ABC News' Jeff Zeleny recently sat down with U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst (R. IA) to discuss her campaign for Senator Tom Harkin's (D. IA) seat:
http://abcnews.go.com/...
Joni Ernst is not striving to be the next Ted Cruz. But if she reaches the Senate, she hopes aspiring senators want to be the next Joni Ernst.
“I hope that after a couple of years, people are going to say, ‘I want to model myself after Joni Ernst,’” she told ABC News today.
Ernst, a state senator who has become one of the Republican Party’s most promising recruits of the midterm election season, acknowledged that she feels pressure as one of the key pieces in the GOP effort to try and pick up six seats to win control of the Senate in November.
“It is such a phenomenally positive pressure,” Ernst said. “I have gone from being a very little known state senator from southwest Iowa to now being someone that can really make a difference for Iowa in our federal legislature.” - ABC News, 8/8/14
What didn't make the interview Zeleny Tweeted and it should stop and make you worried about her becoming the next Senator from Iowa:
Has your head exploded yet? You shouldn't be surprised to hear this type on nonsense out of Ernst's mouth when it comes to the Iraq War:
http://www.usnews.com/...
Joni Ernst, an Iowa state senator running for the GOP nomination for U.S. senator, delivered a remarkable line in an interview with the Des Moines Register. Said Ernst: “I do have reason to believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
It’s a rewriting of history that demands a new definition of the word “audacious.” Here is one of the most famous misstatements – decide on your own if you believe it was misinformation or an out-and-out lie – made in recent presidential history. In the eerie glow of fear in the years after 9/11, the George W. Bush administration was able to convince Congress and the American people, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them against the United States. No proof was produced – nothing solid, anyway. It was the sort of innocuous “evidence,” shown privately to members of Congress, that was very much in the eye of the beholder. If you really wanted to believe the photos showed WMD, well, then, they did.
Many millions, billions of dollars later, many deaths – American and Iraqi – later, there were still no weapons of mass destruction. Nothing was found, and it wasn’t because no one was looking. The Bush administration, prosecuting a war that was beginning to be pretty unpopular, was desperate to prove it had done the right thing by invading a sovereign, if deeply troubled and repressive, nation. Nada.
Ernst, however, talked to the editorial board as if she was one of the few who new the real story. Ernst is a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard and served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to her bio, her unit ran convoys from Kuwait into southern Iraq. That's an important mission, during any kind of war, but it’s not like she was on the search-and-recover team for WMD. She won’t say how she knows, or exactly what she knows – just that the intelligence under which they were operating was based on the idea Saddam Hussein had WMD. Well, of course it was. That was the entire basis for the debacle of a war. What else would officers in country be told? - U.S. News, 5/ 13/14
So yeah, she's a nut job. She's also getting hit on this issue:
http://www.radioiowa.com/...
Two people dressed as ears of corn were in the crowd surrounding Ernst to call attention to questions Democrats have raised about Ernst’s support for ethanol. There were other protestors promoting other causes, like gun control, but none of the protestors disrupted her speech. Carol Hunter, the Des Moines Register’s executive news director, made this announcement to the crowd just before introducing Ernst: “Let’s have civil discourse here. Let’s let each of the speakers have their say.”
Ernst began her day on the fairgrounds with a news conference alongside other Republican elected officials to tout the federal mandate for yearly ethanol production. The Renewable Fuels Standard for 2014 is in limbo as federal officials consider scaling it back.
“I have had a 100 percent voting record supporting RFS in the Iowa state Senate,” Ernst said. “Not only have I supported it legislatively, but I have been an advocate for RFS.”
Ernst said during the primary season that she is philosophically opposed to all tax credits for selected industries, including the one for ethanol, but would support keeping it until the playing field is leveled and all tax credits are ended. Democrats have questioned whether Ernst has promised her campaign contributors from the oil industry that she would vote to do away with the Renewable Fuels Standard if she’s elected to the U.S. Senate.
“I’m just going to say that most of the attacks out there are blatantly false,” Ernst told reporters. “They are distractions from my actual record on where I stand on the RFS.”
Republican Governor Terry Branstad jumped to her defense, saying he “resents” the ads running against Ernst, questioning her fidelity to ethanol. - Radio Iowa, 8/8/14
And Braley is emphasizing this as a key campaign issue:
http://amestrib.com/...
Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley took aim at state Sen. Joni Ernst over her opposition to the federal minimum wage during a visit to the Ames Tribune on Wednesday.
Braley, a Democrat, and Ernst, a Republican, are locked in a dead heat for the seat currently occupied by Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, whose retirement this year will mark the first time in four decades that an open Senate seat will appear on an Iowa ballot.
The congressman has made his support for increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and indexing it to inflation the focus of his campaign this week.
The proposal builds on a television advertisement his campaign released at the end of July that calls Ernst’s position on the issue an “extreme idea.”
“(Raising the minimum wage) would pump over $250 million in new income into the state economy,” Braley said. “That’s a significant impact on the Iowa economy, because people who are working minimum wage jobs take that money and they spend it (on) necessities: food, shelter, clothing, fuel.”
The figure Braley cited was taken from a report released in February by the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund and Progress Iowa. The report found that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would create more than $272 million in additional gross domestic product for the state economy and increase the pay of 300,000 Iowans — another figure Braley pointed out. - Ames Tribune, 8/6/14
And this:
http://siouxcityjournal.com/...
Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Bruce Braley said Saturday in the Quad-Cities that raising the minimum wage, improving the economy and lifting the cap on income subject to payroll taxes would stabilize the Social Security program over the long term.
And the congressman from Waterloo sharpened his criticism of Republican rival Joni Ernst, saying that she supports the use of private accounts in the program that would amount to a "betrayal of trust."
Braley was at the Hotel Blackhawk in Davenport to recieve the endorsement of the Alliance for Retired Americans, a union-affiliated group that opposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
"If people ask you what my plan is to save Social Security and strengthen it for future generations, there's three things right there. But we don't need to radically transform it and go toward a risky private investment scheme," he said.
His campaign has pointed to statements made during the Republican primary campaign earlier this year in which Iowa Sen. Ernst, R-Red Oak, said Congress needs to look at setting up private accounts for younger workers.
Social Security and Medicare are key issues in states with older populations such as Iowa, where one in six residents receive a Social Security check. Democrats have warned that diverting Social Security revenues into private accounts, as then-President Bush proposed in 2005, would destabilize the system. - Sioux City Journal, 8/2/14
The GOP is eager to win this seat and we can't let Ernst dupe voters into voting for her. Click here to donate and get involved with Braley's campaign:
http://www.brucebraley.com/