Photo finishing

A couple of followup notes on the Dwain Lingenfelter photo story from last night.

First, the Lingenfelter campaign's response may raise more questions than it answers:

A First Nations chief is upset that his picture has appeared on the online social network Facebook as a supporter of Saskatchewan NDP leadership candidate Dwain Lingenfelter.

Wally Burns, chief of the James Smith Cree Nation, told CBC News on Wednesday he recently discovered his image in an online photo album associated with Lingenfelter's campaign.
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Burns said he is not a Lingenfelter supporter. He told CBC News that Lingenfelter simply asked to have a picture taken with chiefs at a recent gathering of the Prince Albert Grand Council.
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The online album page has since been altered. By Thursday afternoon the site did not contain any photographs of Lingenfelter alongside any chiefs from the Prince Albert area.

Now, I may be missing some compelling reason why a concern from Burns in particular would result in Lingenfelter's campaign removing photos of all "chiefs from the Prince Albert area" based simply on their attending the same gathering as Burns. But it would seem to me that the more logical response would be either to deal with Burns' photo alone or to take a more general look at all claimed supporters in the album - rather than drawing a seemingly arbitrary line at First Nations leaders only from one area of the province.

Meanwhile, if the Lingenfelter campaign does bother going through and double-check whether it's accurate in its claimed support, this would figure to be one of the first to come under question. And it's worth wondering whether Lingenfelter's claim to a picture with Lorne Calvert as an endorsement might lead Calvert to be less constrained by any custom about not affecting the outcome of the race.

(H/t to a reader on the Calvert photo.)