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State to judge: Serial loser senate candidate's legal arguments are ridculous and he should feel ridiculous

We here at the UHub Legal Desk know that many of you are sick to death of reading our endless accounts of said candidate's repeated attempts to have a judge order Secretary of State Bill Galvin tossed into a volcano, almost as much as you're tired of reading about somebody suing over the lack of butter in some company's sticks of butter, but bear with us for just a couple moments longer.

Last week, in writing about how the candidate had been banned forever and ever amen by Twitter, we noted how he had filed Yet Another Very Legal Motion demanding a judge in Boston federal court hold off on ordering Galvin pushed into a volcano only long enough to immediately force Galvin to give Twitter a virtual wedgie until Twitter restores the Real Indian's Twitter account, and then personally declared the Father of Email the winner of the September Republican primary, rather than the alleged loser who was declared the winner.

Today, Galvin, by way of two assistant state attorneys general, filed his reply, which, in non-legal terms, is similar to the one given by that American general at the Battle of the Bulge: Nuts.

Of course, lawyers are rarely that economic with their words, so assistant AGs Adam Hornstine and Anne Sterman devoted 23 pages, including a one-page table of contents, to explaining just how wrong even a man with multiple degrees from MIT, albeit none of them in law, given that MIT doesn't have a law school, can be.

Plaintiff alleges, with no basis in fact, that Twitter deplatformed him because the Secretary's office supposedly asked Twitter to apply an algorithm to detect any instance in which he uttered a certain word. This is not true. Plaintiff's "theory" is not only ridiculous but also ignores the fact that "Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules," rules that are publicly available and which Plaintiff agreed to follow when he signed up for a Twitter account. A cursory review of Plaintiff's provocative Tweets over the past few months provides ample reason as to why Twitter may have decided to remove the Plaintiff's account: he cheered as insurrectionists violently stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, called COVID-19 death rates a hoax and spread unfounded conspiracies about forced vaccinations, and argued that elections in Massachusetts and elsewhere were rigged by way of doctored voting machines. These actions all violated Twitter's Terms of Use. Indeed, over the past few months, Twitter suspended Plaintiff temporarily at least three times, deleted Plaintiff's Tweets, and labeled a number of his Tweets as containing misinformation – all sanctions contemplated by Twitter's Terms of Use agreement and done of Twitter's own volition.

But Plaintiff does not accept personal blame for his antics that caused Twitter to remove him from its service for violating the Terms of Use agreement. Instead, he conjures a fact-free conspiracy theory that employees of the Secretary of the Commonwealth somehow forced Twitter to put one employee's name on an automated blacklist such that if Plaintiff ever spoke this name, a trapdoor would open and Plaintiff would be deplatformed. He offers no evidence in support of this conjecture but instead launches into an intensely personal attack against one of the Defendants. Plaintiff's theory is contradicted by all admissible evidence in the record. Since the last hearing in this case, the Secretary's office has not reported any of Plaintiff's myriad misconduct to Twitter or asked anyone else to report his Tweets. Nor has the Secretary's office ever asked Twitter to fashion a blacklist of forbidden words. Simply put, Plaintiff pushed the bounds of Twitter's Terms of Use, and Twitter, acting of its own volition, deplatformed him.

And that doesn't even include the discussions of how the judge can't force Twitter to do anything since it's not a party to the suit, how the First Amendment rights of both the Secretary of State (yes, Bill Galvin has First Amendment rights) and Twitter come into play and why the Eleventh Amendment might wish to have a word with the plaintiff, who ditched his lawyer a few months ago and his been rapid-filing his own motions ever since.

The next step is up to US District Court Judge Mark Wolf, who has to either schedule a hearing on the candidate's latest legal request, never mind his two pending lawsuits, or just say: Enough already.

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Comments

the DA's Office starts off a legal response by using the word 'ridiculous' in the third sentence.

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stew in his own juices, starved of the Twitter attention he so desperately craves, just like his mango-tinged, similarly fascist abomination of a hero.

Enjoy obscurity and irrelevance, you ridiculous fraud. You worked hard to earn both.

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Two lawyers on the AG's staff had to spend time writing and filing a 23-page argument against the idiot's foolish lawsuit. We paid for that. Personally, I would prefer that the courts enjoin the idiot from any further waste of their time, as amusing as such waste may be.

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I too understand that our tax dollars pay those that we employ with our tax dollars, but if they are on the payroll, and not external counsel, we're paying them regardless, and responding to legal action on our behalf (*we* are being sued by Shiva, through our government of, for, and by the people) is their job.

Besides, it's not just the public sector where lawyers are being assigned stupid work. My private employer sent an $800 contract I needed approved through legal review because rules and stuff. That lawyer time certainly was worth more than the contract they were reviewing.

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They are not spending time on cases that actually deserve their time and attention. Just because state attorneys don’t get paid “extra” for this, does mean there is no cost. The taxpayer loses their work on something valuable.

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this kind of dangerous anti-reality in the cradle, lest its ability to thrive inspire other cranks, loons, and educated, anti-social psychos like The Brownshirt Who Shall Not Be Named to press similar hopeless but resource-sapping suits in the future.

Patch the hole in the dike now, or bear the cost of recovering from an eventual deluge of hateful, cracked, self-absorbed dumbfuckery later.

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But I'm afraid that ship has sailed sunk. 40 years of Republican lies, as endorsed by Irving Kristol, his son William, and many, many other prominent Republicans, and loudly trumpeted by their organ Fox News, have utterly devalued truth and reality in the public sphere. The time to take a strong stand was many years ago, and the failure to do it has brought us to today, when a mob of millions of benighted souls unquestioningly supports a fascist ideologue. How bad is it? Witness the Republican senators who refuse to acknowledge that Trump's incitement to riot was beyond the pale. If he escapes impeachment yet again, we can expect continuing assaults on Democracy.

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To be fair, I bet the AG staff had fun with this one and didn't have to work too hard. Probably felt good to unleash the snark for a bit.

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they won an office pool.

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Was omitting his name from this article a question of writing style, since the quotes from the AG's office didn't use it either, or an attempt at damnatio memoriae?

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His name is preserved in a tag at the bottom of the story. I just wanted to see if I could write about a guy I seem to write about a lot without using his name. I figured at this point, everybody who actually calls up the story would know exactly who I mean.

As for the state's brief, interesting, I hadn't noticed that (in their case, his name is preserved at the very top of the document).

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Magoo wants the truth. But Magoo can’t handle the truth. Magoo submits Rule 12b6 motion to dismiss. Magoo.

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There will be a Magoo defense to complement the Chewbacca defense.

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As a long-time Uhub reader and contributing account holder, I never tire of reading about consumer court cases, Dr. EMAIL, or a certain house owned by a man in Sudbury. If anything, those stories are what make visiting Uhub so enjoyable.

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You can almost honestly, truly say that THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA NEVER EVER COVERS THIS.

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CAPS ARE FOR WEATHER

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!!!!!!1!!!11!!!!1!!!!!!

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C-SPAN TRANSCRIPTS TOO...

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Didn't that house get sold FINALLY?

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The court-appointed receiver fixed it up, sold it to, I think, a developer, who in turn sold off the house. The receiver subtracted the costs of the repairs and his fees and the old owner got the rest.

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I don't see how that applies, since the plaintiff is suing his own state, not a different state, in federal court.

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The 11th protects states from being sued by citizens in federal court. It is a state matter and if he would like to sue the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he would need to do that within the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth.

https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/a...

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It also comes into play because the good non-medical doctor is seeking monetary damages, even if not quite the $1 billion+ he originally sought and even if the judge already told him the amendment prohibits the awarding of monetary damages against state officials performing their jobs.

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Auntiffa and the left....

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is actually short for Auntie Fabulous, the family nickname for my Aunt Fanny. She gets into a lot of trouble, of course, but it’s good trouble. She always wins people over in the end. She amazes them into submission.

She does wear black on occasion, but it’s just to let people know that she’s suffering a little from the after effects of the previous evening’s adventures, and is not to be spoken to before noon.

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If she the one that I've never met but always sends a card at Christmas?

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Me thinks.

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Until the part where you said Bill Galvin has rights.

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