Last week several pro-Barack Obama bloggers found themselves shut out of their blogs. All users of Google’s free blogging platform, Blogger, their sites had been falsely "flagged" as spam by users. But Ben Smith at Politico wondered who was behind it — Google, known for temporarily removing politically controversial material from YouTube, or political opponents of Obama? Possibly, the latter.

Smith exchanged emails with Google’s Adam Kovacevich, who said the company’s spam filter had erroneously tagged the sites in question as spam. But get this: "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." The network of PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass) has a simple platform: "We will not support Obama for President under ANY circumstances." Still, Kovacevich’s words aren’t entirely clear: he only mentions the content of the spam emails, not the senders. (Of course, there’s another question: are the PUMAs really Democrats?)

Meanwhile, across the aisle, John McCain’s campaign appears to have a pay-per-troll system: It’ll award "points" in its Action Center to supporters who leave, record and have verified their pro-McCain comments at various blogs. Featured blogs, linked presumably for point-seeking commenters to target, include Daily Kos, Red State and conservative blogger Jeff Emmanuel.