Former conservative ‘blogger' to become Thune senior adviserBy Kevin Woster, Journal Staff Writer... Friday April 8, 2005
A South Dakota State University history professor who ran a computer Web site critical of former Sen. Tom Daschle during the 2004 campaign is joining the staff of Sen. John Thune, the Republican who ended Daschle's 26-year congressional career.Jon Lauck said Tuesday night that he would begin his new job as senior adviser to Thune sometime this summer. Lauck, who received $27,000 from Thune's campaign last year as a research consultant, said he was excited about the chance to work full time in helping Thune shape national policy on key issues.
"This is a very historic time for our country," the 33-year-old Madison native said. "Why would I want to be digging through the archives and writing history when I could be living history?"
Lauck already has been more than an observer of political history in South Dakota. He helped Thune with agricultural policy research while Thune was in the U.S. House of Representatives. Lauck also is a lawyer who was previously employed with two Sioux Falls law firms. He also worked for the national Republican Party investigating never-substantiated reports of voting improprieties on Indian reservations following Thune's 524-vote loss to Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson in 2002.
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2005/04/07/news/local/news09.txt-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's one other thing that raises our curiosity about who or what is behind "Gannon." It seems that when he wasn't bashing Kerry, he paid a ton of attention to the Thune vs. Daschle Senate race in South Dakota. One blog that seemed to think "Gannon" was an authoritative journalist and linked to at least one of his reports was called "Daschle v. Thune."
If that name sounds familiar, it should. It later was reported that the author of the blog, Jon Lauck, was a former Thune campaign staffer and was paid $27,000 by Thune's 2004 campaign while he was producing the Web site.So let us get this straight: The top Democrat in the Senate loses a race where the GOP sets up a phony blog that passes along news reports from a pseudo media organization, written by a reporter given White House credentials under a fake name.
Our head is spinning.
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:k5-Fp9Qm1uwJ:rynemcclaren.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/the_great_ganno.html+Jon+Lauck+%2B+Jeff+Gannon&hl=en
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Gannon: The early years
Before he was buttering up Bush at White House press conferences, "Jeff Gannon" was doing the GOP's dirty work in attacking Tom Daschle.- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason
Daschle's defeat is old news by now, of course. Yet to understand who "Gannon" really was -- and why he obtained such special treatment from Karl Rove's White House communications operation -- one useful exercise may be what intelligence analysts call "walking back the cat." In essence, this means running the movie in reverse slow-motion to see where the suspect came from and what he did along the way.
Looking back at the special role played by Talon and Gannon in the South Dakota Senate campaign may provide clues in the mystery of the male-escort-cum-journalist's extraordinary access to the Bush White House.
The cooperation between the Talon News writer and Daschle's Republican challenger dates back to the early weeks of the South Dakota campaign, when Thune showed up as a guest on "Jeff Gannon's Washington," the writer's Internet radio program on Rightalk.com. It might have seemed unusual for a Midwestern Senate candidate to show up on an Internet radio show in Washington, where he would reach almost no listeners in his home state. But Gannon didn't waste Thune's time. His friendly questioning allowed the Republican candidate to lay out the themes of his campaign to unseat the incumbent: Daschle was an obstructionist opponent of the president, out of touch with the home folks, and married to a rich pharmaceutical lobbyist.
On Feb. 8, 2004, Gannon's interview with Thune was the subject of an article in the Argus-Leader, and immediately got picked up by "DaschlevThune," a Web blog operated by history professor and Republican activist Jon Lauck, and South Dakota Politics.com, run by a lawyer named Jason Van Beek. Lauck promoted a series of Talon News articles by Gannon, which charged that Dave Kranz, the Argus-Leader's chief political correspondent, and a three-decade veteran reporter, was in essence nothing more than a hit man for Daschle.http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:sD8g84ea1RYJ:www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2005/02/18/gannon/+Jon+Lauck+%2B+Jeff+Gannon&hl=en