"That wasn't addressed to you, Mr. Meade. I've seen enough of your shameless trolling in every corner of the Internets to take any thing you say in good faith."

Commenter in a ridiculous thread in which Meade challenges people who characterize the voter ID requirement as "Jim Crow" racism.

"If Laura Bush has called Cheri Daniels, then Mitch is in and... Mitch Daniels is who the Bush people (the political team) hopes gets the nomination."

Says Rush Limbaugh, who is also leery of the way the press is pushing Daniels:

The Washington Post, everybody knows, is gonna vote for Obama; is gonna do everything it can to reelect Obama. Now, I'm sorry, folks, but I can't help it. I live in Realville....  and if I got Ruth Marcus here writing about how she wants Mitch Daniels to run for president and win the Republican nomination but wants Obama to win, then something tells me that she believes that Mitch Daniels would pose not that big a challenge.

Turn it around. Let's say we're all supporters of Ronald Reagan. He's coming up on his second term, and the Democrats tell us that they're going to nominate either Mario Cuomo or Walter Mondull, and we say, "Well, you know what? We really want a good campaign; we want to be entertained here. We think Mondale is good. Mondale, Mondale, that's the guy! Mondale, he'd give Reagan the best run for his money." Who would believe us? If we did something akin to this -- started trying to pick their nominee -- they would accuse us of trying to pick somebody's gonna lose. Here they are, at least the Washington Post, trying to pick our nominee on the basis that it would be boring to have anybody but Mitch be the nominee, and only Mitch stands a chance of winning.

"The greatest thing anyone could do for our proud state of Wisconsin is accidentally slip some cyanide into your morning coffee or accidentally push you down the stairs of our great state capitol."

"Go fuck yourself. Please. Just fucking die already.... You are the worst thing that has ever happened to Wisconsin, and all the red-necked hillbillies that elected you should be ashamed of themselves. It will not be long until my brothers and sisters in Madison have forced you out of office. I sincerely wish you harm, Mr. Governor. I hope you and your dictatorial regime spend (sic) get to spend and (sic) extended amount of time in Hell. Honestly."

Email sent to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker that the Capitol Police regarded as not worth pursuing — reported in an article in the Isthmus that seems more concerned about the fact that a that a state senator told another senator's chief of staff that she "was stupid, amongst other mean and hurtful things."

"If nitecruzr is just some random dude with no connection to Google, how does he have the ability to flag your account for calling him rude and unprofessional?"

Patterico gets to the root of things!

"You plaster your naked daughters across billboards in order to sell a product without any shame."

"You have brainwashed your daughters into believing they are liberated by wearing revealing clothes, yet in reality all they have liberated is your sexual desire."

Wrote Osama bin Laden in his letter to us — the American people — in 2002. That's why it's considered really funny and helpful that there's a treasure trove of pornography in the bin Laden treasure trove. It's a treasure trove, you know?

"Google Introduces New Computer-Like Object, Where Everything Happens On the Web."

Oh? Great.

Benefit? It's a neat idea.

Drawback? Do you feel lucky?

Well, I'm not feeling lucky with Google this week. I'd like to like the cloud, though. You know, one reason that I've stayed on Blogger is that I want my archive to be around after I'm dead. I trust Google to continue on indefinitely, and because Blogger doesn't demand payments, I wasn't worried about my blog going away when I'm not here anymore to pay my bills.

So like, Google had become an idea of the afterlife. And now, they're all about the cloud. It's becoming so God-ish. Google as God. It's a mystical experience we are having here in the world, getting absorbed into The Whole.

The link goes to Ace of Spades, whose next post is "Google Pulls Althouse's Blog And Isn't Telling Her Why?" Why?! Well, clearly, I have sinned, and Google has said unto me — I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

And I enjoyed the comments over there, even the ones that brought up the old show about "nutting." At some point, the commenters get into my political orientation:

I know that Althouse gets lots of link love from Instapundit, but I've never been all that impressed with her. She'll talk a good game about not being a liberal, but if you read her blog long enough you can tell that she's still emotionally wedded to the Democrats.

So no matter what complaints she has about the Democratic candidate, I doubt she'll ever be able to bring herself to vote for a <shudder> conservative. Plus she tends to be rather thin-skinned and quick to anger.

Meh.

Heh.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some advise me to switch to Catholicism and Don't Tread 2012 points to...

"Why as a Developer, I Switched to Blogger.com and Why I'm Staying With It."

Everyone's telling me to get out of Blogger. Here's the counter-argument, blogged last Monday — before the epic outage. This is hard to take:

I can expect my blog to be up 100% of the time. They simply don't go down! It was actually quite a relief today, with such a high traffic day (see my blog post about it), to not have to worry about any of my servers in the process. You simply don't need to worry about a burst in traffic, DoS attacks, or anything like that. Google handles all that for you and they're pros at it.

He's talking about going down because you get too much traffic. I've never had to deal with that issue. The idea of traffic as a bad, damaging thing... I've never blogged in that sort of environment. I've had the issue of getting waves of traffic from a very negative link, where I'm suddenly dealing with readers who are Althouse-haters. That's a problem in the comments, or if I click through to the link and see what sort of awful thing that's been said. Like on that blog that I don't link to anymore, where someone is trashing me for using the letter "M" to mean a thousand.

"Terror twit cries a river."

A Daily News headline about Mohamed Mamdouh, who was arrested and "charged with terrorism and hate crimes for a scheme to dress as Hasidic Jews and go on a killing spree in New York synagogues." The News interviewed him in jail:

"I was at the wrong place at the wrong time... I don't have problems with anyone - not Jews, not anyone."...

"I never spoke about guns and blowing things up, either... That was [the other guy, Ahmed Ferhani]. It was all his idea. I had nothing to do with any of it."

..."I was drunk ... We had a conversation after the movie ['The Ultra Zionists'] was over. . . . It was just a conversation. It was not serious."

Mamdouh points the finger at Ferhani, but he also tries to help him....

"At the bottom of my heart, I swear I don't think he would kill anyone either... I don't think he has the b----."

... help him and insult him.

"Althouse appeared to have fared the worst, with a number of missing entries and comments — and a full 24 hours offline."

You could say that... if by "a number," you mean 23,850 missing entries and — what? — a quarter million comments!

And those hours offline entailed readers going to my URL and seeing a notice telling them that my blog had been removed from the Blogger system. I have worked for 7.5 years building up a readership, and thousands of people were given the false information that the site no longer exists. I have to hope that they don't take that information seriously and that they try again now that the blog is restored, but that hurt a lot more than if the blog were displayed but not working or if it didn't display but the notice accurately explained that it was only a temporary outage.

Patterico reassembles the Google support thread in which "nitecruzr" "kept taunting Ann, and then removing (memory-holing) his own taunts, but leaving her responses — making the thread an unreadable mess."

Original, unexpurgated forum thread here. Patterico reviews it with commentary here. Excerpt:

Oh, she was complaining about your helpful statement that you escalated your complaint to Blogger Support for her? Is that it, nitecruzr? Uh, sorry, that doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s just that, now that he has deleted all the abusive comments, that’s the last comment of his left standing.

Patterico does an excellent job showing what happened in that thread and how the power to delete was used for ass-covering and making me look presumptuous and thin-skinned.

But is nitecruzr a Google employee? He takes on a gatekeeping function in the forum, but he isn't designated as an employee like Brett — electrobutter — who finally shows up and treats me with some respect.

"If Ann wanted to sue people who falsely reported her blog as a spam-blog, could she make Google cough up their information?"

"I think the answer is yes."

Says lawprof Glenn Reynolds, contemplating the possibility that Google removed my blog because, as a longtime reader/former Google employee wrote:

Blogger lets users report spam blogs here...

so one possibility is that people who don’t like Ann’s blog launched an astroturf campaign to get her marked as spam.

Is this thing really back?

I hope to see the return of the old posts!

ADDED: I'm moving everything I wrote over on Althouse2 today. I'm setting the times to when they were originally posted there, so scroll down. Not all of the posts are about the blog problem. For example, there's one about parakeets.

RELOCATED FROM ALTHOUSE2: "So, your blog goes down right after being reported as a cesspool of [misogyny] and homophobia? Hmmmmm . . ."

Says LawGirl, over in the "weasel" post.

The anonymous professor who emailed lawprof Brian Leiter to attack my commentariat said "She has the free speech right to run whatever cesspool she wants, but is she prioritizing her desire for a widely read blog over her obligation to be a responsible member of academia?" — which is quoted by Freeman Hunt, who laughs, calls it the "quote of the day," and paraphrases it: "Free speech is incompatible with academia!" Freeman adds: "Free speech areas are cesspools. Restricted speech areas are responsible academia." Yeah, but can you really expect law professors to drape their brains around that?

Maguro said: "The email is so prissy and self-important that Leiter almost certainly wrote it himself. Anonymous colleague, my ass." Well, let's be fair. Professor Anonymous does call the blog comments here a "festival of misogyny and homophobia." Palladian said: "I hope there's an open bar at your festival of misogyny and homophobia."

Roger J. said:

Professor A: unless I have completely misread you over the last five years, I am thinking you arent going down without a fight--(just dont ask me for money however, my principles arent THAT strong :) )

Hey, good idea. Please! Encourage me:

I need some love!

dbp said:

An interesting logical loop here: Brian Leiter's blog posts an anonymous comment, which presumably is in agreement with the blog's editor. The comment is actively put forward by that blog, unlike at Althouse where comments are all posted and hardly ever deleted.

Both blogs contain what could fairly be described as scurrilous comments. The difference is that Alhouse neither approves or disapproves of the comments while Leiter clearly takes an editorial ownership.

"She has the free speech right to run whatever cesspool she wants, but is she prioritizing her desire for a widely read blog over her obligation to be a responsible member of academia?"

This had got to be the most lame use of a question mark in history. Oh, I make a big long ugly accusation then make it all right with a meaningless squiggle on top of the dot.

If the Leiter post led to the removal of the Althouse blog, then is there a case of slander here?

Good point. But it's not slander. If it's in writing, we lawyers say libel, not slander. But it's not libel. It's just opinion. Lame ass opinion from a lawprof who — in my opinion — envies my readership, which is bigger than his.

***

Now, maybe you're wondering just what the hell was in those terrible comments — that supposed "festival of misogyny and homophobia." You try the link at Leiter's, but it gets you nowhere, because Blogger removed my blog. But here's the cached version of the page the Leiter blog links to. Check out the comments and see if you can tell what's really upset the people who are on my case. There are only 32 comments. They are easy enough to read. I pick out a few.

Maguro said:

[The 3 candidates] seem notably lacking in victim-group credentials. Are any of them gay, trans or gender non-conforming?

This is a criticism based on one commenter's sense of what law schools do.

gutless said:

Is Margaret a lesbian? One imagines so in that her background doesn't seem competitive and yet, here she is. If so, she has the job. If not ,she is merely window dressing and the less offensive of the other two gets the nod.

That's obviously another criticism of law schools, reflecting an assumption that law schools make choices based on diversity factors. I'm sure the criticism hurts some people, but it doesn't say there's something wrong with being a lesbian or that the candidate is a lesbian. Maybe a nervous reader could take that the wrong way, in which case, I'd say: that festival of misogyny and homophobia is in your head. Good thing you hid your name!

Thorley Winston said:

I think it’s generally a bad idea to announce the “finalists” when conducting a job interview, particularly for the top position. IMO there shouldn’t be a public announcement until they’ve made their selection.

I agree, but the Law School chose to put the names and their credentials on its official website, obviously inviting public comment. I linked, opening it up to the comments. You know we are a public law school, and it's appropriate that people around the state receive information and have an opportunity to speak. And yet, feelings can be hurt. People in legal academia like to think that their feelings are righteous indignation having to do with women and minorities... but are they really? Think carefully!

Titus said:

If the woman candidate has big tits I say hire her. Otherwise, go with one of the men.

You can't go wrong with big tits.

tits...yum

All right, that's absurd and over-the-top, by our dear, treasured Titus — a gay man. He's been talking like that on this blog for years. The regulars know him. And they know I love him. If that's what Leiter and the Anonymous Professor feel such angst about... it's because they don't understand the community here. They're like Sean Hannity fretting about Common in White House.

RELOCATED FROM ALTHOUSE2: "Wonder if this has anything to do with Ann’s objective (and thus, anti-administration) coverage of the Wisconsin protests?"

Asks Moe Lane at RedState:

Well, isn’t this interesting: apparently Blogger/Google has decided to remove Ann Althouse’s blog. They’re also being neither particularly helpful in either explaining why, nor sounding particularly sympathetic that it’s been taken down, either.

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that there's some behind-the-scenes campaign to report my blog as abusive. People who hate/fear the Althouse blog could make a loud noise to Google.

Back in 2004, 98% of Google employees gave money to Democrats. [ADDED: That should say, 98% of the Google employees who made political donations, donated to Democrats. Presumably, not all employees made donations.]

COMMENTS (Relocated):

RELOCATED FROM ALTHOUSE2: "I’d prefer not to say this for attribution...only because I’m..."

... only because I'm a weasel.

COMMENTS (Relocated):

RELOCATED FROM ALTHOUSE2: Save Ann Althouse's Blog.

The Facebook page.

COMMENTS (Relocated):