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.
Tom Miller
Democratic Attorney General Tom Miller announced Monday that he will return a $10,000 campaign contribution in 2005 from an Iowa family implicated in a national voluntary recall of more than half a billion eggs.
The Iowa Independent first reported about the donation Friday, finding that since 1999 Jack DeCoster, owner of DeCoster Farms, and members of his immediate family have made more than $500,000 in political contributions — all of it to Democrats, and much of it to the benefit of Iowa Democrats.
In 2005, Peter DeCoster, a son of Jack, donated $10,000 to Miller’s reelection campaign, only five years after Miller’s office labeled DeCoster the state’s first “habitual violator” of state environmental laws.
Miller told The Iowa Independent in an interview that the “habitual violator” classification applied to the DeCoster family in 2000 had been removed nearly a year prior to the political donation by Peter DeCoster. But his Republican opponent, Brenna Findley, called on him to return the donation, saying “habitual violators should not be allowed pollute our politics.”
Miller told the Associated Press that he wouldn’t have accepted the donation if he knew DeCoster would have future problems.
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