Category: Bill Schmalfeldt

Colorado Conservative SWATted After Argument With Bill Schmalfeldt?

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First, the news from the Hollywood Reporter:

Conservative pundit and author Erik Rush has become the latest victim of “swatting,” a growing trend in which individuals place fake 911 calls drawing police response to a celebrity’s home. Rush, who resides in Fort Collins, Colo., appears to have been targeted following a series of controversial tweets regarding the Boston Marathon explosions.
According to Coloradoan.com, an individual claiming to be Rush called Fort Collins police Monday at about 5 p.m., reporting that two men wielding AK-47 rifles were firing rounds inside his home. But with no additional calls reporting the gunshots and because the call came to 911 through a third-party relay service, police dispatchers were suspicious. Rush was contacted by police via his home phone and confirmed that the call was fake.

Now, the interesting coincidence explained by Patterico:

Schmalfeldt credited himself as being “the first person” to respond to Rush. One of Schmalfeldt’s fellow travelers credited Schmalfeldt as the person who called out Rush, and told Schmalfeldt that she had gotten his screencaps in an email from People from the American Way. Another Twitter user told Schmalfeldt that his tweet had appeared on Turkish TV, to which Schmalfeldt replied: “Man. I’m famous!”

Read the rest at Patterico, and follow Eric Rush on Twitter. Anybody hated by Bill Schmalfeldt must be awesome!

 

E-Mail From a Former Maryland Resident to Howard County (Md.) State’s Attorney

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REQUESTING STATEMENT ON HARASSMENT POLICY
Monday, April 8, 2013 1:22 PM
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Dear Sirs:
As I am certain you are now aware, it has been reported that the office of Howard County State’s Attorney has refused to prosecute persons accused of online harassment, in apparent contravention of Maryland Criminal Statutes 3-803 and/or 3-805. In fact, it has been reported that a member of your staff, Assistant State’s Attorney Jim Brewer, advised persons complaining of such harassment, “If you’re so concerned about your safety, don’t come to Maryland,” and, “Stay off the Internet if you don’t want to be harassed.”
While I understand that authorities have wide discretion in choosing which complaints to pursue as criminal matters, these reports of official indifference to online harassment are certainly disturbing, and I wish to verify their accuracy. Has your office issued any statement clarifying your policy on this matter, or do you intend to issue such a statement in the future?
I ask this question as a reporter, a career journalist with more than 25 years in the news industry, but also as a former Maryland resident who left the state last year to escape the increasingly hostile climate of harassment that is apparently tolerated by officials there. While I am not a lawyer, and thus not qualified to state whether any particular action qualifies as a crime under Maryland statutes, I know right from wrong, and the harassing behaviors complained of in these reports would seem clearly wrong.
If you have any comment, please contact me via this e-mail address, as I hesitate to include my phone number or address in communication with your office.

Sincerely,

ROBERT STACY McCAIN
Editor-in-Chief, ViralRead.com
Correspondent, The American Spectator
Blogger, TheOtherMcCain.com

————————

Today is Everyone Blog About the Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office Day. John Hoge lists the participating sites:

Monitor’s Access
R. M. Nixon (Deceased) / Dead Republican Party
Tanny O’Haley
The Other McCain
Batshit Crazy News
Grumpy Opinions
Ameryx le Gallois
The Lonely Conservative
Raging Against the Rhetoric
Joyce Junior
Allergic to Bull
Patterico’s Pontifications

Certainly, this list will grow longer before the day ends. Dustyn at Monitor’s Access reports that the number at the office of Howard County State’s Attorney’s Dario J. Broccolino is (410) 313-2108; the number for Wayne Kirwan, the public spokesman for the office, is 410-313-3002.

My object is to get some kind of official statement from Broccolino or his spokesman, as to why there seems to be no legal redress for those complaining of harassment. Readers communicating with Broccolino’s office should be civil and polite.

 

Bill Schmalfeldt, Violentacrez, Barrett Brown and the Scourge of ‘Troll Rights’

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“Arrogant sociopathic punks think they can go around threatening people and if you dare say a word back to them, you’re the bad guy.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sept. 4, 2012

Donald Douglas at American Power reminds me of the deranged cyberstalker’s irrational grievance: “Troll rights.”

A basic problem of online life: People Who Don’t Understand How the Internet Works, No Matter How Often You Try to Explain It to Them.

Back in the day you could — and, in many places on the Internet, you still can — say anything you want to say in the comments. People who habitually frequent such places become accustomed to unleashing their id at will, and believe that this is a basic First Amendment freedom, which it is — as long as the proprietors of the site don’t care what people say in the comments. But one way or another, that online space is owned by someone, and the proprietor makes the rules.

Try going over to Democrat Underground or Daily Kos, spewing out GOP talking points, and see how long it takes them to ban you.

Trolls don’t understand this. They believe that having access to the Internet confers on them the inalienable right to say anything they want anywhere they want to say it, and any site operator who refuses to acknowledge that right is a fascist totalitarian.

To which I customarily reply: Get your own damned blog.

Here in my space, I will say what I want to say and — while disagreement and criticism from commenters is tolerated — there are clear limits to what can be tolerated without destroying the value of the site as a community of readers. Some of our regular commenters regularly disagree with me, and disagree with each other, and that’s OK. But what is not permitted is intentionally disruptive behavior, or personal attacks impugning the character of the hosts or the integrity of the site, which is inevitably the kind of “argument” trolls want to make.

This rule is a matter of hospitality and courtesy. You don’t accept an invitation to a party then show up and start harassing your fellow guests, complaining about the food and saying rude things about the hosts. Well, maybe you do that, but decent people don’t.

If you hate me, there are lots of places on the Internet where you are free to express that hatred. The comments of this blog are not such a place.

The classic example of the troll mentality was Michael Brutsch, a.k.a. Violentacrez, the notorious “jailbait” troll on Reddit.

In the free-for-all environment which the proprietors of Reddit seemingly encouraged, Violentacrez’s domineering id-monster act flourished. There were no limits he would not transgress, no sensibilities he failed to offend, and anyone who tried to get in his way was denounced as a crybaby, a “pussy.”

Well,  it was anonymous, you see?

Except for a few trusted friends, nobody knew who Violentacrez actually was, and so there were no consequences for his deliberately vile behavior until, one day, consequences happened.

One of his “few trusted friends” finally had enough of his outrageous bullshit and narked him out to Adrian Chen of Gawker:

Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres).
“It’s amazing how much you can sweat in a 60 degree office,” he said with a nervous laugh.
Judging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for a voyeuristic sexual thrill. It was called “Creepshots.” Now Brutsch was the one feeling exposed and it didn’t suit him very well. . ..
“My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment,” he said.

Alas, too late. Within a week, Michael Brutsch was fired from his job.

There are many words to describe Brutsch’s online behavior, but the important word is antisocial — a hostility to rules, a defiance of authority, an unwillingness to cooperate with others. Rules exist for a reason, and if you have a problem understanding why “distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls” is against the rules . . .

Dude, do I even need to finish that sentence? Continue reading Bill Schmalfeldt, Violentacrez, Barrett Brown and the Scourge of ‘Troll Rights’ →

Harassment Is Not Journalism

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Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland, a.k.a. “Liberal Grouch”

“If you’re so concerned about your safety, don’t come to Maryland.”
— Jim Brewer, Howard County (Md.) Assistant State’s Attorney

People who don’t use Twitter may not understand what it’s like when someone starts sending to your “handle” unsolicited messages full of accusations and obscenities. This is what Bill Schmalfeldt does to people he targets for harassment: He monitors their Twitter account and sends harassing messages to them, as well as to people he sees associating on Twitter with his targets. It is the persistence of Schmalfeldt’s obsessions with his targets that qualifies what he does as cyberstalking.

I have previously described how Schmalfeldt began cyberstalking Aaron Walker in June, when he sent these messages to Walker:

2670. Sun Jun 03 19:55:53 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209372854213558273,
@catsrimportant can someone point me to something written about this Aaron Walker case that was NOT written by some right wing shithead?

2669. Sun Jun 03 20:30:58 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209381683034722305,
@AaronWorthing Are you really comparing yourself with MLK?

2668. Sun Jun 03 20:42:09 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209384499425976320,
@AaronWorthing I know next to nothing about this case. What did Kimberlin say you allegedly said/tweeted/google that proved threating?

2667. Sun Jun 03 20:42:39 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209384626899255296,
@AaronWorthing Forgive me for asking, but I have some strong views about the First Amendment and I’m researching this story for my blog.

2666. Sun Jun 03 20:42:54 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209384689511841792,
@AaronWorthing I promise. No one will come to get you. 😉

2665. Sun Jun 03 21:10:29 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209391629881192448,
@AaronWorthing Well, certainly a new Twitter chum can recommend to another new Twitter chum a website he might find interesting, say wot?

The nature of Schmalfeldt’s obsession became obvious when he began to escalate his campaign of harassment, expanding his target list to include myself and other of Walker’s friends. The situation gradually got bad enough that, on the Sunday before Election Day — while I was in Ohio covering the final push of the presidential campaign — I felt the need to call attention to what Schmalfeldt was doing: “Monsters on the Internet: Sociopathic Sadism and Bill Schmalfeldt’s Madness.” Three weeks later, during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Schmalfeldt sent me more than 200 harassing Twitter messages in the span of 48 hours, including a message in which he threatened to contact my wife.

Schmalfeldt’s motives for this weird behavior have been a subject of speculation. There are those who say that Schmalfeldt is being paid by convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin, or by persons associated with Kimberlin, and that what Schmalfeldt is doing is part of a deliberate effort to intimidate or discredit those who write about Kimberlin’s criminal past as Indiana’s notorious “Speedway Bomber.”

I remain agnostic about these theories because (a) there is no firm evidence of any such payment, and (b) crazy people don’t need rational motives to do crazy things. So whether Schmalfeldt’s harassment is hired thuggery or amateur insanity is ultimately irrelevant to this fact: It is evil.

Evil, however, is not necessarily criminal. And describing the evil that Bill Schmalfeldt does cannot stop him from doing what he does.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, stalkers gotta stalk.

John Hoge and others have attempted to have Maryland authorities prosecute Schmalfeldt for his harassment, with no success so far. This illustrates a problem with law enforcement that has become increasingly apparent since I began covering the Brett Kimberlin story last May, namely the tendency to dismiss such harassment as “just a bunch of crazy people arguing on the Internet.” Which would be true, except:

  • Many of the people targeted as enemies by Kimberlin (and Kimberlin’s avowed associate, Neal Rauhauser) are being harassed for no other reason than the fact that they wrote about Kimberlin’s criminal past, or defended those who did;
  • The harassment is, to an extent, demonstrably an attempt to silence political opponents of Kimberlin, whose 501(c) organizations have been funded with more than $2 million in contributions under the pretext of pursuing various progressive “social justice” issues, including election-fraud claims and crusades against high-profile individuals and organizations including Karl Rove, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce;
  • To intimidate Kimberlin’s opponents, people have had their employment situations jeopardized and their reputations attacked with unsubstantiated accusations of criminal wrongdoing; and
  • Because many of the targets of this harassment are citizen-journalists who use Twitter as a vital tool for gathering news, communicating with sources, and promoting their work to readers, the constant barrage of unsolicited hostile Twitter messages from persons like Schmalfeldt hinders their ability to do their jobs.

Ask anyone who has been subjected to this pattern of harassment — Mandy Nagy, Aaron Walker, Patrick Frey, Lee Stranahan, Ali Akbar, et al. — what it’s like to be besieged by a swarm of Twitter trolls, knowing full well their malicious motives, and then to see friends turn their heads because they don’t want to get involved, or because the trolls have managed, through the repetition of accusations, to cast a shadow of unfair suspicion around their target.

You can call that whatever you want — I call it cyberstalking and harassment — but don’t you dare call it “journalism.”

In an effort to encourage officials to take this online evil seriously, John Hoge has declared Monday — tomorrow, April 8 — “Everyone Blog About the Howard County State’s Attorney Day.”

Do it.




 

 


Bill Schmalfeldt’s Very Bad Idea
UPDATE: Maryland Resident Brandishes AR-15, Recently Banned in Maryland UPDATE: Schmalfeldt’s Gun Is a Toy UPDATE: No, Says Schmalfeldt, He’s Actually Armed; Dangerous? Maybe

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Bill Schmalfeldt never gets any good ideas, so it takes a particularly bad idea for me even to bother noticing. Remember, Schmalfeldt is the guy who got banned from Daily Kos for his grossly offensive writings about anal sex. Schmalfeldt is habitually dishonest, and one of his most heinous lies involved a vicious attack on Andrew Breitbart’s memory:

In July, Schmalfeldt created a Web site called “Big Damnation” which he promoted with a Twitter account called @DeadAndrew that mocked Breitbart as supposedly repenting his conservative “sins” (and denouncing his former colleagues) while suffering in Hell.
Bill Schmalfeldt is a remorseless liar and, after this vile project was exposed, Schmalfeldt deceptively used his phony “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner to promote his dishonest (anti-Breitbart) version of this controversy. In doing so, Schmalfeldt (a) defended Brett Kimberlin and (b) pretended that he wasn’t responsible for the “Big Damnation”/@DeadAndrew atrocity, as Lee Stranahan has explained.

As I said, Schmalfeldt never gets any good ideas, but this latest one is particularly bad: “Team Kimberlin” T-shirts!

For obvious reasons, no decent human being would link any site run by Bill Schmalfeldt, and I can’t help but wonder: How much do would-be members of “Team Kimberlin” know about the man with whom they would be associating themselves by buying those T-shirts?

Brett Kimberlin, the “Speedway Bomber” — what do they know about him? Do they know about Vietnam veteran Carl DeLong, whose leg got blown off by one of Kimberlin’s bombs? And do those “Team Kimberlin” members know about the little girl whose grandmother got shot to death in what investigators believed was a murder-for-hire plot?

“For three consecutive summers, 1974 through 1976, they took vacations of a week or longer in Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. Sandi couldn’t get time off from work, so on these summer trips it was just the two of them — Brett and Jessica.
“Eyebrows levitated. A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: ‘We’d see a girl, who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, “Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?” It made me very uncomfortable.’ Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as ‘my girlfriend,’ and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker . . . Sandi confided that Kimberlin was ‘grooming Jessica to be his wife.’ To another, Sandi explained that although Kimberlin’s relationship with Jessica was chaste, he intended ‘to wait for her and would marry her.’”
— Mark Singer, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, Page 78

There’s just so much to learn about Brett Kimberlin:

As thoroughly despicable as Brett Kimberlin is, it takes an especially depraved character to admire Brett Kimberlin.

And few characters are more depraved than Bill Schmalfeldt.

UPDATE: Schmalfeldt would be easier to hate, if he weren’t so hopelessly stupid that you almost feel sorry for him:

Almost, I said . . .

UPDATE II: Well, if Che Guevara gets a T-shirt . . .

UPDATE III: Further scrutiny of the photo in which Schmalfeldt appears to brandish an AR-15 reveals that the gun is, in fact, a toy.

UPDATE IV: OK, so Schmalfeldt’s been all up in my timeline on Twitter this morning, accusing me of “libel” and insisting that indeed he was brandishing a genuine AR-15 rifle in that photo he posted to the Internet. Therefore, I apologize for my mistake in correcting what I previously thought was a mistake, and hereby correct the record by stating that Bill Schmalfeldt is in possession of a semi-automatic weapon with a high-capacity magazine and, probably, lots of ammunition.

Also, he’s crazy as hell. But there’s never been any doubt about that.




 

 

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You Stay Classy, Bill Schmalfeldt!

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Bill Schmalfeldt: Proud to be a ‘Brain-Damaged Troll’

It’s been more than a week since we took notice of Brett Kimberlin fanboy Bill Schmalfeldt, who has been charged in Maryland with Internet harassment of Lee Stranahan. Before examining Schmalfeldt’s latest eruption of obscene idiocy, however, I’d like to treat you to an amusing blast from Schmalfeldt’s disreputable past.

Right Wing Scrambles to Reassign
Blame for Tucson Tragedy

That was the headline on Schmalfeldt’s debut as the self-described “Brain-Damaged Troll” columnist at Technorati in January 2011. Bill’s theme was, as usual, completely wrong — the exact opposite of truth. Even as Schmalfeldt was ranting on about the Tea Party, “Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly” as the culprits in the Tucson massacre, actual reporters were quietly working to determine the nature of the madness behind Jared Loughner’s bloody crimes.

Loughner was not a Republican, not a conservative, not a Tea Party activist. He was a paranoid schizophrenic. Once a promising young musician — he had played saxophone in a high-school jazz group — Loughner got involved with drugs:

Some friends have traced the start of his decline to his sophomore year of high school in 2005, when he broke up with a girlfriend. He dropped out of high school after his junior year and thereafter lost touch with many of his former friends, including Caitlyn Parker. On the day of the shooting which targeted Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, Parker was one of the first of the accused gunman’s acquaintances to push back against speculation that the crime had been perpetrated by a right-winger. No, Parker said in a series of Twitter messages, the Jared Loughner she remembered was “quite liberal,” even “radical” in his politics.

Ah, so the dope-addled crazy was not a Rush Limbaugh listener, not a Glenn Beck fan, not a Fox News viewer. Well, what set him off?

The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” —parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”

So, the belief that Bill Schmalfeldt expressed in his Technorati column on Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011 — that the Tea Party and conservative media personalities were directly at fault for the Tucson massacre, and that the Right was dishonestly attempting to “reassign blame” — was 180 degrees opposite of the truth. In fact, insofar as the crimes of a madman can be said to have a political motive, Loughner’s motives were those associated with the radical Left, including 9/11 Trutherism, anti-Christianity and anti-capitalist beliefs not unlike those of the “Occupy” movement.

The account of the Tucson gunman’s madness cited above is my own American Spectator column, “Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession” (Jan. 17, 2011), and regular readers will recall how much coverage of the Loughner/Zeitgeist phenomenon I provided here:

So, while I covered Loughner’s actual motive every day for seven consecutive days (Jan. 12-18), Schmalfeldt lost interest in Loughner’s motives as soon as evidence emerged proving Schmalfeldt’s original “pin-the-tail-on-the-famous-right-wingers” smear was false.

And here’s the thing: Bill Schmalfeldt never owned up to the falseness of his accusation. He continued being published at Technorati until November 2011 without ever once acknowledging that his very first column for Technorati was a big, fat, evil lie.

There are many faults and personal shortcomings that can be tolerated in journalism. Deliberate malicious dishonesty is not one of them.

All that is necessary to discredit Bill Schmalfeldt is to quote Bill Schmalfeldt. The vile creep got banned from Daily Kos for his grossly offensive writings about anal sodomy. Schmalfeldt’s penchant for obscene defamation, as Lee Stranahan pointed out last week, includes describing his own ex-wife — the mother of his children, whom Schmalfeldt divorced in 1988 — as a “meth-abusing serial adultress.”

You may ask, how would such a person choose to honor the memory of his recently deceased mother? By accusing his ex-wife of “sucking Stranny Balls” and “sucking Stranny dick,” calling her an “adulterous slut” and a “lower form of life,” and also describing one of Lee Stranahan’s female friends as a “throbbing hemorrhoid” and a “cunt.”

You stay classy, Bill Schmalfeldt!




 

 

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Bill Schmalfeldt Praises Kimberlin for ‘Social Justice,’ Then Deletes Tweet

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Today there was a peace order hearing in Maryland in the matter of Bill Schmalfeldt v. John Hoge, which Aaron Walker describes briefly, with the interesting news that Brett Kimberlin showed up for the hearing.

Schmalfeldt gushed on Twitter that the “high point” of his day was meeting Kimberlin: “I don’t care what he did in the past. He is redeeming himself every day by trying to bring social justice to the world.” Schmalfeldt deleted that Tweet, but Lee Stranahan has the screen-caps.

Schmalfeldt’s concept of political redemption is, of course, the same hustle that Kimberlin has been selling for years. Kimberlin has been called a “world-class liar” and a “top-flight con man” and over the years he has managed to dupe many people smarter than Bill Schmalfeldt.

As for what Kimberlin “did in the past,” read “When ‘Jessica’ Was 10, 11, 12” and see if you think Kimberlin, who served 17 years of a 50-year-federal sentence, can ever bring enough “social justice” to make anyone forget his career as the “Speedway Bomber,” a crime spree for which Kimberlin has never even admitted his guilt, much less apologized.

Admitting his guilt for the bombings of which he was convicted, you see, might require Kimberlin to address his motives for those crimes and . . . well, maybe you ought to read that article to understand the problem there.

The profound irony of Bill Schmalfeldt being indifferent to Brett Kimberlin’s crimes, of course, is that Schmalfeldt has harassed Lee Stranahan (and Stranahan’s defenders) in part on the basis of Stranahan having once shot some “erotic photography,” which Schmalfeldt tries to depict as evidence of moral turpitude and even criminality.

All of Brett Kimberlin’s enemies are very bad people, Bill Schmalfeldt would have you believe, whereas Kimberlin is a saintly instrument of “social justice.”

UPDATE: To show Schmalfeldt’s bully-boy modus operandi, check out this account by his erstwhile Public Enemy Number One, defenders of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. In order to get the “information” he wanted, Schmalfeldt contacted a woman and, in quite vulgar terms, warned of the evil that would befall her if she didn’t “start telling the truth and telling it real quick.” Consider the consequences Schmalfeldt threatened:

“Now, do you wanna play dumb and lose your kids? Or do you wanna play smart and keep what you got?”

A real sweetheart, that Bill. And if he thinks it is protected First Amendment speech — much less journalism — to send people messages like that, he will probably have another think coming, sooner or later.

 

Consulting the Legal Department

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My previous observation that no one could be sued for libel for merely describing the self-evident fact of Bill Schmalfeldt’s derangment drew a mildly critical e-mail from a lawyer friend:

Not to be a pedant, but the reason it’s not defamatory is that it’s a statement of opinion based on disclosed facts, and therefore not subject to defamation analysis.
Statements of opinion (except for those implying that they are based on hidden, false facts) can’t be defamatory.
Like if you called me a jerk. That can’t be defamation.

To this, I replied:

“Opinion”? Don’t try to fool me with all your high-falutin legalistic argle-bargle, sir!
I’m a professional journalist. I deal with facts, and the Neutral Objective Fact is, this guy is a certifiable nutjob.
Any journalist who says otherwise should turn in their press credentials, clean out their desk and find another line of work.

On at least one previous occasion, Bill Schmalfeldt suggested that certain lawyers he doesn’t like deserve “to have their knees broken with baseball bats.” (You could look it up.)

It it merely an opinion to say that Schmalfeldt’s nuttier than a fruitcake, loony as a goony bird, a few fries short of a Happy Meal?

No, I state as a fact that Bill Schmalfeldt is neurologically impaired, mentally defective and psychologically abnormal.

The kook  is ranting about Lee Stranahan’s teeth, for God’s sake!

Your Honor, I rest my case.

However, aware that a federal judge has recently declared notorious lunatic Barrett Brown mentally competent to stand trial, I wish to reserve my right to the “satire” defense, which Schmalfeldt himself used to defend his statements about anal rape.

Yeah, they banned Bill from Daily Kos for that. And anybody who’s too crazy for Daily Kos will have a hard time proving libel merely because I state the obvious truth that he is bonkers, unhinged, off his rocker, daffy, mad as a March hare and not in his right mind.