KPFA: Edwards-Tiekert Sics Bush-Cheney Lawyers on Pacifica

Edwards-Tiekert, who rumor has it has already filed no less than five individual union grievances on his own behalf, including one asserting he is a victim of reverse discrimination because he is a white man, today filed suit via Dhillon Smith, the law firm headed up by Harmeet Dhillon, the co-chair of Lawyers for Bush/Cheney 2004, former Heritage Foundation "journalist" and Republican challenger to Tom Ammiano.

Edwards-Tiekert is protesting his own penalty for taking to the airwaves at the end of Sptember to make wild accusations that board members not affiliated with his own faction were in secret meetings assembling political hit lists to fire everyone in sight and busting the union.

After due consideration of pages of transcripts and audio files from the on-air barrage, the now-departed Pacifica election supervisor decided that Edwards-Tiekert and 2 other staff members who also participated in lengthy on-air speeches at the end of the election period telling voters who they didn't want them to vote for, impacted the results. She concluded that members of the station's staff could not fail to be impacted by reports that Independents for Community Radio candidates were planning to fire them all, and this likely impacted the results of an election where 20% of the ballots came in in the last 2 days and the margin between 3rd and 4th place was one vote.

The available remedies included redoing the election (at some expense and certainly some inconvenience to candidates and voters), removing the programmers from the air (she was not permitted to do so by the station's managers) or disqualifying the offending members. The action she took was to disqualify.

The lawsuit names the Pacifica Foundation as a defendant, as well as the former election supervisor individually, and the 3rd place candidate (a member of the unpaid staff) individually.

It asks for unspecified monetary damages, as well as for the election results to stand with no remedy for the on-air violations committed by Edwards-Tiekert and others.