Traverse City Record-Eagle

Opinion

August 11, 2007

Bishop oversteps bounds by blocking pro-Dem blog

Who does he think he is? Dick Cheney?

After a brief fling as Michigan's Censor-in-Chief, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop on Tuesday restored access for lawmakers and staffers to a political Web site that had apparently hurt his feelings.

By the time he reversed himself, however, whatever the site had said about him paled in comparison to the beating he took in the blogosphere and in print — from left and right — over his decision to unilaterally suspend the First Amendment for senators and staffers.

Last week Bishop chief of staff Matt Miner directed the secretary of the Senate to block access to the site www.bloggingformichigan.com from Senate Internet servers. The site is run by Christine Barry, a Shiawassee County resident who works as a systems engineer in Flint.

After ordering the shutdown, Bishop's office immediately started a backup smear campaign. Bishop spokesperson Matt Marsden claimed the site was being fed inside information — or worse. "It was fairly clear that this blog had access to Senate information off Senate servers," he intoned ominously.

Even assistant Senate Secretary Pam Nyquist got in on the act. She told Gongwer News Serivce that an investigation was under way to determine if the blog was created by a Senate employee using Senate equipment.

"That would not be appropriate," she said.

No, it wouldn't — if even a single word of it was true. But it was all just blather, and by Tuesday Bishop's office had dropped the conspiracy theories.

When it came out that Bishop had not blocked access to other overtly political sites — including the left-leaning www.michiganliberal.com and the conservative www.rightmichigan.com — Miner fessed up. He was quoted in the political newsletter MIRS that michiganliberal.com wasn't blocked because it doesn't "say bad things about us."

Good Heavens! Bad things?

Since Tuesday Bishop has been trying to frame his walk on the dark side and hasty retreat in terms of Senate staffers wasting their time on sites of "questionable content" instead of working diligently for the people of Michigan.

The fact that www.rightmichigan.com was never blocked put the lie to his newfound concern over the Senate's work ethic, no matter how it was spun.

On Tuesday, an e-mail to the media from Louis F. Meizlish, Bishop's "Deputy Director of External Affairs" (is there a director of external affairs, too?) wrote that "Senate Democrats seem intent on making this a debate on censorship ..."

So what else is there to debate? Changing the subject won't work. Bishop and perhaps some other GOP senators got mad, flexed their muscles in an effort to muzzle or intimidate Christine Barry and her blog and got caught. It's as simple as that.

Just FYI, the deadline to cut $1.8 billion from the state budget is just 52 days away. Tick, tick, tick.

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