I wonder how the Sacramento Bee would have responded if Gray Davis had asked them to crack down on Dan Weintraub's blogging to the effect that:

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante "certainly owed his elevation to the job of Assembly speaker to his ethnic background and to the support he received from fellow Latinos. If his name had been Charles Bustmont rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher."

Further, he alleged, "it's indisputably true that the Legislature's Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California, in the name of ethnic unity."

The Sac Bee's ombudsman tries to explain the response of the paper:

No matter what I or anyone else thinks, he [Weintraub] has every right to analyze the political scene and reach those conclusions. But no newspaper should publish an analysis without an editor's review. That doesn't necessarily mean that Weintraub's blog should have been reworded, but an editor should at least have had the opportunity to question his conclusions.

Say what?! It's a BLOG, for crying out loud! That's the point of a blog, that it's immediate and isn't edited. It's pure freedom of speech. If it needs correction, let the writer fix it himself. If it's edited by someone else, it isn't a blog anymore--it's a column. If Weintraub had really said something abusive of Latinos, he could have been reprimanded or even fired, but he didn't. The paper chose instead to de-blog his blog. What's the point of that?

All I can say is, I guess that's why the paper isn't called the Independent.