The following is a statement released by TheSockObama Co. reprinted exactly as received by the Deseret News.

We at TheSockObama Co. have some questions to pose. What's really going on in America? In the good ol' fashion spirit of entrepreneurialism ; free enterprise has been censored, and TheSockObama politically plush toy has been discriminated against in the marketplace of the United States of America.

Double standards appear to be a common thread here. It's okay for there to be hundreds of thousands of Google sites containing references to our current president's resemblance to a chimpanzee. However, it's not okay to make that same association regarding our possible next president. Isn't this the very definition of hypocrisy? We find this to be both obvious and curious in the same breath.

After seven days as an e-commerce merchant, we had to close our doors today at www.thesockobama.com. Sadly, we are currently issuing refunds to all of our wonderful new Customers around the globe. TheSockObama is no longer scheduled to go into mass production. Nor will his cast of politically plush friends be produced, including JohnnieMcSock, his fierce political competitor that we had planned to introduce next week. We are compelled to take this action, as a result of our designer/supplier conceding, seemingly due to the enormous pressure from opposers. Have the bullies won here?

Our first and last foray into the blogging world began and ended on Tuesday June 10th. In an amateurish, clumsy attempt at marketing a time-sensitive, politically plush toy online; we came upon some sort of an election-themed website that looked promising; and we blogged our new business with a sassy lure of plush prose. We didnit know there were rules to blogging. We know now.

There, the blogging dens of resistance quickly began their fury of emails. An electronic battery of fiery darts flowed swiftly but silently through the veins of technology. Feverish fingers frantically clicking coast to coast, crashing and burning our tragically naive - yet sparkling website. A steady stream of repetitive verbal eloquence graced our Customer service inbox with tasty tidbits like, eff-ewe and every other colorul expletive you could possibly imagine. We thought we had heard it all. Hey thanks. This is America, right?