The boycott of Politico is back on.

As regular readers will remember, I vowed to boycott Politico almost a year ago, after they issued a cease-and-desist letter to Stephen Gutowski, aka The College Politico.  Politico lawyers claimed that Gutowski was infringing their trademark by using the word “politico” — a commonly used term defined in the dictionary as “politician.”

Some time later, I wrote Gutkowski to ask what had happened with the lawyers.  He told me he thought the episode was behind him:

[In response to my e-mail, Gutkowski] said that [Politico] had never followed up and he assumed that they had silently backed down. He doesn’t consider it an issue any more, and accordingly, neither do I.

Well, things just changed.  The Daily Caller reports that, this week,

Gutowski received another take-down notice [PDF], this time arguing that he’s “squatting” on the TheCollegePolitico.com domain.

“We have not received any response to our demand that Mr. Gutowski immediately cease all use of any marks or domain names that are confusingly similar to the POLITICO Marks, including all use of the mark THE COLLEGE POLITICO and the domain name ‘thecollegepolitico.com,’ and that Mr. Gutowski promptly take all necessary steps to transfer ‘thecollegepolitico.com’ domain name to out client,” the letter reads.

The letter also charges that Gutowski’s use of the word “politico” is “actiononable under both the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act,” which prevents consumers from buying up domain names and using them to wring money out of companies or persons who might one day seek to start a website using their name in the URL.

In other words, they’re still threatening to sue.

This cannot stand.

This is a bogus claim with no legal merit.  It’s classic Internet bullying by the Big Guy against the Little Guy — with no basis in law.

We must fight it.

I am on a Politico e-mail list that sends out Politico stories to bloggers.  I am unsubscribing from that list tonight, and explaining why.  I am reinstating my boycott on the site — meaning I will not link Politico stories until this is resolved in a manner favorable to Gutowski. I encourage all like-minded bloggers to do the same.

We’re not submitting to bogus licensing demands by the government, and we’re not giving in to legal thuggery.

We have to take a stand.

Spread the word.
 

It may be a bit of deliberate hyperbole on Tim’s part, but it is pretty bad:

[I]t’s not Shane Goldmacher’s opinion, just straight news, that the lame-duck governor of California is sending a “gubernatorial ransom note” and “holding the state hostage” in his budget negotiations, thus repeating a “shameful chapter in California’s history” and alienating cooperative Democrats with his “ultimatums.” It is furthermore objectively true that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing this not just from an honest desire to fix Sacramento’s chronic budgeting problems but out of personal pique, that he is trying to retrofit a “fiscal system that has bedeviled California — and him — for years.”

Just the facts! That’s how they always operate at our favorite paper.

The L.A. Times today publishes an article by Borzou Daragahi about how Muslims across the world disapprove of opposition to the Ground Zero mosque:

The heated debate across America over construction of the so-called ground zero mosque is reverberating across the globe, with the potential of creating a worldwide black eye for the United States.

Many Muslims abroad are miffed by the stateside debate, largely conducted by non-Muslims, that has grown so loud as to become a topic of discussion on talk shows and newspapers from Bali to Bahrain, from Baghdad to Berlin. The proposed Cordoba House has become a symbol of America’s fraught relations with the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.

I don’t understand why anyone would discern hostile intentions from the builders.  After all, t’s not like the project’s “moderate” imam Feisal Rauf is happy about the controversy, right?

“The fact we are getting this kind of attention is a sign of success,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf reportedly said Sunday with respect to the project, addressing a gathering at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain.

“It is my hope that people will understand more,” Rauf said without elaborating, according to the AP.

Oh.

While the paper does report that quote in a separate article, portraying it as benign, the quote does not make it into this article.

That wouldn’t be good propaganda.

Amid a flurry of Arab complaints about the U.S. — we need to do something about Israel; we need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan; etc. — the article does include the perspective of some Muslims that the mosque is a bad idea.  See if you can figure out what aspect of that admission they leave out.

“Building a mosque there will increase hatred between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West,” said Gamal Awad, a professor at Cairo’s Al Azhar University. “It will further connect Islam with a horrible event.”

Al Aznar, eh?  They’re the folks who declared the mosque a Zionist conspiracy — a little tidbit that the L.A. Times doesn’t tell you about.

That wouldn’t be good propaganda.

Are we seriously to believe that Borzou Daragahi, or his special correspondents — Amro Hassan in Cairo, Ranya Kadri in Amman, Jordan, Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran, or Meris Lutz in Beirut — elicited no anti-Semitic comments about the mosque being a Zionist conspiracy?

Or should we conclude, rather, that somewhere along the chain, such comments were deemed “unhelpful” to the agenda of the story?