed local party officials around the state.

The other argument I hear from the occasional conspiracy theorist on a different blog is that Obama’s campaign bused in large numbers of students from out of state. First, that would have affected turnout in a relatively small number of Iowa’s 1,800 precincts.

Second, as long as those students attend Iowa colleges and live in state most of the year, I have no problem with a campaign helping them get back to their campuses in early January. What’s the qualitative difference between that and my giving someone in my neighborhood a ride to the caucus if he or she can’t drive?

The caucuses never should have been scheduled during the winter vacation of most colleges anyway.  

On Friday my husband and I received the latest direct-mail piece from Congressman Leonard Boswell’s campaign. Like his recent mailings about the economy and the Iraq War, this piece portrays Boswell as a fighter.

It’s not very subtle, with five references to Boswell “taking on” the opposition and three references to him fighting or not being afraid of a fight.

I’ve described the layout of the four-page mailer and transcribed its text after the jump.

I’ve just read this wonderful feature in the Sunday Register about Ronald Autry and his parents, Jim Autry and former Lieutenant Governor Sally Pederson.

The article discusses Ronald Autry’s education and the steps he and his parents took to help him learn to live independently as an adult. It also talks about his parents’ role in creating a new program at the University of Iowa:

The REACH program – Realizing Educational and Career Hopes – is interviewing people who hope to be among the inaugural class of 25 students. It’s only the second program at a major public university in the United States; the other started last fall at UCLA.

“This is the new frontier for special education,” director Dennis C. Harper says.

Students with multiple disabilities will be integrated into the student body, live in residence halls, take classes, do laundry, manage their money.

And learn to fall and get up, just like any young adult.

This sounds like a great program, and I congratulate everyone who helped get it going. It required private fundraising as well as a commitment from the university.

The article reminded me that I haven’t blogged yet about April being Autism Awareness Month. Since becoming a mother I’ve gotten to know several moms of children with autism. It’s a spectrum disorder that manifests in many ways, and most likely has many different causes.

One thing I’ve learned from my friends and acquaintances is that early intervention is extremely important for children with autism. Parents are understandably reluctant to have their children labeled, but if tuned-in parents are genuinely concerned about their child’s development, it’s better to seek out a diagnosis as soon as possible.

Some children with autism respond very well to a special gluten-free/casein-free diet, or extra doses of vitamin B-6 with magnesium, or extensive speech and occupational therapy. I know of some families who have seen so much improvement that their children were able to eventually lose their autism diagnosis.

Not only are the treatment options more likely to work better at a younger age, but a diagnosis may be needed before parents can access some of the state and local services for children with autism.

Lots of resources for families affected by autism can be found on the websites of Autism Speaks and the Autism Research Institute.

However, it’s worth noting that some autistics are offended by the idea that autism is a “disease” that should be “cured”; they want services to support autistics without trying to make their brains function “normally.” The Autism Speaks organization has been particularly criticized by these advocates of “neurodiversity”.

Daily Kos diarist plf515 (who is writing a fantastic series on the Congressional races, by the way) has a learning disability “in the same ballpark as Asperger’s,” which is on the autism spectrum. Last year he wrote a good diary: A little bit special: Things not to say to LD people (or their parents).

I can’t resist ending this diary with plf515’s favorite joke about Asperger’s:

A guy is flying in a hot air balloon, and he’s lost.  He lowers himself over a field and calls to a guy “Can you tell me where I am and where I’m headed?”

“Sure.  You’re at 41 degrees 2 minutes and 14 seconds North, 144 degrees 4 minute and 19 seconds East; you’re at an altitude of 762 meters above sea level, and right now you’re hovering, but you were on a vector of 234 degrees at 12 meters per second”

“Amazing! Thanks!  By the way, do you have Asperger’s Syndrome?”

“I do! How did you know that?”

“Because everything you said is true, it’s much more detail than I need, and you told me in a way that’s no use to me at all.”

“Huh.  Are you a clinical psychologist?”

“I am, but how the heck did you know that??”

“You don’t know where you are.  You don’t know where you’re going.  You got where you are by blowing hot air.  You put labels on people after asking a few questions, and you’re in exactly the same spot you were 5 minutes ago, but now, somehow, it’s my fault!