Governor unveils Coast projects funded by BP money.

BP PLC is paying $69 million for interactive exhibits at a Hancock County science center, a concrete pathway on the beach at Pascagoula, up to six miles of shoreline and improvements at a park as part of Mississippi Gulf Coast restoration from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Gov. Phil Bryant said.

The money is part of $1 billion the oil giant agreed two years ago to pay for early restoration work after the 2010 disaster. The money is going to Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Texas and the federal government. Each state is to get at least $100 million.

Mississippi has now received a total of $82.6 million, Bryant said today.

He said the money will go to four projects across the Mississippi Coast.

“These four projects, which extend across the entirety of our Gulf Coast counties, are an important step in that journey. Each addresses a critical part of restoration of the natural resource and recreational losses caused by the spill. In whole, they will help to restore and enhance a wide array of habitat, from oyster and fish to marshes and the public’s opportunities to enjoy and better understand the intricate Gulf Coast environment,” Bryant said in a statement.

Mississippi’s project were proposed as a result a public comment process on the Gulf Coast and were negotiated with BP and Mississippi’s federal and state partners. The projects will go through another phase of public review and comment before work begins.

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Medicaid: Sad stories begin in time to try to sway election.

BY: B. Keith Plunkett @Keithplunkett

I have always had a good relationship with Mississippi’s Associated Press reporters as a Political and Communications Strategist. But, not all AP writers are as ethical in the practice of their craft.

The media picture has become more muddied. The internet, community reporting from bloggers close to story makers, and the quickly growing trend to have an on-staff or contracted content producer for virtually every organization big and small means information is everywhere. It’s a good thing in my mind that no one entity controls the flow of information, as has been the case in the past. It’s how technology and the insatiable appetite of the public for information gave birth to the likes of . . . well, me.

Unlike some online producers, I don’t hide my name or my face when I write an article. That is a trend that will increase as online news becomes more a norm of everyday consumption. I stand behind what I write and we welcome the engaging conversation. I believe it leads to real dialogue, because it rejects the notion that you can say anything and get away with it.

In the drive to compete with smaller and more nimble content producers, large organizations like the AP have loosened standards. For 165 years those standards of neutrality have allowed local beat reporters to take a news article and fill in the local angle with follow up stories. But as we are beginning to see, that is coming to an end. It all started with the changing of the guard in 2008 at the AP, and has ramped up in 2012. A 2011 leaked AP memo called “The New Distinctiveness” laid bare the new rules.

Writer Michael Calderone published a piece in Politico in 2008 about the shift in thinking at AP when he wrote that the organization was

“scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers.”

In other words, the AP is looking to compete with more opinion and analysis. But, not so much define it as such. Instead the analysis and the emotionally charged become part of the overall reporting. Some groups are beginning to take note of the leftward lean, and have even begun referring to the AP as the “Administration’s Propagandist’s”, referring to the number of pro-Obama articles that are appearing.

What is most troubling about this is the number of smaller news markets that are affected by it.

I am consistently surprised by the number of people who still don’t realize how much of the news coming from traditional local outlets is not the product of staff reporters. There are many people that pick up a paper or see a report online that just assume it’s from a local source, even if it is attributed to the Associated Press.

Case in point: a recently published article on the rejection of Medicaid changes by state governors in the Sun Herald, the lead dog of print media on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. While featuring Mississippi as one of the states, none of the named contributing writers were from Mississippi.

I’m not arguing they necessarily should be. But one can’t help but notice the “New Distinctiveness” from the AP in the article. The timing of it suggests a political lean to the left in order to affect upcoming elections, and they use emotionally charged stories to get to the reader.

Here’s an excerpt:

Sandra Pico is poor, but not poor enough.

She makes about $15,000 a year, on which she supports her daughter and unemployed husband. She thought she’d be able to get health insurance after the Supreme Court upheld President Barack Obama’s health care law.

Then she heard her own governor won’t agree to the federal plan to extend Medicaid coverage to people like her in two years. So she expects to remain uninsured, struggling to pay for her blood pressure medicine.

“You fall through the cracks and there’s nothing you can do about it,” said the 52-year-old home health aide. “It makes me feel like garbage, like the American dream, my dream in my homeland is not being accomplished.”

Many working parents like Pico are below the federal poverty line but don’t qualify for Medicaid, a decades-old state-federal insurance program. That’s especially true in states in which conservative governors say they’ll reject the Medicaid expansion under Obama’s health law.

In South Carolina, a yearly income of $16,900 is too much for Medicaid for a family of three. In Florida, $11,000 a year is too much. In Mississippi, $8,200 a year is too much. In Louisiana and Texas, earning more than just $5,000 a year makes you ineligible for Medicaid.

Governors in those five states have said they’ll reject the Medicaid expansion underpinning Obama’s health law after the Supreme Court’s decision gave states that option. They favor small government and say they can’t afford the added cost to their states even if it’s delayed by several years. Some states estimate the expansion could ultimately cost them a billion dollars a year or more.

Sun Herald

The article goes on to praise the Obama administrations efforts while demonizing the Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan’s plans as damaging.

If there was ever an example of why online producers of content like Mississippi PEP should exist, then this is it.

Are these sad, heart-wrenching stories? Yes. But, I could find you a hundred stories that shows how government health care like Medicaid has ravaged peoples lives by restricting their choices. How many stories of abuse of the system could be dug up? Just as many.

My thanks goes out to the local AP reporters I have had the privilege of dealing with. Please don’t fall prey to this type of reporting. Let the pundits and politicos among us do what we do. We need you to keep the story steady.

About Keith: Keith Plunkett has worked on communications issues with a range of public officials from aldermen to Congressmen, and a variety of businesses, governmental agencies and non-profits. He serves or has served as a board member of several non-profit, civic and political organizations. Contact him by going to HorizonMediaMarketing.com or follow him on Twitter @Keithplunkett

More Government Control: Feds to set critical habitat for endangered gopher frog

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is designating nearly 6,500 acres in Mississippi and Louisiana as critical habitat for the endangered Mississippi gopher frog — the only endangered or threatened frog in the Southeast.

An estimated 100 to 200 live in the wild in Mississippi, and 892 in zoos, said the Memphis Zoo’s Steve Reichling, who keeps the gopher frog stud book.

Most of the land described in a notice to be published in Tuesday’s Federal Register is in Mississippi but it also includes the frog’s last known Louisiana breeding ground, in St. Tammany Parish, where five of the temporary ponds it needs remain in hopping distance of each other.

Edward Poitevent, whose family owns most of the Louisiana land, has been fighting the designation. He says he cannot comment until he reads the full notice.

Critical habitat designation requires Fish and Wildlife Service consultation for federal permits.

The land includes about 1,600 acres in St. Tammany Parish, La., with the rest in Mississippi’s Jackson, Harrison, Forrest and Perry counties. The Mississippi land includes about 3,500 acres of federal land, 264 acres owned by the state and the rest private.

The private landowners in Mississippi are working with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said Connie Light Dickard, an agency spokeswoman. She said the Mississippi National Guard opposed designation of part of the DeSoto National Forest where it has a special use permit, but Fish and Wildlife doesn’t expect the designation to hamper the National Guard’s activities.

Gopher frogs live in stump holes and burrows dug by other animals, laying their eggs in ponds so shallow they dry up for several months of the year and are therefore free of fish that would eat frog eggs. They’re part of a whole ecology that depends on regular fires to burn away brush and smaller trees from the longleaf pine forests where they live.

It’s very important that the government included areas where the frog isn’t currently found, said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

via Feds to set critical habitat for endangered gopher frog | The Clarion-Ledger | clarionledger.com.

Charter schools and voucher program working in New Orleans, expanding throughout Louisiana

The sweeping legislation will put limits on teacher tenure, link their compensation partly to student performance, make it easier for communities to set up charter schools and expand the number of lower-income students who can use private school vouchers.

Gov. Jindal’s reforms offer real promise. Although Louisiana embraced higher academic standards and made students and schools accountable for meeting those standards a decade and a half ago, progress has been slow.

Only in New Orleans, where devastation from levee breaches during Hurricane Katrina led to an extreme makeover of schools, have results been dramatic. Although there were bright spots, city schools as a whole were among the worst-performing in the state before the disaster.

Since the state took over most schools post-Katrina, that is changing. Recovery School District students, including charter and traditional campuses, posted their fourth consecutive year of improvement last year. The proportion of students scoring at grade level or above grew to 48 percent in 2011 ­– more than double the percentage in 2007.

That progress has come as most city schools became public charter schools, a concept that the governor’s legislation would expand statewide.

Some opponents of the reform legislation have tried to make charter schools seem like a questionable experiment and point to the failure of some schools. But there are highly successful, stable charter schools in New Orleans. And the fact that some unsuccessful schools have been closed down is a sign that the system is working.

Traditional public schools that do a poor job educating students generally don’t get closed down or make dramatic changes to staff. They just stay mediocre. Making it easier to set up charter schools in communities where education leaders have been resistant should change that dynamic.

via Louisiana’s education reform is a dramatic plan for schools and our children: An editorial | NOLA.com.

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• Charter-school law should not close the door for online schools (mississippipep.wordpress.com)
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Miss. AP hires reporter Tillman to expand coverage of state government and politics

The Associated Press has named Laura Tillman as a legislative relief reporter in Mississippi.

The announcement was made on Monday by AP South Region Editor Lisa Marie Pane, Mississippi-Louisiana News Editor Brian Schwaner and Chief of Bureau Adam Yeomans.

“Coverage of government and politics is a top priority for AP in Mississippi,” Schwaner said. AP has two reporters assigned full-time to the Capitol in Jackson — Emily Wagster Pettus and Jeff Amy. Tillman will supplement their work, and report as well on other key news topics of interest to AP members in Mississippi.

via Miss. AP hires reporter Tillman to expand coverage of state government and politics | The Republic.

For Politics in South, Race Divide Is Defining – NYTimes.com

Image by NatalieMaynor via Flickr

In few places are the current woes of Democrats in the South in such clear relief as they are in Mississippi. It is here that a possibility long considered may soon become a reality, as Democrats ponder the prospect of becoming, definitively, the minority party — in both senses of the word.

At a glance, Democrats may seem to be in better shape here than they are in neighboring states. Republicans won a supermajority in the Alabama Legislature in the 2010 elections and took over the Louisiana Legislature a month later as a result of several party switches, while Mississippi Democrats still control the State House of Representatives. Unlike in Louisiana, Democrats in Mississippi have actually managed to field candidates for a few statewide offices in this year’s elections, and hold the office of attorney general.

But the tale told by demographics is a stark one. Mississippi has, proportionally, the largest black population of any state, at 37 percent. Given the dependably Democratic voting record of African-Americans here, strategists in each party concede that Democrats start out any statewide race with nearly 40 percent of the vote.

That is a remarkable head start. And yet Brad Morris, a Democratic strategist, is being optimistic when saying this: “We’ve hit rock bottom.”

Simply put, the votes Democrats count on automatically may be the only ones they can get.

Mr. Morris argues that the decades-old partisan realignment of the South has gone as far as it can go and that it will soon rebound.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Democratic support among whites could get any lower when, according to 2008 exit polls, only 6 percent of white males in Mississippi described themselves as Democrats.

But Republicans are not ready to concede an endpoint.

“There has been a significant political shift to the right,” Frank Corder, a Pascagoula city councilman and conservative blogger, wrote in an e-mail, “and as the access to new media grows in the rural areas, political party identifications will change and we will see even more traditional Democratic strongholds turn red.”

There are still such things as white Democratic strongholds in the South, believe it or not. They are run by the often long-serving sheriffs, circuit clerks and other county officials who have remained Democrats out of habit, family tradition, allegiance to the party behind the New Deal or a strategic aim to attract black voters.

via For Politics in South, Race Divide Is Defining – NYTimes.com.

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