Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The head of the Republican Party of Iowa said Saturday that Mitt Romney was wrongly blamed for causing the cancellation of a live debate scheduled to air on the Fox News Network on December 4.
State Chairman Ray Hoffmann said in a brief statement that, in fact, several Republican candidates had scheduling conflicts which caused the cancellation of the event.
“Yesterday, members of our staff put out a misleading statement concerning Mitt Romney and the cancellation of the RPI/FOX NEWS debate. We regret this statement,” Hoffmann said. “The facts are that a number of campaigns had scheduling conflicts, such that the debate could not take place.”
Although the Republican debate was one of several scheduled in the state this year, party officials had planned to include activists from all 99 counties in its audience and were excited about the coverage on the Fox News Channel.“It is too bad that a candidate wouldn’t want to take advantage of this kind of debate with representation from all 99 Iowa counties in the audience, let alone the fact Fox News Channel has had the most viewers of any debate,” Chuck Laudner, Executive Director of the Republican Party of Iowa, said in the statement Hoffmann referred to on Saturday.
The Romney campaign quickly followed on Friday with a statement from Gentry Collins, a Des Moines lawyer who serves as its state director.
“We have received invitations to a number of debates in the month of December. Along with other campaigns, we unfortunately had to decline an invite to a December 4 debate as part of a scheduling decision.”
Hoffmann’s statement didn’t mention which other front-runners had agreed to attend the debate.
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