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Rising Up Against … Google?

March 24, 2005

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In the wake of the recent horrific school shooting in Minnesota, the blogosphere has launched a crusade against neo-Nazism.

Following a call to arms by Jeff Jarvis, The Confederate Yankee informed his readers that he had clicked on Google’s “Send us your question” box. This is what he had to say:

Google News has now added neo-Nazis (National Vanguard) to their index of approved news sources. I, and hopefully other bloggers have tired of an arcane and apparently senseless news source approval process from Google News, that refuses to carry nationally-recognized columnists such as Michelle Malkin, or top bloggers like Instapundit, but that appears more than willing to carry a hotbed of conspiracy theories such as the Democratic Underground.

The Yankee considers this “intellectual dishonesty” or something close to it, and wanting no part of it, has dropped his Google ads.

Later on, conservative powerhouse blog Little Green Footballs reported, via Internetnews.com, that Google had removed the National Vanguard from its search aggregator because, as a Google spokesman put it, “Google News does not allow hate content.”

There is no word, however, on who currently is in possession of the Lost Ark.

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Now, on to Social Security.

In a post titled, “I guess horses’ heads don’t have the impact they used to,” Lambert at Corrente is unimpressed with the apparently declining power of the Bush administration. She writes, “I mean, you know the Social Security actuaries must have been under tremendous pressure to cook the books to support Bush’s plan to phase out Social Security, and all they can come up with is one lousy year?”

That year also makes no difference to the Right Mind, who trumpets his mandate as “Exposing the Hypocrisy of the Left’s Intellectual Elite, Media, and Establishment.” Shocking his readership, the Right Mind takes issue with the Democratic response to the recently released Social Security trustees’ report. He writes, “The Democratic response? ‘Two trustees who are not Bush administration officials said in a separate statement that the outlook for Social Security has in fact improved slightly over the last five years.'”

Miffed, he muses, “That’s still 36 years away. There’s no crisis. Back to heads-in-the-sand …”

MaxSpeak sees it a little differently. After reading the report, he concludes that “the real message implied by the specifics of the report is that the condition of Social Security improved minutely over the past year, as far as the next 74 years were concerned.” He adds, “By rights, the solvency debate should be over, and private accounts are already down the toilet. In light of the contents of the report, the press conference was 98 percent spin. Not a surprise, and not the last of it, for damn sure.”

–Thomas Lang

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Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.