BVD-clad blogger Wesley "Ding" Elsberry is on a gossiping witch-hunt

As usual, BVD-clad blogger Wesley "Ding" Elsberry (called Herr Fuhrer Esley Welsberry -- pronounced "Velsberry" -- by John A. Davison) -- who shamelessly practices arbitrary censorship of blog visitors' comments -- is up to no good again. He is now on a gossiping witch-hunt. Below are excerpts from a Miami Herald article that cites his Austringer blog. As I said before, blogs where there is arbitrary censorship of comments lack fairness and credibility and so should not be cited by the official news media. Elsberry actually censored comments under a Panda's Thumb blog article on the subject of the Miami Herald article-- more about that later. The Miami Herald article says,
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Florida's No. 2 education official is tangled in a cyber-tussle with a tiny Minnesota newspaper and a scientist who blogs about the politics of teaching evolution.

Back in October 2003, the Princeton Union Eagle wrote that Cheri Yecke, then Minnesota's education commissioner, explained in ''advance publicity'' for a public hearing that 'schools could include the concept of `intelligent design' in teaching how the world came to be.''

Big news? Apparently not. The line was buried in the 22nd paragraph.

But four years later, Yecke is Florida's K-12 chancellor and a leading candidate to be its next education commissioner. And now she says the newspaper got it wrong.

Through an Internet company called reputationdefender, Yecke recently asked a scientist who riffed on the statement to either remove his blog post or modify it.

The scientist said he would if Yecke showed proof the statement was wrong. But the newspaper is standing by its reporter . . . . .

. . . . . Yecke's position on the teaching of intelligent design, a faith-based counterpart to evolution, was at issue when she was hired in August 2005 by then-Education Commissioner John Winn.

Critics in Minnesota say Yecke tried to ease such theories into the curriculum by misrepresenting the position of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and by quietly tinkering with wording when science standards were drafted.

Yecke has called those characterizations off base.

This week, she said the Union Eagle statement is inaccurate and worth setting straight because she believes such decisions should be left up to district officials.

Until recently, the scientist in the picture, Wesley Elsberry, worked for the National Center for Science Education, a pro-science watchdog group. Now a visiting researcher at Michigan State University, he says the statement in question might be more controversial for Yecke than her other statements because it ''would tie her directly to advocacy of intelligent design.'' But in his view, Yecke's other words and actions already made her an advocate.

Elsberry recently updated his blog, the Austringer, with a written explanation from Yecke. But he said he wouldn't remove the offending statement unless he could examine the ''advance publicity'' referred to by the newspaper.

It's unclear what the ''advance publicity'' was. Union Eagle Editor Chris Schafer said he thinks it was a press release, but neither he nor the reporter who wrote the story still have it. Yecke said any press release from her office would not have included such a statement.

Schafer said the story is ''fair and accurate.'' He said Yecke never contacted the paper for a retraction. ''If there was a problem, why weren't we doing this the day after the story ran?'' he said.

Yecke said she never saw the story. ''They're such a little paper,'' she said. ``I didn't even know about it.'

"Ding" Elsberry is asking for the impossible. He says that he wants to see the "advance publicity," but the Union Eagle newspaper says that it no longer has it. And how can Union Eagle Editor Schafer claim that the story is "fair and accurate" when he no longer has the evidence to back up that claim? This is all nothing but gossip. If Elsberry had an ounce of integrity, he would comply with Yecke's request that the Union Eagle's statement either be removed from his blog or modified.

Also, Yecke's claim that she never saw the story because "they're such a little paper" reminds me of the time that I wrote a letter to a Virginia state legislator regarding a big Los Angeles Times article about a bill that he had introduced. He sent me a reply thanking me for informing him about the article because he was not aware that his bill had been publicized in a West Coast paper -- and the Los Angeles Times is one hell of a lot bigger than the Princeton Union Eagle (however, that was before the Internet was as popular as it is today, so it probably would have been harder then for him to find the article on his own than it is today).
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