MOVEON BACKS DOWN: “The left-leaning political advocacy group, MoveOn.org, is backing down in a flap over the use of its name in online advertisements, permitting an influential Republican senator to criticize the organization in a reelection ad on Google’s search engine. . . . Both MoveOn.org and Google late last week faced a barrage of criticism after an internet strategist for Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine complained that Google had blocked several re-election ads from the search engine’s advertising network because the ads contained the trademarked term ‘MoveOn.org’ in the text.”

This doesn’t get Google off the hook, though.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I just notified Google that I am cutting my company’s Google advertising budget in half. The rest is in jeapordy as well because of their blatantly partisan behavior and their complicity with censorship overseas. We may not be General Motors, but if enough people say enough it will have an impact. Google is a money machine. Like all machines the greatest threat to its smooth operation is human stupidity.

I wonder if they’ll face more of this as they’re increasingly perceived as partisan.