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DES MOINES, Iowa — Vice President Joe Biden is heading into the belly of Democrats' anti-war opposition, venturing into a politically influential heartland state for the first time since President Barack Obama publicly endorsed a possible military strike on Syria. Biden is scheduled to headline a fundraiser in Iowa Sunday for Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, an annual steak picnic for the senator who is popular with anti-war Democrats. Even if Biden sidesteps talk of Syria, the issue will be as much a part of the backdrop as the bales of hay and smoke from the grilling steaks, and in a...

President Obama has some work to do if he wants congressional authority to bomb Syria. Already some of his liberal allies are questioning the evidence which is supposed to show that Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people. “I have just attended a classified Congressional briefing on Syria that quite frankly raised more questions than it answered. I found the evidence presented by Administration officials to be circumstantial. The atrocious use of chemical weapons against civilian is an affront to human values and a violation of international law. It should be condemned by the international community...

President Obama was described as “exotic” by one senator from a Southern state during a closed-door meeting, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) claimed Wednesday. Harkin said the remark was made at a private event attended by nearly the entire Senate on filibuster reform. “I'm not naming any names, but one senator got up from a Southern state and said, ‘Well, you've got to understand that to my people down here, Obama seems like he's exotic,’ ” Harkin told the Des Moines Register’s editorial board on Wednesday. “That he's just exotic, he doesn't share our values.” Harkin spoke in response to a...

Iowa state Sen. Joni Ernst (R) will run for retiring Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-Iowa) seat, she announced Wednesday afternoon. "As a mother, soldier, and a conservative, the values I hold dear, and have fought more than 20 years to protect, are being threatened by the failed policies of this president," she said in a statement on her new campaign website. "Washington has failed us. We need and deserve better leadership. And that's why I am running for U.S. Senate." Ernst, a lieutenant colonel in Iowa's national guard and first-term state lawmaker, has received encouragement from Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R)...

Iowa Congressman Steve King sent an email to supporters Friday night announcing he would not seek the state’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2014. The announcement is not unexpected. King said in February that he was leaning toward running. However, as he struggled with the decision for three months, it became less likely that he would enter the fray. King would have been an overwhelming favorite in a Republican primary. His decision not to run opens the field for other candidates to enter. Former U.S. Attorney Matt Whitaker has stated he would run for the seat if King opted not...

WASHINGTON — Don't take Steve King lightly. That's the warning from Sen. Tom Harkin for his fellow Iowa Democrats itching for King to jump into a statewide race. “I've never underestimated Steve King,” Harkin told The World-Herald. “He is a smart guy. He is a tough campaigner.” Harkin is retiring after five terms in the U.S. Senate, and the race to succeed him in 2014 could help determine the body's balance of power. The race is viewed as a toss-up at this very early stage, before the candidates have been determined.

Credible sources are reporting this morning that Democrat U.S. Senator Tom Harkin will not seek reelection next year.

<p>CUMMING (AP) - Iowa Senator Tom Harkin said he will not seek re-election in 2014.</p> <p>The 73-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview, "It's just time to step aside."</p> <p>By the time Harkin would finish a sixth term, he would be 81 years old.</p>

AP) IOWA CITY, Iowa - An Iowa Board of Regents member worked behind the scenes to create a university institute honoring her husband, Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, and then pushed for its approval before two of the couple’s allies left the board, according to an email obtained by The Associated Press. The 2011 email from then-Iowa State University Provost Elizabeth Hoffman describes the top-secret process that Ruth Harkin and a small group of officials pursued in planning the Harkin Institute of Public Policy, which remains mired in controversy nearly two years later. It noted that an ethics scandal involving a...

Someone is running amok at C-SPAN, the nonprofit network where political junkies get their kicks watching the inner workings of Congress. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, as most of the country partied away the first few hours of the 2013, anyone who was watching C-SPAN at 1:27 a.m., breathlessly waiting for the Senate to pass a deal on the fiscal cliff, would have seen a somewhat odd caption over Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin: “Just Plain Dick.” The caption was memorialized by Erin Skinner Cochran on Twitter, and reported by Jim Romenesko on his media blog.

Businesses already feeling burdened by the weight of being required to offer employee health insurance beginning in 2014 under the Affordable Care Act now could have another government mandate to worry about. Over the summer, Sen. Harkin (D-IA), chairman of Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, issued a white paper about a new proposal to require employers that do not offer a workplace retirement plan with automatic enrollment and a minimum level of employer contributions to automatically withhold a portion of their employees' pay and send such amounts to a USA Retirement Fund. In addition, these employers would be...

DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin said Friday he will push for more money in federal grants to pay for anti-bullying programs and attach more strings to teacher training money the federal government already doles out. Harkin made his remarks following a 2 ½- hour hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee held in the gymnasium of East High School in Des Moines Friday afternoon. But testimony at the hearing, which included brutally frank and heart-wrenching accounts of bullying from student panelists, made it clear that the federal government has a limited ability to do...

UNITED NATIONS — A former Nicaraguan foreign minister who once called President Ronald Reagan “the butcher of my people” has been appointed to represent Libya at the United Nations after its delegate was denied a visa, the Nicaraguan government said on Wednesday. Nicaragua said the former minister, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, 78, an outspoken critic of the United States and a Catholic priest, would replace the Libyan diplomat Ali Abdussalam Treki, who had been unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States. Libya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgam, defected in late February after denouncing Col. Muammar...

Gannett paper, link only: Obama’s new Iowa campaign HQ opens Sunday – in Romney’s old digs

Newly released FBI memos detail a sensitive investigation into fundraising in the Carter White House that started with a comparison to Watergate but fizzled after uncovering special access for donors but no criminal wrongdoing. The memos were released from the file of Charles Manatt, an Iowa native and former Democratic National Committee Chairman who was interviewed during the investigation. The records became public after Manatt died in July at age 75 in Richmond, Va. Manatt grew up on an Audobon farm and studied rural sociology at Iowa State University before ascending to the top of the fields of law, business...

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...

en. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said that Newt Gingrich would be a "heaven-sent" nominee for President Obama's reelection campaign and that there was "silent cheering" from the Obama campaign about his emergence in the GOP race. The senator went on to dismiss the former Speaker as a "bomb thrower" in a call with reporters Thursday. "I was in the House with Newt, as a matter of fact, years ago. I can remember him being a bomb thrower at that time," Harkin said. "One of those people always lobbing things around - I thought at that time, in his early career in...

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Representative Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) are set to propose a tax on financial transactions similar to what is being proposed in Europe (as if that lends them any support). It is being marketed by the folks behind it as very small, so small that Tom Harkin bets that "nobody would even feel it". Statements like that further convince me that he has absolutely zero knowledge of the financial world, not surprising given that he has had a total of 2 years of private sector experience (practicing law 37 years ago after he lost a Congressional election)...

Should we use ethanol for fuel? Certainly. Should we use corn to make that ethanol? Certainly not. Sure, we want to get over our need for foreign oil. Sure, we want to find a renewable fuel for our vehicles. Sure, ethanol could work just fine. But don’t make it from corn. Here’s what I’m talking about. The president and a bunch of powerful people in Congress have been working over recent years to hold up corn-based ethanol as the answer to our future energy-supply needs. When he talks about it, the president says corn-based ethanol is our only hope of...

A top aide to Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin supplied an answer last year to a thorny question a friendly witness would face the next day at a pivotal hearing on for-profit colleges, raising questions of witness tampering, an email obtained by The Daily Caller shows. As Harkin prepares for another event on the same subject at 2:00 p.m. today, the email raises fresh concerns about the senator’s committee conduct after he recently faced accusations from Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigators that he pressured them on an error-ridden report unveiled at the very same hearing. That Senate Health, Education, Labor...