WINONA MEA CULPRIT?
Bryan Anderson, a Gutknecht staffer, 'fesses up to editing Gil's Wikipedia entry in a Winona Daily News guest view. His narrative of events:
Here’s the truth: A fellow staff member noted to me how the congressman’s Wikipedia biography failed to include anything from his body of work during his 12 years in the U.S. Congress.
As someone who has worked extensively with high schoolers, I know that young people often look to Wikipedia as a source for information. So, I thought it more appropriate to include the congressman’s official biography on the site.
No thought whatsoever was given to term limits when I got “caught” (the whole idea of Wikipedia is for those with knowledge of a topic to add content). A few minutes after I changed the biography, it was changed back. In all honesty, this amused me, so I tried to change it again. Sure enough, it was changed back. At that point, I gave up, realizing I didn’t have the time to wage what has been so eloquently dubbed a “Wiki war.”
Unfortunately, he only mentions one editing episode of the two in the story. Here's the section from Wikipedia's entry on Congressional edits (current version)
On August 16, 2006, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reported that the office of Representative Gil Gutknecht tried twice -- on July 24 and August 14, 2006 -- to remove a 128-word section in the Wikipedia article on him, replacing it with a more flattering 315-word entry taken from his official congressional biography. Most of the removed text was about the 12-year term-limit Gutknecht imposed on himself in 1995 (Gutknecht is running for re-election in 2006, breaking his promise). A spokesman for Gutknecht did not dispute that his office tried to change his Wikipedia entry, but questioned the reliability of the encyclopedia. [3].
Gutknecht's office used the account Gutknecht01 for the first edits on July 24;[4] that account was then notified (via its talk page) of wikipedia policies against self-editing. For the second set of edits on August 16, his office used a anonymous Congressional IP address.[5]
THE COMPANY GUTKNECHT KEEPS, OR, RUNAWAY CONGRESSMAN?
In "GOP might skip Bush's visit to state: President's low ratings in Michigan could keep many Republicans from Bouchard's fundraiser," the Detroit Free Press reports that President Bush heads to Michigan today for a fundraiser:
President Bush sprints through southeast Michigan for a three-hour visit today to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Republican Senate candidate Michael Bouchard -- and to raise a tough question for other GOP politicians.
Do you stand beside the standard bearer of your party, a president still popular with his conservative base? Or do you maintain a distance from a politician to whom most of America -- and Michigan -- gives a failing grade?
With the president's approval ratings hovering around 40 percent, GOP candidates around the country have stayed away when Bush visited their districts -- U.S. Rep. Thelma Drake of Virginia didn't even attend a Bush fundraising event for her campaign, and Senate candidate Thomas Kean of New Jersey showed up at his fundraiser after Bush had left.
Gee, that's not quite what Fox News said the other day.
Consider the runaway destination reported for Pete Hoekstra:
Other Michigan Republicans say they have previous events they can't reschedule to attend the president's visit, which was announced last week. . . . Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Holland will be in Minnesota campaigning with Rep. Gil Gutknecht.
Some interesting activity on the part of Representative Hoekstra. Here's one gem from the Washington Post article "Lawmakers Cite Weapons Found in Iraq" back in June:
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.
"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Santorum said.
The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.
The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
And there's Hoekstra's own pledge on term limits:
. . .He promised to serve only six terms (12 years) in the House. He scored a monumental upset, winning by almost six points. This primary win was tantamount to election in the 2nd, which is the most Republican district in Michigan (Republicans have held the district for all but four years since its creation in 1873). He has been reelected six times with virtually no Democratic opposition, never dropping below 65 percent of the vote.
In 2004, Hoekstra announced that he would run for another term after all, citing his membership on the House Select Committee on Intelligence. He faced no significant opposition in the Republican primary, all but clinching a 7th term. Shortly after the primary, he was named chairman of the committee, succeeding Porter Goss, who was named to head the CIA.
We look forward to hearing what the pair has to say to voters in Minnesota's First Congressional District.
OLLIE OX UPDATE: Polinaut has more on the Hoekstra visit.
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