Standard Mischief

Way back in January, I predicted that the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership Blog would not last 48 hours without imposing some kind of dramatic censure of the comments. I was wrong, but only by about two orders of magnitude. They actually had relatively free and open comments for about six months!

Comments ran 10 to 1 against the Paul, frequently with cites and stats to back up their arguments, while Paul and his pitiful pro-Brady commenters ran with the usual half truths and outright lies.

Well, Paul’s experiment in freedom has ended. They have posted the following message:

In the coming weeks, we’ll be making some changes here at the Brady Blog.
Some changes will happen behind the scenes as we manage our staff and technology. Others will be more visible. Please bear with us as we roll out the next phase of the Brady Blog.

With that message, they have closed comments on every active post. It seems pretty clear to everyone what change #1 is going to be. I would imagine that the comments onslaught would continue over on Huffington Post, but I note that Paul’s last two entries have not been crossposted.

Sharp as a Marble has the highly recommended top ten list, and I was beat to the punch by Pro Gun Progressive, Snowflakes in Hell, and Say Uncle.

 Update 31jul07: As others (above) have noted, the new improve Brady Blog has the comments disabled. However, as of this moment, trackback seems to still be enabled. I won’t attempt to guess how long that will remain visible, but I suppose not too long. Although they did say “…changes will happen behind the scenes as we manage our staff and technology”, it seems that they are still stuck using WordPress 2.0.5. Hey Paul Helmke, what you are still using is vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting attacks. It’s well past time to upgrade. You should have done that back in January.