One of the Iowa delegates at the Republican National Convention helped open the high-tech NASDAQ stock exchange this morning. Hoffman was invited along with a handful of other delegates from other states to kick off today’s trading. Hoffman has been a stock broker for 25 years, but he’s never been invited on the floor of the exchange.Hoffman, who also owns a restaurant in Sioux City, says he’s lived the American dream. Hoffman came to this country from Germany, and when he landed on the dock in New York City there was a longshoreman’s strike. Hoffman was 16 at the time, and made about 60 dollars the first hour he was on American soil, hauling other passengers’ bags off the boat. That was more money than he’d ever seen in his life.

“So right away, I loved this country from the instant I set foot on it,” Hoffman says. Hoffman was born in 1944, and remembers the U-S occupation of Germany following World War II. Hoffman says his mother warned him as he went off to his first day of school to move his hand when he waved at friends so the American soldiers wouldn’t think he was giving the Nazi salute. Hoffman says “at times it was scary. When we saw the planes flying low over our city, we all ducked, we all ran down into the basements because we didn’t know what was going on.”

The folks at the NASDAQ took Hoffman’s picture today, used their computer editing and handed him back a photo which superimposes his torso on the big screen that New Yorkers see in Times Square. Senator Charles Grassley will go solo on Friday as he uses his own electronic signature to open the NASDAQ stock exchange.

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The Iowa Republican delegates at their national convention in New York City aren’t getting too worked up by President Bush calling Iowa “the hinterlands.” Bush made the statement on the Rush Limbaugh program, then quickly corrected his mis-statement, calling Iowa part of the “heartland.” Steve Roberts of Des Moines, a member of the Republican National Committee, says Iowa IS the hinterlands. “Well, in a sense we are as far as the East is concerned,” said Roberts, a Des Moines attorney. “A lot of people in the east have not been west of the Hudson and in many cases see no reason to do that unless they’re going to LA, with a fuel stop in Chicago.” Another Iowan chimed in the discussion. “It’s sort of self-depricating humor because (Bush) lives on the other end of I-35,” said Kayne Robinson, a retired Des Moines cop who is now president of the NRA. “So, he’s talking about himself too.Roberts said “the hinterlands aren’t a bad place to be.” Robinson replied “Who’d want to live here” in New York City. Governor Tom Vilsack, a democrat, says Bush’s comment is disappointing because Iowa is a great place to live, its citizens are the most literate in the country and it’s home to groundbreaking research that’ll help solve the world’s agricultural problems. Vilsack linked Bush’s “hinterlands” reference to the President’s earlier statement this week that the U-S can’t win the war on terror — a statement Bush has since clarified as meaning there’s no nation to sign an armistice with since the terrorists are independent operators. “Bush has gone from Mission Accomplished to Mission Impossible to Mission Confused,” Vilsack said.

A 25-year-old school teacher from West Des Moines had V-I-P seating in the V-P’s box last night at the Republican National Convention in New York City. Isaiah McGee, an alternate convention delegate, was invited to sit in the box because he helped organize a pubic service project the Iowa delegates worked on yesterday in Harlem. (as said above)McGee says sitting on the floor isn’t all its cracked up to be, because it’s crowded, the media stands in your way and it’s hard to hear. He says the box was a whole different experience, like sitting in a luxury box at a sports arena. McGee says Vice President Dick Cheney was late in arriving at the convention and McGee had a limited time in the area, so he missed getting to meet Cheney in person by about half an hour.

Iowa Senator Charles Grassley is calling on the independent groups that have been running commercials critical of the new prescription drug benefit for seniors to pull those ads. Grassley also wants the groups to stop “bad-mouthing” the plan as he says some low-income seniors aren’t signing up for free prescription drugs.Grassley says the groups are making false accusations for political purposes. Grassley at one point pounded the lectern as he talked about the ads yesterday at a news conference in New York City. “It’s fair to say I’m a little incensed,” he said. Grassley says up to three MILLION poor senior citizens haven’t signed up for the six-hundred dollars worth of prescription drug coverage they are now due under the new law. Grassley conceeds the ads are not currently running on Iowa t-v stations, but he says he they have before and he expects them to air again sometime before the November election.

Two more potential presidential candidates of 2008 paid a visit to Iowa convention delegates this morning. The Iowans jumped to their feet the moment former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani walked in the room. Guiliani didn’t give a long speech, and spent more of his time answering questions. All but one of the questions were about September 11th, and afterwards, Guiliani said that’s not unusual, even though New Yorkers think the rest of the country didn’t “feel” 9/11 the way they did.

”It’s really interesting because the impression often is just the opposite,” Guiliani said. “The impression is that we’re closer to it and people outside New York maybe don’t feel it as much, but I’ve found in traveling that it’s actually maybe just the opposite. I think that people outside New York do feel it quite a bit and this is something that isn’t just New York, I mean this affected all of America. They watched it. They saw it. It was catastrophic for all of them and you can’t imagine how many people have connections to it – a relative or a friend and then they don’t get to see day in and day out the recovery that’s taken place, so many people will come here from other places and actually be shocked that the people of New York have recovered as well as they have.”

Guiliani told reporters he’s not ready to talk about the ’08 race. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I have no focus beyond 2004 right now. The only two things I’m thinking about in the future right now are the Yankees getting themselves into the World Series and President Bush being re-elected.” And for you baseball fans, Guiliani said Bush’s re-election was more likely. The other potential candidate of the future to talk with Iowans was Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Romney made sure the crowd knew he had spent time in Iowa, working as a consultant for a Marshalltown company.

”I spent probably two years flying into Des Moines and then driving, about an hour a little over an hour to get to Marshalltown and then we’d go out to dinner at Rubes,” he said, mentioning an infamous steakhouse where patrons are allowed to grill their own steaks.

“You know Rubes?” he asked the Iowans, who began nodding and ahhing. “Ah, yea, we know Rubes. And so I feel like I know at least a corner of Iowa because I spent so much time there in Marshalltown and then over in Ames and back in Des Moines. And I know there are a lot more republicans in Iowa than there are in Massachusetts.”

Romney, who was head of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, spoke for about 20 minutes, and spent a few minutes attacking democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for flip-flopping.

“He’s conflicted on so many issues he sounds like and actually is a person incapable of coming down firmly on one side of a key issue,” Romney said.

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Iowa’s delegation at the Republican National Convention was right next to the seat filmmaker Michael Moore sat in last night on the convention floor. Jerry Tweeten of Forest City took a picture. “Why? Just to see what his expression was, that’s all,” Tweeten said. “He was hiding for a while.” Tweeten isn’t impressed with Moore, and waved a George W. Bush sign in Moore’s face after he snapped the picture. Another Iowa delegate, Paula Dierenfeld, tried to take a picture of Moore with someone else’s camera. “As I’m trying to take the picture, one of the security guards came up and put his hand over my camera and said ‘You can’t do that, miss,’ and so I wasn’t able to take a picture of him,” Dierenfeld said. Dierenfeld, who’s no fan of Moore’s either, was outraged. “This is a public figure in a public place,” Dierenfeld said. “He has no right to privacy there.” The Iowa guys who got the snaps of Moore say they were just more persistent than Dierenfeld was. Dierenfeld says she didn’t want the security guard to take her friend’s camera. Moore, the maker of the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 which criticizes the war in Iraq, was roundly booed last night on the convention floor as Senator John McCain criticized Moore. The filmmaker is writing an opinion column for USA Today, and had a reserved seat in the press gallery on the convention floor.