kahunaburger

Hmm, strange things are happening on the internets again.

Via email I received a link to an online petition at moveon.org (http://pol.moveon.org/contraception/), claiming that the Bush Administration is trying to redefine contraception as a form of abortion. On the moveon-page it says:

It seems unbelievable, but the Bush Administration is quietly trying to redefine “abortion” to include birth control. The Houston Chronicle says this could wipe out dozens of state laws that protect women’s reproductive freedom and protect rape victims. This “rule change” doesn’t need congressional approval.

I want to find the source of the article and search for “Houston Chronicle abortion” on google. Sure enough, top search result seems to link to an article from Aug 10th 2008 on the chron.com (Houston Chronicle) site.

I click on the link to attempt to go to the source and, boom, a 404 screams at me. “No such article” it says. I search for “abortion” on chron.com and there’s no article from Aug 10th. Fake? Propaganda? Google poisoning?

Back to Google and a click on “Cached” reveals that Google stills has a cached copy of said editorial:

I capture it to a handy PDF-file to make sure it’s preserved even after it disappears from Google’s Cache (500k PDF document here).

And on the cached page at the bottom, there’s a link to the comments on the article. Funny enough that link on chron.com is still active, so people are commenting on an article that does not exist on the site itself? Interesting! The internets are really acting up these days. You can see the live comments page here: http://www.chron.com/disp/discuss.mpl/editorial/5935532.html (I suspect it’ll also self-destruct soon).

And now, go read the article (local PDF) and scratch your head …