Franken’s Gym Shorts — and Cheney in the Wayback Machine

Growling about Al: Al Franken in gym shorts: That’s the image City Pages treats us to today. In a story by Brooklyn-based writer Ben Westhoff, we hear from neighbors at Franken’s downtown Minneapolis condo about his antics in the building’s gym. Among the stunning revelations: Franken has been spotted shouting at the TV during a Twins game, singing aloud with his iPod, putting his own campaign sticker on his car, and, worst of all, having a public persona — a comedic one — even when in the relative privacy of the exercise room. The key story, illustrated by Jay Bevenour (above), is relayed by resident Lauren Zeller, a 28-year-old Republican who “swears her politics haven’t affected her perception of Franken.” She’s irked that Franken does a routine, clearly meant to “get a rise out of” fellow residents, in which “He yells, ‘Go Al!’ and then puts his sweaty towel in his mouth, shakes his head back and forth, and growls like a dog.”

The story has riled readers at MNspeak, including one who wonders if Franken’s opponent, Sen. Norm Coleman, will get such unflattering treatment in an upcoming issue. City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman commented at the site, stating that the piece is “a lighthearted story not meant to be a huge expose.” Reached by email later, he said, “I thought the story was newsworthy because Al Franken is running for a major public office. If George W. Bush liked to gnaw on a sweaty towel and growl like a dog while running on the treadmill, don’t you think it would be worth publishing?”

Anatomy of a meme: Track this one: Dick Cheney gives an interview in 1994 about why the United States didn’t go into Baghdad in the first Gulf War, saying that to do so, alone, would’ve landed us in a “quagmire” and wouldn’t have been worth the potential loss of human lives. C-Span revives the footage in 2007 on its website and in broadcasts. The world fails to pay attention. Then YouTube user GrandTheftCountry posts it, it gets more than 430,000 hits, and now CNN is covering it. The local angle: Steve Perry, former editor of City Pages, picked up on Cheney’s now-and-then contradiction in a 2003 blog post. He found an earlier speech — at the Soref Symposium in 1991 — in which Cheney said White House discussions about invading Baghdad were met with a “resounding ‘no’.” He said that it “would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq” and asked, “How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?” (Download the speech here.)

Media Monitor continues…Fox whacks Wiki facts: Wired reported yesterday that many entities are changing Wikipedia entries to stamp out criticism, including touchscreen voting machine manufacturer Diebold, the CIA, political campaigns and, according to tech bloggers, Fox News . Through a search tool called the Wikiscanner, users can trace anonymous editors to the IP addresses of the computers they use. The tech blog O’Reilly, for instance, used the scanner to discover that someone at a Fox News IP modified the entry for Al Franken to delete a quote from Franken that the 2003 lawsuit against the Minnesotan by the news outlet was “literally laughed out of court” and that the judge’s ruling that the suit was “wholly without merit” was “a good characterization of Fox News itself.” (Here’s a more complete list of changes made by Fox.) No news yet on what the scanner revealed about, say, changes made by users at New York Times’ IPs.

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