That would be the ridiculous pursuit of a criminal case against Benito Acosta for raising a fuss at a City Council meeting when the mayor refused to allow him his full speaking time.
The criminal charge was rejected by county prosecutors before the city took it on and had its knuckles rapped by a county court, then in county and state appellate courts.
Running this out against steadily increasing odds was not only irresponsible by the city and the law firm representing it but may very likely have caused irreparable damage to the city’s position in the counter lawsuit filed by Acosta charging that the city had denied his right to free speech.
If this should end in a judgment against the city, we can look back on a long string of irresponsibility that started with the manner in which the meeting was conducted and was fueled by the city’s determination to keep flogging a horse that was long since dead. It could prove to be an expensive effort to justify an ego.
Chuck Cassity has offered Pilot readers another model of determination.
His mission is to show up those of us guilty of “cacophonous caterwauling” in suggesting that the United States should get off its butt and join the majority of our scientists and the rest of the world in efforts to check global warming while we still can.
Since Cassity and I arguing the reality of global warming is rather like two Little Leaguers debating how to pitch to Manny Ramirez, I would like to skip that debate here and nominate him, instead, as a role model in a form of argument refined and made famous for the past eight years by the administration of George W. Bush. This system is called Selective Facts, and it goes like this:
