JackDallas:

He's a nice decent man. Unlike you.

I may not be perfect....but I do write my own poetry.

Jack

Yeah, I saw one, once.

"Roses are red/violets are blue/everything you just said/is bullshit."

I'll bet the girls just go googly over it! :)

RonB52:

JackDallas:

He's a nice decent man. Unlike you.

I may not be perfect....but I do write my own poetry.

Jack

Yeah, I saw one, once.

"Roses are red/violets are blue/everything you just said/is bullshit."

I'll bet the girls just go googly over it! :)

Ha! That's about right.

;-)

He's on record now. Here and where it counts.

Great post. You really are good at putting thought to paper, even virtual paper.

Thanks for posting this.

Some do

One thought I left out:

I think one has to admire the way the Secret Service handles these. It is armed with a law that permits it to punish pure speech. I haven't read that law in a while, and I don't want to look it up right now because I'm not eager to type the necessary words into a search engine, if you know what I mean. But anyway, my recollection is that these particular kinds of threats are made criminal in a way, and at an early stage of their fermentation, that we don't generally see in other areas of the criminal law.

Whether you agree with those laws or not isn't so much the question. That is the law that the Secret Service is charged with enforcing and I'm sure they take their job very seriously.

And yet, you don't get the sense that there are "political prisoners" rotting away in US prisons as the result of over-zealous enforcement of this particular law.

They seem to take great pains to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to let the chaff go with a good spanking.

To clarify myself...

I'm glad you top posted this, because false information was being floated around. I'm also glad you contacted the Secret Service. For myself, I don't know that I would have mentioned contacting the S.S. back when the events transpired. That's all.

The person Geoff/Slate/Fray should be blaming is predicto, not cat.

Have you been following the discussion next door? I think amid all the rest, and as odd as it may be, you and I just may bring the next John Forbes Nash back from the other side.

I too wanted to respond to it.

It's a beautiful country ,Ron. That's what this all says really.

Because if they chose to or determined there was even a remote threat he would have been gone from here.

And yet in this great country even cops have to abide by an American citizen's right to express themselves as long as what they express is still within the parameters of the law. Free speech is a beautiful right.

that said, Imay not agree with predicto and find his posts uterly disgusting but he has the right to say it.

You are a lawyer so you well know, that the law states a threat has to be a direct threat.

The wording is everything within the law.

A direct threat is when someone says," I am going to kill you" Or I am going to hit you" That's how the law is.

When someone posts or says," I wish someone would kill him"..that's not a direct threat within the law, even as sick as that statement would be.

I mean even a novice legal beagle like me knows that much about the law.

I must say,however, no one seems to be able to answer how truning in of jo and DB to the Feds is okay.

what I would call beautiful. I trust you're looking at the right post - the one with the lawyer joke in it.

Also, I've addressed your comments about the Secret Service and the First Amendment somewhere around here. If you go back to the thread on FB, he is not simply saying "I wish." I think he says "the time is now" and something that ends with "so arrest me."

The law is not limited to narrow or rigid interpretations of what is written. This is one of the hardest concepts to get across to my students. Let me give you an example. Here's an ad that's running in a newspaper:

"Have you lost money investing with SmithB52? Call the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe. 1800-555-1212"

Of course, Dewey, Cheatham and Howe will try to defend themselves by saying "I didn't actually say anything about SmithB52!!"

But the law will disagree.

Without actually using these words, the ad says, plain as day, "SmithB52 is engaged in repeated illegal activities."

Look, if predicto never crossed the line in the eyes of the well-dressed guys with wrist radios, there would be fewer jelly doughnuts in the world, right?

My bad.

As it turns out:

A. The posts regarding DD's threat, and my response were all made BEFORE Geoff even left.

B. That post was made on Ballot Box. Geoff is talking about Best of Fray.

C. Geoff wrote that Slate is upset about unwarranted emails and reports of abuse. He's not talking justified reports of abuse (and clearly, DD's post fit the description for abuse).

just me trying to make sense. BTW, dd isn't allowed to post whatever he wants here under "free speech" because it's Slate's property. They can choose to let inflammatory words stand with a disclaimer, or delete them. That doesn't change the reality that the guy was way, way over the line. I'm glad none of the bs was directed at your action.