Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. After hackers took down SoapBlox, a one-man blog-hosting company which runs local political Web sites, a silenced liberal commentariat found out how true that was.

SoapBlox grew out of Scoop, the software used on DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas’s left-of-center superblog. Paul Preston, its developer, found himself running 25 different sites–the likes of My Left Wing, Blue Hampshire, West Michigan Rising, and Swing State Project. (All politics is local!)

And yet SoapBlox remained a one-man band. So when still-unidentified hackers infiltrated SoapBlox’s servers, causing them to be taken offline, Preston despaired.

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I moved to New York City a mere six months ago, expecting an anonymous existence while I struggled to make new friends. Things moved quickly, starting with my very first night out. “I know you,” said some scruffy guy who accosted me at the Magician, that Lower East Side bar overfrequented by bloggers. “You’re the guy who Garrison Keillor tried to sue.”

That happens to be true. A few years back I launched a T-shirt line with ironic slogans. One parodic shirt in particular apparently raised the ire of the Lake Wobegon creator: “Prairie Ho Companion.” It seemed funny to me, but a micro-scandal ensued when the cease-and-desist for trademark infringement arrived from Keillor’s lawyer. It created a silly blip on the Internet that day, followed by a couple of afternoons of online mayhem, as the story was picked up by Drudge, then Sullivan, then Kos, then Huffington. And then the mainstream media started to call.

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