My Day With Linda Martin
Or The Triumph of Success
By: Sandra Feigley,
Publisher
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As the publisher of this very popular website, I recently had
a very encouraging day. I had to give a deposition in a lawsuit
where the guards want to censor us. The experience made one thing
delightfully clear, we're doing it right! The guards
HATE this website. They will do almost anything (legal or not)
to silence us.
The guards' lawyers, a tribe of stumbling rocket scientists from Philadelphia, had been trying to bully, intimidate and harass me. After all, guards and parole agents are bullies. The lawyers, lacking in both a command of First Amendment law and civil decorum, were simply following their client's lead. I was questioned in the sprawling AFSCME Counsel 13 Building on Executive Park Drive in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The suckers whose hard-earned dues financed this place must not realize how their money is squandered. Working people have too often been exploited by unions. I was questioned by Linda Martin who purported to be an attorney. I wanted to publish her picture with this article, but my request to her was ignored. The pictures available from college and schools are not very good. They seem to have been made before she put on so much weight and bought the silly shoes. Please don't get the impression that I find the slightest fault in Linda-the-lawyer. She seemed to be a perfectly dandy woman except she spits sometimes when agitated. In fact, she and I seem to share some social values. Judging from her appearance, she patronizes thrift shops. Personally, I find it admirable to recycle and reuse hand-me-downs. The guards' suit is about how scared they are by our website. Maybe Linda-the-inquisitor was a tad scared too. She came to the deposition with John Bilsky and Richard Lindsey. Frankly, neither one of them would have made much of a bodyguard had one been needed. Flabby is not formidable. The Bilsky fellow was offered as a lawyer which may or may not be true. Lindsey was held out to be the "executive assistant" to the "executive director" of the union. It seemed to me like a lot of executives for a labor union. What happened to workingmen? In any event, neither of those males dared to interrupt Linda's meandering examination. Even with notes the poor girl had difficulty sticking to the subject of the suit. Linda-the-loquacious questioned me for about two hours. She seemed to have a hard time understanding the workings of the Web and its dissimilarity to newspapers. I reassured her that along with our writers, I make a sincere effort to report accurately while avidly advocating our causes. I assured her that, unlike guards and parole agents, I'm not a danger to anybody. She didn't seem to have any grasp of the freedom of the press and speech provisions of the United States and Pennsylvania Constitutions. She even contended that the Internet is not protected by the First Amendment. I assume that, being a lawyer, her obsessions with money obscured the fundamentals of civil liberties. Speaking about money, much of the deposition reflected the greedy fascination of the legal fraternity with money. Linda-the-lawyer wanted my income tax returns. She seemed to object to my managing an enterprise for a religious organization and all but slavered over the $17 I had in Community Bank. One ploy that had been used by the guards and is sometimes used by disreputable advocates and fanatics is to censor a publication by going after the publication's advertisers. The idea (often used by bullies such as the religious crazies and other extremists) is to harass the advertisers and thereby break the publication's financial base. I wasn't surprised, therefore when Linda produced pages from our site about our advertisers. She made a fundamental error. Since we aren't supported by advertisers, intimidating them would have no effect on me or on the website. That's not to infer that Linda would stoop to such a tactic ... certainly not! Almost none of Linda's questions were about the issue of the
lawsuit, the supposed invasion of the guards' privacy. It was
all about censoring us. To my delight she produced a raft of
printouts from our website. With each, she made clear her chagrin.
Besides our offending Home Page,
her distemper included: "The Guards List Revisited" "Judge Sides With Guards to Abridge Free Press" "Timid Guards so Frightened They Sue" "Prisons Try to Censor Us Through Intimidation" "The Tremblers' Transfer" My Mending Society speech Announcement "News Items" and the Homepage of the shop I run. Looking a mite miffed, Linda seemed nonplused by the business I manage. She inferred that work was somehow unsavory or demeaning. Being a lawyer, she might be unfamiliar with respectable occupations. Her whining about the other articles was pretty much indignation that we published descent, protests and had the temerity to criticize authorities. She didn't seem to grasp that that's the reason why the First Amendment exists. She made it abundantly clear that she objected to our free speech/press rights and wished we were censored. Linda may not command Constitutional law, but she seemed intrigued by astrology. She questioned me closely about some remarks we published about the Honorable Rochelle S. Friedman of the Commonwealth Court. She's pictured on page 5-27 of the Pennsylvania Manual. Linda seemed to think that Rochelle, now 65, was not a Gemini as we suggested. I don't know how an astrological birth sign might affect a judge, but it seemed important to Linda. If the judge is a Taurus and even older than we thought, that's okay with me. Colonial Virginia had the right idea; lawyers are simply a bane and should be outlawed. Some members of that universally detested legal racket become so inflated with their little club that their egos obscure what law is really about. The courts don't exist to benefit parasitic lawyers. The courts exist to benefit the people. The courts aren't a closed fraternity of judges and lawyers. The courts exist as servants of the people. The courts must be open and accommodating. It's fundamentally wrong for the courts to be used to harass or to bully citizens. It's patently improper to use the courts as a billy club to truncheon persons out of their constitutional liberties. Intimidation is ugly. To all the guards, parole agents, cops and other thugs, I'm no threat to you. Treat persons decently and don't tremble. To all the lawyers and other sleazy types, "don't tread on me!" To Linda Martin, thanks so much for the deposition. It certainly encouraged me. We're doing something right! You are welcome to use or republish
any of our material.
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