Klayman v. #Facebook has now ended in a knock-out #legal victory for the social media giant.

In a 12-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton has dismissed a $1 billion, or so, lawsuit filed by former Judicial Watch head and current Freedom Watch chairman Larry Klayman. Mr. Klayman, who files many lawsuits, had accused Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg of "assault and negligence" for having allowed the posting of a page for the "Third Palestinian Intifada." The organization, or whatever it was, used its Facebook page to call for "an uprising beginning on May 15, 2011, after Muslim prayers [were] completed, announcing and threatening that ‘Judgment Day will be brought upon us only once Muslims have killed all the Jews.’”

Facebook initially refused to take the page down, but finally did so, Klayman argued, "begrudgingly."

Judge Walton concluded that Facebook was not an "information content provider" and hence was not responsible for the noxious posting. The Communications Decency Act of 1996, Walton noted, "immunizes internet computer service providers from liability for the publication of information or speech originating from third parties."

A long-shot lawsuit challenging the #Senate #filibuster rules has been tossed out by a federal judge.

In a 47-page ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan acknowledged that the "filibuster rule is an important and controversial issue...as in recent years, even the mere threat of a filibuster is powerful enough to completely forestall legislative action."

Nonetheless, as could have been predicted, Sullivan added that "this court finds itself powerless to address this issue for two independent reasons."

Specifically, Sullivan concluded the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue, and he cited as well his assessment that "to intrude into this area would offend the separation of powers on which the Constitution rests." The judge reasoned:

"Reaching the merits of this case would require an invasion into internal Senate processes at the heart of the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives as a House of Congress, and would thus express a lack of respect for the Senate as a coordinate branch of government."

Common Cause filed the lawsuit on behalf of itself, several members of the House of Representatives and three indivudals who said they would have benefited from the so-called DREAM Act had it not been blocked by the filibuster. Erika Andiola, Celso Mireles, and Caesar Vargas, who were born in Mexico and now live in the United States, said the stalled legislation could have helped them attain legal U.S. status.

The lawsuit claimed that the filibuster, which among other things requires a vote of 60 senators to proceed with or close debate on bills, is unconstitutional because it is “inconsistent with the principle of majority rule."

In part, Sullivan observed that the plaintiffs "failed to demonstrate" that the DREAM Act immigration bill, as well as a campaign finance reform bill, would have passed if it weren't for the filibuster.

A #FOIA lawsuit by an enterprising #journalist has shed light on an extensive Pentagon investigation into misconduct allegations against a Navy captain.

Responding to a FOIA request filed by reporter William McMichael, the U.S. Strategic Command had refused to either confirm or deny it even had records concerning an Office of Inspector General investigation into the allegedly abusive command climate created by Capt. William Power. Power served as director of logistics for the U.S. Strategic Command between October 2008 and March 2010.

But in an 11-page decision, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer said Pentagon officials were wrong to simply blow off McMichael's request. Stated Collyer:

"Mr. McMichael’s asserted public interest is significant and...the information he seeks is likely to advance this interest....balancing Captain Power’s diminished expectation of privacy against the public’s interest in knowing whether the IG investigated allegations of misconduct, it must be concluded that the public interest prevails."

While the report is still not public, officials will have to perform a more careful analysis to see what could be released. There's certainly a lot of paper there. Through McMichael's reporting, Collyer recounted that one "USSTRATCOM employee reported that the investigation generated over 1,000 pages of testimony" and that "a different USSTRATCOM employee informed Mr. McMichael that the investigation included an estimated 30 witnesses and lasted more than eight months but closed with no action taken."

McMichael was with Navy Times at the time of his 2011 request; he is now with the News Journal in Wilmington, Del.

#Justice Department #OIG investigators have found problems in the way officials handled the clemency bid of Clarence Aaron, a first-time drug offender whose case drew sharp media scrutiny.

In a 32-page report issued Tuesday, the investigators found that Pardon Attorney Ronald Rodgers "did not accurately represent the U.S Attorney’s views regarding Aaron’s commutation petition" and "used ambiguous language that risked misleading the White House Counsel’s Office about the sentencing judge’s position on Aaron’s petition."

The OIG audit followed on the exemplary investigative reporting of the Washington Post and ProPublica's Dafna Linzer.

As summed up in the new report, Aaron was convicted in 1993 of several criminal charges relating to a large cocaine deal. He was sentenced to three concurrent life terms in prison. In 2001, Aaron submitted a clemency petition. In 2007, however, the White House requested that the Department of Justice reconsider Aaron’s still-pending commutation petition.

Rather than prepare a new memo, Rodgers received permission to send an e-mail supplementing the earlier denial recommendation. The OIG investigators, after going into considerable detail, concluded that:

"The primary responsibility for the inaccuracies and ambiguity contained in the e-mail that was sent to the White House ultimately lies with Rodgers...nevertheless, we believe that the Office of the Deputy Attorney General shares some responsibility for this error" because of a failure to edit carefully.

Rodgers, a decorated former Marine Corps officer, noted to investigators the heavy workload facing his office: in November and December of 2008 alone, his office received 757 clemency applications.The report does not contain a formal response.

#Politico and the Washington Post took diametrically opposed approaches toward their coverage of the late millionaire businessman Joe L. Allbritton.

Now, guess which newspaper used to compete against the Allbritton-owned Washington Star? And guess which newspaper has as its publisher Allbritton's only son, Robert?

The Post clenched its hand into a fist on Page A1 with a prominent reference, in the first paragraph, to the "massive money-laundering scheme" that embroiled the "once venerable" Riggs National Bank during Allbritton's tenure. Inside the paper, some 16 full paragraphs are devoted to the legal and financia travails of Riggs, from its cultivation of "dictators with long records of human rights abuses" and "scandal-plagued decline" to its pleading guilty to a federal criminal charge and the denunciations of a federal judge who called it "a greedy corporate henchman of dictators and their corrupt regimes."

Politico, on the other hand, buried the only specific reference to Rigg's problems under Allbritton to two sentences in the 14th paragraph of the story. In the second paragraph, Politico allowed an oblique reference to "high-profile business controversies." All told, Politico devoted some 46 otherwise laudatory paragraphs across two open pages to the Allbritton obit. The toughest it got was to say that "the loss of the historic Riggs name....remained a source of regret for Allbritton, associates said."

The contrasts covered more than Riggs.

In its coverage of Allbritton's ownership of the Star, the Post devotes two paragraphs to the resignation of a Star editor unhappy over Allbritton's political meddling. That episode is nowhere to be found in Politico. Instead, Politico devotes a paragraph to a gushing quote from the late Katharine Graham about Allbritton's "brains and great charm" and such.

Surprise: the Katharine Graham quote is nowhere to be found in the Post's story.

Politico's story was co-authored by the paper's editor-in-chief, John F. Harris, along with James Hohman. The Post's story was written by Emma Brown.

#Guantanamo videos showing a detainee being forcibly extracted from his cell can remain secret, under a new ruling.

In a 14-page decision dated Dec. 4, U.S. District Judge John Bates accepted Defense Department arguments that release of the Gitmo videos could harm national security. International Counsel Bureau and the law firm Pillsbury, Winthrop, Shaw, Pittman had requested the videos under the Freedom of Information Act, as part of a larger effort.

The cell-extraction videos involved a detainee named Fawzi Khaled Abdullah Fahad Al Odah, while a separate video showed a detainee named Khalid Abdullah Misha'al Al–Mutairi getting a haircut while restrained, according to Bates.

The Defense Department, Bates noted, argued that "public release of the videos would allow detainees to communicate through means other than the accepted channels," and allow them to "convey direct or coded messages."

The Defense Department further asserted that "even a ten second image of a detainee waiting to be forcibly removed from his cell would show the public that a detainee was resisting the rules of the detention facility, which would allow al-Qaeda and its affiliates to create propaganda out of such images," Bates recounted.

Judge Bates bought the Pentagon's argument, reasoning that "the Department has provided sufficient explanations as to how these solo images, if released, 'reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security' and are therefore properly withheld" under FOIA exemptions.

A once prominent #lawyer disbarred in Washington state has now taken another hit, with a U.S. Tax Court loss.

W. Russell Van Camp, who at one time represented anti-abortion activists and described himself as a "very expensive attorney" who "makes a lot of money," was challenging the Internal Revenue Service's imposition of tax liens. In negotiations with the IRS, Van Camp's attorney had come close to an agreement for a series of installment payments that would cover the taxes due for the 2001, 2007 and 2008 tax years.

Then, a turn for the worse. As U.S. Tax Court Judge Stephen J. Swift described it Monday:

"On April 2, 2010, before final approval and implementation of the installment agreement, petitioners’ attorney informed the settlement officer that petitioners’ financial affairs were 'going from bad to worse...'

Come to find out, the reason was Van Camp's imminent disbarment for his actions in a messy little case where he charged $25,000 for a routine matter. An attorney whose work once landed him on the front page of the New York Times, Van Camp called that disbarment a change in circumstance that merited reconsideration of the installment paymment plan; the judge Monday said otherwise and let the IRS proceed with the liens and levies.

The Supreme Court on Monday once more put off to another day a decision on whether to hear gay marriage cases.

The court's nine justices had met privately Friday to discuss potential cases, potentially including challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act and a lower court's ruling that struck down California's Proposition 8. But in orders issued at 9:30 a.m., none of the gay marriage cases were listed.