[Update: Today we learned that Rep. Jim Marshall of Georgia, like Rep. Boswell a Blue Dog Democrat, has expressed support for HR 811 even without the unfunded mandate amendment. The bill will not get to the floor until Friday, so there is time to contact Rep. Boswell, and be sure to tell him about Rep. Marshall!]

HR 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, is getting a vote this week. Passage of the bill is essential to a verifiable 2008 election. We need voter-verified paper records and random mandatory audits by 2008!

There is a potential amendment to the bill that needs to be defeated. An “unfunded mandate” amendment could be introduced that would delay the 2008 deadline for paper records and audits.  This amendment is unnecessary. HR 811 now allows states and counties to purchase less expensive paper-trail printers for the 2008 election. And last spring Iowa passed funding for upgrades that meet the 2008 requirements of the bill (see line 10-21). The bill is probably going to the floor on Thursday so today is the day to act.

**Call Congressman Boswell TODAY at 202-225-3806 to tell him to oppose the unfunded mandate amendment to HR 811!**

More on the flip.

Iowa True Blue is back and better than ever.  Especially this post.  Just letting you know in case you, like me, had abandoned it when it wasn't updated for months.

Not really, but it is entertaining watching Kos from DailyKos become further and further unhinged.  The latest?  Going apopleptic over a Bill Richardson joke.  Honestly, I don't know if his heart is going to make it through this election cycle. 

I'm trying to come up with a breakdown of the size of unions in Iowa, along with their endorsement history.  Here is what I have so far, but it might not be 100% accurate.  Unions report their size using different metrics to fluff up their apparent importance.  I've divided their reports into four categories – Membership, Employees Represented, Active and Retired Employees, and Families.  Because of the Right to Work (for less) law in Iowa, the membership is always going to be the smallest of these numbers, and probably the most important.  (Active and retired members would be helpful too, but no one reports that.)

Of course, it is not all that unlikely that some of the membership numbers are misrepresented, as well.  Still, this is a pretty good rough approximation of the most important labor unions in Iowa, at least for the top 5 or so, their sizes, and their track records.

If you can help me fill in the blanks, please email me at simonrstevenson@gmail.com.

(Inspired by this post from Open Left on the national breakdown.) 

A while back I put up a post about the different attitude toward disagreement on political blogs and non-political blogs. I noted that

One surprising lesson I've learned is that people take offense much more easily on parenting blogs than at places like Daily Kos and MyDD.

Well, in the past few days I have gotten myself banned at a blog for the first time ever. It was Jess's Christian parenting/simple living blog Making Home, where I had been commenting for a few months. Jess is one of those bloggers who moderates comments not to screen out spam but to screen out views she considers “personal attacks” or intended to lead her readers astray.

I had tangled with the blogger before, resulting in her censoring my comments, but the last straw for her was the thread below this post, in which she made all kinds of ridiculous assertions about evil society vs. perfect Christian womanhood. She did post my first comment, under which she commented that in the south they have a saying: if you throw a rock over a fence, it's the hit dog that hollers.

Meaning that if I objected to her absurd stereotypes about women who don't share her values, my disagreement is proof that she must be right and must have struck a nerve.

I tried to respond to her (and to her husband, who fancies himself a real Biblical scholar) several more times, but never made it through her editorial screen again.

Elsewhere on the thread, I noticed that Jess, her husband and several of her readers tag-teamed to attack “Christine,” who had previously identified herself on the blog as a terminally ill theology student who had felt Jesus Christ's healing power in her own life. Christine's version of Christian faith was insufficiently judgmental and narrow-minded for Jess. I felt bad for her, but when I tried to post a comment supporting her, of course Jess did not let it through.

I don't post this in any effort to drum up a blogswarm, because there's no point–Jess would never let any of those comments through either. 

But I did find it amusing that after years of participating in all kinds of arguments at Daily Kos and MyDD, handing out and receiving fewer than a dozen troll ratings during all of that time, I managed to get banned from one of these non-political blogs in a matter of months. It's amazing how thin-skinned some of these people are.

Freeganism.

Do you know what it is? The definition and link to the blog where I learned about it are after the jump. 

Have you learned any new words lately?

Iowa,  Nevada,  New Hampshire and  South  Carolina Call on
Democratic Presidential Candidates to Sign Campaign  Pledge

Des  Moines, Las Vegas, Concord, Columbia  – The Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina Democratic Parties joined  together today in releasing a pledge that calls on the Presidential candidates  to preserve the traditional role of retail politics, socioeconomic and ethnic  diversity early in the nominating process.

The pledge, a one-page document that the early states  are asking the Presidential candidates to sign, respects the work done by the  DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee in 2006. The Committee created a pre-window  allowing for early contests in only Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina. This calendar was approved by the full DNC over a  year ago.

As Chairs of the four pre-window Democratic State  parties, we believe recent actions by a few states have sought to create  upheaval in the approved calendar and dismantle the thoughtful and deliberate  work previously agreed upon. As a party, we owe it to the people working  diligently to elect the next Democratic President of the  United  States  to conduct a sensible and timely nominating process, one that has already been  established.

“I believe the pledge we asked the Presidential  candidates to sign sends a strong message from  Iowa and our early-state companions that the pre-window  must be respected,” said Scott Brennan, Iowa Democratic Party State Chair. “We  need to bring order, predictability and common sense to the presidential  nominating calendar and focus on electing a President who will deal with the  ongoing war in Iraq, healthcare and renewable energy, instead of  focusing on selecting dates to hold our nominating  contests.”

Attached to this release is the letter sent to all  the Democratic Presidential candidates along with the pledge the  Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina Democratic Parties are asking the  candidates to sign.

In case you're wondering or have heard wrong, I checked with campaigsn that Clinton, Richardson, AND Obama are all returning Norman Hsu's donations.  The other interesting part of that story is all the donations he bundled from people who realistically wouldn't be able to afford the levels they were giving at.  Campaigns can't be expected to investigate every donor, though, and if and when more information comes out it seems clear that they are ready to do the right thing.

Of course, the mere fact that it is impossible for some people to contribute even a fraction of what others can seems more like an indictment of the system than of the donors.

Chase Martyn over at Iowa Independent notices Mike Huckabee climbing the charts in the latest ARG poll.  ARG is usually total crap, but this particular result is corroborated by a recent poll by the ONE campaign as well.  With Fred Thompson tanking before he even officially announces, and Huckabee going negative on President Bush, is he the Republican Howard Dean?

About fucking time.

Interestingly, the AP quotes Republican Senator Ron Wieck, a leading contender for Senate Minority Leader.

Here's the decision courtesy of KCCI.  The key quote:

The court concludes that there are no genuine issues of material fact and that Plaintiffs [the six homosexual couples] are entitled to judgement as a matter of law but Defendant is not.  Because 595.2(1) violates Plaintiff's due process and equal protection rights for the aforementioned reasons including, but not limited to, the absence of a rational relationship to the achievement of any legitimate governmental interest, the Court concludes it is unconstitutional and invalid.

I only have time for a quick-hit–head over to Open Left for Chris Bowers' analysis of the state of the race, including new polls from ARG and Time magazine:

http://www.openleft….

Chris has an easy-to-read chart. ARG, which has shown Clinton ahead in Iowa all year, has Clinton 28, Obama 23, Edwards 20, Richardson 13.

Time has Edwards 29, Clinton 24, Obama 22, Richardson 11. 

ARG seems to be polling a broader sample of Iowans, and I think they are polling too many people who have no chance in hell of showing up on caucus night.

That said, anyone would have to agree that it is very tight in Iowa now. If the polls stay like this up until January, no one will have any idea who is going to win. Too much depends on how candidates' support is spread around the state and who leads among second choices.

Not Iowa related (thank God) but if you're like me you'll find this article really interesting.

As the excruciatingly boring presidential campain grinds remorselessly on:

The Associated Press reports that Sen. John Putney, R-Gladbrook has become the third republican Iowa senator to announce his retirement. 

 

Putney was elected in 2002 and is in his second term. He is head of the Iowa State Fair Blue Ribbon Foundation, and said he'll focus his time and energy on the State Fair after he leaves office.

He joins Senate Republican Leader Mary Lundby, of Marion, and Sen. Thurman Gaskill, of Corwith, in announcing plans to not seek re-election.

All three are veteran lawmakers who would be overwhelming favorites to win another term in office, and their decisions mean Republicans will have to defend at least three open seats in next year's election.

Democrats grabbed control of the Senate in last year's election by a lopsided 30-20 edge. They also control the House by a 53-47 margin and hold the governor's office. That gives Democrats control of state government for the first time in 42 years, and Republicans are struggling to recover.

Of the 25 Senate seats that will be on the ballot next year, Republicans must defend 14 while 11 Democrats are on the ballot. None of the Democrats facing re-election have announced plans to step down.

 

Progressives are presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cement a veto-proof majority in both houses of the legislature.

We need to focus on finding good candidates in all districts.  And in January when the legislature convenes, we need to apply pressure to this new legislature to follow-up on the wishes of the people that put them there: to pass VOICE with mandatory limits and to produce some meaningful health care reform, for starters.

From the cman blog. 

I put this up recently at MyDD and Daily Kos, but for some reason forgot to cross-post here.

I am writing one front-page post at MyDD every Tuesday in support of John Edwards as part of their “unofficial candidate blogger” series (two Clinton supporters post on Mondays, two Edwards supporters post on Tuesdays, two Obama supporters post on Wednesdays, and a Biden, Dodd and Richardson supporter each post on Thursdays).

This was my first piece in that series.  It's a bit of personal narrative about how I came to be supporting Edwards, and it includes links to a lot of other good diaries about the candidate and his policies.

It's long, so I put it after the jump. I welcome your feedback, and I encourage you to put up diaries telling us why you are supporting your favorite in the race, if you have already decided. 

Wyoming Republicans just moved to January 5th.

Wyoming selects its delegates at county conventions and the state convention, rather than using a caucus or primary system.  This means that Gardner could declare them to be dissimilar enough not to trigger the New Hampshire law.  It's also possible that the legitimate early state Republican parties can work together to force a boycott of Wyoming.  My guess is that this won't end up changing anything.

The normal avenue of attack from Iowa and New Hampshire don't work against Wyoming though – it has the lowest population of any state, so campaigning there would be about as one-on-one as it gets.  It is geographically large, but then so is Iowa for its population.  If that is the problem then you might as well have Delaware and Rhode Island first every year.  It isn't a swing state, but then the caucusgoers in Iowa and primary voters in New Hampshire don't tend to represent swing voters anyway.

What do you think – minus the linecutting in this particular instance, would Wyoming be a legitimate state for pre-window status?

The smart money is on January 3rd.

David Yepsen covered most of the bases in his column yesterday, but here are a couple more reasons:

• Florida isn't backing down.  With their jump the South Carolina Democrats will likely follow their Republican statemates and go on the 19th of January, and Michigan will feel justified in violating the DNC scheduling rules as well.
• New Hampshire SOS Bill Gardner wants to go on a Tuesday.  While the New Hampshire reworked their law so that he can put it on any day just so long as it is the first primary.  In case you're just tuning in, Gardner is the God of the Primary in New Hampshire.  Even if Michigan backs off, the latest Tuesday available is January 8th.

If New Hampshire is on the 8th, then legally we can go no earlier than the 31st of December.  Fat chance.  Since December is basically out of the picture barring further excitement, the only possible dates are the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th, and the earlier the better.  The 2nd will be ruled out as too close to New Year's Day, although really anyone who hasn't slept off their hangover from drinking 43 hours before is probably not a likely caucus attendee anyway.  The 3rd seems like the sweet spot between giving people at least a little time to think about politics again and giving the winners a measurable bump in New Hampshire.

Back in June, I urged Barack Obama to fire the scheduler who put him at a west-coast fundraiser instead of at the Iowa Democratic Party's Hall of Fame dinner in Cedar Rapids. It seemed crazy to me for Obama to pass up a chance to address 1,000 Democratic activists in Iowa, especially since he wasn't hurting in the fundraising department. 

I've long questioned the wisdom of David Axelrod's strategy to make the Obama campaign about Obama's inspiring personal story and his quest for consensus and post-partisanship.

Now I read in the Des Moines Register on Friday that Barack Obama will skip the September 20 American Association for Retired Persons forum in Davenport.

John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson will be there. But Obama will miss the chance to address more than 2,000 Iowa seniors, as well as the national public television audience who will watch the event.

Last week the Obama campaign announced plans to skip many of the remaining forums held by interest groups, and his national campaign manager explained the decision to the Register:

The number of events threatened to take Obama off his own game plan, his national campaign manager David Plouffe said.

“Otherwise, our schedule would be dictated by dozens and dozens of forums and debates, and we think the most important part of this process is individual interaction with voters,” Plouffe said. “We benefit greatly when we're out there meeting with voters at our own events.”

A lot of pundits and bloggers applauded Obama's decision, saying there are too many debates and forums. I see their point, but on the other hand, interest group forums raise questions that might not come up often on the campaign trail. I like the idea of the candidates being forced to address these issues.

Plus, I think it's risky to turn down an invitation when your rivals will all be there. 

But even if I agreed with Obama's general strategy to attend fewer of these forums, the last one I'd skip is the AARP forum in Iowa.

Think about it: Obama does well with the under-30 crowd, but many (most?) Iowa precincts have a very small proportion of voters under 30. The majority of caucus-goers are likely to be over 50. The Register notes:

That group also has carried disproportionate clout in recent caucuses, according to Iowa Democratic Party statistics.

In 2004, 64 percent of the people who participated in the Democratic presidential caucuses were 50 or older. In 2000, the figure was 63 percent.

If Obama is going to do well in Iowa, he'll have to improve his numbers with the over-50 set.

Iowa State University political science professor Dianne Bystrom said she would have thought Obama would have made an exception for the AARP forum.

“He may not think that's his political base,” said Bystrom, whose expertise includes debate strategy. “But it's the older voters that go to the caucuses, and I think he's really passing up an opportunity to speak to those voters.”

Obama has a great Iowa staff led by John Norris, who managed John Kerry's campaign here in 2003 and 2004 Paul Tewes. But his national campaign handlers need to have their heads examined.

You may wonder why I care, since I am supporting Edwards for president. But I don't want Obama to do poorly in Iowa. I want him to finish ahead of Clinton.

To do that, he'll need to do better with older voters.  I hope he'll turn up in Davenport on September 20 after all.

The rabble-rousers over at Open Left (Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller, and Mike Lux) have launched a campaign against “Bush dogs”, defined as Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have in 2007 both capitulated on the Iraq funding bill and voted to allow Alberto Gonzales warrantless wiretapping powers.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that IA-03's own Leonard Boswell makes this list. Like many in the group, he is in the “Blue Dog” faction in the House. (Other “Bush dogs” are in the “New Democrats” group in the House, but Boswell does not belong to that club.) 

Boswell's disappointing vote on these issues is only the latest in a long string of disappointments for me, from voting for all of Bush's horrible energy bills to supporting permanent repeal of the estate tax to voting for the “torture” bill in the fall of 2006.

Does Boswell really represent such a conservative district that he “has” to vote with Republicans on these issues? No, he does not. His district actually has a partisan index of D+1.4, whereas many of the Bush dogs are in districts that lean Republican, or deep-South districts where rank and file Democrats tend to be more conservative. 

Chris Bowers specifically criticized Boswell in this post, in which he made the case that Boswell is NOT “voting his district” when he casts his lot with the Bush White House.

Paul Rosenberg provides some interesting data on the “Bush dogs” and how vulnerable they might be to a strong challenge: click here for more. 

Some in the blogosphere have criticized this effort to target in possibly hit Bush dogs with primary challengers, saying it could endanger our majority in the House and is bad form to “meddle” in other states' politics. Chris Bowers responded to the criticism here, and Mike Lux weighed in on the dispute, and his desire to promote progressive voting in Congress without harming Democrats in truly vulnerable positions, here.

What do you think? I support letting Boswell know when we are upset about his voting, but I don't see a primary challenge as having much chance here. Anyway, Iowa is going to lose a district after the 2010 census, and Boswell will likely retire at that point.

Primary challenges against other “Bush dogs” may be well worth the effort, on the other hand. Even if we don't beat these people in the primary, we can push them to vote better, as Jane Harman and Ellen Tauscher (both California Democrats) have been doing since netroots progressives targeted them for primary challenges. 

The Iowa State Fair has come and gone, and with it the only non-scientific poll that Ron Paul supporters weren't able to freep.  I am of course referring to the infamous “Cast Your Kernel” table set up by WHO 13, where fair attendees were able to drop a kernel of corn into the jar of the candidate they wanted to see as our next President.  If you wanted to you could probably go cast a kernel every few hours, but the nature of the event would make it difficult and costly to really stuff the poll.

The results on the Democratic side ended up very similar to caucus polling, suggesting that either most caucus polls are basically sampling the general population of Iowa rather than likely-caucusgoers, or that only likely caucus-goers attend the Iowa State Fair.  The Republican totals meanwhile either show a tremendous Huckabee bounce after his second place finish in the Ames Straw Poll or that the heavy presence of Fair Tax people at the fair ended up influencing this vote too.

The most important thing of all from this exercise though is the total number cast for each side:  21,438 for Democrats and 14,010 for Republicans.  That's better than 60%/40% for the Dems, and shows that even among the rural-and-probably-conservative-leaning Iowa State Fair crowd most people would like to see a Democratic President.

I wasn't crazy enough to wake up for the debate, but I did watch the rerun on C-Span.  The thing I noticed most was the number of times they cut to Elizabeth Kucinich in the audience.  I think she might have actually gotten more face time than her husband, the candidate.  Certainly her legs got more attention from ABC than Dennis's new plan to nationalize the banking industry in the face of the subprime mortgage crisis.  I guess ABC didn't want MSNBC to corner the market on blatant sexism.

George Stephanopoulos mostly stayed out of the way of the candidates, but seemed to deliberately steer the conversation to either Obama or Clinton, trying desperately to get them to attack each other or to at least get the other candidates to attack them.  He succeeded in at least getting nearly all the post-debate coverage to focus on the two of them, but I guess he is an old Clinton hand so what do you expect.

The actual issue discussion for the debate was pretty good.  While nailing the big three down on just how many troops they would leave in Iraq has been difficult, we did get an idea of who has given the topic much thought in terms of logistics (Biden, Clinton, Richardson:  A lot; Obama, Edwards:  Not much).  No one gave any indication of their residual force goals, leaving Richardson as still the only serious candidate who really wants to bring home all the troops.

Merit pay for education was discussed with candidates coming down in no particularly predictable way, other than me remembering Obama's answer as the one that seemed the most reasonable.  He doesn't want to impose it on teachers, but thinks that it is a good idea if they can be convinced to buy in.  Everyone else just talks about paying teachers more, which would be nice of course but didn't answer the question and is generally more of a state issue anyway.

Aside from some blah blahing about Nuclear hypotheticals where Clinton got caught attacking Obama for something she herself had advocated just months before, there wasn't much else of substance discussed at the debate.  Clinton, Obama, and Kucinich all had pretty good laugh lines, and Richardson avoided looking like a homeless man brought on stage for sport, which qualifies as a debate “win” for him.  Mike Gravel, on the other hand, might actually be a homeless man masquerading as a candidate.  Someone should look into this.