Yes indeed, it is clearly happening, that fact is not being disputed.  The only real question is “by who”.  This, by the way I regard as a serious issue.  I left Blogger 3 years ago to give my blog more creative control and security, and now I am even more glad I did.

We start at Sister Toldjah:

Just another example of how far some far left Obama supporters are willing to go to shut down criticism about the Obamessiah? Bloggasm and Stop The ACLU take a look.

I haven’t had much of a chance to dive too deeply into the controversy, but it wouldn’t be surprising to find out this indeed was happening, considering how so many far left Obama supporters react at the slightest hint of criticism of Barry Oh.

Yea, that much is certainly true.  The supporters of Obama defend him with a religious fervor.  Those who criticize him are essentially heretics.

Even denying Global Warming is a lesser sin then doubting Obama.

Stop the ACLU continues:

Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Sites on its Blogger Platform

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. If enough complaints are registered with blogger, you might get a response within 5 days but it takes a concerted effort. This is a huge problem with blogger and something google needs to get a handle on.

Regardless who is at fault, this shutting down of free speech is disturbing.

-Edit by WTH: If I can find a link to prove that it was a concerted effort by Obama supporters, I’ll post it.

As the next story shows, one of the more interesting tidbits is that even liberal  blogs are being targeted, apparently for being critical of the Messiah.

I may be sounding facetious, but I am dead serious.  The Obama-ites are utterly without mercy in their defense of Obama.  Any criticisms are generally denounced as racist.

And the beauty of it, the utter beauty is that he gets the chance to take some of their more outrageous actions, call for moderation and tolerance, and appear as the calm moderate voice of reason.  Since its just his “supporters” he can disavow anything they do, look good in the process, and then lather, rinse and repeat.

It has happened time and time again, and it is a brilliant bit of chicanery.  But I digress…

Hot Air wraps it up:

Now just imagine Blogger was the FEC

Carissa Snedeker could be excused in thinking that she should have no problems in expressing her political views in the blogosphere.   The Democrat had created Blue Lyon a few years ago, but had recently begun blogging about her membership in a growing group of Hillary Clinton supporters who didn’t yet support Barack Obama.  Much to her surprise, when she attempted to log into her account, Blogger — run now by Google — had locked her out, as Simon Owens reports at Bloggasm:

“At first I thought it was just this random thing with Blogger’s spam bots,” she told me in a phone interview. “I thought that perhaps in their looking across the blogger universe, that I got accidentally flagged somehow. Stuff like that happens.”

But a short time later Snedeker received an email from another blogger claiming that a number of anti-Obama blogs had been “hacked” that same night. After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.

…

One would think that Google/Blogger would take care of its blogger customers better than this, but that would require an expectation of Google hiring people who know what they’re doing. A quick read of Blue Lyon shows that it’s obviously not a spam blog, but apparently no one at Google thought to check out the blog before they locked out Snedeker.  The lesson here is simple: if you care about free speech, don’t get a free blog from Blogger.

There are a couple of other lessons here as well.  If Snedeker, GeekLove, and the others experiencing the lockout are correct, some Barack Obama supporters have organized to shut down blog sites.  I seriously doubt that the Obama campaign would be stupid enough to get involved in such an effort, but it does say something about his supporters.   Filing false complaints to harass critics is close to dirty tricks, and going after free speech shows that to be a virtue that is at best underappreciated by the people involved in these attacks.

Finally, I’d like to recall a few years ago when the federal courts demanded that the Federal Election Commission take action to apply the BCRA to the Internet.  A bipartisan coalition of bloggers, including myself, warned that even modest regulations that had sanctions against Internet writers could create a monstrous regulatory hurdle — one that could get invoked precisely by the same kind of specious and malicious complaints that Blogger received.  Instead of just taking a few days to get the sites back, though, complaints to the FEC would have required us to hire lawyers and spend months to clear our names.

With the fairness doctrine once again being batted about, as far as I am concerned, any attacks on free speech need to be stopped, forcefully.

This is something that ALL bloggers - liberal, moderate or conservative - need to rally together against.

Hot Air gets the final word:

It doesn’t take much to attack free speech.  All it requires is a regulatory mechanism manned by clueless bureaucrats, triggered by people who don’t value free political speech.  Thankfully, that’s limited to Blogger …. for the moment.

Indeed.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Right Truth, Shadowscope, The Amboy Times, Beagle Scout - Support the No More Excuses Energy Act, Democrat=Socialist, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, DragonLady’s World, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, , Right Voices, Stageleft, The Random Yak, Adam’s Blog, Cao’s Blog, Conservative Cat, Nuke Gingrich, Allie is Wired, Faultline USA, McCain Blogs, The World According to Carl, Walls of the City, Rosemary’s News and Ideas, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Nuke’s News, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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