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Federal health care reform talks have achieved critical mass, as the end of this week will be a key time to see whether reform moves forward. The U.S. House could vote on a measure Saturday, and today some local chapters of the American Association of Retired People are holding press conferences to talk about support for the House bill. That will happen in a few minutes in Des Moines with Iowa AARP talking about advocacy efforts.

On the flip side, at noon Republicans like Iowa 5th District Congressman Steve King and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann will follow through with a press event called a “house call” on the east steps of the Capitol in Washington to beat back reform. Two days ago King and other reform critics called on Americans to “fill the streets of Washington and opposed the (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi health care bill. ”

“For liberals, this legislation is the crown jewel of their socialist agenda,” King said, since it “will place bureaucrats between patients and doctors,” and raise taxes on small businesses. Bachmann pitched the “house call” with, “Nothing scares members of Congress like freedom-loving Americans.”

With equal conviction he’s right on the issue, on Tuesday a Storm Lake newspaperman gave testimony to the Senate Health, Education, Health and Pensions Committee hearing on health insurance, as invited by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times spoke about how the newspaper has struggled to continue to provide health insurance to 12 employees as costs rise. He cited rates doubling (and then annually increasing by double digits) after an employee had a kidney transplant in 2005, and bemoaned an inability to change insurers because of employees with pre-existing conditions.

“The Storm Lake Times now pays nearly $50,000 per year for health insurance coverage. That’s almost as much as we pay for newsprint. Were it not for such high insurance costs we could add more employees and help to grow our local economy,” Cullen testified.

Cullen noted Buena Vista County families have an average household income of $36,000 and it costs about one-third of that amount to buy an annual private health care plan. Click here to see the 176-minute hearing, including the very last minute in which an incensed, arms-waving Cullen goes off prepared testimony to vent about  insurance companies “screwing” Americans.

The results of the Sioux City Council race yesterday demonstrated how incumbents have had a rough go of it in the 2000s, as the sole councilman seeking re-election placed fourth, not in the money for the three seats that were set. Jim Rixner, who was elected in 2005, will be leaving the council in January. Additionally, two councilmen didn’t seek re-election — Dave Ferris after eight years and Brent Hoffman after four years, so a combined 16 years of tenure goes by the wayside.

Replacing the three are furniture store associate Keith Radig (who ran unsuccessfully for the Iowa House in 2002 and 2004 as a Republican), former councilman Tom Padgett and long-time contractor John Fitch. Padgett brings eight years of council experience, which is helpful, while the other two men on the council, Mayor Mike Hobart and Councilman Aaron Rochester, are two years in on four-year terms. In the aggregate, not a lot of experience.

Going into the election, I had one thought on sole incumbent Rixner’s chances — just how ticked off would Sioux Cityans be over the new city ordinance limiting pit full ownership? Rixner has taken some hits over supporting the pit bull ordinance, and after the loss he said the pit bull ordinance anger factored into his defeat.

He also said there was a “furious effort” by the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce to defeat him. Hmmmm. I guess we can see the merits of nabbing a chamber endorsement — in the Sioux City School Board race, the three candidates who were endorsed by the chamber (Molly Williams, Nancy Mounts and Doug Batcheller) won the seats, while that happened again now in the council race. The pro-business chamber, indeed, endorsed Fitch, Radig and Padgett.

The final results: Padgett, 4,245 votes; Fitch, 3,915; Radig, 3,030; Rixner, 2,840; and Ian Rappolt, 2,758.

A year ago tonight, the votes were counted and Barack Obama won the presidency and Democrats strengthened their holds in the two federal chambers. Republicans nationally and in Iowa licked their wounds, then looked ahead.

State Rep. Chris Rants, R-Sioux City, showing me a host of vote totals from various statehouse races on his laptop, pointed to where some of the statehouse elections could have turned for the GOP with not too many more votes. Rants said Republicans needed to do the grunt work of registering more voters to the party, then turning them out.

So are Republicans cutting into the voter registration lead of Democrats? From the early November voter registration totals from the Iowa Secretary of State office, Dems still are sitting on a very substantial lead, one of well over 100,000 people.

The number of active Democratic Party registrations is 682,641 compared to 577,789 registered Republicans (and with 704,824 active no party registrations in Iowa). If you throw the inactive registrations, the number becomes 723,626 for Democrats and 609,976 for Republicans.

Maybe many of those registered Democrats voted for Obama in 2008, have soured on him (and other Dems) and will switch for the 2010 election in which an Iowa governor position, U.S. Senate post and five congressional seats will be on the ballot. Or maybe that’s a substantial voter registration lead that gives Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn cause for concern.

Consider that the registration totals have barely moved in the last three months: At the beginning of August there were 683,117 Democrats and 577,223 Republicans.  Basically, Democrats have dropped by about 475 and Republicans gained 550. Yeah, it’s 12 months out, but the numbers provide an interesting snapshot.

Just had a chance to look at a piece from yesterday in Columbia Journalism Review. You know that 24/7 coverage from the national press on the New York Congressional District 23 race? The political press has to cover something, I guess, but the CJR offers food for thought below on what assessments we can make from the off-year election results:

On Tuesday, November 3, voters around the country will go to the polls to elect officials in a variety of races. These campaigns, known as the “off-year elections” because of the absence of regularly scheduled federal contests, are mostly obscure. But a few of them—the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and (especially) Virginia, and the House race in New York’s Twenty-third Congressional District—have been endowed with broader significance; the outcomes there will be analyzed and interpreted as symbols of the national political mood and tests of “the Obama agenda.” For reasons John Sides lays out briefly here, these analyses will be mostly meaningless. The sample is too small, the factors that drive election outcomes are too complex, local conditions are too variable, and our knowledge about voters’ motivations is too limited to draw any real conclusions.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that the political press is eager to assign meaning here where none may be warranted. But what’s aggravating about this situation is that reporters will frequently acknowledge the limitations of what these off-year elections tell us about national politics—and then happily speculate about their meaning nonetheless.

Woodbury County Auditor Pat Gill traditionally has two benchmarks to gauge voter turnout — he has the polling places call in totals at 11 a.m. and then 4 p.m. Gill just got the latter time results, and said voter turnout is tracking at less than 10 percent. He said typically half the voters have been cast by 4 p.m., so with 3,980 votes cast at this point, it will be hard to get beyond 8,000. There are currently 43,876 active registered voters in Sioux City.

Voters are picking among five men for three Sioux City Council positions: incumbent Jim Rixner, Keith Radig, John Fitch, and the two men who essentially tied in topping  fundraising, Ian Rappolt ($7,667) and Tom Padgett ($7,665).

Just about the time polls close in Iowa tonight, a prime political event in the neighborhood will be wrapping as well. A forum for GOP gubernatorial candidates will be held about five miles southeast of Ida Grove, where the Ida and Crawford County Republican Parties will be cooperating to host five candidates in a Morton building on an acreage. The field includes everyone who plans to run for governor save former Gov. Terry Branstad — Bob Vander Plaats and Chris Rants of Sioux City, state lawmakers Jerry Behn and Rod Roberts and Cedar Rapids insurance exec Christian Fong. And the political parties landed a nice ‘get’ to moderate the event, as Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn will handle those duties.

The event is called Barn(get it?)storming for Governor, and Rachel Law of rural Correctionville is pleased she’ll be able to take it in. Law, who’s on the Ida County Republican Party Central Committee, said she hasn’t settled on a candidate she’d like to see win the governorship a year from tonight. She particularly wants to hear the five men talk about taxation, education and their views of the 10 percent across-the-board budget cut for Iowa agencies, as recently ordered by Democratic Gov. Chet Culver.

You might recall a week ago tonight, four of the five candidates (Roberts, Vander Plaats, Behn and Rants) shared the stage for a governor debate at the Sioux City Convention Center.

UPDATE: Behn had farmwork to do — given the wet weather, the harvest  has been very slow — and did not attend the Ida/Crawford GOP event.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard a person pitch Steve King for president in 2012. Mere weeks after the 2008 election in which Barack Obama was selected as president, we at The Journal took a look at what names Northwest Iowans might see in the ‘12 race. (Yes, some readers said, too much, too soon.) That involved asking  Republican Party chairpersons in many surrounding counties to list their top three picks for four years off. A county chairwoman was quick to put King’s name on her list.

With GOP people like Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney and others taking top mentions in early 2009, I forgot about King as a possible presidential candidate. The speculation was whether this would be the year King ran for governor, which he ultimately did not pursue.

Then last month, when interviewing Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann for a profile piece on King, I asked about her perceived interest in the presidency. Before saying she had no intention to pursue the presidency, Bachmann first brought up King’s name as getting mention on Capitol Hill.

And last night, Dave Price of WHO, the Des Moines NBC affiliate, aired an interview with King in which the four-term congressman won’t rule out running for president. And why should he? King is beloved by the conservative base of the Republican Party, which in many states has a big role in pushing candidates toward victories in primaries and caucuses. King loves having a national voice on issues of importance, which doesn’t hurt his profile with the base. (Yeah, sure, he riles up Democrats, that’s a given.)

Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, who King has noted is essentially his twin, ran for president in 2008. Why shouldn’t Steve King?

When we get missives from the press office of the Terry Branstad for Governor campaign (yes, still technically in ‘exploratory’ status), they’ll be the product of an area native. Ida Grove’s Tim Albrecht this morning has been announced as Branstad’s communications team director, and he’s on the job this very day.

Albrecht, 32, has had a hand in a lot of Republican political campaigns after leaving the University of Northern Iowa. He was part of the Steve Forbes presidential campaign, worked for Steve Sukup when he ran for governor in 2002, then served for four years as spokesman for Iowa House Speaker Chris Rants of Sioux City.

Rants was a very early supporter of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the 2008 presidential race way back in late 2006, and Albrecht became press secretary for Romney’s campaign in Iowa. I figured at some point, Albrecht would come on board with Rants in his 2010 gubernatorial campaign. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Many of you know Albrecht about a year ago launched a popular Web site, TheBeanWalker, which is a right-of-center news aggregator, a sort of Iowa-ized Drudge Report. Albrecht announced the site will continue with a new publisher. He also is leaving behind his job as communications director for American Future Fund, the group that in 2009 brought to the state a batch of high-profile GOP people with supposed designs on the 2012 presidency, including U.S. Sen. John Ensign to speak here in Sioux City.

The race for three Sioux City Council seats will be decided two nights from now. The five candidates include the sole incumbent, Jim Rixner, former councilman and mayor Tom Padgett, 2002 and 2004 statehouse (Republican) candidate Keith Radig, developer John Fitch and political newcomer Ian Rappolt, who works at Boys and Girls Home. Rappolt may be a newbie, but he’s a formidable fundraiser, especially in tapping into the political action committees of local labor unions. Again the story of the another campaign finance reporting period is how Rappolt is raking in from union PACs.

Rappolt has raised a total of $7,667, virtually a dead heat with the $7,665 Padgett has amassed. Of that $7,667 for Rappolt, he’s got $3,950 from union PACs. He’s gotten a lot of guff for that from commenters to the Journal’s Web site, but Rappolt said he’s heard not one word of concern from anyone he’s visited with while campaigning.

Here are the key Sioux City Council candidate totals, from two reporting periods with the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board:

Funds raised first report: (1) Padgett, $5,800, (2) Rappolt, $4,205, (3) Fitch, $2,200, (4) Radig, $2,055 and (5) Rixner, $1,030.

Funds raised second report: (1) Rixner, $4,690, (2) Rappolt, $3,462, (3) Fitch, $3,150, (4) Padgett, $1,865 and (5) Radig, $1,500.

Funds raised all told: (1) Rappolt, $7,667, (2) Padgett, $7,665, (3) Rixner, $5,720, (4) Fitch, $5,350 and (5) Radig, $3,555.

Funds raised from PACs: (1) Rappolt, $3,950, and (2) Rixner, $1,450.

Will he run for the 2010 governor spot? Certainly.

Here’s the key quote made late yesterday by former Gov. Terry Branstad, after journeying  from Iowa City (after the Hawkeyes defeated Indiana) to Wilton to speak at a fundraiser for Republican State Rep. Jeff Kaufmann: “This is a Saturday we’ll always remember — the day the Hawkeyes set a record nine straight wins… and the day I had the opportunity to re-enter the political fray.”

Wait, did Branstad in any way cite the Iowa State football program?