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.
Despite some efforts to raise its profile here, a new poll indicates that the so-called ‘birther’ movement, which believes that President Barack Obama was born outside the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president, has not gained much traction in America’s heartland.
The poll, conducted by Research 2000 for DailyKos, carries a margin of error of two percentage points for the general survey question, “Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?”
Overall, 77 percent of Americans said ‘yes,’ 11 percent said ‘no,’ and 12 percent weren’t sure.
But digging deeper into the numbers, more trends seem to emerge. In the midwest, 90 percent of respondents answered ‘yes’ and only six percent said ‘no.’ (I should caution that the margin of error tends to increase when you start looking at smaller groups within the larger sample of the survey.)
The bulk of the birthers seem to live in southern states, where fewer than half — 47 percent — said they believed Obama was born in the United States. 23 percent said he wasn’t born in the country, while 30 percent said they weren’t sure.
The partisan breakdown of the survey shows an even bigger gap than the regional one. Among self-reported Democrats, 93 percent said Obama was natural-born, while only four percent said he wasn’t. Among self-reported Republicans, however, only 42 percent said ‘yes,’ while a staggering 28 percent said ‘no’ and 30 percent were unsure.
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