The John Edwards/Rielle Hunter story continues to, as they say, develop. You might even say it’s gestating. Whether the “legitimate” news likes it or not:

• Lee Stranahan, who posted the first (only?) serious, thoughtful analysis of the whole mess at the Huffington Post, has been banned from the Daily Kos for daring to talk about it there. (Lee has more at his personal blog.)
• Some Wikipedians keep trying to add the forbidden name “Rielle Hunter” to thoroughly relevant entries, and other Wikipedians keep taking it out. In the Wiki entry for the 1988 Jay McInerney novel Story of My Life, one brave soul has added some information that seems pretty well-sourced, considering Hunter herself put it up on her site, Being Is Free: the fact that Hunter directly inspired Alison Poole, the novel’s main character. For some reason, certain people don’t consider this fact relevant to understanding the novel, or to be of any interest to anyone whatsoever. The two sides are now battling it out. (I haven’t been keeping track of Edwards’ Wiki entry, after the same thing happened there last week, but I think they’re finally starting to acknowledge Hunter’s existence.)
• Incidentally, if Google Blog Search is any indication, Deceiver was the first blog to post anything substantial about Being Is Free. Sam Stein at the Huffington Post noted last year that the site had been deleted, but it looks like we were the first ones to note that there’s a mirror site, let alone to look at it in any detail. (And I’m still not done with it.) But of course, Wikipedia can’t cite us because we’re just a silly blog with a hot pink logo.

  (Update: Deceiver reader Kris, who originally tipped me off to Being Is Free, has the provenance of that information. The Stranahans are on the case!)

• If I had to sum up my past week of posts (and at this point you probably wish I would), one thread runs through this story: People taking down stuff they had put up on the Internet voluntarily. The Edwards campaign videos that Hunter made: deleted. Hunter’s whole site: deleted. The resume and contact info for Bob McGovern, Hunter’s psychic friend and alleged hotel hookup-enabler: deleted. And that’s just what we know about so far. It sure does look like somebody’s trying to cover their tracks.

  To put it into perspective: Last month, word got out that a blogger named Xeni Jardin had gone through the archives of the group blog Boing Boing and deleted — or as she insists, “unpublished” — every single post that so much as mentioned a particular person she didn’t like anymore. Within a week this made national news, all the way up to the hallowed New York Times.

  Now we have a past and potentially future candidate for Vice President of the United States apparently scrubbing lots of possibly damaging information from the Internet, and two weeks into the story, only a handful of people are talking about it. Even if you don’t care about the more lurid aspects of this whole debacle, you have to admit that the Edwards camp has a very poor grasp of Netiquette.

• Just to end things on an up note, I’ve got “John & Rielle” running through my head to the tune of “Johnny Ryall” by the Beastie Boys. What, me obsessed?

Fairly Major Update: As of 1:45 PM EST today, that mirror site of Being Is Free is gone. Noticing a pattern here? Luckily, I already saved every single page to my hard drive…