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.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
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 Iowa Attorney General’s office will decide in the next few days whether to investigate complaints about automated telephone calls made to state voters in support of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
Bob Brammer, a spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, said investigators are in the process of setting up a meeting with officials at the Mitt Romney presidential campaign and will give them a chance to outline their concerns.
Romney’s campaign wrote a letter to Miller Tuesday saying the calls may be illegal because they do not immediately identify the caller and do not provide contact information.The letter says the group making the calls, Common Sense Issues, appears to violate the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 by cloaking its identity. In its letter to Miller, the Romney campaign said that although the Telephone Consumer Protection Act is a federal law, state attorneys general are required to ensure that the legislation is enforced.
Brammer said the initial inquiry will likely be handled by lawyers in the agency’s consumer protection division. Miller’s office has taken an aggressive stand on consumer protection issues in the past and has the experience necessary to fairly judge the merits of the complaint, Brammer said.
The letter from the Romney campaign, dated December, said that the calls, which advocate for Huckabee’s election, “do not include any identification of the originating entity at the beginning of the call” and “do not provide a telephone number for the originating entity at any point.” In addition, when Iowa residents receive their calls, their caller ID shows “incomplete data.”
The TCPA rules make it illegal for a automated caller, or so called robo-caller, to hide its identity or refrain from providing contact information to call recipients.
Huckabee, on Tuesday, said his campaign was unaware of plans by an outside organization to make the calls and asked that they be stopped. Eric Woolson, his Iowa campaign manager, said Huckabee asked that the calls be halted as soon as he learned about them and that he would welcome an investigation by Miller’s office.
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