By Denise Ross

One of the ususal suspects as the potential secret $750,000 donor to the 2006 Vote Yes for Life campaign has been the Catholic Church, a notion I dismissed almost out of hand. For some reason, I thought the church wouldn’t funnel its money into political campaigns, even on an abortion measure.

Not being Catholic, I shouldn’t have assumed such things. What do I know about the culture of the church, beyond the sadly salacious headlines about pedophile priests and the lawsuits they generate? (The massive payouts that have brought some parts of the church to its financial knees accounted for part of my belief that it wouldn’t spend money on campaigns.)

As it turns out, not only did the church contribute to the campaign that turned back a law legalizing gay marriage in Maine, but it was former Sioux Falls Bishop Robert Carlson taking part. (Read it all here.)

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From my e-mail box:

Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, D-S.D., takes a break from being pummeled about the head and shoulders for her no vote on health care to file this Veteran’s Day op-ed, which provides an overview of some of the veteran-related legislation Congress is working on:  

Honoring Our Veterans

-Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin

     As we observe Veterans Day this year, I would like to recognize all of those who have bravely served our country in uniform and offer my gratitude on behalf of a grateful nation. South Dakotans have bravely answered the call to serve for generations. Men and women from our state have served in every conflict this nation has seen in the 20th century — including our current missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I salute their memory and honor their bravery. 
     This patriotic sense of duty to country is one of the many reasons why I am proud to represent South Dakota in Congress and serve on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and chair its Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity. As a member of this committee, I have been committed to ensuring our veterans receive the benefits they deserve such as

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By Denise Ross

From the files of stuff you couldn’t dream up, South Dakota’s own Larry Pressler has a post in the Obama administration. If that’s not awesome enough, it’s on a commision that I - at least - would not have imagined possible. It’s the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.

It’s the “abroad” part that gets me. Seems like that maybe ought to be a private non-profit or something. Must be the South Dakotan in me.

 In any case, here’s what came out in a White House press release:

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By Denise Ross

The growing rift in the Republican Party, highlighted by yesterday’s House election in New York’s District 23, reminds CBS’s Bob Schieffer of the Democrats in 1972 and the presidential defeat of South Dakota’s own George McGovern.

Here’s video from Tuesday’s CBS Evening News, with Schieffer’s comments specific to McGovern transcribed below. (Shieffer begins his analysis at about 3:09, and the McGovern bit starts at about 3:55.)

Watch CBS News Videos Online

ANCHOR HARRY SMITH:  Does this race tell us trends in terms of how Republicans expect to be running in the future?

BOB SCHIEFFER: In this case, I think it will, Harry, because what have is this third party conservative who literally pushed a moderate Republican out of the race, and she went on to endorse Obama. The Republican Party is really split, and it is the conservatives who seem to have the juice right now. It’s very much like what Democrats went through in 1972. The party activists on the left were so upset with mainstream candidates that in an effort to purify the party, they pushed it so far to the left that they nominated the very liberal George McGovern for president.

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By Denise Ross

One has to look for the good news when it comes to the news business these days.

For the Associated Press, it might be that the Tribune Co. is dropping it only for a week (for now).

The Tribune papers (including the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times) will use reports from its papers around the country, as well as content from Reuters, the Washington Post, New York Times, Agence France Presse, Cable News Network, Global Post, Bloomberg and McClatchy newspapers.

Just last week I was speaking to a college class in Sioux Falls (taught by KELO’s Beth Jensen), and I predicted that newspapers would start dropping AP, as they do charge subscription fees that hit a budget hard. I also know discussions of such a move have gone on in SD media circles, predating by years the trend of newspapers routinely closing up shop - in other words, before the media world’s budget woes got truly woeful.

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By Denise Ross

I thought of the angry, pitchfork-bearing villagers demanding that Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and Tim Johnson hold town hall meetings during the August recess when I heard about the congressman who spent a summer vacation on a deserted tropical island.  

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., sought to test ought his survivor skills by living on fish he speared himself and coconuts after being dropped off by “the military” (ah-hem; taxpayer money?) to a tiny Pacific Island. Read more about it and see a photo slideshow in The Hill.

This story has quickly spread in the national press, so you might have already heard about this. I hadn’t until a relative from Arizona asked me how this amounted to news. Oh, honey, this one’s irresistable.

Commenters on the various stories I’ve read either love the guy for his independent spirit or revile him for being, well, a duty-shirking flake. I’m leaning towards the latter crowd but probably would feel fine about the congressman’s little vacation if he hadn’t turned over his photo album and diary to the media. Maybe he and ballon boy’s dad ought to share that island for awhile. A long while.

I think this would be a career-killer for any South Dakota politician. Am I wrong?

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Oft-praised bill would cost practically nothing.

By Denise Ross

Tired of the health care debate yet? If so, too bad as it’s likely to dominate Capitol Hill news throughout the end of the year. Here’s some health care news about SD’s House member that’s not been widely reported and might even become relevant in the coming weeks.

I wrote a recent newspaper column about Stephanie Herseth Sandlin’s co-sponsorship of a health care reform bill that would, among other things, end Medicaid. It also would be cheap, according to the CBO, and would cover everyone via a mandate. (Read the full column on the jump.)

The Healthy Americans Act would require everybody to buy health insurance, would provide government subsidies to help the poor and near-poor buy insurance and would mandate that insurance companies cover all comers, thereby ending practices such as capping lifetime benefits.

Americans would buy health insurance from a marketplace of plans, called pools, set up by state or region. Each plan would be required to meet minimum standards.

The HAA, also called the Wyden-Bennett bill, has not gained the support of South Dakota’s two senators. Others are apparently offering some lip service to the bill. This from Wikipedia:

According to Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, the list of HAA Republican supporters is deceptive: “The plan has a lot more fake support than it has real support. If every Republican who has co-sponsored [HAA] would commit to voting for it, the plan might pass. But they haven’t.”

To read what I wrote about HAA, click “CLICK HERE” below.

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By Denise Ross

There’s a battle brewing between the telecom giant of yore and the tech giant of now, AT&T and Google, over little old us. AT&T is demanding that the FCC require Google to stop blocking some calls to rural telephone numbers on the relatively new Google Voice application.

Last Friday, the FCC launched an inquiry into Google Voice’s blocking of calls and began an review of whether the application should be regulated as a traditional telephone service, also known as a common carrier. Google has rejected such claims, saying in a blog posting that Google Voice is a Web application and not a telecom service.

That is from the Washington Post’s tech blog. Read it all here. AT&T claims that Google has blocked calls to an ambulance service, a community center and a tribal center. (Out here in the sticks, we are more expensive to connect up to the grid. Ergo, phone companies - including AT&T - have tried but failed to find ways around the rules that say they have to connect to the more expensive numbers.)

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By Denise Ross

A sleeping baby is keeping me from Dennis Daugaard’s official campaign announcement, so let’s look at one of the plethora of events in the evolution of media and journalism.

Late last week, UC Berkeley’s J school hosted a summit on new media at Google HQ. (The venue just about says it all; it wasn’t, after all, at the San Francisco Chronicle despite its fairly great website.)

The best message came from an old media casualty:

The stakes of the digital media debate were underscored during the opening session as John Temple, former publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, discussed some of the missteps that led the nearly 150-year-old daily to close earlier this year. That closure left Denver, like most U.S. cities, a one-newspaper town.

One critical mistake was thinking of themselves as a newspaper instead of an information company, and viewing every new media initiative merely as a means to protect the core product, he said.

If the company had instead monitored and responded to what consumers were doing online, the business might have invented a service like Yelp, instead of competing with it for ad dollars it used to own.

“We had all the advantages and we let it slip away,” he said.

Those still running newspapers would be wise to listen to Temple, but I don’t expect them to. The very concept of R&D at most newspapers (and I’m told TV & radio stations) is anathema. That would be spending precious profits - which long hovered around the 30 % mark - on the “non-revenue generating department,” as my old home at the RC Journal’s newsroom was referred to by those in charge. Even if attitudes and the MSM culture were to drastically change, those profits no longer soar at such lofty heights.

Instead, I’m reading with equal parts amusement and dismay about AP’s plans to embed a “tracking beacon” into its content and that of its members (ie, almost all MSM news outlets) - see hilarious graphic on the jump. (Apologies to my friends at the AP in Sioux Falls.) Meanwhile, here’s how Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab describes what AP is up to:

The point, of course, is to identify uses of AP and potentially member content that isn’t licensed. So if someone copied an article’s source code onto his own site, by hand or automation, the beacon would follow along and, according to the document distributed to some AP members, “send reports back to the core database each time the item is clicked on by an end user. The beacon will identify each piece of content, the IP address of the content viewer, the referring Web server and the time of use.”

That’s right - “the IP address of the content viewer.” The Nieman blogger also notes that the graphic (see it on the jump) unintentionally depicts a “faceless news consumer will be deposited into a toxic waste recepticle.”

The same blog post notes that AP spokesfolk aren’t being terribly clear about what they plan to do with whatever information they gather, but the anger and bitterness level amongst many ensconced in the upper levels of the MSM has been growing steadily. For reasons I can’t understand, I seem to hear most of the vitriol targeted at Google for its success at monetizing search.

It also appears as though the AP is searching for methods to block its content from anyone who doesn’t pay, a thoroughly effective way to lose most of your readership. They talk a lot about protecting copyright, which is a valid pursuit and which also completely misses the vast technological opportunities at any media organization’s feet. (ie, per the Rocky Mountain News’s Temple, “Maybe if we weren’t so busy snarling at all the new technology and those using it to good effect, perhaps we would have invented search-targeted advertising.”)

There’s no shortage of discussion of this topic online, but I’ve got to stop here. Click “CLICK HERE” below to see that graphic, which includes the cryptic, detached phrase “royalty settlement,” described on the Nieman blog thusly:

The AP’s graphic explaining the beacon and a new microformat was easily mocked and labeled “magic beans” by prominent tech blogger John Gruber.

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