Friday, July 28, 2006

Blog Wars: An Update

The battles between some conservative and liberal bloggers is continuing and may be moving to court.

Apparently, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom is pressing charges against leftist blogger Deb Frisch for making what appear to be threatening comments against his two year old son. (See my previous post on the Goldstein-Frish fight here.)

A person believed to be Deb Frisch continues to make profane and sexual references to Jeff's son in posts to his blog and to other blogs; the IP address traces to Eugene, Oregon where Deb now lives. Her comments have nothing to do with the topic at hand, e.g. baseball. Patterico's Pontifications has the details (hat tip Sara at Squiggler).

This week the conservative blog Seixon criticized an unhinged Lefty named Jason Leopold. Leopold runs a website, truthout.org, and is a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

Seixon blog says that Leopold has apparently retaliated for Seixon's criticisms with both death threats and forged emails alleged to be from Seixon, in which Seixon "threatens" to "blackmail" Leopold. Leopold has been posting the forged emails at ThinkProgress in an effort to discredit Seixon and paint its owner as a "threat." Seixon reprints and exposes the fraud in these emails at his website (follow "forged emails" link above).

According to the Volokh Conspiracy, Leopold wrote an article on Enron for ezine Salon Magazine which included several allegedly plagiarized paragraphs. The article was also heavily based on an email that Leopold claimed he received, but that Salon believed to have been fabricated (the alleged sender of the email denied ever speaking to Leopold). Salon then withdrew Leopold's article.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post said of Leopold:

Leopold says he engaged in "lying, cheating and backstabbing," is a former cocaine addict, served time for grand larceny, repeatedly tried to kill himself and has battled mental illness his whole life.

Apparently he's still battling the latter.

No comments: