Group of Liberal Bloggers Who Oppose Obama Say Google Tried to Censor Them

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Web Wars

A group of liberal bloggers who oppose Barack Obama says the candidate's supporters — and Internet giant Google — tried to censor them by freezing their Web sites for five days last month.

Seven anti-Obama Web sites were incorrectly flagged as spam by Blogger, which is the Web-hosting service that Google owns. The Web site operators say Obama supporters took advantage of a loophole in the system that allows readers to report Web blogs they say are fakes.

Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich told FOX News, "Politics has absolutely nothing to do with this — it was a spam issue."

But the bloggers say the freeze was no accident. Carissa Snedeker from blog Blue Lyon said, "We were specifically targeted by some over-enthusiastic Obama supporters."

Office Space

Updating a Grapevine item from Friday, New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel has decided to move his campaign office out of an apartment in a Harlem luxury complex.

Rangel has been taking heat since a New York Times article revealed he was renting four rent-stabilized apartments in the building — and paying about half of market value — at a time when living space is at a premium. Rangel's use of one of them as an office was a violation of city and state guidelines.

Friday, Rangel said he did not see anything improper about the situation. Monday, a political watchdog group filed suit alleging the discounted rent was an illegal campaign contribution. And, House Republicans say an ethics investigation might be in order.

Picture This

A British man who was taking photos of young children in a park in Wolverhampton, England, has been accused of being a "pervert." But the Daily Mail newspaper reports that the children Gary Crutchley was photographing were his own.

Two of Crutchley's sons were on an inflatable slide when the slide operator asked him to stop taking pictures. When he refused, other families waiting in the line also demanded that he put away the camera. One woman accused him of taking photos of children to post on the Internet, calling him a "pervert."

Crutchley says that the accusations got so out of hand that he had to get two policemen to confirm that he had done nothing wrong, saying, "This parental paranoia is getting completely out of hand."

Rat Snack

And finally, an Appleton, Wisconsin, woman was eating at a local restaurant last April when she said she found a dead rat in her food.

The Post-Crescent newspaper reports Debbie Miller wanted The Season's restaurant to pay her $500,000 dollars or she would alert the media. She also said she had to seek medical treatment.

But when the rodent was turned over to insurance investigators, they found out some things about the rat, and the woman.

They say it was a white domestic variety rat — the kind used in lab experiments — and not found in the wild. They also discovered that the rat had been cooked in a microwave. But the restaurant does not use microwaves. And investigators could find no records of the woman seeking medical treatment — leading authorities to conclude that Miller put the rat in her own food.

She has since been charged with extortion, obstructing an officer and disorderly conduct.

— FOX News Channel's Zachary Kenworthy contributed to this report.