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DES MOINES, Iowa -- A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office. Zachary Edwards was arrested Friday and charged with identity theft. The Iowa Department of Public Safety issued a news release saying Schultz's office discovered the scheme on June 24, 2011 and notified authorities.

IOWA – -(Ammoland.com)- Progress at the Capitol!This has been a busy, busy couple of weeks for IFC, your Iowa NRA Affiliate Club! We have 3 issues to update you on, a new state added recognition of Iowa’s Permit to Carry, steady progress on the Traditional Ammunition Ban front and most importantly Stand Your Ground legislation is moving forward! Iowa Permit Now Recognized in Georgia IFC has been working with NRA, and also with Gary Slider at www.hangunlaw.us, to help get Georgia to recognize Iowa’s Permit to Carry. Thanks to all parties involved for their efforts. Georgia law was written such...

Lottery Calls Series Of Events 'Strangest Situation' In 26-Year History DES MOINES, Iowa -- A New York lawyer, acting as the trustee for what is called the Hexham Investment Trust, has indicated he will not pursue a claim for a $14 million lottery jackpot. Just after 6 p.m. Thursday, lawyers in Des Moines representing attorney Crawford Shaw said he is withdrawing his claim for the "Hot Lotto" ticket that was submitted to Iowa Lottery officials just hours before a Dec. 29, 2011 deadline. The ticket had been purchased at a Des Moines convenience store a year earlier. Lottery officials said...

Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz plans to unveil a voter identification bill at Statehouse news conference. Schultz, a Republican, has scheduled an announcement Thursday morning on a voter ID bill. The issue was central to his successful 2010 campaign for secretary of state. Critics of voter ID laws say they unfairly discourage voting by poor, minority and older voters who are less likely to have government issued identification. They also argue that voter fraud is rare. Some say the effort is a ploy to discourage voting by groups that tend to support Democratic candidates. Schultz has noted people have...

When an employee of Link Strategies was arrested Friday for trying to steal the Iowa Secretary of State’s identity, it was not the first time the Democrat consultant group was investigated for criminal activity aimed at tearing down a Republican opponent. Back in 2002, while Link Strategies was running Tom Harkin’s senatorial campaign, the group was involved in an infamous “taping” scandal. The 2002 incident became one of the most talked about stories in Iowa politics that year. A Harkin campaign staffer arranged to have a supporter tape-record a private strategy session conducted by Harkin’s Republican opponent, Greg Ganske. The...

Rick Santorum said he would be pleased with a third-place finish in South Carolina Saturday but vowed to stay in the presidential race through the Florida primary no matter what. He also blasted his "desperate" rival Mitt Romney for perpetrating "cheap stuff" as Mr. Romney's position as front runner here melted away the past week... "We finally were given the victory in Iowa," Mr. Santorum said. "If we had had it two weeks ago, it might be a very different situation. It might have been a very different race." Mr. Santorum also said he was disappointed in Mr. Romney after...

Why did the Iowa Republican Party decide to announce a Santorum victory, only a day before the South Carolina Primary? http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-21/santorum-declared-iowa-caucuses-winner-by-state-party-leaders.html# It requires no more than 4 days after the announcement of the initial results, to conduct a fully certified recount, because relatively few people vote in the Iowa Caucuses. The reason why they announced Santorum as the winner of Iowa at this time, is to get some supporters of Gingrich to vote for Santorum, in order to split the conservative vote and assure a victory for Romney. American elections have become as corrupt as the elections in Mexico, Colombia,...

Barack Obama’s 2008 Iowa New Media Director was arrested Friday for attempting to use the identities of Secretary of State Matt Schultz, and/or his brother Thomas, with the intent to falsely implicate the Secretary Schultz in illegal or unethical behavior. Zach Edwards, 29, of Des Moines, currently works for Link Strategies, a Democrat-affiliated organization with ties to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. Edwards is the Director of New Media for Link Strategies. The Secretary of State’s office discovered the alleged crime and reported it to authorities. Edwards turned himself in to the Iowa DCI agents Friday afternoon. He was charged with...

GREENVILLE, S.C. — On the eve of the South Carolina primary, ­ Iowa Republicans dealt Mitt Romney’s campaign a blow by formally declaring Rick Santorum the winner of their Jan. 3 caucuses. At 18 minutes before midnight Friday, South Carolina time, the Republican Party of Iowa released a statement revising its Thursday announcement that reported Santorum ahead of Romney but also saying the two-week-old race had no clear winner. “In order to clarify conflicting reports and to affirm the results released January 18 by the Republican Party of Iowa, Chairman Matthew Strawn and the State Central Committee declared Senator Rick...

Allies of embattled GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich are coming to his defense against his ex-wife's new and salacious charges, labeling Marianne as "unstable" and "unhinged." What's more is that they are slapping at ABC, which is set to run an interview Thursday with Marianne Gingrich in which she claims the former speaker wanted an open marriage so he could date his current wife, Callista. Gingrich's supporters claim the network is trying to get the Republican out of the race just as he's peaking in the polls. What was once a quiet campaign to distance Marianne from Gingrich has kicked...

Mitt Romney made a "polite" phone call Thursday to rival Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to "concede victory" in Iowa, according to Santorum's spokesman Hogan Gidley. But Romney's team objected, saying his campaign didn't concede. “He just called him. They talked, and he recognized his efforts," a top campaign aide told CNN. Santorum finished the Iowa Republican caucuses 34 votes ahead of Mitt Romney, but results from several precincts are missing and the full actual results may never be known, according to a final certified tally released Thursday by the Iowa GOP. The new numbers show 29,839 votes for Santorum...

Reacting to this morning’s news that not only has Rick Santorum won the Iowa Caucuses after all but that they’ve managed to lose more ballots than the margin of victory, the Telegraph’s Toby Harnden tweets, “What a debacle for Iowa. Hard to see why candidates should take Iowa caucuses seriously in future.” Indeed. This is truly a joke. In a contest with fewer total votes (121,503 counted; goodness knows how many lost) than your average election for a school board seat, the powers that be have managed to have wild shifts in the vote count in several districts and be...

Former Senator Rick Santorum won the January 3 Iowa Republican presidential caucuses by a razor-thin margin of 34 votes, according to certified results released on Thursday by the Iowa Republican Party. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had been declared the winner on the night of the caucuses, but now falls to second place. Santorum received 29,839 votes, compared with 29,805 for Romney, according to the new figures.

The Iowa Republican Party will certify this month's presidential caucuses as a split decision between former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, citing missing data from eight precincts, the Des Moines Register reported on Thursday. The party had previously awarded the contest to Romney, with an eight vote margin. The official certified caucus results are due out Thursday at 8:15 a.m. local time (1415 GMT). The Register said the new count put Santorum ahead by 34 votes. However, results from any one of the eight precincts with "missing data" could hold an advantage for Romney, the...

LINCOLN — Californian Therese Ebert dreamed of being a modern-day homesteader, pulling up stakes from her rented room in Poway, Calif., to build a home of her own in Beatrice, Neb. Chasing the promise of free land, she packed her two dogs and her belongings into the back of an SUV and set off for Nebraska. She had signed up last January for a free lot in Beatrice on condition that she build a home on the property within five years. "Everything I owned was with me," Ebert said. "The car was packed, I wasn't looking back." But, alas, homesteading...

Oh my. MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — It’s conventional wisdom in Republican circles here in South Carolina that if Mitt Romney wins the state’s primary this Saturday — having already won in Iowa and New Hampshire — he’ll be the GOP presidential nominee. “If for some reason he’s not derailed here and Mitt Romney wins South Carolina — no one’s ever won all three — I think it should be over,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday. “That would be quite a testament to his ability as a candidate and a campaigner.” But what if Romney did not actually win Iowa? That...

If for nothing else, Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas will be remembered for an anecdote from 2010. After he spent hours disputing an allegation in the French media that Michelle Obama thought life in the White House was “hell,” press secretary Robert Gibbs encountered senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. She told him the first lady was unhappy with his work. Gibbs exploded in a rage, informing Jarrett that she didn’t “know what the f— you’re talking about” and that if Mrs. Obama was displeased, well, “f— her too.” Subsequent relations between the senior adviser and press secretary were strained. Gibbs told Kantor...

Despite a better than 1,000 percent increase in the number of gun permits issued in Dubuque County in 2011, officials who fought the new law are somewhat surprised at the lack of problems caused by it. More than 2,000 county residents received permits to carry in 2011, a 1,170 percent increase from the previous year. Such an increase was certainly expected; Dubuque County Sheriff Don Vrotsos actually predicted more would apply. And while gun-control groups didn't quite predict the end of the world as we know it, the predictions came close -- thousands of people flashing handguns; fist fights dissolving...

What was Tom Emmer thinking when he applied for a faculty position at Hamline University? Surely he knows that our campus intelligentsia generally view conservatives like him as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. At many campuses, Emmer might have made it to the second round of interviews if he had been a disabled "person of color" or confused about his sexuality. But even then he probably couldn't have overcome the cardinal rule of campus "diversity" -- diversity of political views will not be tolerated. Given his rejection by Hamline (after he thought he had a job), Emmer might be pleased to know that...