As yesterday’s deadline for seniors to enroll in Bush’s Medicare Plan D program approached, last week Democrats explained that the program is really just a huge give away to pharmaceutical and insurance companies. The costs of the plan have already doubled, and 74% of the 29 million people Bush is claiming to have helped already had prescription drug coverage via Medicaid, Medicare advantage plans, or an employer/union plan. According to USA Today, under the plan costs would increase for 19-23% of seniors.
Since the plan is confusing, probably not helpful, and a lot of people don’t even know about it, it makes sense that Democrats were calling for the May 15 deadline to be repealed.
Naturally he had less to say to the Des Moines Register about his reasoning for sponsoring a bill to remove deadline penalites:
Grassley said those who rushed to sign up before the deadline “could legitimately see this as unfair to them, because they signed up.” But, he said, “we are dealing with a whole brand new program” and it takes time to be accepted.
Democrats had pushed hard for the deadline to be extended and the penalty waived. Grassley said he did not propose the legislation so that Democrats would lose an election issue. “Good policy makes good politics and I think this is good policy,” he said.
At any rate, anyone who thinks repealing a $2 a month penalty is going to stop healthcare from being an election issue is clearly off their meds.
A reader has been pestering us to post about Leonard Boswell’s MySpace for a little while now. I saw that Ed Fallon also had one, so I thought it’d be a good time to post some thoughts about how campaigns use the internet.
I’ve thought for a while that most political campaigns — especially in Iowa — use at most about 10% of the Internet’s potential for connecting with voters and organizing supporters. This campaign season is better than past ones here, but still, I’ve signed up for most of the Iowa campaigns’ email lists, and I get fewer than one a week from all of them except for Nussle’s. (Some, I’ve never gotten any from, even though I’ve signed up on their web sites. So maybe there have been errors with signup, too?)
The IDP sends out emails pretty frequently, but this week I’ve gotten about six emails with exactly the same thing each time (about a Medicare Press Conference), and that’s just annoying.
MySpace is nice, but it isn’t going to connect a campaign with rural voters all that well. And emails are good, but they usually only work for people who have already pledged support, because no one else signs up on an email list.
What could be improved? For one, the web sites themselves could all stand to be a lot more usable. That means things like taking more advantage of whitespace, making site organization more logical, making content more readable, and making the design easier to look at for long periods of time.
But it also means more interactivity. Real blogs would be nice (I haven’t seen a single thing I’d call a “blog” on any Iowa sites, even though Fallon claims to have one). Also, the photo galleries should be updated more regularly, so that candidates can say “check my web site to see if your picture got taken today!” at all of their appearances. That’ll get people to the web sites and keep them thinking about candidates.
In general, it seems like the people at the top of campaigns often see web sites as much as a liability as a tool, and that’s not helpful. I’ve been offering my help around to some campaigns, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to help out a little bit with this stuff.
For the money, there’s no better marketing tool than the Internet. Someday, everyone will realize it.
When we (and other Iowa Blogs) posted a call to support Boswell in Barbara Boxer’s “Whom should we give money to?” poll, you responded. We were pretty sure Boswell would lose, since he was at second-to-last place, but then he jumped, and this weekend, he was declared the winner with 31% of the votes. I won’t claim that bloggers did it all, but we certainly made a difference, and that’s something we can all be proud of.
In general, Iowa political blogs — in particular, progressive Iowa blogs — seem to have improved significantly since I started watching them closely in January. I think all of us have seen our traffic increase, and that has kept us interested in it. In particular, I’ve seen Iowa Progress’s traffic go from 0 (we were only founded in March) to over 1,000 visits per week. Most surprising, perhaps, is the fact that we get a ton of our hits from outside Iowa. That means that people who are looking for places to send money are listening to us, and we’re filling a niche for them that may not have been filled before us.
It also means that potential presidential campaigns are listening to what we have to say. And that much is clear from the interviews that Drew (Feingold, Warner) and the folks at Political Forecast (Warner) have done with potential candidates. I’ve complained about the quality of the interviews in the past, but I still think that they’re interesting and that they set an important precedent for 2008 that candidates can’t afford to ignore us.
But unfortunately, today Drew announced that he won’t be blogging at DrewMiller.net for the next several months. This is a blow to our blogosphere in Iowa, but it won’t be fatal. We have a void to fill, and I know all of us bloggers are going to try our best to fill it.
With gas prices soaring to above $3/gal in parts of the country it is no wonder that people are talking about alternative energy. Here in Iowa, of course, we like to talk a lot about ethanol, because we grow a lot of corn, one of the materials that can be turned into ethanol.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington are considering legislation that would mandate an increase in the amount of ethanol used for fuel. Both Democrats and Republicans from the Midwest are proposing legislation, and while they think that it is useful to both be working on similar proposals, it seems unlikely that any bills would actually pass as midterms approach. There is concern that mandating the use of ethanol might not be the wisest move right now:
“To say that we have to incorporate these huge volumes of ethanol into gas regardless of what they cost is not very good policy if you’re trying to moderate gasoline prices,” said Bob Slaughter, president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.
Furthermore, there is speculation that the dramatic increase in corn-derived ethanol costs may actually be contributing to high gas prices. So as a recap, so far we’ve got people saying high gas prices are driving up corn prices and other people saying that high corn prices are driving up gas prices. This economist though says that the only thing determining gas prices is good ol’ supply and demand.
So lets complicate things a little further: according to the same Register article there are also proposals in Congress to end the 54 cent per gallon tariff on imported ethanol. Places like Brazil are big ethanol producers, but they make it from sugar cane, not corn. However, it is uncertain if this would really reduce gas prices. Not to mention,
Latham, a close ally of House Majority Leader John Boehner, said the tariff cut would be unlikely to pass the House.
Another question that is being debated is how useful ethanol really is. While the debate over gas prices is one thing, the larger issue here is renewable energy. Is ethanol really a viable energy resource? Recent studies coming out of Cornell University have found that ethanol actually takes more energy to make than it produces. Basically that is bad. So even if ethanol could replace a sizable chunk of our foreign oil imports we might be better off looking for ways to power our vehicles with natural gas or coal (the biggest electricity producers in the U.S.).
What a lot of people are depending on in the future of ethanol is that there will be some technology advances. However, those advances are expected to come from finding new sources for ethanol, like plant wastes and wood chips. So what does this all mean? I don’t really know either, but it seems like the benefits Iowa derives from the ethanol industry might not be there in the future. (Maybe we should be focusing on that other renewable energy resource that we have a lot of…wind!)
I’m hoping the impacts on Newton won’t be quite so grave, but the news coverage the story has been getting seems to tell a different story, one of a town that essentially is a company. The stories across the country have been touching and surprisingly well-researched (several out-of-state papers have written their own reports instead of using wire services). Here are the four stories I thought were the best-written:
NPR’s All Things Considered — A piece by a former Newton resident who reflects on Newton’s history with Maytag
AP (via Washington Post) — has a photo of the Whirlpool CEO giving a press conference in front of a refrigerator?
Detroit Free Press — quotes an expert who says that this won’t be as devastating as this type of closure would be for auto workers
And the Register has comments from all four major gubernatorial candidates, who seem to say roughly the same things. Except Nussle’s comment is much shorter, because he can’t criticize a company that gave him two $1,000 donations last year (and that was just for his congressional campaign account).
Some of these topics deserve a bit more coverage than this post will give them, but still, here are the skinnies…
Tom Vilsack will make his first visit to New Hampshire next month, headlining a fund-raiser for Democrats from Manchester (NH’s largest city). He was supposed to go last Fall, but somehow hurricane Katrina forced him to reschedule. Past guests at this particular event include both Al Gore and John Kerry.
Results from the immigrant protests are beginning to be quantified here in Iowa. United for the Safety and Dignity of Immigrants, a big immigrants’ rights organization here in Iowa, has estimated that 40,000 Iowans participated in the May 1 “Day Without Immigrants.” It’s also being estimated that 17 Iowans who participated were fired as a result. It seems impossible to even begin to understand how either of those statistics were compiled, but there they are.
The University of Iowa is trying to improve gender equity in its faculty hiring and promotion process. They’re still well short of their (somewhat meager) goal of making their faculty 32% female by 2010, but a committee today proposed improving the situation with a fairer tenure review process that wouldn’t penalize women who take maternity leave. Women make up an “increasing” percentage of their faculty, but the “increase” is less than 1% a year.
Archer Daniels Midland is building two new ethanol plants, one of which will be in Cedar Rapids (the other will be in Columbus, NE). Both plants will output about 275 million gallons a year. The Cedar Rapids plant will be finished in the second half of 2008, and it’ll expand ADM’s ethanol output from 1 billion gallons a year to 1.5 billion.
Diebold screws up again, and it looks like it’s going to affect us in Iowa. Computer scientists are calling this newly discovered way of tampering with “black box” voting machines the “worst case scenario” and the “most serious security breach.” They won’t even describe the flaw because of the risk of any Joe Schmo doing it to tamper with or disable the voting machines. Maybe private companies shouldn’t be controlling the way we elect our government officials?
I’m going to try to take some time to write up another post about the political implications of the Maytag closure tonight, so don’t be alarmed that I haven’t included a single story on that in this roundup.
The economy of central Iowa — and, in particular, the area immediately around us in Grinnell — took a huge blow yesterday, when Whirlpool executives announced that they planned to close the Maytag plant in Newton in 2007. The city of Newton was practically built around Maytag, which was founded in Newton over 100 years ago, and which currently employs 1,200 Newton residents. So that’s 1,200 jobs that won’t be in Newton anymore in a year and a half.
“The merger was anti-competitive, as Rep. Boswell warned, and has now resulted in a devastating loss of jobs in Newton,” said Mike Milligan, executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party. “Jeff Lamberti’s poor decision to back the merger ignored other potential buyers of Maytag who wanted to keep the operations working in Newton. And now, worst of all, he is trying to avoid accountability.”
In fact, the IDP’s entire main page is dominated by various incumbents’ comments on the Maytag announcement. They know what I don’t think anyone has wanted to say out loud yet: incumbents get blamed for stuff like this, even when they shouldn’t be. Everyone reading this probably already knows that it’s not Vilsack’s fault and it’s not Boswell’s fault, but — unless the IDP and the politicians themselves get the word out really, really well — it’s going to hurt incumbents in the polls. So we really need to work on this now. Especially if union support goes down in the area, it could hurt Boswell a lot.
But I’m very interested to see what kind of an impact this is going to have on the surrounding area, including Grinnell and Marshalltown. Something tells me that jobs are going to get a lot harder to find here, too, as more people start competing for the same number of jobs.
What are some things we can do to solve the problem? Well, in this poorly written Register article (hopefully it’ll get cleaned up by an editor soon), I found this particularly interesting:
Robert Henderson, a Maytag union representative, said health care costs and the rising cost of health insurance likely contributed to the plant closing. He also said top managers and other white collar workers will continue to have insurance while others will lose out.
That sounds like something the Democrats in Des Moines are trying to fix, so hopefully they’ll be able to take care of that soon. And since most of this post has been a downer, I’ll close with another quote from the Register piece — this time a kind-of funny one:
Maytag workers learned the news shortly after 8 a.m. today. After the news was delivered, officials closed the plant for the day, said Maytag workers, who had gathered at Snook Inn Sandwich Shop. Workers were expected to report back to work on Thursday.
“I’m still digesting it,” said Carroll Simbro, as he ate cheesy potatoes and fried eggs.
Drew does a nice job of explaining why dragging Mike Mauro into CIETC is silly and why Yepson stanks.
The Register goes over Ed Fallon’s latest ads. They have some cute ideas, but I’m not sure cute is what one looks for in a successful gubernatorial tv ad. Also, why are they only running on cable tv? That seems a little anti-Fallon to me.
The Quad-City Times reports on fifth-graders learning about death the hard way: “Feathery down flew as the hawk scarfed down the first duckling and supplemented its feast with two more.”
There’s some good news at least. 81% of this year’s corn is in the ground. (How on earth do they know that?)
Sure, it’s obvious from his record deficit that he’s a Bush crony, but now that Nussle is getting free publicity from Fox News this morning, it’s certifiable. This is from a campaign email a few days ago:
Watch Jim Nussle talk with E.D, Brian and Steve of FOX and Friends this Tuesday about his vision to make Iowa the Renewable Energy Capital of the World. Jim will discuss his bipartisan “Independence from Oil With Agriculture (IOWA) Act,” which helps ease prices at the pump for hard-working Iowans.
That’s at 7:30AM Central in case you want to watch him talk for a few minutes without being interrupted by difficult questions or by pesky Democrats who also happen to be running for Governor (and, in at least one case, who happen to be leading Nussle in the polls).
And although I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise to you, it might come as a disappointment. If you want to tell them what you think, email friends@foxnews.com or call 888 369 4762. And please, if you get a good response post it as a comment. I emailed about 36 hours ago and never got a response.
(Also feel free to email Jim Nussle and tell him how hokey you think naming a bill “the IOWA Act” is — especially just months ahead of the gubernatorial election.)
I haven’t seen anyone else comment about the most recent Rasmussen Iowa poll, so I’ll point out a few highlights. First and foremost is the fact that every single Democratic candidate has made gains on Nussle, culminating in Culver now reaching a 6 point lead over Nussle. Reading further into the Poll, however, and we can see just how polarized politics, and particularly “hot-button issues” are becoming in Iowa. For example, even though the primary hasn’t happened yet, only 12% of voters have not made up their mind about Nussle, a guaranteed candidate. Seems like a lot of money is going to be wasted this summer and fall preaching to either the choir or deaf ears. If only campaign money could be spent on something more important…like the things the politicians are promising (you know, crazy stuff, such as.. education, or health care).
In other news, the Register reports that Mike Johanns, former Gov. of Nebraska and current Secretary of Agriculture, has now learned what everyone in Iowa has known for years: the current subsidy system is broken.
One of my favorite senators, our Tom Harkin, is bringing a resolution to the Senate that calls for America to withdraw from Iraq by Dec. 31st at the latest. Another of my favorites, Russ Feingold, is trying to attach similar legislation to emergency spending bills. I give props to those in Congress who are willing to stand up and offer actual time frames for bringing home the troops, rather than politicians who just proffer vagueries and false promises as they see more and more Americans lose favor with the war.
In more national news, it appears Karl Rove has returned to what he does best: trying to get Americans to remember that Democrats are the enemy, not terrorists or insurgents. I guess we really do have them nervous about 2006. I for one will enjoy Bush’s final two years as the lamest of lame duck presidents ever to exist.
