People are getting locked up for speaking their mind.
Bob Fitrakis, a communications-based lawyer and publisher of the Columbus Free Press has issued a
Call to Arms about free speech at school boards and people like my former client and recently-imprisoned protester Jerry Doyle and the voice that he represents. I was Jerry Doyle's lawyer for years after I left the Attorney General's office and won a First Amendment trespassing case for him and made City Council call him to speak at meetings after a year of refusing to do so at their whimsy.
Jerry Doyle, who was arrested at the [School Board] meeting, has the right idea. Parents and citizens concerned with democracy should use any means necessary to protect their rights and restore accountability to the Columbus School Board, which apparently is only allowed now in suburbia.
The Columbus Indy Media
broke the story about Jerry Doyle and pointed to my blawg.
I am all about raising awareness that the Devil is in the Details -- and my career certainly provides an ample view into some of those details and the lies that government and big business perpetuate in order to consolidate their power over the people.
Below is a copy of a Doyle "On the Columbus Plantation" newsletter, a publication that Attorney Fitrakis and I vigorously protect as the same exact medium as exercised by the original pamphleteers. I have chosen the one in which Mr. Doyle quotes Civil Rights legend and Dr. Martin Luther King's contemporary Ralph Abernathy after he met with him:
"Blacks in Columbus suffer as much now from inequality and poverty as they did during the 1960's, and they aren't fighting hard enough. They need to get back in the fight.... Just because they've got a black man in the Ohio House and a black man on the City Council, they think we have won a victory.... they must be shown into reality."
The newsletter reads further:
"Among Black people it seems that those who most frequently sell us out and betray us are from our most educated and advanced class...."
SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas and the NAACP come to mind, readily.
And here is an excerpt from my blawg today -- similarly providing a Call to Arms as did Attorey Fitrakis back in 2001, and as Lucy Hurston and I discussed 3 days ago.
Yeah, it's easier for them to do the dirt without me around to win Mr. Doyle's First Amendment criminal cases, or to sue the government back for doing things like forbidding him to speak before City Council for an entire year. The Columbus Indy Media story is here, and it contains these/two relevant links about how the Columbus infrastructure really works -- showing JPEGs of Mr. Doyle's "On the Columbus Plantation" newsletter that left the Columbus Hitler Youth absolutely mortified. Mr. Doyle also has testified about voting irregularities in the 2004 Presidential Elections in the Ohio swing State.
And you can watch Mr. Doyle lament the fact that he couldn't get other attorneys to represent him for fear of reprisal in the videos at KingCast.net -- bringing cameras into courtrooms for the benefit of little people since 1996. He's in "American Lawyer 1," in which police abuse victim Michael Isreal sings a nigra' spiritual after I whupped Rob Tobias' arse in Mr. Doyle's School Board wrongful arrest, and he also appears in "Oreo," and "Live Revolution."
.....Also, what the Columbus Dispatch story fails to communicate is that other people delivering a pro-school board or City Council message could run over time at will without repercussion.
As a side note, I know all about some of the people who run Columbus government because some of them like former Board President and current County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy were, or are friends with my then-girlfriend and still good friend Martha -- herself a well-respected Social Studies teacher at Columbus Public. Just emailed with her today in fact. And Kilroy, Esq. and I and her husband Bob Handleman, Esq., used to quaff beers with their then law clerk, Jon Wentz, Esq., who was my neighbor and classmate of my then-fiancee, MLD, at OSU Law School. I'm the nigger that knew too much.
Speaking of knowing too much, let's reflect on American Tower Corporation -- a major player in the whole current move to eliminate Internet neutrality because of the size of their communications infrastructure -- as a case in point: Several former employees and I sued and that company was found in violation of labor laws pursuant to a complaint I drafted. Their lawyer and former Massachusetts Bar Association Attorney Richard C. Van Nostrand tricked Blogger _ex parte_ (that's behind the back without me present for you non-lawyers) to delete some of my blawg posts about their abusive conduct, but Blogger actually reinstated the posts after attorney review pursuant to U.S. v. Carmichael, 326 F.Supp.2d 1267 (M.D.Ala. 2004). Those issues go to the core of what Daily Kos is all about -- as do the concerns noted by Attorney Fitrakis, above.