Modern News

In an interesting take on what is or isn’t legal, a union is threatening a critical blog for using the union’s name in its blog title. The American Federation of Teachers had its lawyers send a cease and desist letter to the operators of a blog called AFTexposed.com.

Now right off the top, this is an idiotic attempt to use legal threats on a blog. Imagine if this proscription became a legal precedent! Imagine a movie reviewer not being able to use a movie title in an article critical of the movie. Imagine a TV news station not being able to use the name of an organization it is investigating. Obviously this is more union thuggery on display, attempting to use the threat of law to stop people from criticizing them.

So, what happened? Here is Kyle Olson’s post on the matter at BigGovernment.com:

On Friday, October 9, we received a threatening letter from the AFT’s general counsel (which was carbon copied to AFT President Randi Weingarten), demanding we immediately stop using the acronym ‘AFT’ anywhere on the site, effectively neutering it, and turn over the domain registration to the union. [See the letter here.] How can we have a website completely dedicated to analyzing the AFT and its agenda if we aren’t allowed to use the acronym ‘AFT?’

What got these union thugs so upset? Well, for one thing AFTExposed.com used the union’s financial reports (called LM-2 filings) to report that the teachers union had donated $1.3 million dollars to ACORN.

Why would a teacher’s union be donating such a huge amount of money to the criminal ACORN organization? Why do teachers need to affiliate with a group know primarily for government shakedowns and voter fraud? Good question, so good that the AFT is a bit miffed that anyone would dare to report on their generous donation.

So, it’s off to the lawyers to try and bully someone into shutting up and violating their free political speech.

No wonder our schools are in such a mess.