veiled4allah: Donald Luskin, stalker

Remember when Fox News sued Al Franken for using the words "fair and balanced" in a book title, claiming that they held exclusive rights to the use of that phrase?

Now there may be an even more stupid lawsuit. Donald Luskin, a columnist for National Review Online, writes a lot of (negative) commentary about economist Paul Krugman.

In May, Luskin wrote a column for NRO called We Stalked. He Balked. Based on the title of this column, conservative blogger Instapundit linked approvingly to it the same day with the words Donald Luskin is stalking Paul Krugman.

Apparently inspired by these titles, on October 5, liberal blogger Atrios featured a link to Luskin's new blog under the title Diary of a Stalker.

As a result of this, as well as various remarks made about Luskin in the comments thread of that post, Luskin's attorney today sent Atrios a letter threatening to sue Atrios for libel over the "stalker" designation.

Thanks to a decision in June by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Atrios is in the clear over his comments section, even if genuinely libelous statements were made there; only the actual author of such statements could be sued for libel.

As for Atrios's blog post, the idea of that being libelous is a joke. It would be a very weak claim anyway, but given that Luskin described himself as a stalker he more or less gave tacit permission to anybody else to do the same. And of course, Luskin isn't threatening to sue Instapundit, it's only the liberal blogger that he's going after.

In response to the Fox-Franken lawsuit, many bloggers added the phrase "fair and balanced" to their blog title or tagline. We figured that Fox couldn't possibly sue us all. In solidarity with Atrios, many bloggers are now referring to Donald Luskin as a stalker, since he can't sue us all either.

Update: Law professor Jack Balkin has more on the legal issues involved.