Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall says Ernst’s ideas about localism and the ACA are “insane” and remind him of something you’d hear from “militia types.”
Joni Ernst
By Ken Shepherd | October 6, 2014 | 10:20 PM EDT
Managing Editor's Note (Jan. 15, 2015; 5:15 p.m. Eastern): I've republished this to the front page today given the news that Sen. Ernst will be give the official Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union Address next Wednesday. If Chris Matthews doesn't make repeated sneering references to hog castration on MSNBC next Wednesday night, look out your window. You'll probably see a pig flying by.
By Tom Johnson | October 1, 2014 | 12:32 PM EDT
Charlie Pierce at Esquire complained that Democrats refuse to make the case that “the Republican party has thrown its marbles gleefully to the four winds,” which among other things means that “crackpot” Joni Ernst has a good chance to win a Senate seat.
"She shouldn't be allowed into the United States Senate on a tour, let alone as one of its 100 members," he wrote. "This is more than just a message sponsored by the Committee To Not Electing [sic] Morons."
By P.J. Gladnick | September 29, 2014 | 12:02 PM EDT
Politico has noticed a lack of women in statewide office in Iowa for over 20 years. So who is promoted as the possible savior of this situation? Not the obvious choice. Instead it is promoting Hillary Clinton who is might be running to win the Iowa primary for presidential nomination, not statewide office.
By Ken Shepherd | July 29, 2014 | 8:55 PM EDT
Her ears ringing with the "code words" of "nullification" and "states rights," Salon's Joan Walsh strongly suggested on Tuesday's Hardball that Iowa Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst was cynically reaching out to nefarious elements of the GOP when she answered a question about nullification of federal laws in a September 2013 forum. [See my related story about the Daily Beast's biased reporting here]
Naturally host Chris Matthews agreed, tag-teaming with the left-wing scribe against Republican strategist John Brabender who insisted that the Iowa state senator was being taken out of context by Democrats eager to define her in a negative light ahead of November's election. [listen to MP3 audio here; video follows page break]
By Ken Shepherd | July 28, 2014 | 7:00 PM EDT
Recent polls show a tight contest in the Iowa Senate race to replace retiring liberal Democrat Tom Harkin (D), so leave it to the Daily Beast to hype a video clip it recently unearthed to insist that it is evidence that Republican nominee Joni Ernst as a nut who betrays a "shocking ignorance" [see image below page break] about constitutional law regarding the Tenth Amendment and state nullification of federal law.
That's how Ben Jacobs painted the military veteran and Republican state senator, suggesting her answer to a question posed to her at a September 13, 2013 event was an endorsement of state legislatures issuing nullification proclamations against federal laws:
By Mark Finkelstein | July 9, 2014 | 7:52 AM EDT
Bartender—send a double Wyborowa with a Zoloft chaser to the nice lady at the end of the table. But seriously, relax, Mika. Four months before an election in which they are poised to triumph, congressional Republicans are not about to muddy the waters by trying to impeach President Obama.
But on today's Morning Joe, that reality did not prevent Mika Brzezinski from getting verklempt and asking for time to compose herself before introducing a segment on impeachment talk from Sarah Palin and Iowa Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst. View the amusing video after the jump.
By Ken Shepherd | June 9, 2014 | 10:50 PM EDT
Reporting a new poll out on the Iowa Senate race on this evening's program, Hardball host Chris Matthews seemed a bit befuddled that a Tea Party conservative who grew up on a farm, Joni Ernst, is actually leading a Democratic lawyer Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) who waded into a muck a few months ago with an elitist-sounding crack about Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) being a "farmer from Iowa who never went to law school."
Twice Matthews mentioned Ernst's memorable ads in which she mentioned how she castrated pigs when she was growing up on a farm and tied that in to her pledge to cut pork in Washington, D.C. Of course, Matthews failed to make that connection for his viewers and twice mentioned the hog castration as though it were some odd disqualifier in a state the chief industres of which are agriculture and food processing (particularly pork). [Watch the video and read the transcript below the page break]