Ah, Dear Readers,
Yes, I must be careful. Although I keep getting stopped everywhere by people offering me their good wishes I have scared the bejesus out of friend and foe alike. Thirty years of being a nice guy have been sorely tested over the past year by people for whom that bumper sticker “Mean people S***” was slapped on many a car.
A colleague of Supt. Dixon, the Superintendent of Two Harbors whose school district is suffering financially because of poorly thought out building programs, was the first. That was laughable but it was the first.
The second came from Ralph Doty. He practically begged Johnson Controls to sue me for libel in a column he had published in the Budgeteer three days before the last school board election so that I had no time to rebut it before voters went to the polls to cast their votes.
The most recent was a string of emails that demanded I grovel on this blog for forgiveness or else the Fryberger law firm who gave the Duluth School Board the legal opinion that no vote was necessary would represent an individual who would sue me for factual mistakes I made in a post.
This sort of treatment has pushed me well beyond the limits of my Minnesota Nice upbringing. Until this latest school board campaign is over with this is the rule of thumb I will adhere to:
I’ll reserve my hardest and most caustic comments for big shots, chronic liars and the like. I will accept criticism leveled at me from people whose genuine motivation is their children’s welfare with patience and my rebuttals will be tempered with fairness and objectivity.
But, because I am being subjected to the attention of a lot of well paid lawyers I’ll do my best to make corrections of anything I’ve posted in Lincolndemocrat that seems to be in error that rises above the level of triviality.
So to that end:
Blogger Fallibility Alert.
In the last post I said that the Board has passed a resolution forbidding another school board member from talking with any plaintiff suing the School District. That is not correct. The resolution forbids school board members from talking to the attorneys representing any plaintiff suing the District.
But this could be complicated. I’m a plaintiff without an attorney at the present. Plaintiffs without attorneys may become their own attorneys or “attorney’s pro se.” Does that mean I’m an attorney at the moment? Good Question. huh?
