Obama & His Spam-Bots

There is so much to blog about today! Where to begin?

I will start with Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily article, Obama's theological Chinese menu,

Excerpt:

"I am a Christian," said Obama. "So, I have a deep faith. So I draw from the Christian faith. On the other hand, I was born in Hawaii where obviously there are a lot of Eastern influences. I lived in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, between the ages of 6 and 10. My father was from Kenya, and although he was probably most accurately labeled an agnostic, his father was Muslim. And I'd say, probably, intellectually I've drawn as much from Judaism as any other faith. So, I'm rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there's an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived."

The statement was apparently well-considered by Obama, because it bears striking resemblance to an interview he gave the Chicago Sun-Times about a week later.

Yet, what Obama reveals about his brand of Christianity is that it has little in common with what Jesus had to say about salvation in John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."

There aren't many paths, according to the Bible – just one. And it tells us even that one path is very narrow. Obama makes the mistake of many who believe themselves to be Christians – that they can pick and choose what they like about the Bible as if [it] were an oversized Chinese menu.

In the interview, Obama says he was raised as a Christian by his mother and grandparents. Yet, his mother, who married two Muslim men, permitted him to be educated in a Muslim school in Indonesia. Then he describes his grandparents as practicing universalists.

The only church he ever attended regularly was the one presided over by Jeremiah Wright – a subscriber to liberation theology, an ideology more in line with the beliefs of Barabbas than Jesus.

And who is Jesus to Barack Obama?

He laughs nervously when asked by the interviewer, then responds: "Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he's also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher. And he's also a wonderful teacher. I think it's important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history."

Of course, Christians believe Jesus is the bridge to God for all willing to accept Him and His substitutionary sacrifice for their sins.

Obama admits in the interview he seldom read the Bible, but relied on spiritual guidance from Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger. He said he had "enormous respect for" Wright and described Pfleger, from whom he has also distanced himself this year, as "a dear friend and somebody I interact with closely."

"This is something that I'm sure I'd have serious debates with my fellow Christians about," Obama says, leading up to another shocker for believers. "I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize," he said. "There's the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven't embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they're going to hell."

The interviewer asks: "You don't believe that?"

"I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell," he says. "I can't imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity. That's just not part of my religious makeup."

But, of course, that leaves us with the question of why Jesus chose to die for the sins of mankind if, indeed, there was another way to avoid hell.

Then again, see how Obama defines sin.

Interviewer: "Do you believe in sin?"

Obama: "Yes."

Interviewer: "What is sin?"

Obama: "Being out of alignment with my values."

Where does all this spiritual confusion lead? Does it suggest Obama will not win the presidency?

Oversided Chinese menu...HA!! That's funny! Sad, but accurately describes the smorgasbord theology of Obama's spiritual oblivion!

Since when does a Christian label The Great Commission, authorized by Jesus Himself upon his resurrection and shared with the disciples just before he ascended to the Father in heaven "proselytizing"?? That is usually a term used by gospel-rejecting secular-humanist Christian haters! (i.e. like the ACLU and Barry Lynn!) Welp...now we can add Barry Hussein Obama to the list!

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Pat Buchanan also came through with a great article today. In defense of Dobson.


Excerpt:

"(H)e (Obama) is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter," said Dobson. "Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the life of tiny babies?"

"What he (Obama) is saying here is that unless everyone agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe."

Dobson has no small point. For in his litany of moral heroes, Barack himself selected no "can't-we-all-just-get-along?" Christians.

Buchanan answers that "can't we all just get along" question beautifully:

Obama, however, is now preaching a kumbaya Christianity where leaders who believe abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn are to set their convictions and cause aside in the name of ecumenical amity.

It is Dobson who, in his intolerance of perceived evil, seems in the tradition of the abolitionists, and Barack who appears more like the milquetoast believers of whom Christ said he would spit them out of his mouth because they were neither hot nor cold and whom Dante consigned to the deepest reaches of hell.

Does social peace require the toleration of manifest evil?

In the Roman Empire before Constantine, Christians accepted martyrdom rather than burn incense to Caesar. Thomas More went to his death rather than assent to the divorce of Henry VIII, declaring, "I am the king's good servant, but God's first."

A disciple of Gandhi, Dr. King is celebrated as a champion of civil disobedience against the injustice of segregation. What would Obama say to massive civil disobedience by those who believe the killing of 50 million unborn children since Roe v. Wade is a greater evil than segregating folks by race in public accommodations?

Would an Obama, who hails the abolitionists and Dr. King, condemn them as divisive? Was not that the charge thrown up at Dr. King?

Dr. Dobson sums up Obama's pseudo-Christianity and horribly inaccurate idea of our Constitution when he quite bluntly stated:

"Barack has a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution if he thinks it requires us to give up fighting for justice because it may be divisive," says Dobson.

Yep....

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The following is a blog post from a blog that I cannot, in good conscience, link to. Why? Because the person chooses to have links to sexually explicit material. There is no copyright notice at the site, so I am presenting it here in it's entirety. If you want to find the blog, you could probably place the first sentences in a search engine and locate it.

The issue is a very important one. It just goes to show what kind of "change" Obama and his minions would want - squelching the time-honored, free speech rights of American citizens on the Internet with whom they disagree.

Frightening...truly scary!!!

Please note. Most of the links being purposely targeted and shut down as "spam blogs" are leftist, Clinton supporter blogs!! I am not including the links to the blogs being discussed. Again, using a search engine will aide you in locating them.

Christine

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When Carissa Snedeker went to log into her Blogspot account Wednesday evening at about 7:30, she had no idea what would be waiting for her. She had created her blog, Blue Lyon, three years ago and up until this point had very few problems posting new content. But this time a message from Google came up when she visited her dashboard.

“This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations,” the message stated. “You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked.”

When Snedeker clicked on the link at the bottom of the message she came to another one that told her that her blog “has characteristics of a spam blog” and, because of this, it had been locked. It allowed her the chance to send an “unlock request” but told her she’d have to wait up to four business days before someone at Google could review her blog and confirm it wasn’t publishing spam.

“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.

A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”

I spoke to several of the bloggers who had accounts locked and every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted — a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive.

The incident highlights the often-contentious relationship between online Hillary and Obama supporters. Popular sites like Digg.com have consistently posted anti-Hillary links and popular liberal blog Daily Kos experienced a “boycott” a few months ago when several Hillary supporters left the site.

A blogger who uses the pseudonym “GeekLove” (she wouldn’t agree to a phone interview and wouldn’t tell me her real name) said to me via email that when her blog, Come A Long Way, was shut down she thought it was a fluke as well.

“I also felt a little bit humiliated that someone would think to characterize my Blog as ’spam,’” she said. “I had no idea why it would be ’spam’ I assumed it was just some sort of mistake. I did think it was an isolated incident. I requested the Blogger review. I then went to the Hillary Clinton Forum, a place I frequently participate in on line discussions, and I saw Nobama’s post ‘Blogger just shut down my NObama Blog!!‘ Then when other Blogger blogs were affected, I knew it was more than coincidence.”

Like the others I spoke to, she immediately became convinced that Obama supporters were behind the outages.

“I suspect that it was Obama supporters because I think the block was timed to affect blogs prior to the unity event so that we would not ‘rain on the unity parade,’ GeekLove said. “Also, Obama has ads out hiring people with no experience, except the ability to use computers. I presume these are the individuals responsible for silencing any opposition. His campaign has really harnessed the power of the internet and in the process learned to game the system in a way that I find frightening.”

When it comes to butting heads with Obama supporters, perhaps nobody has more experience than Larry Johnson. If his name rings a bell, it’s because Johnson, who worked for the CIA in the ’80s and now does military consulting, was the origin of the famous “whitey” claim. Not long ago he reported on his website that people connected with the McCain campaign are in possession of video footage of Michelle Obama saying derogatory things about white people. However, he admitted that he hadn’t actually seen the video and his two sources hadn’t seen it either. He quickly became a target of bloggers from both the right and left.

Several of the bloggers hit by the Blogspot outage also write at his site, No Quarter, and so Johnson has been watching the controversy with interest. Like the others, he believes wholeheartedly that Obama supporters are behind the “attack,” and he told me in a phone interview that his website had experienced similar problems a few months ago.

“We were contacted by our host in March and they claimed we were draining too many resources,” he said. “They shut us down completely. But when we went in to look at our site statistics it was evident that something else was clearly going on — we were the subject of some kind of spam attack that was putting a strain on the site.”

To ward off such attacks, he decided to go with his own server, a move that he said would make it harder to shut him down. But after he published the “whitey” claims, he had more direct conflicts with Obama supporters.

“The problem with these people who had their Google accounts shut down, they’re intimidated by it,” Johnson said. “They don’t want to get themselves in a situation so they would be identified. Some of these people who get identified, the Obama folks start picking up the phone and calling. I had phone calls into my office, threatening me, saying that you’re going to be fired, let me talk to your boss. I told them to go f*** themselves, because I am my own boss. It helps to be self-employed.”

Johnson and the other people interviewed for this article all agreed that Google was partly to blame for the outages. It was because of the search giant’s “guilty until proven innocent” approach, they said, that allowed the attackers to shut down the blogs so easily.

“My biggest objection is not necessarily that these people did this, but that Blogger had the policy that basically locks you out,” Snedeker said. “In other words you’re guilty until proven innocent, instead of the other way around, and that was what frustrated me.”

“I understand the need if you have some complaints from people that you need to investigate it,” Johnson said. “But you also have to make sure that the person filing the complaint is legitimate.”

An email I sent to Google requesting comment was not immediately returned. Nearly all the bloggers who were targeted by this spam crusade are not waiting around for their accounts to be restored. They’ve flocked to Wordpress and opened free accounts there (including Blue Lyon and Come A Long Way), and they don’t have any immediate plans to return to their original URLs once the dust settles.

What’s perhaps even more notable is that none of the people I spoke to is planning any kind of backlash against Obama supporters. It seemed to me that, for the most part, they just want to be left alone.

“While I am expressing my political beliefs, on Blogger it was a simple push of a button to mark my blog as spam and silence me,” GeekLove said. ” Pushing the button set me back a couple of days and I was unable to post anything during the unity event. The prospect of starting over on another blog was also daunting [and] I briefly, only briefly considered [giving] up blogging. Tactics like this work to silence opposition, why wouldn’t we expect more of that in the future?”

Here is a copy of one of the bloggers who was affected by this spam scam. She decided to leave blogger for wordpress:

June 30, 2008
Bye Bye Blogger
Well, well, well. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Magically, my posting privileges are back. Blogger sent me this email:

Hi there,

On behalf of the Blogger Team, I want to apologize for the recent trouble you've had with your locked blog. Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science, and although we are constantly working to improve our tools, it appears that our filters have caused some Blogger accounts to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts.

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.

Regardless, we have restored posting rights to your blog, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.

So once again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience as we looked into the problem.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science

Huh. Well, don't you think your system should be able to tell a blog with nearly 700 posts and that's been around for oh, say, THREE YEARS, from a "spam" blog???? Let's work on that, shall we? And in the absence of this sort of flagging on YOUR end, how's about a little benefit of the doubt for the next set of bloggers that get caught in your "automated spam detection" maze.

"...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..."

Sorry, but no. Not buying it. Whenever the JSND coalition sends out an email, it does not list all of the blogs, but merely directs people to the web site where we are all listed. If there was any spamming going on, it wasn't from Just Say No Deal.

And furthermore, how many flags does it take for a blog to get shut down? One? Five? Twenty? A hundred?

In the meantime, I'm happily settled in over at WordPress. Loving the new blog smell.

HT's: WorldNetDaily

Blue Lyon

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Related Article: Google and the Anti-Obama Bloggers