It’s one thing to take the bait, but you’re jumping in the boat and fileting yourself.

July 23, 2008

TO: Dan Emery, Republican SD 48 Chair
FROM: HD 48B Nominations/Search Committee
RE: Donald Huizenga Web posting matter
The following is the Report of the HD 48B Nominations Committee (Joe Field (Chair),Matt Look and Jeff Weaver) which was recently recalled by SD 48 to inquire into allegations of potential offensive material allegedly written by Don Huizenga, a candidate for HD 48B. The Committee has investigated the matter by partially reviewing two websites: hardcoresledder.com (hereinafter “HCS”) and freedomsledder.com (hereinafter “FS”) and by interviewing Mr. Huizenga. The Committee was also supplied with certain pages from the HCS site which were previously forwarded by Barb Abeler to the Chair of the Committee. It should be noted that both websites contained a “current events” community web posting section which was the only section reviewed by the Committee. The HCS “current events” section contained over 330 pages and FS (which was just created this year) “current events” section contained over 50 pages. The Committee reviewed samplings of these pages but given the time and the voluntary resources of the Committee it was not feasible for the Committee to review each and every page of both websites. The reason two websites were reviewed is because Mr. Huizenga claims to have discontinued using HCS and started using FS this year due to overly restrictive conditions placed by the new owner of HCS on dialogue within that website.
Mr. Huizenga admitted to contributing posts to both HCS and FS. He was identified on HCS as simply “Huizenga” with a member number of “23,010”. Whenever he presented a post on HCS a group picture of him & others at a dinner table would show. On FS he was identified once again as “Huizenga”, with a member number of “21”. His posts on FS would show a picture of a campaign sign stating “Don Huizenga, State Representative.” It appears that his posts to FS did not start until May 2008.
Mr. Huizenga said his posts on both websites were done ‘tongue in cheek’ on a number of occasions given the dialogue and authors submitting their own posts. He says there is a lot of “bantering” which occurs on these sites. The Committee noted that both websites appeared to have a high tolerance for the use of profanity. Mr. Huizenga was no exception in using it though he appeared to diminish its use in the FS website. However, the Committee views Mr. Huizenga’s use of profanity on the FS website, with his campaign banner in full display to be particularly ill-advised and lacking in appropriate judgment. The Committee recommends that Mr. Huizenga curtail his public use of profanity while he attempts to secure a political seat under the Republican Party banner.
With regard to the February 26, 2008 web posting on HCS referencing Klobuchar, Mr. Huizenga admits writing the post but denies putting the “c” word (c- -t), as he referred to it, in the post. He also denied writing the other profane expression there as well (use of the “f” word). He stated, as conjecture, that someone, such as a “moderator” or “contributing member” might have added these inflammatory terms in his posting. He states he does not know how to prove this but claims these individuals have access to the utilities on the website that can make it happen if they wanted to. The Nominations Committee is not in a position to make a determination as to whether his statements were indeed tampered with. This would require some type of ‘forensic analysis’ which would have to be the call of the House District if it wished to pursue it. As to the profanity, while disfavored, that alone should not be determinative of a candidate’s viability to represent a district. Mr. Huizenga’s web postings, while sparsely profane at times, do reveal his passion, knowledge and sometimes naiveté for political issues and process.
The Committee did come across one web posting of concern, in the manner of a banner Ad, that contained Mr. Huizenga’s name as author. The statement is dated April 1, 2008 and reads as follows:
“Yes. What I mean is that I don’t think most blacks have the same mental capacity for “learned” thought in the way we test for it. RE: History, English, Math or IQ even.”
The Committee Chair asked Mr. Huizenga if he wrote this statement. He said he did. He was then asked what his intention was in writing the comment. He stated, in essence, that his intention was to point out that our testing methods are skewed against the cultural heritage that blacks are given. The Nominations Committee believes that this statement was clumsily drafted by Mr. Huizenga and could be interpreted to be a racist remark which, of course, is not what the Republican Party wishes to present in a candidate. Given that Mr. Huizenga denies intending the remark to be racist and given the plausibility of his response, the Committee does not believe his actions in drafting it should warrant sanctions by the House District, presuming that such sanctions were available to the District in this case.
The Committee did review one web posting provided to the Committee Chair by Barb Abeler which contained what appeared to be a number of racial and ethnic slurs which stood alone in the web postings without comment. It was not apparent whether Mr. Huizenga wrote these terms but he did recall that a “test” was done shortly after HCS tightened its content filters to see if these words would get through. It appeared that some writers, at the time, were having ‘some fun’ testing the limits on the new filtering system, according to Mr. Huizenga. No other references to such racial or ethnic slurs were found on either HCS or FS, at least not associated with Mr. Huizenga. Of course, neither website was referenced in its entirety though four hours of searches were conducted on both websites during the process of this investigation.
It is the conclusion of the Nominations Committee that Donald Huizenga did not mislead the Committee in its initial interview and inquiry into Mr. Huizenga’s past regarding whether there were any “skeletons in his closet”. In addition, while the occasional use of profanity by Mr. Huizenga on his web posts is disfavored these uses do not rise to the level of sanctions in the opinion of the Committee. The vulgar term used in connection with Klobuchar does cause the Committee some concern as it unnecessarily and crudely demeans a sitting U.S. Senator from the State of Minnesota. However, Mr. Huizenga has denied writing the offensive remark and submits an explanation which possibly explains how an edit to his posting could have occurred. Even if Mr. Huizenga wrote the offensive remark this does not appear to be a pattern of conduct that he is typically engaged in, i.e., making vulgar references to men or women of political stature. The reference to Klobuchar appears as an isolated occurrence. The Committee notices in particular that Mr. Huizenga also authored references to Obama and Al Franken which, while cutting, did not contain openly offensive and vulgar remarks about their person, at least from those postings read for this Report.
This concludes the Report of the Nominations Committee on Mr. Donald Huizenga.

By the way, another site has posted an analysis of Abeler’s campaign contributions.

http://anokacountywatchdog.com/email/2008/08.29.08_update.htm