by Paul Murphy
July 5th, 2008 @ 12:15 am

Yesterday, Americans celebrated Independence Day - and I got to spent too much of the day loafing around paging lazily through a whole bunch of more or less nutty political sites.

One of things I noticed was the marked difference in treatment accorded a particularly nasty little controversy around whether or not google was purposely shutting down anti-Obama sites on its blogger.com network. Here’s the salient bit from what appears to have been the first blast of the whistle - by Warner Huston:

It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign and decided that its contribution would be to shut down any blog on the Google owned Blogspot.com blogging system that has an anti-Obama message. Yes, it sure seems that Google has begun to go through its many thousands of blogs to lock out the owners of anti-Obama blogs so that the noObama message is effectively squelched.

A bit after writing this he added this update above his original story: Update: Perhaps it isn’t google, but Obamaniacs taking advantage of google’s faulty sytem. A commenter explains: The problem with blogger is that a group of people with an ax to grind can report any blog as spam and after enough complaints, it’s automatically suspended until a real live human being can get around to examining it.