Gawker is running a hit job on Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. If they had consulted with an attorney before running it, they would have learned that they are merely repeating a false accusation that was thrown out of court because the accuser’s own attorney had determined it was a complete fabrication.

Here are the highlights of Gawker’s breathless account:

In 2000, Scott Brown was a freshman state representative in Massachusetts. A few years earlier, he’d served on the Wrentham, Mass. Board of Selectmen. Jennifer Firth, a local mortgage banker who was elected to the Board of Selectmen in 1999, filed a civil defamation suit against Brown in July of 2000, alleging that he had harassed her when she worked on his campaign in 1998, and then tried to smear her reputation around town with forged letters and emails.

According to Firth’s complaint, Brown engaged in “offensive” conduct that caused her to quit his campaign; he then tried to “defame and humiliate” her by spreading rumors to her colleagues that she “had made sexual advances” towards him during his campaign. She also alleged that Brown told several people that he’d had an “intimate relationship” with her and that he had a stack of sexually explicit letters that Firth had sent him. In her suit, Firth says that she’d never been sexually intimate with Brown, nor did she ever send him the aforementioned letters. A 2000 article in the local paper, the Sun Chronicle reported that Brown had denied the charges; for her part, Firth said she felt that filing the suit was “the only way I could stop this.”

The case then took a strange turn. Two days after the lawsuit was filed, Jennifer Firth’s lawyer, Harvey Schwartz, filed a motion to withdraw as her counsel, saying that “to the best of [Schwartz's] knowledge, information and belief, the above allegations [by Firth] are not supported by ‘good grounds.’” The next day, Jennifer Firth withdrew her suit. It was dismissed with prejudice, which means it can never be re-filed. Brown told a local newspaper that her lawyer had decided to withdraw after he was presented with letters and e-mail messages that proved she’d been harassing Brown. The day after she dropped her suit, Firth claimed she’d done so because “her lawyer told her she was unlikely to win it.”

Allow me to translate some of the legal mumbo-jumbo. Firth’s attorney filed a motion to withdraw the case, and in that motion cited to Rule of Professional Conduct 3.3 (a copy of the motion is reprinted here).  RPC 3.3 deals with “candor towards the tribunal,” which is a nice way of saying what to do when you find out your client has committed fraud or perjury. By moving to withdraw and citing RPC 3.3, Firth’s lawyer was making what is known as a “noisy withdraw.” This is a coded way of sounding an alarm to the court that the lawyer has learned that the client is attempting to perpetrate a fraud on the court.

(more…)

From Yuval Levin:

Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it. Surely it’s time to start over.

The best sign that the Democrats don’t have the votes on Obamacare is that they are still dreaming up procedural maneuvers to pass it. The latest, as report by The Washington Examiner, is the suggestion that the House will use a vote on the “Rule” to “deem” the Senate version of Obamacare to have been passed. This option is being advocated by Louise “These-Dentures-Sure-Do-Hurt” Slaughter, the Chairman of the House Rules Committee.

The best explanation I’ve seen of this is over at NRO’s Corner blog from Daniel Foster. The whole thing is a must-read, but here is the gist of it:

[E]ach bill brought to the floor of the House is debated under its own “rule” setting the length and structure of debate, including which if any amendments can be considered. A given bill’s rule is created by the — you guessed it — Rules Committee and presented to the whole House for a simple majority vote prior to consideration of the bill itself. In this case, the Democrats would bring a “self-executing rule” to the floor that allowed for the adoption of the Senate bill when, and only when, the reconciliation sidecar is passed, thereby avoiding the need to bring the Senate bill to the floor for a separate up-or-down vote.

This procedure is nearly impossible to stop:

Unlike in the Senate, where individual Senators have broad discretion to steer debate and introduce amendments, the legislative process in the House is rigidly governed by the Rules Committee. This limits the Republicans’ options in fighting a self-executing rule for Obamacare. As one Republican House staffer put it to me today, “the Committee can do just about anything if they can get the votes to pass the rule.”

In case anyone was wondering how desperate the Dems are to pass the thing, here’s the proof.

If the Dems are going to ram this through at all costs—and I think that’s where we’re heading—I hope they do it this way. The use of reconciliation is unprecedented and unprincipled, as I explained here, but it has a certain empathic appeal. Dems can argue that they are simply letting the will of the majority prevail, which is always a powerful argument in a democratic-republic. But this is different. This is a pure act of political cowardice. They want to vote for the bill without actually voting for the bill. I think the Slaughter Solution will be a bigger rallying cry against the Democrats in November and 2012 than anything we’ve seen to date. Bring it on.

Now we know what really happened between Eric Massa and Rahm Emanuel in the shower:

On last night’s Red Eye from the mouth of Andy Levy:

“Dude, you’ve got to take a personal inventory. You’re getting thrown out of a curling match.”

Here’s a wonderful follow-up to yesterday’s spat between Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin over Eric “Tickle Me” Massa. Beck invited Malkin back on the show today just so that she could say, “I told you so.” Malkin, however, was incredibly gracious. Here’s the video:

Glenn is getting a ton of criticism on Twitter and elsewhere for tonight’s Massa debacle. In a sense, it’s deserved. I was skeptical of Massa, as were many other brighter lights. But here’s the bottom line: the show sucked, but Glenn admitted it and apologized for it—twice—before the show had even ended. That’s an example of class and honesty that deserves praise.