Anti-Obama Bloggers Say They Were Silenced
Election 2008
By ANNA PHILLIPS, Special to the Sun | August 5, 2008

Web loggers 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.

On her right-leaning blog "Atlas Shrugs," Pamela Geller keeps a list of blogs that Google has temporarily blocked. "The blockings do come in waves," she said. "The last wave was this past week, and now it got very quiet."

Some writers have had their blogs unblocked, while others have moved them to WordPress, a rival blog host.

"I don't think" Google has "malicious intentions at all, it's just that spammers can literally overrun a service if you're not careful, so their defenses have become overzealous," a spokesman for WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, said in an e-mail.

"We always have human review before turning off an active blog," he said. "People invest so much time into their blogs, to treat it with anything less than the utmost respect is criminal."

Well. This is -interesting- ...hmmm.

Well, so much for cutting down on the retarded smears.

McCain has a black baby. AHHHHH!

quote:

On her right-leaning blog "Atlas Shrugs," Pamela Geller keeps a list of blogs that Google has temporarily blocked. "The blockings do come in waves," she said. "The last wave was this past week, and now it got very quiet."

Ha! Pamela Geller is pushing this story?

Cal, I'm kind of serious when I ask this: Is there a Right Wing Nut mailing list or something? How do you get this much total crap?

Seems a birth certificate is reasonable.

We all had to produce one of those at one point.

Obama released it. You can see it here.

All kidding aside, does it feel like the McCain camps smear attempts are going splat at an embarrassing rate? Does this mean Obama was really well prepared or something?

When you start resorting to claiming that Obama's energy plan is to fill tires and get tune-ups... and they're so proud of it that they start giving out tire gauges that say, "Obama's Energy Plan?"

Doesn't that sound like Tracey Flick in Election or something? I mean, considering how sweeping Obama's energy plan really is, and how much approval it's getting, even from T. Boone?

Worse yet... it turns out the Bush administration sent out the same advice... and drivers really will save more money from careful maintenance than they'll ever see from offshore drilling (also something the Bush Administration agrees with, as do many McCain advocates).

Oops.

http://www.nysun.com/national/anti-obama-bloggers-say-t...were-silenced/83179/

This is not an Obama smear. It doesn't say Obama did anything.
It's referring to whoever is at Google, let themselves be eh...
unduly influenced to shut down some anti Obama blogs.

That's it.

And Obama did say the keep your tires inflated properly etc to save more oil than we could drill for.. whatever.

And that was a stupid thing for Obama to say. He's out of his element, and he is making more and more errors off the cuff.

quote:

Originally posted by shepwrite:


Worse yet... it turns out the Bush administration sent out the same advice...

Well, if those idiots agree with it, it must be wrong.

quote:

And that was a stupid thing for Obama to say.

No it wasn't. At all. Because it's absolutely true. Experts within the Bush administration did a program around it. There's evidence to support it as far as fuel efficiency.

A woman asked Obama and he was prepared with the answer. The only way it becomes "dumb" is when you really, really want it to be, so you claim that it's "Obama's Energy Plan."

Now that's dumb, right? The smear part of it? Isn't it kind of ridiculous, Cal, considering all the support Obama's plan is getting? Considering the brilliant minds he brought together to craft it?

Doesn't the smear sound desperate and silly?

On the heels of the Britney-Paris debacle, I think handing out chatzkis to mock something smart was a big mistake. I sincerely do. Right now, McCain's campaign looks like it's being run by two snickering 14-year-olds.

I guess it could successfully preach to the choir. But even the choir knows by now that everybody on earth agrees with Obama's recommendation.

What's strange, is that while McCain's campaign probably has all of us wondering "what the ???"...

Obama is losing support, per a new Zogby poll out.