Frivolous Lawsuit Filed Against Sarah Palin, AP Fails Reporting Story

Last Tuesday, a man by the name of Chip Thoma filed a lawsuit against Governor Palin over an alleged "traffic conspiracy." Yes, you read that right... If you're thinking this sounds like some sort of ridiculous frivolous complaint, you would be correct. Mr. Thoma isn't new to Governor Palin, nor is he new to filing frivolous claims against Alaskan Governors. However, you wouldn't know much about this case if you got all of your news from the Associated Press.

Becky Bohrer, the AP writer who covered the story, not only posted her story with an embarrassing grammatical error, but she also omitted key details from her report. She wrote:

An activist is suing Sarah Palin for at least $100,000, claiming she undertook a campaign to "punish, embarrass, discredit and silence" him while she was Alaska's governor.

Palin's attorney, John Tiemessen, called the complaint frivolous and said it was filed "merely for the purpose of harassment."

"The governor's actions and statements regarding this matter are a matter of public record and governed by the long standing doctrine of executive immunity from tort claims," he said in an email late Friday. "Like all of the other harassing complaints against the governor, we anticipate that Mr. Thoma's will be quickly and summarily dismissed."

Thoma's attorney, James McGowan, said Thoma complained about tour bus traffic on the narrow, windy [sic] streets around the governor's mansion. McGowan said Thoma, whom he described as a "Palin fan" at the time, sent tour operators fliers to try to encourage them to change the routes. He said Thoma also helped neighbors create yard signs against what Thoma considered the noise, pollution and congestion caused by the buses.

I think Chip Thoma was as much of a "Palin fan" as I am an Obama supporter. Of course, I'm not sure what Mr. Thoma's voting eligibility status is after his cocaine conviction and receiving numerous DWI's.

This all started back in May of 2009, when Chip Thoma started publicly protesting tourists visiting Juneau and the buses that drove them around the city. He claimed that Governor Palin attracted "voyeurism" due to her "notoriety," in an interview he gave to the Anchorage Daily News shortly after he sent letters to tour bus operators and started placing signs that read "Stop Local Tours" around the area of the governor's mansion. Palin offered to meet with Thoma to see if they could work something out, but he declined the meeting. She then delivered a written statement in which she welcomed the tourists and said she "can't imagine other areas of Alaska looking at having the Governor's house nearby as a degrading irritation that invites voyeurism."

The current complaint from Thoma was filed as an intentional tort, meaning that he believes she caused him some sort of harm by speaking about his efforts to curb tourism to the city. Governor Palin was completely within the bounds of the law, and also her duty to speak publicly about someone who was attacking one the state's largest industry's.

As Palin's attorney stated in the AP article, this case will be throw out, just as the case Chip Thoma filed against former Alaska Governor, Walter Hickel in 1997. The case of Thoma vs. Hickel is a key detail left out of Becky Bohrer's report. Considering the complaint is of the same nature, and directed at the same seat of government, one would think this would be a relevant item to the current story.

Walter Hickel was accused of engaging in a "smear campaign" against Chip Thoma after Thoma began a recall effort against the governor. The Sierra Club joined Mr. Thoma in his effort to get Governor Hickel out of office. When Hickel's office wrote the Sierra Club asking them why would they align themselves with a convicted felon and a serial drunk driver, Thoma cried foul over the disclosure of such information. Everything Hickel's office state in their letter was a matter of public record. And as was the case in 2009, "under Alaska law, public officials in the executive departments of government have either absolute or qualified immunity from tort suits." The court ruled against Thoma in this case stating:

The court holds in Part II that Hickel is entitled to qualified immunity from this suit because Thoma failed to assert a valid claim under 42 U.S.C. 1983, concluding that a 1983 claim does not reach retaliation by speech because imposition of § 1983 liability would have a chilling effect on expression protected by the First Amendment.

The court concludes that imposition of 1983 liability on a public official who “responds in kind” to protected speech critical of the official would not be consistent with the First Amendment:

Making public officials civilly liable for retaliatory speech would, in essence, convert the First Amendment model of an interchange into a one-way street. As we believe this would be fundamentally inconsistent with the values protected by the First Amendment, we conclude that no valid claim of retaliation has been asserted by Thoma.

Not only did Wally Hickel win the verdict, he was also awarded $77,865.50 in attorney's fees. You would think that Chip Thoma would have learned his lesson on tort laws during his experience with Governor Hickel, but it's clear that he did not. He clearly found an attorney who is willing to take his case on against Governor Palin, perhaps someone seeking some "notoriety" of their own.

Americans are sick of these sort of frivolous cases that so abuse our justice system. These things cost taxpayers money and place an unnecessary burden on to the public. We are equally tired of the shoddy reporting from the likes of the Associated Press. When they aren't distorting and spinning facts to fit their world-view, they are disregarding key elements in stories such as this. Whether their lackluster performance at their duties are ideologically driven, or rooted in old-fashion laziness, is hard to say. The silver-lining here is that while we may be fed up with the current state of journalism, we also have other sources for information gathering available to us. Use your search engines wisely.

The Strategy of the Media's Bias

The Associated Press and Politico found it necessary to report Bristol Palin's honest wages to the broad public, via their respective front page. Whether their reporting was honest, is another matter. It's hard to tell considering that Rachel D'Oro (a name longtime C4P readers are familiar with), author of the first MSM piece, used the Trig Truther freaks at "Palingates" as a source. Using terms like "rakes it in" and getting a "payout," these so-called "news" articles are clearly designed to sell a narrative that the media has been pushing about Bristol's mother for a long time. There is nothing wrong with what Bristol did for the foundation she worked for. This "story" belongs nowhere near a front page, much less a news publication. It isn't a story, it's one young woman's life. Running this piece, with vile conspiracy theorists as the source, is disgraceful behavior by an already close to illegitimate press.

Kelsey has more on Bristol here.

For many years I believed that the media had a blanket left-wing bias towards all Conservatives. It has been proven lately that there is more of a strategy at play, in regards to what the media reports and what they don't, versus knee-jerk ideology. Take for instance this story that popped up a few days ago on Mother Jones:

Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid.

In 2007, during Huckabee's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, the issue of the eradicated hard drives surfaced briefly, but it was never fully examined, and key questions remain. Why had Huckabee gone to such great lengths to wipe out his own records? What ever happened to a backup collection that was provided to a Huckabee aide?

Huckabee is now considering another presidential run, and if he does enter the race, he would do so as a frontrunner. Which would make the case of the missing records all the more significant. These records would shed light on Huckabee's governorship—and could provide insight into how a President Huckabee might run the country. Meanwhile, observers of Arkansas' political scene—including one of Huckabee's former GOP allies—say the episode is characteristic of a politician who was distrustful and secretive by nature.

A truly fascinating piece of information, especially for a "GOP front-runner," is it not? Yet, there were no corresponding stories from AP and the only thing Politico had on it was a link buried on Ben Smith's blog page. Why didn't the media cover this? Doesn't the public have a right to know what kind of behavior a potential candidate for the presidency took part in? Can you imagine if Governor Palin ever would have done such a thing? I would bet every dollar I have ever made, and ever will make, that that story wouldn't be buried in a link in the blog section. It would be Top Story news, in every media publication, and on every network.

Speaking of 'what ifs'... What if Governor Palin had said this:

Bachmann, who's flirting with a presidential run, was in the early-primary state of Iowa last week for the Rediscover God in America conference. Bachmann was born in Iowa, as she told the crowd. But she couldn't leave it at just being an ordinary Iowan:

"I'm actually even more than just an Iowan," she told her audience. "I'm a seventh-generation Iowan. Our family goes back to the 1850s, to the first pioneers that came to Iowa from Sognfjord, Norway."

[...]

Unfortunately, the story doesn't hold water, as researcher Chris Rodda ably points out at OpEdNews.

"I was watching her speech, and it was when she said that she was a seventh-generation Iowan that I knew something was wrong," Rodda tells City Pages. "She's in her fifties--there's no way there could be seven generations between her and ancestors in the 1850s."

So Rodda, who has a background in genealogical research, decided to do a little digging. Without too much trouble, she found that Bachmann is actually a fourth-generation American, not seventh, as she claimed. And that's just the start.

Bachmann's immigrant ancestors didn't make a pilgrimage straight to the promised land of Iowa. From Quebec, they went to Wisconsin. That's where the 1860 census found them. From there, they moved to the Dakota Territory.

Bachmann claims that her people "kept going, and they persevered" through floods and crippling winters. Well, kind of. After enduring those trials in the unforgiving Dakota Territory, they actually turned tail and retreated to the relative ease and safety of...Iowa.

"Okay," Bachmann apologists may be saying at this point, "but history is hard and stuff! Maybe this was just an honest mistake."

Not a chance, Rodda says.

"The only historical sources where she could have found some of the details of her story--like the 13-week ocean passage--also clearly show that her family went to Wisconsin, not Iowa," Rodda says. "She couldn't have known those things without knowing that the whole premise of her speech was a lie."

You really can't blame Bachmann for that though. Tuesday night on O'Reilly, she stated (4:32 mark) that she just reads whatever is on the teleprompter. She also indicated during the interview that she isn't "afraid" of media attacks on her. After the mainstream media let a whole speech full of pandering distortions, slide on by without mere mention, I wouldn't be afraid if I were Bachmann either. At least, not at this point.

I think my Twitter buddy, Val said it best today:

Liberals & Dems SHOULD fear @SarahPalinUSA in 2012, b/c she is thee ONLY candidate who will NOT have an October surprise!

Clearly that has a lot to do with the strategy being implemented by the media, in this pre-primary season.

Here we have three possible contenders for the GOP nomination in the upcoming presidential election of 2012. While all three claim the mantle of "Conservative," one is treated very differently than the others. The reason for this is something I eluded to in my last blog post. The media and the left will promote and omit news that will help them in the long-run. For Governor Palin, there will be no "October surprise." Every little detail of her life is already out in the open. She would be the most intensely scrutinized candidate in our nation's history. With the other two possible candidates, that is simply not the case.

Let's face it, the other two Republicans here don't have the same name recognition as Governor Palin. Huckabee has been largely unscrutinized for years, and most people outside the world of politics, don't know who Michele Bachmann is. Governor Palin and her family are recognizable faces to rake over the coals.

With Governor Palin, the leftist media is forced to throw everything at her, as soon as they can. They do whatever they can think of to try and damage her in any way possible. With the others, they can afford to wait. This is after all, a strategy with the re-election of Obama in mind. The left, and their partners in the press know what's at stake. They don't want to face Governor Palin in a general election, but the others look like walk in the park in comparison. They will save their bias and garbage reporting for a more strategically significant date. At the right time, they will unload all the information they held from the public on these candidates, given the opportunity. Let's not give it to them.

The AP's Blatantly Biased Haiti Coverage

The Associated Press provided another example as to why the media cannot be trusted to cover anything Governor Palin does fairly. AP "reporter" Jonathan Katz, wrote an article about the governor's recent trip to Haiti with Franklin Graham and Samaritan's Purse. Katz opens his article by saying:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin began a tightly stage-managed visit to Haiti on Saturday in which she visited cholera clinics while avoiding crowds and the press.

"Stage-managed" eh? As to imply that this is just some sort of staged political photo-op, no doubt. It wasn't, but regardless it is not Jonathan Katz' job as an AP reporter to make that assumption in the first place.

He then goes on to say (emphasis mine):

Palin, who traveled in part by helicopter, provided access on her tour solely to the U.S. cable network Fox News.

Graham's organization, Samaritan's Purse, refused to discuss Palin's itinerary with other media and asked Haitian and American reporters to leave its compounds, citing a "security lockdown."

It should be noted that Greta Van Susteren was asked by Franklin Graham (this is not the first time Greta has accompanied Graham on an overseas trip) to come to Haiti, it wasn't Governor Palin who set that up.

Rebecca Mansour weighed in on Twitter to say:

Jonathan Katz of the Associated Press is a liar. He knows very well that Samaritan's Purse was in charge of press in Haiti, not Gov. Palin.

Also

I told him myself repeatedly. He also knows very well that for security reasons, Samaritan's Purse did not want to release their itinerary.

Katz and others in the media seem to be saying two different things in their articles about Governor Palin's trip to Haiti. They imply it was a photo-op on one hand, then complain about a lack of access on the other. So which is it? I gather this is just more, 'throw the kitchen sink' at Governor Palin to see what sticks.

Jonathan Katz then writes:

Associated Press television journalists saw Palin talking with foreign aid workers. She wore cargo pants, a T-shirt and designer sunglasses on her first trip outside the United States since speaking to investors in Hong Kong last year. That speech was also closed to the media.

Why is JonathanKatz reporting on Governor's Palin's wardrobe? The last time I checked, Katz wasn't a fashion reporter. Who cares what Governor Palin wore on a humanitarian mission? Some might say that it was sexist of Katz to include that in his article. I'll leave that up to readers to decide for themselves.

By the way, as Ian noted earlier, Governor Palin and Franklin Graham held a press conference on Sunday in Haiti from the Samaritan's Purse camp. So, no this trip was not closed to the media. You can see a photo from that presser here.

Update: I was just reminded that the Hong Kong speech was not closed to the media. Katz was wrong about that as well. The Wall Street Journal covered the Hong Kong event here.