THE SUNDAY NIGHT MASSACRE: THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND THE DIVISIVE HATE GROUP Sunday night, David Madore banned members of this Facebook group in wholesale terms from commenting on his county Facebook profile. He set that Facebook profile up as an individual, but he has since made it his conduit for two-way communication with constituents on county business and accesses it on County time from county computers or using the countys Internet servers. His Sunday night actions are reminiscent of Richard Nixons Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon dismissed the Special Prosecutor investigating Watergate, after both the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General resigned rather than issue the order firing the prosecutor. Here, we have the wholesale exclusion of a group from access to its public servant simply on the grounds of membership in the group. remember, according to Madore, were the bosses - but only situationally. All bosses are equal, but some bosses are more equal than others.Our group has a right of exclusive membership (minimally exercised; explained below) as we are a private group, but a government official does not have a right to discriminate in terms of who can voice dissent or approbation, and who cannot; who has access to a channel of government communication and who does not. Its equivalent to saying, throw away all the e-mails or letters from this group of people, unopened. No can do. It would be abridging Freedom of Speech, as well as destruction of Public Records. THE FIRST AMENDMENT After his wholesale ban was completed, Madore claimed he was asserting his First Amendment rights. Madores claim shows his ignorance of the U.S. Constitution and what it means. The First Amendment protects individuals from being silenced or censored by the government. It has nothing to do with individual to individual speech. On the contrary, he is government as it affirms on his page, and he is suppressing the free speech of constituents who are trying to address him on his official county page. He has labeled the page repeatedly County Update - Madore. A government page can spell out bad behavior - profanity and obscenity, denigration of others - and uniformly limit such content, but here you have capricious application of standards. The limits are meant to be very restrictive, and apply to the content, not the commenter. The Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission has advised elected officials there: you can’t remove negative comments from your official blog or Facebook site unless they’re “obscene, profane, libelous or defamatory. The idea of restricting an entire group simply on the basis of membership in that group is abhorrent to any interpretation of free speech. Madore is the government and is therefor the one the First Amendment prohibits from abridging free speech. The First Amendment, and similar protections in the Washington Constitution, protect us from him - not him from us. He needs to start figuring that out. DIVISIVE HATE GROUP Besides claiming he was asserting his First Amendment rights, Madore claimed he was rejecting all members of divisive hate groups. The idea of calling us a hate group is clearly borrowed from bloggers Kelly Hinton and Lew Waters and is beyond insane, as there are no examples of hate speech to be found here. No one much pays attention to these two bloggers venomous rants, except each other, and now David Madore. Hinton and Waters comment on each others blogs and feed each others egos in sort of a mental version of the circle jerk that Carolyn Crain [the other frequent commenter on Lews blog] alluded to at Vancouver City Council, not long ago; without each other, theyd both be mostly talking to the wind. blogs.columbian/all-politics-is-local/an-uncomfortable-and-inaccurate-choice-of-words/ Hintons the guy who called us scum and slimy worms on Madores page. He resents us so inordinately much that he calls us a divisive hate group and David Madore, in his clouded judgment, obviously thinks that is a pretty cool trick. The Columbian has written extensively about Hintons political dirty tricks, ethical lapses, and why he is banned on their forums. columbian/.../who-man-wearing-american-flag/ columbian/.../18/we-blew-it-mcclued-letters/ columbian/.../mystery-surrounds.../ blogs.columbian/politica.../2010/07/28/blog-wars/ columbian/.../jul/31/guilt-by-association/ columbian/.../2010/aug/07/kicked-to-the-curb/ Hinton pedals hate on his blog [Clark County Politics]. He has written how he despises us and our ilk (favorite term); how he hates scum like us; expressions of hate that you simply dont find in our posts and comments. clarkcountypolitics.blogspot/2014/06/answering-melissa-smiths-camas-city.html (I dont encourage anyone to check out this link, but it verifies his expressions of hate towards our membership - NSFW) Only rarely have I seen anyone here refer to others as part of a group and then generalize about the group, even then the generalization never extended to a hateful remark except a rare couple of times long ago, and then I or another administrator removed the offending remark. This kind of attack is the meat and potatoes of both Hintons and Lew Waters blogs. We are open, but we are minimally discriminatory: we are NOT the government and have privileges of private association. With 500 members, we clearly dont discriminate based on race, religion, gender, orientation, age, party affiliation, or philosophical persuasion. We are Republican, Independent, Democrat, Libertarian, conservative, and progressive, agnostics, atheists, and true believers. We do value peoples time and have excluded a limited number of people (3-4: Hinton, Waters, Dean) who have a history of hijacking threads, over-contributing and consuming all the oxygen, defamatory comments or personal slurs, or the above-noted attacks by generalization: the characteristic of lumping people into categories and then making wild generalizations about the category: your ilk [theres that term again] or your sort always lie. Add Madores new slur, you are all haters and divisive as another rash generalization. And another example of this kind of unsupported generalization is this Lew Waters blog post which equates our membership to brown shirts, claims we are a front for the Democratic Party, and lumps us, Democrats, and Lou Brancaccio, as all part of some conspiracy to make the lives of conservatives [who happen to represent many active members of this group] miserable: lewwaters/.../will-the-hate-from-the-left.../ These blogs have minuscule importance...note the very limited self-reinforcing group that comments. Their writers are excluded from this group because of their wide-spread abuse of inflammatory language, hostitlity, or disregard of ethics. Their only significance here is that these jaundiced commentators to themselves are Madores source for his misguided characterization of our group; a monumental lapse in judgment. That Madore has adopted this low-information, incompetent characterization of our group, and then initiated a blanket ban on all group members is, I think, a clear indication of the further deterioration of his judgment, never exceptional from the start, but which now seems to be descending to some kind of mental fiery hell. David Madore - judgment expired. Only his term of office survives.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 08:39:56 +0000
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