An apology and a retraction - Granite Grok

An apology and a retraction

Our official motto is “Spank’em when they’re wrong and Thank’em when they’re right”.  That can be applied to ourselves as well (as well as it should).  We try to get all of our facts rights.  With GraniteGrok closing in on 10,300 posts, we pretty much get it right almost all of the time.

Almost.

This is not one of those times (or could be taken to be such – so be it).  Well, in the comments to this post (“Meet Another State Employee Wasting Taxpayer Time Online“), there is a discussion concerning yet another NH State employee that has been posting lots of comments at the Concord Monitor with the “handle” of “Gaia” (actually twice as many as self-admitted guilty Richard de Seve).  Well, a name was put up for discussion as “Is this Gaia?” and it was brought up to our attention – wrong person.  Steve adjusted his comment with this:

Just to clarify, by posting my last comment I am not implicating Mr. Liptak as the commenter Gaia.  I am actually asking if he is the State Employee named “John” mentioned in the comment thread.

There are several coincidences between them but at this point that is all they are.  We apologize if posting his name in the comments was in any way interpreted as evidence of complicity on his part.

This morning I received this from the NH DES RTK Dude:

On behalf of Mr. Liptak, thank you for posting a correction to the comments section of the post in which he was mentioned.

Following up on that, our HR office has advised me that after reviewing the matter with a focus on Gaia’s posts, there is no correlation between Mr. Liptak’s use of his computer and the activity at the Monitor.  Also, this matter was discussed with Mr. Liptak yesterday morning.  Subsequent to that discussion, at 11:32 and 11:35 yesterday morning, Gaia continued to post.  Mr. Liptak strongly denies any association or even knowledge of the Monitor user named Gaia.  HR’s inquiry supports his assertion.

Mr. Liptak is very concerned with his name being associated with the alleged impropriety.  Therefore, he is asking that a more prominent retraction be posted and, thereafter, that his name be removed from the comments section.

Please let me know if his request can be accommodated.

Consider this, with our apologies, as the “more prominent retraction”.  While we are hunting for those that cost taxpayers money for time spent doing other than what they should be doing net-wise, we certainly do not believe in creating “collateral damage” along the way.  We apologize for any implication that has been made that he is the “Gaia” commenter.  Although we do not have the definitive proof (tie backs from outbound data packets traced back to a DHCP lease), we see that DES HR has done its  job and we hope that this fulfills the above request.

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