Rall v. Coulter? It's an Expensive, But Viable, Proposition

The original poster said:
"You'd think he'd promise to share with his donors some of the take if he does win. The fact that he didn't says a great deal."

He is donating the money back to the donors relative to the percentage of their donation. He told the donors in the emails he sent them, and I think on the blog too.

If it "says a great deal" when he does not share the winnings, Im sure you think the same if he does share the winnings.

You guys don't know the stregnths and weaknesses of Coulters case-to-be. She only said he submitted "holocaust cartoons", not "holocaust denial cartoons" or "pro-holocaust cartoons". Furthermore, the Iranian contest she is referencing says that its purpose is to test the boundaries of free speech. Thus, saying someone made a submission does not neccesarily mean it is going to be antisemetic or holocaust-denying. So you can tell your lib friends and family that. The problem is that none of this matters. Infact, under United States law libel generally requires five key elements.
1)The plaintiff must prove that the information was published(check),
2)the defendant was directly or indirectly identified(check),
3)the remarks were defamatory towards the plaintiff's reputation(check),
4)the published information is false(check),
5)and that the defendant is at fault(check).

The fact that Ted Rall is not a public official means he only has to show that she was negligent. She not only said it in a speech, but also in her published column! No New York jury is going to think it was a joke. Even a KKK member would have a case against someone who tried to dammage their career by saying he made a 'holocaust cartoon'. Shes toast.

See, although the contest she speaks of is purported by the iranians to simply be a test of the limits of free speech, precidents have shown that the public perception that Rall is anti-semetic is all that will matter. She must have been betting that Rall would not have the dough, or that he is what the law calls 'libel proof'(which means he has cannot be defamed because his reputation already stinks). Unfortunately for her, no one is going to buy that his ultra-liberal remarks have put him where a holocaust-denyers are in the public eye. So she must be betting it is the money issue that will save her. Thats so cynical...and dumb. She may end up being right though.

Still, those supporting her ought to be ashamed. You know that there are two sides here; Reasonable people, and anti-semites. You know that Rall is on our side of this issue and you think its funny that he is being falsely implicated with the holocaust denyers. You know that the Iranians hate the Jews and want to kill them all. Infact, like you, the Jewish, black and liberal New York jurors are not going to see how this was a joke either. Coulter is going down.

(i skipped spell check, so I expect the petty to attack me where they can.)

Ted, is that you? I'll give you credit for one thing: you write better than you draw.

I'll skip the critique of your lousy spelling. I'll concentrate on the fact you obviously know nothing about law. The fact is that people are still able to make jokes. It's called satire, and it's protected under the first amemdent. See the facts surrounding Falwell's suit against Larry Flynt. All nine justices agreed with Flynt.

But I guess Ted Rall doesn't care for free speech much. Coulter's insult must have brought about flashbacks for him to his school days in Ohio when the big kids put him head first in trash bags while calling him all kinds of nasty names. He really needs to get over it.

Are you talking? First off, any law references were straight from the law, not me. I got a B in Constitutional Law and I am curently acing Constitutional Law II, you better report me to my university as a fraud if you think I "know nothing about law". Oh, wait, let me guess "you were just joking".

I guess the cat got your toungue on your debunked claim that Rall was not planning to share his winnings. You were wrong. Let me apologize for you;
"Our Man in Washington, falsely stated that Ted Rall would not share his winnings. He was wrong and he is sorry. Any conclusions about who Ted Rall is as a person as a result of this false belief, are hereby reversed."

There. That felt good, did it not?

Now on to the legal precident you referenced. Falwell did not stand to lose any work as a result of the ad, that is why he decided to supplement his case with the wussy "emotional distress" angle. Run Falwalls case against the crieria and it fails on at least one.

I don't know why rightists don't like rall. He is not that far left on alot of issues. He has anti-abortion views and he wanted clinton impeached. He is a military isolationist and he is anti-illegal immigration. He is for a smaller government and favors a balanced budjet. The list goes on and on. He is not a lefty!!

When I put in that first post, Rall hadn't yet said he would share the winnings. That's a pretty important fact to overlook, so he deserves criticism at the time. Since then, he got around to mentioning it. My earlier post is no longer accurate, but it was accurate at the time I wrote it.

Now if Rall actually had a strong case, he should be able to find some lawyer to take the case on a contingency basis. I challenge you to find one respected lawyer who thinks Rall has a strong case.

Let's see, Rall portrayed Pat Tillman as a murderous bigot. He portrayed September 11th widows as not caring about their spouses. We conservatives believe in decency. Rall is not a decent man.

Lawyers are looking for money. I don't know what you mean by 'contigency basis', but Ralls case will get small winnings (if any) and it will go to donators. I know that pro bono lawyers only do cases that they believe strongly in. I can accept that no lawyer cares about his case. It is hard to feel strongly about.
Decency is hardly the measure of what conservatives consider acceptable. Example: "We should kill all of their leaders and convert them to Christianity". And lets not forget about Ms. Coulter's voting in the wrong precinct in Florida. Of course Coulter is not the only indecent conservative who enjoys widespread acceptance and encouragement from the right. According to Bush himself he was well aware that about 30,000 innocent iraqis would die in the invasion alone. He told Bob Woodward that and gave him permission to print it in his book. Im not saying this was necessarily a bad decision in the grand scheme of things (that is if we end up saving more lives and bringing up the quality of life for millions).

Pat Tillman, a chomski leftist, posed as a murderous bigot and a confused idealist seeking post 911 justice. We now have evidence that he might have been what Colter would refer to as anti-american. In the cartoon, he was portrayed in light of what we all knew at the time:

1) Tillman went to Iraq, which had NOTHING to do with 911, where he was part of a great loss of civilian life.
2) He was transferred to Afghanistan at a time when the number of innocent Afghans killed already topped the number killed on 911.
3) He was part of an effort to secure a route for a trans-afghan pipeline.
4) He turned down a wonderful life to be a part of all of this.

Since then we found out that he was actually WAY far left of Ted, somewhere in Chomskyland. In fact, Ted was WAY off on Pat Tillman and he admitted the revelations have deeply affected his thought process. Ironically, coulter would call Chomski a traitor for his writings. Who knows?; Tillman may have been a commie sleeper in the US army. That would explain why the ARMY would get revenge by using him as a propaganda tool--incase you don't know, his family is attacking the army for that right now (I suppose they are traitors too).

I'm sure that you would be bugged about the same thing rall was bugged about when he drew "terror widows" if you knew what it was. Let me offer my interpretation, then you can tell me what you think.
It is sad that widows are hungry and poor 99.9% of the time, but then we heep millions onto a handful of them for no apparent reason. WHY? Does the way in which your loved one dies have any bearing on whether you deserve a good doctor, for example? Also, Ted was only revering to the terror widows who acted like the ones in his comic.

Coulter has said something about Ted rall which is not true. IT may have been a funny statement, but it could hurt Ted's business. If the thought of that makes you happy, then I challenge you to post a statement of your own about Rall on as many blogs and websites as you can. Make it funny as hell, but you have to follow couter's rules;

1)You are not allowed to say you are joking or not serious.
2)The statement has to be false
3)You have to take credit for the statement personally
4)it has to have the potential to harm his reputation and thus his cash flow.

1. Contingency basis. That would be a typo on my part. It means the lawyer gets a percentage of the take. If the person doing the suing loses, the lawyers gets nothing.

2. If you study conservative philosophy from Burke through Russell Kirk through Goldwater through Sowell, decency and manners play a huge role. I will neither attack nor defend Coulter, because pointing out the alleged misdeeds of one conservative says nothing about conservativism. It's a stupid argument. If I attacked gun control because Ted Kennedy was an advocate and Ted Kennedy has some major personality flaws, I have not made a good argument.

3. Iraq's ties to Al-Qaeda have been well-documented. 9/11 wasn't planned in Baghdad, but 9/11 made us realize how far the terrorists would go to hurt people.

We know that Hussein maintained sanctuaries for terrorists, had ties with Al-Qaeda, wanted to get hold of weapons of mass destruction (and kept his programs in place), was a bad risk-taker, and had two sons more crazy than himself who were next in line to take over Iraq. Those who opposed the invasion have to admit that the situation could have gotten very badly very quickly. Would you rather have a sure loss of 3,000 servicemen and women or a five percent chance of a loss of 100,000 American civilians?

I'm not discounting the loss of Iraqi citizens, but the evidence strongly suggests that the invasion has led to Iraqi lives being saved. Perhaps 30,000 Iraq lives have been lost in three years, but the evidence is high that Hussein's killing and (more signficantly) mismanagement of resources led to higher deaths than that in the three years before we invaded.

3. As for that trans-pipeline conspiracy theory, it's a silly argument. Any change in the geopolitical situation will benefit some company somewhere, so it's easy to claim that some secret business deal is behind the whole thing. Are you saying we shouldn't have attacked Afghanistan, and thereby continued to let it be used as a training and command center for terrorist attacks everywhere?

4. We really don't know what Tillman was thinking. He sounded like an idealistic young man who was searching for answers. He's read Chomsky, but so have I. Anyway, the point is that he put his life on the line for something he believed in. Rall drew him as saying "Never mind the find print. When do I get to kill Arabs?" That's a pretty nasty thing to say.

I'm in the military, and nobody in my unit enjoys killing. In fact, we do work to insure that deaths on both sides are as low as possible. I found Rall's insinuation very insulting.

5. Rall's cartoon made it look like he was attacking all terror widows. If he thought otherwise, he should have expressed that. If you say "All Polish people are stupid" and I object, it's hardly a fair defense to say "I was just talking about stupid Polish people, and you have to admit that some Polish people are stupid, since some people in every ethnic group are stupid."

Anyway, if you want to continue hanging out here, you should really educate yourself about conservativism and get our arguments straight before you attack them. Go read Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk and Barry Goldwater and Thomas Sowell. Read exactly why some conservative thinkers advocated attacking Iraq, and not just why the left claims that Iraq was attacked. Your posts attack the leftist stereotype of conservative thought, rather than the real thing.

Look, during Clinton, I was seriously pissed that the few times he would attempt some military action against evil doers, he caught all kinds of flack from the right (cover of the Limbagh Letter : "WHY KOSOVO"). Many conservatives challenged Clintons intentions citing the much larger humanitarian problems in Africa, eventhough many of them were against his African operations a few years prior. With the exception of Kosovo, I was really frustrated in the 90s. All of these innocent people would get slaughtered while the HUGE and expensive military was forced to sit on their hands. YOu want to talk Goldwater? Do you think he would affirm bush's foreign policy? No way. You don't want me to get into classic conservatism. With all of the isolationism, balanced budget, small government talk; HA, if Goldwater had any say Bush would be run out on a rail!
...gotta go. Hey, I like you. I'm a conservative in many ways. The older I got however, the more I realized how seldom some of its basic tenets were inline with my core, Christian beleifs. I am all about ill-defined military missions, hastily thought out actions against evil, when there are no other solutions. Iraq is a waste though. We are not even spending our own money anymore. It is our grandchildren who will pay. A war this costly ought to only be fought if it is CERTAIN it will save more lives than it violently ends. Forget the strategic goals and the oil.
good night

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