Bomber Sues Bloggers

This is the latest post in what I half-jokingly call The Kimberlin Saga^®.  If you are new to the story, that’s okay! Not everyone reads my blog.  The short version is that Kimberlin has been harassing me for over a year, his worst conduct being when he attempted to frame me for a crime.   I recognize that this might sound like an incredible claim, but I provide video and documentary evidence of that fact; in other words, you don’t have to believe my word.  You only have to believe your eyes.  So, if you are new to the story, go to this page and you’ll be able to catch up on what has been happening.

That is the name of the site set up by Ali Akbar as my officially endorsed™ legal defense fund as we get ready to fight the latest frivolous legal action by Brett Kimberlin.  As regular readers know, Brett Kimberlin has sued me, Ali Akbar, John Hoge, Robert Stacy McCain and the blogger known as “Kimberlin Unmasked” for supposed defamation, stalking, and malicious prosecution.  It is an utterly frivolous lawsuit and Brett Kimberlin knows it and we are asking for your donations to help.

How frivolous is it?  So much so that he is suing Robert Stacy McCain for defamation for calling him “evil.”

I mean first, Stacy has a lot of good reasons to call Kimberlin evil given his terrorist bombing campaign has cost one man his life, to name but one example of the downright evil things Brett Kimberlin has done over the years.

But even before you shout “truth is a defense!” even more fundamentally, it cannot be defamation to call someone evil.  I don’t care who you call “evil,” I don’t care how undeserving that person is, it is not defamation.  If Mother Teresa was still among us and a person called her evil, even putting aside that she is a public figure, that would not be defamation.  The exact same thing can be said to the others revered figures in history—Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower—if you called them evil, and they were still alive, even forgetting that they are public figures, it is not defamation, because it is a legally subjective opinion.  I mean morally, I believe like Dr. King that there is such a thing as objective good and evil, and Brett Kimberlin is evil, but in the eyes of the law, there are simply no standards by which to judge if a person is evil and therefore it cannot be not defamation.  It’s like calling a person “unfashionable” or “ugly”—there is no way to prove a person right or wrong on that subject, therefore it is not possible to sue for defamation.

How frivolous is it?  Brett Kimberlin has claimed it was defamation for Stacy and Ali to truthfully report that charges had been filed against him for, more or less, statutory rape.  The technical term is sexual offense in the third degree, and no, it is not defamation to report he was charged with it.  It is a fact.  He may protest he was innocent (I personally think he was guilty but for now he has gotten away with it), but even if he proved himself absolutely innocent, that doesn’t change the fact that he was charged: it could only change what we should think of the fact he was charged.

For instance, Brett Kimberlin filed charges against me for assault.  It is not defamation for a person to say that, even though you and I both know the charges were false:

The fact they were false then reflects poorly on Brett Kimberlin.  The fact he produced medical records and photographs purporting to prove he was injured suggests some serious wrongdoing on his part.  That is why I say to this day that Brett Kimberlin attempted to frame me for a crime: because, logically, he was not injured and therefore that evidence is false.  I won’t say if he forged that evidence, or really hurt himself or had himself hurt, but one way or the other the evidence he produced was not what he purported it to be: the result of any injury caused by me (because in fact I have never harmed him).  One way or the other, that evidence was falsified and he tried to actually frame me.

And none of that makes it defamation to say I was charged with assault.  It just changes what you think about that fact, from being something potentially negative about me, to being something damning about Brett Kimberlin for his false charges.

And bear in mind, he is suing me for malicious prosecution.  Sigh.

How frivolous is it?  He is suing me for offering free legal help to his wife.  But it also reflects what a thug he is.  My entire involvement with him started with Brett Kimberlin seeking to punish me for helping Seth Allen and now he is trying to punish me for helping his wife as a lawyer.  After he caused the House of Ruth to be unable to help her, he now seeks to punish one of the last people she could turn to.  That should enrage any feminist.

Because Ms. Kimberlin came to me as a woman who said she had been sexually abused and she feared that the same might happen to her daughters.  And she said that Kimberlin had been using the courts to try to stop her from leaving him.  And I believed her.  In the case of his abuse of the courts, I saw it firsthand.

Indeed I am confident that the most likely outcome of this case is that the court will find that Brett Kimberlin is in fact a pedophile who had sex with his wife when she was underage.

How frivolous is it?  He is claiming I am stalking him by peacefully coming to court when I was not “invited” ignoring all the times he came to court when he wasn’t invited, either.  For instance, he attempted to intervene when I sought a peace order against Neal Rauhauser, to play lawyer for him.  Even though the court told him he had no right to intervene, at the next hearing he showed up anyway, and tried to intervene again, using the very same written motion that was previously rejected.  And let’s not forget the time he showed up at the courthouse when I sought a peace order against his self-described “friend” Bill Schmalfeldt and then stalked my wife in the parking lot.  And he is suing me, again,* for stalking.  Like all of his previous claims, this one will fail.

But we do need your help.  I believe Brett is pursuing a strategy of “victory through attrition.”  You don’t believe me?  Let me quote the exact words he wrote to Patrick Frey when threatening him with a defamation suit:

I have filed over a hundred lawsuits and another one will be no sweat for me. On the other hand, it will cost you a lot of time and money[.]

This was a threat of a frivolous suit.  Everything Patrick wrote was sourced either in criminal cases, or publicly available articles.  Just as it is not defamation to say he was charged with, more or less, statutory rape, it is not defamation to note that Slate once called him “convicted bomber, habitual liar, and all-around sociopath[.]”  Or more precisely, if that was defamation, it is Slate that committed it, not the person who reported that Slate called him that.

So the message was clear: if you don’t take down what you said about me, I will file a frivolous suit and even if you “win” you will still lose because you will have to travel and even potentially hire a lawyer.  And you might even screw up the way Seth Allen did and default and lose even though you were right all along.  It is pure, unadulterated, anti-free-speech bullying.  And I submit that is what he is doing here, too.

You can directly counteract this.  Donate to the cause, help with our costs, and show him that this is not a winning strategy.  As you can see I have replaced the previous donation buttons with a link to our page.

Besides, don’t you want to see a vigorous defense, with extensive discovery?  (Yes, yes, he might not comply with discovery, but plaintiffs who do not comply with discovery lose their cases by default.)

And there is another reason to help.  One of the defendants is the blogger known only as Kimberlin Unmasked.  As a first step, he is seeking to argue that this person should be “unmasked”—that is google should be required to reveal his identity.  We all know what will happen to this person if Brett succeeds.  The harassment and stalking I, my friends, and even my wife have faced, will be likely to be visited upon this person.  You know because Brett Kimberlin is evil, and so is the cabal we call “Team Kimberlin.”

So if you believe in freedom of speech, then donate.  If you believe in helping a woman to escape a man she says sexually abused her, then donate.  Or if you just want to prevent Brett and company from victimizing another person, “Kimberlin Unmasked,” then donate.

Or for that matter, if you want to see Brett Kimberlin actually adjudicated to be a pedophile, then donate!!!

And know you have my thanks when you do.

The Scene That MUST be in a Justice League Movie...

Update: So now we are getting a Jawalanche!  But they entitled the post, Ministry of Boobies: Marvel Edition.

Marvel edition?!?!?!?!?  Everyone knows that Wonder Woman is a DC character.  Shame!  Shame!  They are hereby losing their nerd card!

Still the post did make me laugh, so there is that.

The original post shall resume as before. 

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So, dear reader, this will be a frivolous post, because we can’t always make things deep or serious or whatever.

I am going to introduce you to the luckiest superhero in the entire D.C. or Marvel universe.  Who would that be?  Superman, born to be nearly invincible?  Or Wonder Woman, or Martian Manhunter, who is also nearly invincible?  Or Aquaman, who...  is kind of useless...?

Nay, dear reader, it is The Atom (pictured right)...

...who has the ability to shrink.  According to this Wikipedia page, when shrunken down he retains the strength of a full sized human being and can scramble his molecules to make him extra strong, invisible or any number of cool things.  On the other hand in Justice League Unlimited, he just appears to have the ability to shrink down.

Justice League Unlimited, of course, was where the run that had been going since Batman: The Animated Series finally jumped the shark.  Previously, Batman: The Animated Series had actually won Emmys for the quality of its work and then Superman: The Animated Series came out, which was still good.  And then a Justice League show.  Unlike the recent and very excellent The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, which typically wrapped each episode up in half an hour, but also featured elements of a continuing storyline for its entire two year run to add depth, the Justice League made things deeper by making each episode a multi-part affair that would wrap up in typically three or four episodes and further you got to know a very small cast of characters pretty well.

And then Justice League Unlimited came out, with a cast of seemingly every DC superhero and storylines like when the characters were all turned into children.  Including Batman.  You know, because that wouldn’t wreck his coolness or anything like that.  And each episode was only half an hour, standing alone, with almost no continuity, so really there was no time for anything but the simplest plots.  So the show wasn’t very good...

...except for having in it the most awesome scene in any superhero show, movie or comic, ever.  It came in the episode entitled Dark Heart (season 1, episode 10, just after the fifteen minute mark for reference purposes).  The story was about how an alien super weapon landed on Earth which would consume the entire planet and every person on it, if left unchecked.  So Ray Palmer, a.k.a. the Atom, needed to get to the “dark heart” of this super weapon in shrunken form to destroy it.  And standing in his way is a swarm of robotic monsters of various kinds.

Dear Mr. Watterson...

Regular readers know that I have a special place in my heart for Calvin and Hobbes.  I don’t obsess, but I do use it as the wallpaper on various things like my cell phone and I have some of the books.  And yes, I made a point of sharing this wonderful world with young people in my family who never heard of it.  But there is no truth to the rumor that I have Calvin and Hobbes Underoos...

So if you loved the comic strip, too, then you might also enjoy this, a documentary about Calvin and Hobbes that is coming (associated with this site):

Shirley Sherrod’s Malicious Pro-Bono Suit Against Andrew Breitbart’s Widow (Updated and Clarified)

Update: I see that Mr. Adams wrote a post discussing my discoveries, and let me clarify a bit on what I said below.  It isn’t strictly accurate to say they are only going after Brietbart’s estate but that is in essence what they are promising.  Let me quote the email I received on “background” exactly:

The motion does not seek to hold Mrs. Breitbart liable, in any way, in her individual capacity.  She is being joined as a substitute for Mr. Breitbart because no estate has been formed.

That is, in my opinion, a very thin distinction.  The fact is that a stream of income to this family has literally died.  Going after their inheritance seems malicious to me.  If Shirley Sherrod really was defamed (a debatable point), and really suffered financial damages and wanted to be made whole, why not sue Breitbart’s companies, instead?

Also Adams raises the question: why does she need a free lawyer when her and her husband’s “New Communities”got $13 million in Pigford money?  I’ll say it again.  I used to work for a firm like Kirkland and Ellis, and it is extremely unusual for her to get pro bono representation.  Ordinarily in a simple tort claim like this, lawyers leave it to a contingency fee, figuring that if it didn’t make sense as a contingency fee (either because it didn’t have a strong chance of winning or because it had little promise of a payout), maybe it shouldn’t be a lawsuit.  By taking it on pro bono, Kirkland is lowering the bar on what claim would actually come to court.  I frankly doubt that any lawyer taking it on contingency would do so.

Update (II): McCainalanche!  Thanks Stacy!  And now an Aceolanche and a Twitchalanche.  Thank you very much.

We now resume the original post, as is.

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That word, “malicious,” is just my opinion on the subject based on the evidence, but let me lay out the case for you, dear reader and you can decide for yourself.

On Tuesday, via the excellent J. Christian Adams, we learned that Shirley Sherrod had filed with the court to substitute the widow Breitbart for Andrew Breitbart in her long-running defamation suit against Breitbart, Larry O’Connor and an unknown John Doe.

Just to review, a long time ago Andrew Breitbart personally wrote a post called Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism—2010.  In it, he showed how Shirley Sherrod, the USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, talked about racistly denying help to a white farmer and then later deciding in a milquetoasty fashion that she was wrong and so on.  By the way, that arc is in the video.  You only had to watch it to see.

But it made Sherrod look so bad that she lost her job even though Breitbart himself always said the target was the NAACP and its reaction to her, not Sherrod herself.  And so she sued Andrew Breitbart, Larry O’Connor (who also works there) and whoever created the video.  Breitbart himself has said that he had never seen the unedited video (indeed the unedited video has never been released contrary to popular claims).

Calling Bull on the Shutdown

So over the last few days we have seen a growing showdown between the Republicans in the House of Representatives who want to use the threat of a “shutdown” to get Obamacare defunded, and the President and the Senate who want to use the threat of a “shutdown,” to get Obamacare defended.  And by all reports the House Republicans have pulled the trigger.  Barring a surprising turn of events, the “shutdown” will occur.

So what will happen if the government shuts down?  Well, the Guardian has a representative—albeit biased—piece on this.  If you work for the Federal Government, either directly or through a contractor, you might read the whole thing, but let me pour over some highlights:

Travel:

Federal air traffic controllers would remain on the job and airport screeners would keep funneling passengers through security checkpoints, though some airports have warned of delays at security. Federal inspectors would continue enforcing safety rules.

The State Department would continue processing foreign applications for visas and US applications for passports, since fees are collected to finance those services. Embassies and consulates overseas would continue to provide services to American citizens.

Courts:

Federal courts would continue operating normally for about 10 business days after the start of a shutdown, roughly until the middle of October. If the shutdown continues, the judiciary would have to begin furloughs of employees whose work is not considered essential. But cases would continue to be heard.

Popehat and I Ask For Your Help

This is the latest post in what I half-jokingly call The Kimberlin Saga^®.  If you are new to the story, that’s okay! Not everyone reads my blog.  The short version is that Kimberlin has been harassing me for over a year, his worst conduct being when he attempted to frame me for a crime.  I recognize that this might sound like an incredible claim, but I provide video and documentary evidence of that fact; in other words, you don’t have to believe my word.  You only have to believe your eyes.  So, if you are new to the story, go to this page and you’ll be able to catch up on what has been happening.

Okay, mostly it’s me asking for help, as well as my friends and co-defendants Robert Stacy McCain, Ali Akbar, William Hoge and whoever the heck Kimberlin Unmasked is.  There isn’t much to this post but to raise awareness.  As most of you know, we have been sued by Brett Kimberlin, for calling him a pedophile and the like (or in most of their cases, accurately reporting that he was called one by his wife).  Ken White, who differs from me on many political issues but has a principled agreement with me on the issue of free speech, has put up the Popehat signal seeking pro-bono counsel.  You can read his post, here.  And if you can help, or if you know anyone who can help, let us know.

It truly is an excellent post, but I will quibble with one part.  He speaks a lot of freedom of speech, and, yes, that is at stake here, but this suit also represents an attack on the right to obtain counsel.  Much of what he is suing me for is offering free legal help to his wife.  His belief is that when he targets someone for the “Aaron Walker treatment”—i.e. false arrest, false charges, trying to get a person fired, smearing them on the internet and similar harassing behavior—that no one is allowed to help that person, and if you dare to do so, you have committed a serious offense against all that is good and decent.  He is basically saying that if you are his enemy—including his own wife—you have no right to get a lawyer.  That is a very frightening precedent he is attempting to set.

We will talk more about the evil involved.  Brett Kimberlin has claimed that Stacy McCain has defamed him by calling him “evil” and so since truth is a defense, it is fair game to explore all the vile things he has done.  But his wife once provided a great insight into his mentality (in a non-privileged conversation).

Let’s Do This: End Military Gun-Free Zones

Some of you might be reading this as regular readers of my blog.  And some of you might be reading this because I posted a petition on the White House website.  Either way, let me share my thoughts on the issue.

About an hour ago, I spoke with a friend of mine who was very happy to get his/her car back.  You see this person, who will remain anonymous, worked at the Washington Navy Yard that was attacked Monday and up until today this person couldn’t get back his/her car.  So I asked, “I had heard that most military bases are basically gun free zones—only the guards are allowed to carry.”

This person verified that this was the case and indeed people on base wondered why this was the case.  This person pointed out that military personnel were allowed to have their guns in airports if they were in uniform, so the natural question was why they couldn’t have it on base?

It all comes from back in 1993 when these rules were instituted under Bill Clinton:

“I Know They Went to Heaven”

That is a moving comment by Sarah Collins Rudolph in a recent video I will show you just in a moment.  This is a picture of her, below:

Fifty years ago, on another Sunday, her life and the lives of four of her friends were ripped apart.

Fifty years ago, a racist terrorist planted a bomb in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  It killed four innocent little girls as they attended Sunday school.  It is important to remember their names: Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, Carole Robinson and Addie Mae Collins.  Sarah Rudolph was there too, then known simply as Sarah Collins.  She watched her sister, Addie Mae, die and was grievously injured herself.  If you see one eye pointing in a different direction from the other it is because her right eye is a fake.

You can watch a news report on her, here:

Prejudice Towards George Zimmerman

Update: Jump to the end of the story for a relevant update.

As I wrote a long time ago at Patterico:

To pre-judge a person is to literally “judge before.”  Before what?  Before it is appropriate, before you have all the facts.  Of course normally we think of prejudice as being based on specific traits.  Racial prejudice is to judge a man by his skin color, rather than getting enough facts to judge him as an individual.  But it can be based on anything.

The George Zimmerman case, of course, was based on prejudice from the beginning and most of it seemed to be racial prejudice.  Right at the beginning of the case involving the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I started to get a “Duke non-rape case” vibe.  Read that analysis: virtually everything I wrote held up, and what little didn’t was merely because of the development of the evidence.  In the Duke case, no one was there but the accused and the accuser, and yet people half a country away acted as though they were personal eyewitnesses, and absolutely convinced of the lacrosse players’ guilt.  But by the end of it, it turned out they were guilty of nothing more than a rowdy college party and positively innocent of rape.  And the same was true in the Zimmerman/Martin case.  Right away people acted like they knew what happened—often with blatant appeals to racial bigotry (i.e. “white people have been victimizing black people therefore this allegedly white man must have victimized Martin”), when what should have happened was for everyone to wait for all the facts being in.

Yesterday, we saw a microcosm of that exact same dynamic when the news hit the web that George Zimmerman had been arrested, for allegedly threatening his wife with a gun.  The press and much of the Twittersphere declared Zimmerman guilty almost immediately... based on the word of a woman who has just recently been convicted of perjury.  I mean, there is no guarantee that a perjurer would lie at every opportunity (though rules barring perjurers from testifying do make a great deal of sense), shouldn’t that have given some people some pause?

Via Twitchy we get several examples of this.  For instance Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

A Limp Excuse For Weiner's Public Ejaculation

First, I apologize for the blog hiatus.  This blog is, still, a one-man show and a combination of being busy and then sick made it impossible for the show to go on.  And yes, I will eventually comment on the frivolous suit that Brett Kimberlin has filed against myself and others basically for truthfully describing him as a pedophile and related matters.  He thinks this will intimidate myself and my co-defendants but frankly I relish the opportunity to prove my allegations to be true.  But beyond that, I will be very likely to engage new counsel and I will maintain silence in the short term until I have a chance to consult with him or her.

But let’s get to the subject of this Weiner post.  Now to be fair to Weiner, this is not his limp excuse.  And by “ejaculation” I mean in the sense of speaking loudly and emotionally, not that other definition.

But yesterday was the start of Rosh Hashanah, i.e. the Jewish new year and my Jewish friends are going to party like it is 5779!  Awful jokes aside, deflated New York City mayoral candidate Weiner was doing the typical politician meat and greet when he had an argument with a man who heckled him.  Here is some early, edited, video of that encounter: