Press-Citizen editorializes against English only inclusing a zing at Jim Nussle:
Rep. Jim Nussle's campaign manager, Nick Ryan, criticized Chet Culver because the Iowa Secretary of State Office makes available voter registration forms in Spanish, Vietnamese, Laotian and Bosnian. Ryan said that Culver needs 'to quit hiding and explain why he's in complete defiance of Iowa's official English law by printing voter materials' in other languages.
The charge demonstrates the vagueness of the law itself. It would be easy for Culver or any voting rights activist to make an argument that such material would be necessary to secure the rights guaranteed by the state and federal constitutions. And even if there was a compelling reason against printing such documents in Laotian or Bosnian, there is no way to enforce the law, and there's no way to punish anyone who might have broken it. All the law does is allow its supporters to denounce its detractors for giving away the farm and allow its detractors to label its supporters as xenophobic bigots.
My guess is Mary Ann Hanusa (campaign slogan: "My name is on the ballot") would yank those forms but it's hard to say; 28 days out she appears to still not have a web site. Mike Mauro has links to them on his front page.
Having dropped back and punted on the Secretary of State race, the GOP is focusing all its downballot effort on the Sec of Ag job. Couple items from the inbox on that race:
Iowa Farm Bureau, which is a strong supporter of the Republican Party recently started a 527 group against me..."
At Tuesday's forum, an audience member asked Northey about his leadership for AgVentures investments in Brazil, which the individual called "outsourcing agriculture." The question asked Northey to justify the fact that he was investing in Brazil, which is the #2 producer of ethanol and in direct competition with Iowa's ethanol industry.
Northey tried to mislead the audience about the investment, saying, "Certainly Brazilian ethanol is not going to be a big competitor of US ethanol." But
the San Diego Union-Tribune reported on September 12 that, "Brazil is aggressively expanding its sugarcane plantations and expects to more than double its annual exports of alcohol fuel, or ethanol, by 2010." Even Hofstrand wrote in that same article that the Brazilian agriculture expansion, "poses a competitive threat to Iowa farmers."
Northey also tried to mislead the audience about the size of the investment. He stated that AgVentures "Put a project together, it didn't get funded there" and that there was, "actually very little investment." In reality, AgVentures invested $786,000 in Good View, a company that purchased 19,595 acres of land in Brazil...
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