Friday, February 16, 2007

NOW who's kvetching??

Due to a mixture of being busy and being lazy, it's been a long time since I last posted here. I wonder if anyone still visits. What prompted me to come out of my hibernation was an IM from my old blogging friend, Orthomom - who it seems is being sued.

Via the NY Daily News:
FLOGGED ON BLOG, SHE'S SEEKING ID

A LAWRENCE school board member fed up with anonymous kvetching about her on a blog is going to court to stop it from calling her a bigot and an anti-Semite.

Pamela Greenbaum, who serves on the Nassau town's board of education, filed papers against Google over nasty comments posted about her on the Orthomom blog.

In the papers filed Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court, Greenbaum said she was "horrified" to discover that she had been labeled a bigot on the Google-owned blog after voting against using public funds for what she called "private school interests."

"I was even more horrified when I discovered the blog reported over 300,000 visitors," Greenbaum said in court papers.

Greenbaum alleges that Orthomom - which focuses on issues of interest to Long Island's Orthodox Jewish communities - slandered her by calling her ugly and an anti-Semite.

Greenbaum, who is Jewish but not Orthodox, seeks to unmask the blogger known only as Orthomom.

"Every day that the defamatory material remains on the Internet for all to see, I continue to be harmed as more such material is posted,"she said in court papers.
Now, as the many people who visit Orthomom know, she writes a lot about local issues affecting the community she lives in, with a large focus on the always-exciting local school board politics.
Well, apparently, Pamela Greenbaum's service on board has not given her the thick skin needed to survive in the political arena. For crying out loud, Asher Mansdorff had protesters picketing outside his dental office!! Politics a dirty game and if you're not prepared to take some heckling and name calling, go back to gardening.

Commenters on Orthomom's blog tend to vilify both end of the spectrum - and that's exactly the point. A blogger posts a news item, an inside tidbit, an opinion and it's up to the reading public to hash it all out and express their opinions. Is Pamela Greenbuam a bigot? Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know her and have no idea, but I'm smart enough to know that if some anonymous commenter called her one, not to think much of it.

I think Pamela made a big boo boo with this one and probably realizes it by now. Too bad . By now, many, many people who didn't read the comment on OM's post (I didn't until now- and I'm a frequent reader of OM) have now.

As I see it, the only person who loses here is Pamela Greenbaum, and only person who wins is Orthomom. Oh, and free speech.