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.
U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said Thursday that a “bizarre” national obsession with socialite Paris Hilton is obscuring other issues and people who should be getting the attention of the media and public.
“I am sick of this Paris Hilton stuff,” Harkin said. “God, I’m telling you. I mean here’s someone that’s ill-educated. I don’t know her and have never met her, and I only saw one time where I ever heard her speak anything. There wasn’t much happening there. There wasn’t much traffic going on upstairs there.”
Harkin said he finds it “bizarre” that Hilton’s every movement gets national focus.
“I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist,” Harkin said. “Something’s going on here that I just don’t understand. I don’t read about this stuff. You can’t avoid it. It’s on the front page. You see it. You know.”
He added, “I can’t explain it.”
Harkin’s comments came during a conference call with several reporters in response to a question from Iowa Independent about Page 1 coverage for Hilton in The New York Times on the same day as the newspaper ran a piece inside on a suicide epidemic on a Native American reservation in South Dakota.
Harkin spent some time discussing the latter story on Native Americans.
“These are the kind of the stories that people ought to know about so we can get some action, get something done about it,” Harkin said.
Only two days earlier, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, ripped the media for being interested in Hilton and other celebrities to the point of missing stories on the presidential election.
When asked what he could do to get more media coverage, Huckabee joked, “Accompanying Paris Hilton to jail might work.”
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