I’m just sayin’…

In a good display of self-interest (which also happens to serve the interest of others on many occasions), many of the nation's newspapers and broadcast outlets declared it Sunshine Week last week, and then dedicated what resources they could marshall in producing stories about how access to public data is better for a democracy than government secrecy.

This is particularly important in Minnesota, we're told, because our state government appears to be moving in a direction of closing access to data in the interest of privacy.

If you get most of your information from the blogs, you probably didn't know about Sunshine Week because very few of them -- and none of the more than 40 I read every day from Minnesota -- touched it. The issue of access to information, let along the ability to transmit it, just isn't that important, I guess.

Well, now it's the bloggers' turn.

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Some of the big blogs have railed against the effort to regulate the relationship between political parties and independent blogs for a few weeks. I even linked to a few although I can't even find the entries now. But a quick Google search shows the Daily Kos discussed the issue to a fair degree in November. Bradley Smith at CNET took a whack it almost a year ago, in a column that was picked up by bloggers from the far left to the far right.

And now this week, it's possible Washington may finally move on the simmering controversy to decide whether political blogs are subject to campaign finance rules.

Here's the bottom line on the issue courtesy of The Hill:

The heated debate over a proposal by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) to exclude online content from the