Murray v. HBO

[Mike]

First off, if you haven't watched John Oliver's piece on the coal industry from Last Week Tonight on HBO, you should take the time to do that now:



Immediately after that, Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Industries filed a lawsuit against HBO and the show and Oliver and a few dozen others claiming defamation. It's a completely frivolous lawsuit by a blowhard with lots of money intended to chill free expression and to scare people away from doing negative stories about him. I can't wait for it to be over so that Oliver can actually talk about it, because he currently can't. And it's killing him:



So anyway, today I got a look at the filed by ACLU-WV, and it's hysterical. I mean, just look at the Table of Contents:



Seriously, that alone is worth the price of admission. And the ACLU in its brief points out that, yes, they're having some fun with this, but the central issues at hand are about the core of free speech and a free press, and they are deadly serious.

I find the whole story to be very incredible.

[Phoebe]

Nice signature. This is why the ACLU gets some of our money even though I'm pissed at the ones who decided that the Charlottesville authorities couldn't move the protest to a more easily secured venue.

[Cazmonster]

This is a great read of the amicus brief.

[Iantha]

This made my day.

On a slightly unrelated note, this reminds me that I need to get back to reading legal opinions again. RBG and Scalia have always been fun to read just because of their writing style.

[El Jefe]

You know how that old expression (it definitely doesn't exist) goes that everybody (nobody) says all of the time (absolutely never):

"Ain't no party like a Scalia party."

[Phoebe]

I would give a lot of something - not sure what, but a lot - to have partied with Scalia. Whatever the views (and really, his deep and obvious inconsistency bothered me more than some of the views I merely disagreed with) may have been, by all accounts a charming person and lovely friend.

Edited to add: this is one of the things that bugs me about Gorsuch. He actually seems like a jerk. He has done some jerk-moves already that seem, shall we say, lower than his actual place.

[Iantha]

As I understand it, Kagan and Scalia were actually friends and that Scalia wasy really quite decent to hang out with.