On the Campaign Trail with Ed Tibbetts

I’m taking some time off, so there likely won’t be much to see here for a couple weeks.

See you then.

President Barack Obama has weighed in on the request to raise the cap on the amount of ethanol that can be blended with gasoline.

Ethanol groups have asked that it be raised from 10 percent to 15 percent. Earlier, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said he liked the idea of an increase, though not necessarily to 15 percent.

Yesterday, regional reporters, including one from the Des Moines Register, met with Obama and the president was asked what his position is on the request and whether he’d be involved in the decision.

Here’s what he had to say, according to a White House transcript:

At some point I usually get involved.  If it — somebody explained to me that nothing comes to my desk if it’s easy.  (Laughter.)  It means that somebody else has solved it.  And I suspect that this one will be reconciling a lot of different issues.

As you know, I’ve been a supporter of biofuels.  I think it is an important ingredient in our overall energy independence.  I’ve also said — and I said during the campaign trail in Iowa, in front of farmers — that it was important for us to transition to the next generation of biofuels, that we’ve got to do a much better job of developing cellulosic ethanol, that corn-based ethanol, over time, is not going to provide us with the energy-efficient solutions that are needed.

And I want to make sure, though, as somebody who comes from a corn-growing state, that the progress that we’ve made in building up a biofuels infrastructure and the important income generation that has come from ethanol plants, that that is sustained, that that’s maintained.

So our challenge, I think, is to see our current ethanol technology as a bridge to the biofuels technologies of the future.  And that’s what we want to invest in, and that’s what I’ll be directing my Department of Agriculture to focus on.

Bottom line: Obama sees corn-based ethanol as a bridge to future biofuel technologies and he wants to keep the bridge strong. He didn’t say whether the 15 percent proposal is the way to do it.

Here’s the Register’s article on the issue.

The Scott County Republican Party has chosen a Bettendorf activist as its new chair.
Judy Davidson, 50, was elected by a wide margin at a meeting Wednesday, said Bryan Sievers, the outgoing chair of the county GOP.

Sievers, a New Liberty farmer, stepped aside after a two year term to devote more time to his family and business.

He declined to release the vote tally, but said Davidson was chosen by an “overwhelming” margin. She and Tom May, a 51 year old businessman from Davenport, ran for the post.

Davidson, a two-term secretary for the local party, had stressed her experience as a member of the party’s executive board and as a local activist since 2000.

The party central committee also made a handful of changes to its executive committee on Wednesday.

May was elected a vice chairman, along with John Ortega and Jim Goff. Ortega represents the 1st District on the state central committee and Goff worked for John McCain’s presidential campaign last year.

Paul Janecek, who had been a vice chair, was replaced. And Greg Adamson, a former county supervisor, moved from vice chair to treasurer.

Adamson replaces Bob Hockridge, who decided to step down after a long tenure as the party’s treasurer, Sievers said.

Carol Crain, of Davenport, was elected secretary.

I just heard about this. Iowa is one of 16 states the General Accountability Office has selected to give extra scrutiny in the spending of federal stimulus money. Here’s a Reuters article that includes the news.

And it’s not just states that will get the eye. A federal official testified to Congress last week (see page 4) that cities in those 16 states will be getting extra scrutiny, too. Illinois is one of the 16, too.

The stimulus law, formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is a big piece of spending, and as I wrote in this morning’s Times, transparency is getting a big push.

President Obama is holding a conference today to talk about spending stimulus money effectively. And, a little lower down the food chain, U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, said today he’s adding a feature to his web site that will allow people to report waste fraud and abuse.

Davenport’s $197 million budget was approved unanimously Wednesday, but it’s not as historic an occasion as Mayor Bill Gluba says.

The mayor said he believes the 10-0 vote was the first time in council history there was no dissent.

In fact, back in the mid-1990s, it wasn’t at all unusual for budgets to get okayed unanimously. In 1994, 1996 and 1997 budgets were approved without a negative vote. There may be other years that was the case, but that’s all the farther I checked.

In fact, it was a surprise in 1995 when Republicans and Democrats split on the budget, prompting a partisan squall.

Majority Republicans claimed Democrats on the council were playing politics in advance of the mayoral election by voting against the spending plan, which was then about $103 million. Democrats said there were too many undecided issues to let the budget pass.

The split vote was cited by proponents pushing a referendum to go to non-partisan elections.

By the next year, though, the rift was healed and the council was back to unanimity on the budget.

Of course, given the council turmoil in the late ’90s and through the better part of this decade, one might be forgiven thinking that it’s always been that way. But, at least as far as budgets are concerned, the period of the mid-90s, when I covered City Hall, was marked by fairly routine approvals.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s been Twittering lately, taking part in the nationwide rage over the social networking tool.

Yesterday, he chatted with Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC about Twittering. He also mentions a Tweet-In in eastern Iowa over the Easter recess. Would love to here more about that one.

Here’s the link.

Twittering, as we all know (right?), is the practice of offering short updates about what you’re doing and seeing at any given time. The Tweets, as they’re called, can be read by followers.

U.S. Rep. Phil Hare gets worked over on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” segment over the proposed “card check” bill.

The legislation would change the way unions are certified.

The basic proposal is if a majority of workers sign a petition asking for a union, then it’s installed as the bargaining agent.

Currently, if enough workers sign cards asking for a union a government-overseen election is held before certification.

Critics of “card check” say the measure gets rid of a secret ballot. Backers say it stops companies from intimidating workers.

The proposal is a top labor priority, and both Hare and Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, are backers.

Interesting that Hare, a former textile worker from Rock Island, is taking such a high profile role in debate.

It’s obvious, though, where CNBC’s sympathies are.

Here’s video of U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, praising Jim Leach today. As noted, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to name Davenport’s federal courthouse after Leach.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved a measure today to rename the federal courthouse in Davenport the “James A. Leach United States Courthouse.”

U.S. Reps. Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, co-sponsored the proposal.

A similar proposal passed the House in 2007, but stalled in the Senate. A companion measure was introduced in the Senate last month by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

A lot of the attention being paid to the $787 billion federal stimulus package is on the money being spent on roads, bridges, unemployment benefits, etc. But there’s more than $200 billion in the law for tax cuts, too, according to ProPublica., an investigative web site which has just published data on the per capita benefit per state.

You can find the list here.  (Click on the View as Text button to see all the states).

The tax money amounts to $631 per Iowan, with $406 of it coming from the Make Work Pay provision, ProPublica says. Make Work Pay is the provision President Barack Obama pushed during the campaign.

A child credit accounts for $26 per Iowan and the Alternative Minimum Tax provision, which Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, got put into the stimulus, came to $199 per person, ProPublica says.

ProPublica used data from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy to come up with its breakdown.

ITEP, which is run by people from “academia, labor and the policy community,” actually took the step of breaking down the benefits from four tax provisions in the stimulus by state and then by income group. You can find their analysis here.

Bottom line: The AMT provision was friendlier to the better off. The Make Work Pay provision was more helpful to people in lower income brackets.

ITEP says 93 percent of the benefit from the AMT break is going to people in the top 20 percent of incomes.

Less than one percent went to people in the bottom 60 percent, it says.

Fifty-one percent of Iowa’s share of the AMT money went to an income bracket whose average household income is $103,500, according to ITEP,  

The Make Work Pay credit was more evenly distributed, ITEP says, with 48 percent going to the bottom 60 percent in income.

Two other tax cuts went more heavily to people in the bottom rungs of the income ladder, but the amounts of money were much smaller.

The data fit into the arguments conservatives and progressives were making in the stimulus debate.

Conservatives argued Obama’s tax cuts were going to people who paid a lesser share, if any at all, of the federal income tax pie.

Progressives, on the othe hand, said the AMT money was being diverted from needed spending plans and going to people in the middle- to upper-income brackets.