Leonard Boswell

The mailer, reproduced below, is very similar to the TV ad. It attacks Boswell for supporting President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and says the American Jobs Act will mean “more big government spending and tax increases of $450 billion.”

Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies has so far spent $186,556 at the KCCI and WHO networks in Des Moines, the local CBS and NBC affiliates. The group has ties to former White House deputy chief Karl Rove.

It’s unclear how much Crossroads is spending on the mailing, or what communities are receiving it. The mailing below was received in Des Moines.

Boswell faces a tough re-election battle against fellow U.S. Rep. Tom Latham (R-Ames), who’s opted to move and take on Boswell rather than face U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Kiron) in his current district.

According to OpenSecrets.org, the 501(c)(4) “outside spending” group spent $15.1 million against Democrats in the 2009-10 cycle and $479,619 for Republicans. It spent another $1.1 million on electioneering communications. The group doesn’t disclose its donors.

American Crossroads, a related “super PAC,” raised $26.5 million in 2010 and spent $21.5 million. It raised and spent the most out of any independent expenditure-only committees in 2010.

Reuters reports:

The top U.S. environmental regulator on Thursday said her agency would soon comment on the proposed $7 billion Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, adding she was concerned about emissions and potential leaks that could result from the project.

“We have comments we are just about completing on the current environmental impact statement,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said at a Howard University event with youth environment leaders.

Jackson listed concerns about the pipeline including additional greenhouse gas emissions from producing the oil sands; the possibility of leaks on the line; and harmful emissions from refineries in communities along the Gulf Coast that could result from the project.

“This isn’t a little tiny pipeline, this is a pipeline that cuts our country literally in half,” she added. The $7 billion project would take 700,000 barrels per day or more from Canada through six states to refineries in Texas.

The EPA was highly critical of the first two drafts of the EIS that the State Department released, forcing the agency to go back and revise their analyses. Environmental groups have revealed close ties between TransCanada and officials in the State Department and accuse the agency of acting as a cheerleader for the project rather than an independent and objective decision maker.

President Obama at the G-20 Summit in Toronto on June 27 (Xinhua/ZUMApress.com)

BERLIN — President Obama’s push for additional economic stimulus is not just hitting a wall in Congress. The president has also been rebuffed by the largest European countries — with potentially profound consequences for the U.S. economy and Obama’s national agenda.

[Economy1] In the run-up to the G-20 summit in late June, the Obama administration went on a PR offensive, urging other wealthy nations to keep pumping stimulus into their economies. But with the Greek budget crisis heightening anxieties over public debt, conservative governments in Berlin, Paris, London and Rome are all on an austerity track. Instead of a pledge to inject more capital into their economies, all Obama got at the Toronto conference was a communique that emphasizes savings over stimulus.

Some economists fret that Europe’s fiscal retreat threatens to tip the U.S. deeper into recession. Meanwhile, leading analysts in Germany, the continent’s largest economy, say the trans-Atlantic spending spat underscores Obama’s limited maneuvering room in his effort to steer the fragile recovery back home.

“America is having enormous difficulties,” said economist Gustav Horn of the Macroeconomic Policy Institute, part of a labor-affiliated foundation in Düsseldorf, Germany. “At the moment, [the U.S.] is dependent on the rest of the world offering it a friendly economic environment.”

For Obama, the environment is less friendly than he would like. In an open letter to other G-20 heads of state before the summit, the president wrote that leaders should “learn from the consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, meanwhile, told the BBC, “Growth in the future around the world can’t depend on the United States as much as it did in the past.”

Some economists warn that austerity in the largest European economies, combined with severe budget cuts in countries such as Greece and Spain, could push the continent into a double-dip recession. If so, the consequences for the U.S. could be severe. A European downturn, Horn said, would hurt American exports, both by lowering demand and by strengthening the dollar. Perhaps more importantly, he added, a stumbling Europe could weaken crucial U.S. trading partners in Asia. Likewise, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently warned that the resistance to more stimulus in Europe and the U.S. raises the specter of a depression.

But the dominant view in Germany is that such fears are misguided. Supporters of budget consolidation note the country is on an upswing, with GDP growth expected to reach as high as 2 percent this year as exports accelerate. Moreover, they argue that fiscal retrenchment will spur private-sector spending. A recent report by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, a Munich-based think tank with government funding, says cuts would lead to an “expansive confidence effect on German consumers and investors.”

The fear that a European slowdown could hurt American trade underscores a more fundamental challenge that German economists say the U.S. must tackle: expanding exports as a source of economic growth.

“Before the crisis, we had a consumption boom in the U.S. that was not sustainable,” said Ifo economist Klaus Abberger. “And so we think there is a need for some redirection.”

That redirection, economists say, will be outward.

“The growth driver you’ve got left is ultimately net exports,” said economist Christian Dreger of the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research, another government-funded think tank.

The Obama administration has come to a similar conclusion. In his State of the Union speech in January, the president announced a new initiative to double American exports within five years, though many analysts called the goal unrealistic.

“For too long, America served as the consumer engine for the entire world,” the president said in follow-up remarks in March. “But we’re rebalancing. … Countries with external deficits need to save and export more.”

But the future of U.S. exports is not entirely under American control. The country can only reduce its trade deficit if the rest of the world has sufficient buying power, Horn said. The G-20 has been touting a new initiative to ease trade imbalances, which would require net exporters like Germany to buy more from net importers like the U.S. But it remains to be seen whether there will be any action to follow the talk.

Obama’s inability to induce Europe to boost its stimulus spending is rendered even more discouraging by the limited traction his spending proposals are getting in Congress. And it does not help that Obama is looking increasingly isolated among world leaders in pushing a more expansive fiscal policy.

“You don’t win something in Congress by saying, oh, Europe’s doing this,” said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “[But] you don’t want the U.S. to look like an outlier.”

The president should not get his hopes up for a hand from Berlin, though. As the Berliner Zeitung newspaper declared of Germany’s chancellor in a recent headline: “Merkel won’t listen to Obama.” The country has a culture of thriftiness to rival even the fiscal-conservative wing of the Republican Party. The traumatic hyperinflation that racked the Weimar Republic during the 1920s has made Germany hyper-sensitive to price stability. The country last year amended its constitution to include limits on government debt. Deep concern that the aging of the population will soon make Germany’s welfare state unaffordable have made people here anxious to get back to budget cutting. Meanwhile, unemployment is lower than in the U.S., so the economic pain is less acute.

Deficit hawks here also argue the turmoil in Greece is a warning to profligate governments across the continent.

“We saw with the Greek crisis how vulnerable highly indebted countries are to [speculative] attack,” said Norbert Barthle, a member of the German parliament from the ruling center-right Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) who specializes in budgeting.

The American economy has managed impressive growth so far this year, but it has largely been driven by the effects of government stimulus, Horn said. And the looming dry-up of stimulus funds around the world amounts to a serious problem for the American president.

“He has to do more if other countries do less,” Horn said. “And in that sense, his worries are absolutely understandable.”

David Dagan is a freelance journalist living in Berlin.

Congressional Democrats started the year believing that once health care reform passed, they would quickly pivot to an agenda flush with job creation bills they could tout back home in the lead-up to the midterm elections. But action on that front is being drowned out by other issues — the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the botched terrorist attack in New York City, financial reform, climate change, immigration reform — and House Democrats are accusing Obama of failing to throw his muscle behind efforts to spur significant job growth.

“We were told we would focus like a laser after December. Well, we haven’t exactly been focused like a laser on jobs and I have seen no movement, particularly on the part of the Obama administration, on the transportation bill,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said.

Other Democrats are criticizing the speed with which the administration is spending the money allocated in last year’s $787 billion bill, Roll Call notes.

Others wondered if Obama is letting his own re-election hopes get in the way of investing stimulus dollars sooner. Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) accused the president of slow-walking stimulus investments until 2011, the year before he runs for re-election, in an effort to look effective during his campaign.

“They want to spend it in 2011, because 2012 is there. Well hell, we want to spend it right now because we are in the bubble. … We’ve got $400 billion in that stimulus money out there and we could do something,” Hastings said.

The comments arrive just a few days after the Labor Department reported that the economy created 290,000 new jobs last month — a vast majority of them in the private sector. That’s good news for an economy that had shed about 600,000 a year earlier. But, as the Economic Policy Institute was quick to note, the country is still 10.7 million jobs behind where it should be. To make up the difference, the economy will have to add 325,000 jobs each month for the next four years. That’s a long time to wait for folks whose unemployment benefits will expire after two.

“I thought the stimulus package ought to have been done differently but, as long as it was there, that Virginia ought to have its share,” he said.

That’s not all. McDonnell was also among the 43 state governors advocating last month for additional federal funds for state Medicaid programs.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, had a few choice words for lawmakers who would blast the stimulus bill as irresponsible, then turn around and lobby for its fruits.

“It’s hypocrisy. There’s nothing else to call it,” she told the Post. “You can’t have it both ways. If you are against something, be against it.”

To some degree the divide makes sense. While the stimulus has prevented unemployment rates from hitting 10.8 percent, the economists estimate, that means little to the 10 percent who are still without a job. And while economists agree that the stimulus prevented things from getting worse, even fans concede that the Democrats frittered some of the spending on provisions with no stimulative effects at all.

Still, 1.2 million jobs isn’t a trivial number, and Republicans — hoping to campaign this year on the bill’s allegedly failure — might want to keep that in mind.

I think clearly we need to move on unemployment insurance and COBRA. Beyond that, you mentioned a couple: public jobs, job tax credits, infrastructure. There are a lot of options available; we are discussing those. We are discussing with economic advisors as to what is the most effective. And, frankly, there are differences of opinion on that.

Asked about the size of the jobs package, Hoyer offered no hints. “I don’t have a figure,” he said tersely.

Obviously, there may be different figures for different things that you do. But it is clear that we need to act in a way that does get to the creation of job opportunities for people in the short term. That is what we are trying for.

Of course, that’s also what Democrats were trying for when they passed their $787 billion stimulus bill in February, when unemployment was 8.1 percent. How many more business tax breaks does Congress have to pass before recognizing that well-targeted infrastructure spending — including money for public transit – just might offer more bang-for-the-buck?

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill addressed the issue, providing additional federal funding for the state-federal Medicaid program. But that extra help expires at the end of next year, when unemployment rates are expected to remain near double digits. The looming expiration has left state health officials and children’s welfare advocates anxious about the effects on kids’ health care.

Enter the House health reform bill, which would provide more than $23 billion to continue the additional federal funding for six months. The Washington Post explains:

Under the Affordable Health Care for America Act, the federal government would continue to pay a higher share of all Medicaid costs — 66 percent on average, up from 57 percent before the stimulus — for an additional six months, and erase in one fell swoop a major chunk of states’ projected shortfalls for the coming year.

“It would be a huge help — critical,” said Cindi Jones, chief deputy director of Virginia’s Medicaid program, which quickly estimated last week that it would receive an extra $360 million to $380 million next year under the bill. At a meeting last week of the nation’s Medicaid directors, Jones said the group is unanimously in favor of the provision.

That provision isn’t included in the Senate’s health reform bill, but states are hoping that it will work its way into the final bill. Of course, the temporary help is no remedy to the flawed Medicaid funding formula. It’s worth asking when Democratic leaders plan to tackle that larger problem, if not in the context of the most sweeping health reforms since the program was created.

Showing signs that they can learn from history, lawmakers are now eying another tax benefit, but only for businesses that create new jobs. That proposal, still in the nascent stages, is designed to address the runaway unemployment numbers that plague many regions, while having the additional advantage of appealing to members of both parties. Indeed, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told The New York Times that there’s “a lot of traction for this kind of idea.”

If the White House will take the lead on this, I’m fairly positive it would be welcomed in a bipartisan fashion.

There’s good reason for Congress to do something. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the economy shed an additional 263,000 in September, knocking the unemployment rate up to 9.8 percent — the highest level since 1983.

The good news here, if Cantor’s comments are indication, is that Republicans, while poised to exploit the jobless numbers to their advantage in next year’s elections, also wouldn’t stand in the way of every proposal addressing the problem.

“This gives consumers a break, reduces dangerous carbon pollution and our dependence on foreign oil, and strengthens the American auto industry,” he said last month, urging Congress to approve the additional funds.

Yet The New York Times captured a wholly different sentiment coming out of the White House yesterday, quoting an anonymous senior aide doubting that the environmental benefits are worth mentioning at all.

“What we ended up with,” said one senior Obama administration official, who would not speak on the record because he was being critical of his own administration’s environmental bona fides, “is a program in which you trade in old clunkers for new clunkers.”

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Indeed, the numbers pouring out of the Department of Transportation last week seemed to indicate that drivers were turning in their gas guzzlers for vehicles with much better fuel efficiencies. The department’s official top-10 list of newly purchased vehicles included only small cars.

Yet, a reworking of that list by Edmunds.com, the auto-sales analysis group, found that the administration was playing the numbers to their advantage, CNN reported. Indeed, when Edmunds crunched the new sales by make and model, and didn’t break its analysis down further than that, both the Ford F-150 and the Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks worked their way into the top 10. (By contrast, the Transportation Department considered each of the five versions of those trucks to be different vehicles for tallying purposes.)

None of this matters in the near term, because the additional $2 billion is already law. But no one’s quite sure how long that funding will last, and you can bet that, if the coffers are dry when Congress returns from recess next month, there will be plenty of pressure on lawmakers to provide yet another expensive lifeline for the program. The question that remains is whether some will fight to alter the guidelines in favor of reduced emissions.