{"id":185672,"date":"2014-09-09T21:16:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T02:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/09\/09\/lamest-man-in-massachusetts-new-hampshire\/"},"modified":"2014-09-09T21:16:00","modified_gmt":"2014-09-10T02:16:00","slug":"lamest-man-in-massachusetts-new-hampshire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/09\/09\/lamest-man-in-massachusetts-new-hampshire\/","title":{"rendered":"Lamest Man in Massachusetts New Hampshire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Scott Brown, of course, who, after losing to Elizabeth Warren, went to work for a law and lobbying firm, got his tits in a bundle with Lawrence Lessig who put out a flyer that criticized Brown as a lobbyist.<\/p>\n<p>The Scott Brown campaign <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/xpress\/2014\/9\/7\/6117963\/scott-brown-lobbyist-lawrence-lessig\">sent a cease and desist letter to Lessig&#8217;s campaign finance reform PAC<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has attempted to revive his political career by running for Senate in New Hampshire. But in the final days before his September 9 primary, he&#8217;s squaring off against another opponent \u2014 Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, who advocates against money in politics. Lessig&#8217;s Mayday PAC endorsed Brown&#8217;s GOP primary challenger Jim Rubens, and is now sending out a mailer calling Brown a &#8220;Washington lobbyist.&#8221;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The mailer led to an angry response from the Brown campaign. &#8220;This is a flat-out lie. Scott Brown is not nor has he ever been a lobbyist. Ever,&#8221; campaign manager Colin Reed wrote, calling on Lessig to &#8220;immediately cease and desist with the mailer in question.&#8221;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In response, Lessig posted the letter on his blog, and linked to an article from The Hill about Brown joining the Boston office of &#8220;Nixon Peabody, a law and lobby firm.&#8221; The firm itself said Brown would work on &#8220;business and governmental affairs,&#8221; including those related to &#8220;the financial services industry.&#8221; Lessig writes:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Yes, according to the Senate, Scott Brown isn&#8217;t a &#8220;lobbyist.&#8221; But I submit to anyone else in the world, a former Senator joining a &#8220;law and lobbying firm&#8221; to help with Wall St&#8217;s &#8220;business and governmental affairs&#8221; is to make him a lobbyist. Because to anyone else in the world, when you sell your influence to affect &#8220;business and governmental affairs,&#8221; you are a lobbyist.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>You would think that a man who is a lawyer who has spent much of his life as a public figure would understand just what it means to be a public figure after <i><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan\">New York Times Co. v. Sullivan<\/a><\/i>, which required actual malice or a reckless disregard for the truth for libel and defamation suits.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, in the process of making this demand, the hapless former Cosmo centerfold has served to generate publicity for the flyer. <\/p>\n<p>See, &#8220;Streisand Effect, The&#8221;.&nbsp;  (Heh)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scott Brown, of course, who, after losing to Elizabeth Warren, went to work for a law and lobbying firm, got his tits in a bundle with Lawrence Lessig who put out a flyer that criticized Brown as a lobbyist. The Scott Brown campaign sent a cease and desist letter to Lessig&#8217;s campaign finance reform PAC: &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1051,972,978,1019,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-hypocrisy","category-justice","category-politics","category-schadenfreude","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}