something of the night - a little bit of politics

POISON IN THE AIR:

We can't help wondering what set off a detector in the Capitol Building this morning - presumably, the sensor for nerve gas was just picking up the increasing levels of poison floating about in the air.

A latest example: Capitol Hill staff have been removing embarassing but accurate material from Wikipedia:

Senator Coleman's office has confirmed that staff there had made a number of changes to his online record.

Where he was described as a "liberal" back in college, this was changed to "activist".

Among other changes, staff also deleted a reference to Mr Coleman voting with President Bush 98% of the time in 2003, despite running as a moderate the year before.

Wikipedia said staffers of Senator Tom Harkin had removed a paragraph relating to Mr Harkin's having falsely claimed to have flown combat missions over North Vietnam, and his subsequent recantation.

A handful of miscellaneous vandalism edits had been made to some senators' articles, it said.

One example was the entry for Republican Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, who it was falsely alleged had been voted "most annoying senator".

Bush editing block

Senator Coleman's chief of staff, Erich Mische, said editing was done to correct inaccuracies and delete information that was not reflective of the politician.

Inaccuracies is one thing - correcting Wikipedia is a fine thing to do. But it's not his staff's place to decide what is and isn't reflective of his public stance. If he wants a "rah-rah-rah, I'm great" website, let him pay for one.