Does Roxanne Conlin Know Where Ethanol Comes From?

DES MOINES – U.S. Senate candidate Roxanne Conlin, who still hasn’t articulated any semblance of a coherent farm policy, revealed her ignorance about agriculture by writing that ethanol is made from the same corn that people eat.

Conlin revealed her lack of knowledge when she attempted to snipe at Sen. Chuck Grassley’s over his support for ethanol. The Des Moines trial lawyer wrote that Grassley “was not realizing tortillas are made from corn as is ethanol.”

“Apparently Mrs. Conlin is ‘not realizing’ that ethanol is made from yellow corn and tortillas are made from white corn, which is not used to produce ethanol,” said Eric Woolson, a spokesman for Grassley’s re-election campaign. “Now it makes perfect sense that she didn’t understand the value of the ethanol funding formula that Chuck Grassley secured for Iowa. Of course, that’s no surprise because when the Des Moines Register’s editorial board endorsed one of her primary opponents, they wrote about Conlin that ‘we were surprised and disappointed she was not knowledgeable about and so oversimplified the details of important policy.’”

Conlin last week criticized the 2005 federal transportation bill, which funded transportation projects across Iowa as “wasteful spending.”

“She as much as said she would have voted against those Iowa projects and opposed the Grassley-authored change in the funding formula that stopped Iowa from being penalized by the federal government for using ethanol and, in turn, resulted in Iowa getting more federal money for road and bridge improvements,” Woolson said. “That’s not the kind of senator we need.”

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