At the end of January of 2006, the John Edwards for President campaign hired two bloggers: One was Mellissa McEwan of Sheakesheressister.blogspot.com, who was hired to do outreach to other progressive blogs. The other was Amanda Marcotte of Pendragon.net who was hired to be the campaign’s blogmaster. Within a week, the conservative organization Catholic League, which defends to institution of the church from what it perceives as defamation, proclaimed the two bloggers as Chistian-hating bigots because of content they wrote on their respective websites which criticized and lampooned church teachings. When the Edwards campaign refused to fire them, Blogger Michele Malkin and pundit Bill O’reilly helped publicize the controversy. Within a few days the two women were not only gets mounting pressure from the media to resign, but they also started death and rape threats. Fed up with the pressure, and not seeing a way to end the escalating threats and criticisms that were hurting the John Edwards campaign, On February 12 Marcott announced her resignation, McEwan did the same the following day. What ramifications does this incident have for the blogoshere? Are political bloggers expected to only hold polite opinions if they are work on a political campaign? Should a politician be held culpable for content written on a bloggers site before they are hired? Will this incident prevent campaigns from hiring bloggers in the future? How should a blogger respond when faced with a media feeding frenzy about something they’ve written. To get answers to these questions, today I have two of the key players in this unfolding story. First, I will interview Bill Dononue, President of the Catholic League and the man who started the accusations of bigotry against the two bloggers by pointing out the material they had written which he found offensive to the press; then, I’ll have an opportunity to talk to Mellisa McEwan to get her side of the story and discuss what she’s learned from this incident. Less