I’m Late
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple of days, but Ellroon at Rants from the Rookery beat me to it: Another attempted shut down of a blog by legal threats.
Lisa at All Hat and No Cattle is being threatened with a libel suit by Joe Scarborough for her web page on the death of one of Joe’s office staff in Fort Walton Beach under mysterious circumstances.
The page has been up for years, so why bring it up now? The point of the page is the remarkable lack of coverage by the local media of this event, even though it occurred during the same time as the Gary Condit / Chandra Levy media scrum. The case was poorly investigated and poorly reported, and Lisa details the problems and wonders why?
You have wonder if Joe’s attorney has ever heard of the Sullivan “Actual Malice” Rule which is the reason the Swift Boaters can get away with their crap. If you are a politician, you make yourself a target and have to prove actual malice as well as falsehood to win a libel case. If you know you can’t prevail in court, the only reason for talking about a lawsuit is to intimidate someone. Joe was once a practicing attorney, he should know these things.
4 comments
More fool he. I had all but forgotten the dead-staffer-in-the-office incident. Now everyone will be reminded… and for what? There is no way he can prevail in court.
Is political stupidity an epidemic these days? Is it contagious? There certainly seems to be a lot of it around.
This is truly stupid. Attacking a political comedy site is guaranteed to produce the wrong kind of publicity.
And even if Mr. Scarborough’s case had any legs (which is apparently does not), what is the point of pursuing it? No matter the outcome, he looks like a bully and a fool.
When I taught school, the first rule I learned was to never argue with a student other than in a strictly professional manner, i.e. in a classroom discussion. Even if you win, you lose.
Personally, I think Lisa should find a lawyer on a contingency basis and counter-sue. This is just stupid and will generate backlash. It makes no sense to bring this up after all this time unless Joe is planning some major move and thinks the information on the ‘Net will be used to attack him.