Speaking of “Not Bothering to Resist” …

It looks like Google didn't bother resisting clowns who tried flagging anything they don't like as spam.

Addendum: On the other hand, Google has claimed that the alleged spam was flagged by buggy software:

On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been 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. 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.”

The political opinions of Google employees might have had something to do with this, not in the sense that they're trying to suppress anything but in the sense that they think their mental models of political partisans reflect reality. It makes sense for the automatic spam-detection programs to include a “this stuff doesn't belong together” detector and such a detector might have been set off by blogs from anti-Obama Democrats.

In related news, my PageRank has gone to zero. Apparently, the “this stuff doesn't belong together” detector (a conservative who's in favor of open borders? an anti-Luddite who's against embryonic stem-cell research?) gave enough of an alarm for this blog to be flagged as resembling spam but not enough to be blocked. (Technoptimist also has a PageRank of zero, probably for similar reasons.)