NO-bama blogsters cry censorship; and, O making dirt on progs?

     Although one wonders about the provability of the claims of some “NO-bama” bloggers in the article cited below, the incident still seems worth noting; see the NY Sun, Anti-Obama Bloggers Say They Were Silenced,

     Web loggers [sic] who are campaigning against Senator Obama’s presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen.
     On Thursday, hours after publishing a post about an online petition demanding that Mr. Obama publicly produce his birth certificate, an associate professor of business administration at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, found that he could no longer access his Web log.
     Google’s Blogger hosting service had suspended “Mitchell Langbert’s Blog,” which Mr. Langbert describes as “two-thirds academic stuff I’m working on and one-third politics,” until it could verify the Web log was not a “spam blog,” or a site designed solely to increase the page views of associated Web sites.
     A day later Google lifted the block on the account, but the incident and earlier Web log freezes in late June have led Mr. Langbert and other anti-Obama bloggers to accuse the Illinois senator’s supporters of intentionally identifying their blog addresses to Google as spam blogs. They also say the company has reflexively suspended the sites.
     “These tech-savvy smart alecks have figured out that if you report a blog you don’t like, you can do some damage to a person,” Mr. Langbert said.
     A spokesman for Google, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement that an overzealous antispam filter was responsible for the blocks.
     “We believe this was caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam,” he said. “We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”
     Several of the blogs that were blocked, including hillaryorbust.com and comealongway.blogspot.com, are part of the “Just Say No Deal” network of anti-Obama blogs. But Mr. Langbert’s blog is not, leading him to conclude that Obama supporters had targeted him. …

     Ouch.
     I doubt Obama himself is into censorship, but maybe some of his more fervent acolytes are starting to lose their cool…

     And on an even more unpleasant note, see, if only for amusement, the title of this post on Larry Johnson’s Obama-hatin’ “No Quarter”: Obama Repeatedly Defecates On Progressives (re: John Barrow, FISA, NAFTA, Campaign Finance…). Actually, read the article itself if you like, although its frothiness and run-Obama-over-with-a-truck vibe may unsettle some delicate appetites.

     Coming in a day or three: some interviews with interesting commentators about Obama and Obamaism. Stay tuned!

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