New reasons emerged this week to doubt the tier system most commentators use to describe the 2008 presidential horse race.
Conventional wisdom — here in Iowa and across the country — dictates that the three candidates to watch on the Democratic side are Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, and former Sen. John Edwards.
Sen. Chris Dodd, [...]

“Mainstream Iowan,” a blog that is decidedly not mainstream, writes this morning that illegal immigration is “a public health issue for all Americans.”
Under a photo of a young hispanic male wearing a scary SARS mask, the blogger recounts this story:
When doctors told Francisco Santos he had tuberculosis Friday, health officials said the Gwinnett County 17-year-old [...]

noneed4thneed of Century of the Common Iowan launched a new online poll last week to measure his readers’ support of Democratic presidential candidates.  He held them in the past, and the results were always unscientific but interesting to see.  Now that campaigns are taking Iowa blogs a bit more seriously, however, Iowa bloggers can’t assume [...]

If you hadn’t heard, French Fries are now Freedom Fries and Iowa Voice is now the Liberty Pundit.
And I’m not really accusing Brian and our other conservative friends at that site of hating our state, but come on.  You blog about national politics, and you think having Iowa in your name is a bad thing [...]

Because of what I do, I get asked a lot about how the “MSM” — I’ll call it the “traditional media” — approaches blogs in Iowa. Because I think that over the past few months I’ve developed an interesting answer to the question, and because at cocktail parties I am not always as articulate [...]

Chris Matthews and other MSNBC shows have featured Obama girl, Giuliani girl, and Hillary girl multiple times — both via their YouTube exploits and in live, in-studio appearances. Why isn’t this video getting any attention? Should she have worn hot pants?

Hat-tip: Common Iowan

Big, important YearlyKos info-dump is forthcoming, I think.  Until I get that up, I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about the differences between seeing a candidate in Iowa and seeing a candidate at a progressive bloggers’ convention.  This was going to be long and developed, but it turned out that there [...]

I’m about to get on a plane to fly to Chicago for YearlyKos.  I’ll likely post occasional updates and thoughts from the convention throughout the weekend, but only when inspiration strikes.  To get in touch with me, shoot an email to chase [at] iowaindependent.com or give me a call.

Before leaving Iowa Independent to head to DC, writer Ben Weyl, who has been our Christian Right correspondent, wrote a final “think piece” on the social conservative movement in Iowa.  His coverage of Iowa social conservatives has, I think, been better and more comprehensive than anyone else’s for the past three months, and this culmination [...]

At the site I work on most often, Iowa Independent, we’ve had quite a few excellent stories, and we are currently being rewarded with a huge day of traffic (we’re going to hit 20,000 visitors by the end of the day). Here are some of the stories that are either getting a lot of [...]