Winners

Ah, the saccharin taste of victory. It must feel really gratifying to kick out an entire community of mainly low-income Hispanic and/or elderly folks from the mobile home park they've lived in for years. And it probably feels even better to steal away to the boardroom and ponder the possibilities for the now-vacant space. Upscale condos, perhaps? A Home Depot? Any other fill-in-the-blank, big-box bastion of suburbandom? We're imagining that's what the folks at 6777 Partners II LLC are doing these days. Immediately after purchasing Andrew Mobile Home Park in Urbandale, 6777 Partners doled out eviction notices, giving residents a May 31 deadline to move it or lose it. Problem is, many of the inhabitants can't afford to transport their homes, so a contingent of pissed-off residents staged a protest at the corporation's West Des Moines office to demand a policy change and a dose of compassion. It was a noble effort, but it isn't likely to change the situation. Iowa law - big surprise - comes down on the side of park owners. And while other states are passing legislation designed to give mobile home owners recourse when their land is literally sold from beneath them, mum's the word with our state's lawmakers.

Flowery congratulatory e-mails from Nan Stillians regarding his tenacity aside, as far as we can tell Clark Kauffman is just really good at coloring inside the lines. Not that Kauffman and his near-Pulitzer aren't the biggest assets of a daily made up mostly of hacks (They are), but if we're truly talking about breaking the CIETC/IWD story, only one person gets the nod: State Auditor David Vaudt. Vaudt is a watchdog in every sense of the word, not caring where a story might take him, whom it might expose or what other nastiness it might stir up (The Register can't say that, can it?). And while others, like, say, his boss, aren't afraid to regurgitate the mantra that government should be open and accountable to all of its citizens, Vaudt lives it; and without his tenacity, God only knows how long the despicable behavior he helped to expose would have been left alone to continue.

Losers

As if we needed further proof that the USDA feeds at the agribusiness trough: Country of Origin Labeling (COOL), which was designed to mandate that producers and grocers label meat products so consumers know where the chunk of flesh on their plates was born and slaughtered, was rendered toothless by a gutless USDA. The agency wants to make the program voluntary (translation: no one's gonna do it), and even then, only for cattle younger than one year old. COOL would have promoted U.S. meat products at home and abroad - a boon for Iowa's 34,000 cattle farms - and helped investigators track mad cow outbreaks. But thanks to incessant bitching from the massive corporate ag sector, which whined about the cost of COOL implementation even as it slipped $2.7 million into Bush's 2004 reelection pocket, COOL is off the front burner, at least for the foreseeable future. CV

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