UPDATE: Read the recovered blog yourself

Jo Egelhoff, Republican candidate for an open Assembly seat in Appleton, has a problem.

Back before she became a candidate, she shared her innermost thoughts with people in a very public way, on a blog at FoxPolitics.net

She was outspoken and provocative on all sorts of local, state and national issues.

But then she entered the political arena, and her blog mysteriously disappeared. Unfortunately for candidate Egelhoff, it didn't disappear entirely from the Internet; her rants are still floating around out there.

Dan Bice of the Journal Sentinel uncovered them this week, and couldn't help but observe that Egelhoff the candidate and Egelhoff the blogger often are at odds on the issues. Candidate Egelhoff sounds more reasonable; Blogger Egelhoff was pretty far out there.

Egelhoff told Bice she deleted her blog to make sure she didn't violate any campaign laws:

Egelhoff said she took down her blog after a staffer with the Government Accountability Board told her that it might be a campaign finance violation for her to post on a corporate-owned Web site.

Interestingly, state Rep. Frank Lasee, a Republican from Green Bay running for re-election, still is a regular blogger on the same site, posting an item this week.

As for her old ramblings, Egelhoff said she deleted those to play it safe.

Even if there is a problem with her continuing to post items on the site -- which is doubtful -- there is no reason the archive of what she wrote before she was a candidate can't stay online.

I quit writing for The Xoff Files, my former blog on WisPolitics, two years ago, but it's still there for anyone to read. Of course, I'm not running for office on a platform that contradicts what I wrote.

Here are a few of the gems Egelhoff didn't want voters to read, now that she's running:

"Of course, SeniorCare is an entitlement. A charity program, operated with your tax dollars and mine. Just like Social Security and Medicare – government programs that were/are sold as insurance programs, but indeed, always were very apparent giveaway programs."

"Programs, like "family planning", which make social problems worse, should be discontinued, and certainly, the taxpayers of Wisconsin must not be made to finance bogus schemes which spread disease among young women ... "

In a series of "ideas" on education, she suggested ending 4-year-old kindergarten, freezing teacher salaries, ending 2/3 state support of school costs, eliminating funding to reduce class sizes, and more.

Cutting state shared revenus aid to municpalities in half. That would cut Appleton's budget by a devastating $5.7-million a year, causing massive cuts and layoffs or huge property tax increases.

That's just a small sampling. There's much, much more.

As Egelhoff wrote back on May 25. 2007: Easy for me to go on record – I don’t have to get re-elected!

Now she wants to be elected, but she doesn't want the voters to read what she wrote. She owes it to them, in the short time remaining before the election, to restore her blog to the Internet and let people read it, evaluate it, and make their own decisions about whether they want to vote for Jo Egelhoff, Extreme Blogger, rather than Jo Egelhoff, Reasonable Candidate.