Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

Readers are familiar with the Brett Kimberlin situation. I have said little about the case since announcing our victory over the notorious bomber in the Maryland case Kimberlin v. Walker, et al.

John Hoge and Aaron Walker have continued updating on proceedings in the federal suit, Kimberlin v. National Bloggers Club, et al.

What I’d like to ask is that readers consider making a special donation — $10, $25, whatever — to BomberSuesBloggers.com.

We have in mind a project, which would involve travel expenses, the details of which I am not at liberty to discuss publicly, for reasons that should be obvious. But if the folks who have previously been so generous in their support would be so kind as to kick in a few more dollars, that might help speed us on our way, so to speak.

BomberSuesBloggers.com

 

Dave Weigel has finally published his account of the Kimberlin v. Walker trial, and it’s amazing that it ends with this:

“These guys are going to come out today and say I’m a pedophile,” said Kimberlin. “And tomorrow, I can file another lawsuit against them. And now I know what I need to do. It’s going to be endless lawsuits for the rest of their lives. And that’s what it ends up being. I sue them. They sue me. They come into court. I sue them. They come into court. That’s the way it is.”

Insanity, is what it is. After the December 2012 hearing in Manassas, Virginia, where a state judge dismissed Aaron Walker’s lawsuit against Kimberlin, I remember eating dinner with Walker, his family and John Hoge, and the question was, “Is this story over?”

Walker’s plight, as well as the involvement of notorious troll Neal Rauhauser, was what originally drew my interest in the Kimberlin story in May 2012. The subsequent escalation — “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day” — was astonishing. But after a few weeks, interest in the story dwindled, I returned to covering the 2012 presidential campaign and, by the time Walker’s Virginia lawsuit was dismissed in December 2012, it seemed that the story had fizzled.

The fact that we’re still talking about Brett Kimberlin in August 2014 is basically a result of actions by Kimberlin and his allies:

• Neal Rauhauser’s obsessive persistence in harassing various of his chosen enemies (including the defendants in Kimberlin’s lawsuits) continued to kindle resentment. The association between Kimberlin and Rauhauser is a proven fact, although the exact nature of their relationship remains mysterious. Because Rauhauser has used the word “client” to describe Kimberlin, it has been generally assumed that Neal was on Brett’s payroll somehow. Anyone hassled by Neal (who has boasted of his exploits as “iron Troll of the Year”) immediately wonders, “Who is paying Neal’s bills?” This casts a shadow of suspicion on Kimberlin.
• Bill Schmalfeldt made a nuisance of himself by harassing Lee Stranahan, the instigator of “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day.” John Hoge assisted Stranahan in trying to stop Schmalfeldt’s  harassment, which led to a war between Hoge  and Schmalfeldt. Given that Kimberlin was clearly supporting Schmalfeldt (hiring a lawyer for one of the Hoge-Schmalfeldt hearings), this helped keep alive interest in Kimberlin throughout 2013.
• In July 2013, Kimberlin went to court trying to get a protective order against his estranged wife, and tried to get criminal charges filed against his wife’s boyfriend Jay Elliott. Court proceedings are a matter of public record, so these actions — which were entirely Brett’s doing — created an entirely new “angle” on the story.
• In late August 2013, Kimberlin sued five of us in Maryland state court, then in October 2013, filed a federal lawsuit against about two dozen defendants.  These lawsuits are newsworthy in their own right, and therefore generated more attention to Kimberlin, none of it good for him.

So now Kimberlin has lost his state case and, based on what I’ve seen of the filings in the federal lawsuit, the judge is just waiting for the case to become “ripe” (as the lawyers say) before dismissing that hopeless mess of a pro se bungle. When that is done, Kimberlin will be 0-for-2 and the smart thing for him to do, as hunters say down home, would be to “call in the dogs and piss on the fire.”

Is he that smart? I don’t know. One of my posts that seemed to piss him off the worst was where I called him “evil,” describing Kimberlin’s sadistic appetite for vengeance. That’s a judgment based on studying and researching the guy, and I think anyone else would reach the same conclusion about him. Kimberlin cannot stand the sense of shame and humiliation he associates with failure. He obviously has a strong sense of self-righteousness, and seems to feel that he is so special that he should never fail at anything. (I blame this tendency on his mother, who obviously spoiled Brett as a child.) Therefore, when Brett does fail, he seems to fixate on “enemies” as the scapegoats for his failures, and seeks to avenge himself by attempting to destroy them. Or so I’ve deduced from observation.

Why not just let it go? Weigel captures a glimpse from the trial:

Once the proceedings had begun, it became very clear, very quickly, why Kimberlin was better off in court than in the wilds of the Internet. In a courtroom, he could control what was known about his past, and what a jury was allowed to consider. He could, theoretically, present himself as a model citizen who made a mistake while obscuring what the mistakes been.
But Kimberlin overreached early and often. The “pedophile” trolling from the blogosphere was based on a few distinct stories. One: Mark Singer’s book had made Kimberlin’s interest in one young girl look downright creepy. Two: A post-prison Kimberlin had written songs about sex with teenage girls, explaining to a reporter that “every guy who’s seen a good-looking teenage girl has thought about it.” Three: In 2013, as the blog war raged, Kimberlin’s wife filed charges against him, alleging that her husband had sex with her, before marriage, when she was 15 years old, and attempted to have sex with her 12-year old cousin.
In court, Kimberlin was both outraged at the “pedophile” claims and slippery about whether they were defamatory.
“Were you ever arrested for a sexual child abuse charge?” asked the judge at one point. “Did they say you were arrested for that?”
“They say I am a pedophile,” said Kimberlin.
“If you’re charged, it’s an arrest. Is that what they say?”
They had not said that. Kimberlin paused before repeating himself. “They say I am a pedophile.”
“My question is, do they say you were charged with being a pedophile? It’s not a hard question.”
“It kind of is,” said Kimberlin.
“If they say you are something you are not, that’s one thing,” said the judge. “If they say you were arrested, that’s another thing.”

You see that it was Kimberlin himself who turned this into the “Brett Kimberlin Pedophile Trial” — and he lost. Oops.

Read the whole thing at the Daily Beast.

 

“Brett Kimberlin is a pedophile.”
— Ali A. Akbar, Aug. 11, 2014

Aaron Walker is transcribing (Part I, Part II, Part III) this past week’s trial in the Maryland case Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., in which John Hoge, Ali Akbar and myself were co-defendants. Of all that he alleged in his original complaint — stalking, harassment, etc. — Brett Kimberlin seems to have decided that his case in court would focus almost exclusively on the use of the word “pedophile” to describe him.

This was rather unwise. Most of his claims had been disallowed in preliminary proceedings, so that the case as it went to court was simply defamation and so-called “false light invasion of privacy.” For Kimberlin to prevail at trial, he would have had to prove that allegations of pedophilia were false. And, as everyone who has read the Indianapolis Star‘s coverage of his Speedway bombing spree knows, the suspicions regarding Kimberlin’s involvement with Debbie Barton — granddaughter of Julia Scyphers, who was the victim of an unsolved murder — were quite disturbing. Nor was this all the available evidence on this subject. In his 1996 biography of Kimberlin, Citizen K, journalist Mark Singer used the pseudonym “Jessica” for Debbie Barton, as he recounted Kimberlin’s relationship with the girl:

From the beginning of his friendship with Sandi [Barton], Kimberlin said, her younger daughter developed an attachment to him. Sandi would come to Eagle Creek, to tend his horses and ride her own; Jessica would tag along, and “she used to hang on me, she didn’t want to let me go.” Jessica was ten years old and Kimberlin was twenty. . . .
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.” . . .

You can buy Citizen K via Amazon and read the whole thing for yourself, and you will find that Debbie Barton was not the only young girl in whom Brett Kimberlin expressed interest. There was another girl — 15 at the time of her “romance” with Kimberlin, then 24 — who figured in Kimberlin’s alibi for his whereabouts on the day in 1978 that Julia Scyphers was shot to death in an apparent contract killing. However, Debbie Barton was very important to the story of Kimberlin’s bombing spree because, as the Indianapolis Star’s Joe Gelarden reported at the time, after bombs began exploding around the Indianapolis suburb of Speedway, police eventually concluded that this was an attempt to distract them from their investigation of the Scyphers murder. Because she had reportedly intervened to prevent Kimberlin from having access to her granddaughter, Debbie Barton, Kimberlin was a suspect, as Gelarden wrote: “Kimberlin seemed to be the only one with a possible motive — to distract police attention from the Scyphers murder and delay or halt their quiet investigation of him.”

It is impossible for any journalist to report accurately on Kimberlin’s criminal career and ignore this aspect of the case, nor can any honest reporter ignore evidence suggesting that Kimberlin’s interest in underage girls was a persistent pattern. Toward the end of Citizen K, Mark Singer describes how, while in federal prison, Kimberlin met a fellow inmate who was a Ukrainian immigrant. This inmate had in his cell a photo of his teenage niece, Juliya. According to Singer, Kimberlin pestered this man for his niece’s mail address and, when he obtained it, Kimberlin then began a three-year pen-pal correspondence with the girl. After he was released from prison in 1994, Kimberlin brought this Ukrainian girl (by then in her early 20s) to America, where they had a relationship that broke up after a few months.

Think about this: Here was a federal convict whose crimes were reportedly believed by investigators to have been related to his interest in a young girl. While serving time in prison, now in his late 30s and early 40s, Kimberlin then begins writing love letters to a teenage girl he’s never met. Indeed, as Mark Singer reported, Kimberlin composed a song for this girl called “Waiting to Meet.” Furthermore, in a 1996 interview with Washington City Paper, when he was futilely pursuing a rock music career, Kimberlin seemed quite unapologetic about his sexual enthusiasm for young girls:

Not all the songs on his album — which Mahern characterizes as minimally produced and “pretty much Brett” — have political overtones, which in some respects may be unfortunate: While tracks like “Life’s a Bitch (For a Government Snitch)” and “Who’s Next” (a song about unfounded sex crime accusations) have a definite edge to them, others, like “Waiting to Meet” and “Teen Dream” (both about having sex with teenage girls) are lacking in subtlety and tend to make one squirm. But this is exactly what Kimberlin wants.
“I say things a lot of people are afraid to say. Yeah, ‘Teen Dream’ is about fucking a teenage girl. Every guy who’s seen a good-looking teenage girl has thought about it. I’m talking about that lecherous quality that every man, though he won’t act on it, has.”

Kimberlin was a 41-year-old recently released federal convict in 1996 when he proclaimed his desire to have sex with teenage girls. Insofar as he sued us for $1 million, claiming among other things that it was defamation to apply the word “pedophile” to him, any juror could have looked at this evidence — had the trial proceeded to the point where the defense presented its case — and decided whether such a label was appropriate. However, the law regarding defamation is quite clear that it is the plaintiff’s burden to show that a statement of fact by defendants is false; the defense need not prove any such statement true. It can be (and probably would have been) argued that someone who said “Brett Kimberlin is a pedophile” was merely expressing an opinion based on available facts. As a matter of law, then, it was impossible for Brett Kimberlin to prevail at trial. Once Kimberlin concluded his two-day courtroom presentation, the defense made a motion for a judgment in their favor, which Judge Johnson was obliged to grant.

@abbywaxenberg Brett Kimberlin is a Pedophile http://t.co/dxkOnwNQtL pic.twitter.com/TLnxRbkMeE @ACSpollen @AdamBaldwin @ElectionLawCtr

— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) July 30, 2013

Yet during the trial, which concluded before the defense could present the case I have just briefly summarized, the testimony and questioning during Kimberlin’s presentation brought up an important point: Kimberlin presented no evidence that any of the defendants had used the word “pedophile” to describe him prior to July 2013, when his estranged wife filed third-degree sexual assault charges against him.

Charges State v Kimberlin (Redacted) by himself2462

Kimberlin’s wife told John Hoge and Aaron Walker that Kimberlin met her on a beach in Ukraine when she was 14, shortly after his release from prison. As she later explained, Kimberlin brought her to the United States in September 1996, a few weeks before her 16th birthday. Kimberlin also brought over some of her family members from Ukraine, his wife said. As she said in her sworn affidavit, Kimberlin began having sex with her when she was still 15, before he subsequently married her when she was 16 and he was 42. Because the legal age of consent in Maryland is 16, the claim by Kimberlin’s wife that they had premarital sex when she was still 15 gave grounds for a charge of third-degree sexual assault. His wife also said in her affidavit that she had once seen Kimberlin make sexual advances toward her 12-year-old cousin.

This was made a matter of public record by Kimberlin’s estranged wife a few weeks after her split from him became public when Kimberlin filed for a domestic protective order against her, and also sought to have criminal charges filed against her boyfriend, Jay Elliott. This courtroom battle, which Kimberlin himself initiated, became the basis of my coverage, which was both newsworthy in its own right (given Kimberlin’s notoriety) and relevant to his prior criminal history. Furthermore, Kimberlin’s wife said he had threatened her, and had falsely claimed that she was mentally ill, so this story was a matter of public interest, insofar as the safety of a woman and her children might be at stake.

T. Kimberlin v. B. Kimberlin Petition for Protective Order 7.9.13 (OCR) by AaronWorthing

After an August 2013 hearing in Maryland in the Kimberlin v. Kimberlin proceedings, Mrs. Kimberlin was apparently discouraged. She reportedly decided against pressing the sexual assault charges, which were then dropped by the State’s Attorney. The last I heard — and this was hearsay, which would have been inadmissable at trial — Mrs. Kimberlin and her boyfriend Jay Elliott had left Maryland; some said she went to Illinois; others say she is now in Utah. During the trial, Kimberlin claimed his wife had returned home, although he produced no evidence of this, and even the judge asked why Kimberlin didn’t bring his wife to testify at the trial:

THE COURT: You know the witness you really need?
KIMBERLIN: Huh?
THE COURT: Is your wife here?
KIMBERLIN: She’s, she’s packing. We’re leaving on vacation tomorrow—
THE COURT: Is she gonna testify? See, that’s — if she were going to testify, that would be one thing, but a 15 year old?

None of the defendants ever expected that Brett Kimberlin would make this the basis of a $1 million lawsuit, and we were all shocked that this lawsuit — which seemed bogus from the start — was allowed to proceed all the way to trial after 11 months of preliminaries. The most shocking thing of all was that, during the trial, Kimberlin insisted on putting his own 15-year-old daughter on the witness stand. Aaron Walker transcribes the courtroom discussion:

Court: You… she’s not a party in this case.
Kimberlin: She’s not a party, she’s a witness.
Court: To what that they did?
Kimberlin: That they harmed me and my family and she’s, you know, I ask you to give me a chance to make that [unintelligible]
Court: But she can’t testify what? Her school and all? That is not relevant.
Kimberlin: She can testify that I’m not a pedophile. She can testify that…
Court: How can…? She can testify that you never did anything to her.
Kimberlin: Or anyone she knows.
Court: Or anyone that she knows.
[Defense attorney Patrick] Ostronic: I will stipulate that he never did anything to her. We’ll stipulate to that.
Kimberlin: No. I want her… I want the harm, there’s harm . . . these people . . . this jury needs to know the harm that this has caused my family.

Every decent person in the courtroom, I believe, was disgusted by Kimberlin’s insistence on compelling his daughter’s testimony. This was his choice, and not ours, and entirely his responsibility.

Please donate to BomberSuesBloggers.com to help defend First Amendment rights that were threatened by Brett Kimberlin.

 

“Brett Kimberlin is a pedophile,” Ali A. Akbar said Tuesday in Montgomery County Circuit Court, as he concluded his argument for dismissing the notorious bomber’s $1 million Maryland defamation lawsuit, Kimberlin v. Walker, et al. Forty-five minutes later, Judge Eric Johnson issued his ruling, finding in favor of the defendants: bloggers Aaron Walker and John Hoge, Akbar and me.

The two-day trial concluded without the defendants ever having to put on the case for our innocence. Kimberlin presented his case — calling all four defendants as witnesses, presenting examples of our writing and even putting his own 15-year-old daughter on the witness stand to testify she was never molested by her 59-year-old father. When the plaintiff rested his case, the defense moved for dismissal.

Attorney and free-speech advocate Ken White writes at Popehat:

After the close of Kimberlin’s day of “evidence,” the judge granted a motion for a directed verdict against him. Under Maryland law, that means the judge necessary found “a total failure of legally sufficient evidence to prove” Kimberlin’s remaining defamation claim. The judge didn’t just find Kimberlin’s evidence unpersuasive; he effectively found it irrelevant. . . .
Furthermore, even though the court ruled that Kimberlin could testify on his own behalf (despite a statute suggesting that people convicted of perjury may not), Kimberlin did not testify. Perhaps he was concerned about how testifying would expose him to a cross-examination that would lovingly recount his history of lawlessness, sociopathy, and crazed litigiousness. Perhaps he recognized the risk of a new perjury charge. Perhaps he realized that he would look ridiculous questioning himself. Perhaps he never planned to, and the purpose of this was always mere harassment. . . .
This result bodes well for Kimberlin’s remaining ludicrous and vexatious claims in federal court against a wide variety of people and institutions. The federal court will see the result and, no doubt, view Kimberlin with even more skepticism. The state ruling may have legal effect in the federal case — let’s let Brett Kimberlin discover why and how. And, most importantly, the trial shows that for all his braggadocio about having filed a hundred suits, Brett Kimberlin is too nutty and disorganized to do even a half-assed job in court. If only one could litigate by drug dealing, perjuring, and blowing the leg off innocent bystanders, he would have been an elite courtroom attorney.

Judge Johnson’s ruling Monday to let Kimberlin testify despite his 1973 perjury conviction (see chapter 7, pp. 46-50, of Kimberlin’s 1996 authorized biography, Citizen K) was the divine green light for Ali Akbar’s decision to go pro se, representing himself at the trial. Our highly competent attorney, F. Patrick Ostronic, had represented us pro bono since Kimberlin filed his meritless and vexatious suit nearly a year ago. Ostronic’s handling of pre-trial motions was as extraordinarily skillful as Kimberlin’s was inept. For example, Ostronic successfully argued that several of the allegations that Kimberlin made in his lawsuit — conspiracy, stalking, harassment, yadda, yadda, yadda — simply were not recognized as causes for civil claims under Maryland law. Stalking and harassment are crimes, not torts, and by suing us for these claims, Kimberlin was effectively attempting to appoint himself as prosecuting attorney, a role the infamous felon clearly covets for himself.

Any student of Christian theology knows that Satan is always the accuser, torturing us with the guilt of our sins, dishonestly attempting to convince us that our wickedness places us beyond the help of God’s grace. At the Day of Judgment, confronted by the infinite righteousness of God, we shall be unable to save ourselves from eternal destruction, except to claim the blood of Jesus as having atoned for our sins. Thus, to become a Christian requires first that we acknowledge what wretched sinners we are — “total human depravity,” in Calvinist doctrine, “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards so memorably phrased it — utterly helpless to deserve salvation by our own merit, and completely dependent on God’s mercy.

Jesus taught his disciples to pray that God’s will may be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” and there are times when divine providence is made so apparent by signs and wonders that the faithful may see the earthly path that God shows. So there was a lot of prayer Monday night, and it was as if God himself was telling Ali to go pro se. When Ali announced this decision in the courtroom, Judge Johnson called him, Ostronic and Kimberlin to the bench where, in a conference, the judge urged Ali to reconsider, and Kimberlin (himself proceeding as his own attorney) actually tried to argue that Ali shouldn’t be allowed to represent himself.

Bingo.

This is what poker players call a “tell.” Kimberlin’s haphazard and arguably unethical methods as a pro se plaintiff have been a weapon in his nearly four-year lawfare campaign against his critics, dating back to October 2010, when he sued Seth Allen and threatened to sue Patrick “Patterico” Frey and Mandy Nagy, writing in an e-mail to Patterico:

“I have filed over a hundred lawsuits and another
one will be no sweat for me. On the other hand,
it will cost you a lot of time and money . . .”

Judges don’t want to do anything prejudicial to a pro se litigant, which might allow him to appeal on the basis of perceived unfairness. In effect, this means that judges have seemed at times to bend over backward on Kimberlin’s behalf, cutting him breaks that a professional lawyer could never expect to get. No matter how dishonest and unethical he may be, as a pro se litigant, Kimberlin never has to worry about being disbarred. In some sense, then, a professional attorney is at a disadvantage against Kimberlin, who not only acquired vast experience as a “jailhouse lawyer” during his 17 years in federal prison, but is also absolutely shameless in the deceitful methods he employs while pursuing vexatious lawsuits to harass, discredit or intimidate his critics.

So when Ali Akbar announced he was going pro se,  Kimberlin became visibly agitated by the prospect of going up against a defendant who might be similarly uninhibited by legal niceties.

Ask yourself this: If Kimberlin had fought so hard to overcome the prohibition on testimony by convicted perjurers, why didn’t Kimberlin ever actually testify at the trial? Do you think that maybe Kimberlin feared cross-examination by the crafty Ali Akbar, who might ask questions to which Kimberlin — as both witness and lawyer — would be compelled to object, or plead the Fifth Amendment?

The verdict: The innocent defendants won, evil lost, and Brett Kimberlin has vowed to continue his litigious harassment:

Kimberlin tells me he’ll appeal, and that as far as the bloggers go there’ll be “endless lawsuits for the rest of their lives."

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) August 12, 2014

Trying to out-crazy Stacy McCain? Case dismissed! @instapundit

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) August 13, 2014

I love the smell of collateral estoppel in the morning. cc: @wjjhoge @ali @rsmccain @aaronworthing @BomberSues

— Stephen Sheiko (@stephensheiko) August 13, 2014

Crowdsourcing Justice: Help Get Brett Kimberlin Declared A Vexatious Litigant | via @Popehat http://t.co/D2gxZZqpNP #lawfare #legal

— Ali A. Akbar (@ali) August 13, 2014

Thinking about having the phrase "Res Judicata" tattooed on my ass. @stranahan @wjjhoge @patterico @instapundit

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) August 13, 2014

The trial transcript and audio will cost more than $900 — readers are urged to go to BomberSuesBloggers.com and chip in $10 or $20 to help defray that expense — so we’ll have to wait to get the official highlights of the trial, including my own “colorful” testimony, and Ali Akbar’s masterful arguments. (Hint: Ali was a champion debater and mock trial participant in high school.) But the bottom line is this: Brett Kimberlin lost, and lost badly, because lies can never ultimately prevail in battle against the truth, nor can evil ever hope to triumph where good men have courage and trust in that great Truth that is eternal and infinite.

To God be the glory. Selah.

 

Today in Rockville, Maryland, in the Circuit Court of Montgomery County, Aaron Walker, John Hoge, Ali Akbar and myself stand trial for defamation and false light invasion of privacy in the case of Kimberlin v. Walker, et al. This case originally included other claims (stalking, harassment, etc.) that were through out in the preliminaries, and I’m still astonished that the remaining claims were not also dismissed. At dinner last night, I kept repeating that word — “astonished” — to describe my feeling that the case is actually going to trial. Twenty-eight years in the news business without ever being accused of libel, and I get sued for defamation by a notorious bomber.

For a discussion of the issues in the case, see the item Ken White did when Kimberlin sued last September: “Help fight evil in Maryland.” You can help support free speech rights:

BomberSuesBloggers.com

Cynthia Yockey has kindly offered her prayers and suggestions.

Your prayers are earnestly requested, and please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

Today in Montgomery County Circuit Court, I watched convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin get away with lying about me, claiming that I had said and done things I have not done. Before the court was the defendants’ motion for summary judgment in the Maryland case Kimberlin v. Walker, et al. In the end, the judge denied the motion, so that we’re going to trial Monday.

This is madness, and the details will be discussed later. But long story short, I’ll spend the next four days preparing for trial. Your prayers are earnestly requested, and please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

UPDATE: John Hoge has more on the case at Hogewash.