Don't see this diaried anywhere, so I thought I'd do a quick diary on it.

Was just over at BarackObama.com to donate (yet again, sombody help me, I can't stop!), and to check out the new diggs (website design updates etc). While doing that I ran into this video of Barack campaigning in Davenport, Iowa this morning.

Cynthia Freidhof, the owner of Ross' restaurant in Davenport, had a question about small businesses and wanted Barack to

1 - Answer her question about small businesses and
2 - to help her convince her husband to vote for him.

Well Barack did her one better. Check out the video over the fold:

It's 2pm here in on the West Coast now. About 14 hours since I found out that Joe Biden was going to be the VP pick. While I was disappointed at first - holding out for Wesley Clark, Brian Schweitzer or Kathleen Sebelius, I've already started to grow from it. And it reminder me of this from my days volunteering for Barack Obama in Iowa.

Joe Biden. Of all the candidates, he always seemed to be the most bitter about Barack Obama. At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, he started his speech with this condescending remark.

"Hello Iowa and hello Chicago."

My immediate thought - not an Iowan but not from Chicago either, and surrounded by fellow Iowans - was "shut up asshole."

Cross-posted at Clintonistas for Obama.

A few days ago, I wrote about Becky Greenwald, who is running for Congress in Iowa and the Progressive Patriots Fund.

We learned from Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas in his devastating essay (posted by Duke in its entirety at Sanctuary), that there were horrible travesties of both the law and justice itself in how the Postville, Iowa raid was executed.

As Dr. Camayd-Freixas said, speaking of his conversation with one of the immigration judges who had no choice but to rule as a rubber-stamp for the ICE:

As a citizen, I want our judges to administer justice, not a federal agency.

Yet that is exactly what happened.  A federal agency administered "justice" and the defense attorneys and judges were helpless to change anything.  As a result, an entire town was ripped apart, economic devastation ensued, and as we now see (h/t woc phd by way of symsess' great roundups at Sanctuary), the human rights abuses continue:

I don't see much evidence that Barack Obama has a problem with women voters. He leads among women by more than Al Gore or John Kerry did at the same time during their own presidential campaigns. The most recent Iowa poll shows Obama leading by six overall but by 12 among Iowa women.

Among purveyors of conventional wisdom, however, there is still a perception that Obama has work to do among women voters, and particularly the women who preferred Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

The Obama campaign has been scheduling women's outreach events to address this issue. Today Governor Kathleen Sebelius is campaigning around central Iowa, and one of her appearances is a lunch in Des Moines specifically geared toward women.

More below the fold.

cross-posted at Bleeding Heartland and La Vida Locavore

Iowa's legislature and state agencies have been notorious for doing nothing to address huge pollution problems stemming from confined-animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

But some big news came out of the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission today.

Here it comes ...
The Iowa Independent's Jason Hancock is reporting that "two media consultants who played key roles in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads in 2004 and the Willie Horton" ads have teamed up ...

Since Virginia is in play this year and has 13, possibly deciding, electoral votes it may not be a bad idea for Obama to announce his running mate there. Speculation is running rampant with the convention just a week away and thus far Obama's last announced appearance this week is in Martinsville, Virginia.

Since he'll be there Wednesday everyone has been speculating about Tim Kaine getting the nod. But there are a few other possibilities with Virginia relations.

While DailyKos is a key stronghold in the netroots movement, it must be admitted that using the internet has certain, tangible limits in terms of voter outreach. Many demographics, primarily the higher age groups that vote strongly for McCain, still largely get their news from newspapers.

Given the amount of writing talent available in the blogging community, it seems logical that this would be a good place to find quality letter-writers. Many newspapers in key swing states have circulations in the hundreds of thousands.

Interested in helping the cause? Oodles of info below the fold.

We're now in day four of the LOLJohnMcCain project, where we have been putting together LOLCats inspired pictures of John McCain that work to build a narrative of incompetence, wrongness, and crazy old age around McCain.

Kossacks have been tremendous in contributing both pictures and ideas for the site. We've had 13,000 viewers in the first three days, and want to keep that going and growing, so that every American on the internet has seen at least one of these LOLJohnMcCain pictures.

cross-posted at La Vida Locavore and Bleeding Heartland

I was concerned when Governor Chet Culver put Lieutenant Governor Patty Judge in charge of the Rebuild Iowa Commission and nine task forces to deal with flood recovery. In her previous job as secretary of agriculture, Judge was very close to industrial agricultural interests and did little to promote sustainable agriculture. She is not receptive to environmental and public-health concerns associated with large-scale livestock operations.

Even though Judge has few friends in the environmental community, I kept an open mind about the process, because one of Rebuild Iowa's nine task forces was dedicated to Environmental Quality and Review.

Howard Wolfson is, yet again, proven to be an ass:

Wolfson, in yet another sign that some Clinton acolytes are having difficulty letting go of the past, caused a stir by telling ABC News that his boss would have captured the Democratic nod had Edwards been forced to the sidelines before the Iowa caucuses in early January.  

"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," the often pugnacious Wolfson said.

Au contraire, argues David Redlawsk -- head of the University of Iowa's Hawkeye Poll and, in the walk-up to the caucuses, himself an Edwards backer.

An e-mail sent today by the school's news service says that polling on caucus night supervised by Redlawsk indicated "that the absence of Edwards would have helped (Barack) Obama."

Not sure if this was timed to go with the Republicans for Obama rollout but it certainly carries alot of weight as most people agree that it's the Mayors who have the political muscle...

Republican Mayor Jim Whitaker has said he is endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

“My goal is to let Republicans have a clear understanding that their right to vote should not be restricted by any party affiliation,” the borough mayor said. He said the economic and political challenges facing the state and country are broader than political parties alone can address and suggested Republicans should consider crossing party lines by focusing on the strongest candidate this year.

Whitaker, a former state lawmaker, said a comparison of Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain leads him to believe Obama has the stronger “intellectual capacity” and a greater ability to manifest it.

Whitaker, who as a politician has often focused on energy issues, said he sensed an open-minded approach in Obama’s campaign toward traditional, alternative and renewable energy issues that can benefit resource-rich Alaska.

Cross-posted at Election Inspection

Alright, first off, die hard Edwards fan here. And Wolfson is not my favorite guy. That being said, he is putting it out there that Edward's being in the race in Iowa cost Clinton the other votes that she would have gotten had he been truthful about the affair or had dropped out.
So in essence, Edwards took Clinton's win in Iowa by lying, and giving a win to Obama.
more here

Last week I had a huge influx of readers interested in my piece on Eric Cantor. Seems I'm not the only one thinking McCain might just pick Cantor. I think it's a longshot, but possible.

Things are getting very hectic personally. This may be the last newsletter for a few weeks or more. We will be on vacation in California for a couple of weeks and I will have Grand Jury duty after that. Plus work is exploding for me and Joy's dissertation is overdue. Even politically, I will need to put some extra effort into my friend, Devin Cohen's primary election September 9th. But this newsletter I cover some pretty critical stuff.

This is the third in a series of state by state voter registration diaries that I have decided to do rather than the omnibus ones I had done in months past (the states I did diaries for before this one were for the states of Nevada and North Carolina).

By devoting a diary to a single state at a time, I hope that I can not only make the reading of the raw numbers more simple but more importantly, that the information is more in depth and more informative by being able to provide some commentary regarding those numbers for that state.  In that vein I will try to provide more of a long term history of the voter registration numbers for each of the states, both over the past year and just as importantly in comparison to the final numbers from the 2004 election with accompanying raw vote totals from the election results in those states that year.

That having been said onto the numbers for today's state Iowa.

Mike Glover of the Associated Press bureau in Des Moines wrote a piece this week on the huge money advantage that Senator Tom Harkin and Iowa's five U.S. House incumbents have over their opponents.

I'll have more to say on this topic in future posts, but for now I want to note one thing: although nearly all incumbents are able to outspend their opponents, that is not always enough to overcome a national tidal wave toward the other party.