Was it something I said?

As many of you are already aware I DID receive a notification from Palin attorney Thomas Van Flein yesterday. It arrived in my e-mail in PDF form and you can read it over at the Alaska Report.

Now Van Flein is forcing me to make an admission that I have resisted addressing for the four plus years I have had this blog.

Yes I DO work in a Kindergarten class during the school year. My main job affords me some time during the day and I have chosen to use it teaching children to read, and helping them to become more independent. I do it because it brings me joy to work with these children and I believe, and have been told, that I am very good at it.

Hopefully that does not diminish me in the eyes of my visitors.

I NEVER discuss politics with my children and they have no idea, nor do most of the adult staff, that I am a blogger. Because to be honest that might diminish me in THEIR eyes.

So thanks to Van Flein you now know my dirty little secret. I am an assistant teacher in a room full of five year old children.

Understanding my love for my job and my desire to protect my children from a potentially frightening encounter, Van Flein threatened to serve my summons "at the kindergarten where you assist". He did not say the "school where you work", he specifically mentioned my classroom in order to frighten me into compliance. Why else would he have said that?

Now as for Van Flein's claims that I have demonstrated "malice" or made "defamatory" accusations. Please read the following definitions and my explanations.

Dictionary.com's definition of "malice":

1.desire to inflict injury, harm, or suffering on another, either because of a hostile impulse or out of deep-seated meanness: the malice and spite of a lifelong enemy.
2.Law. evil intent on the part of a person who commits a wrongful act injurious to others.

I firmly believe in the accuracy of my source/sources. I simply reported what I still believe to be factual information. I had no other "intent" than to get that information out to my readers and invite their comments and criticism. Which I received. And then some.

Dictionary.com's definition of "defamatory":

containing defamation; injurious to reputation; slanderous or libelous: She claimed that the article in the magazine was defamatory.

Well if this were 1945 Van Flein might have a case. But this is 2009, when divorce is almost as common as marriage itself. It is highly doubtful that a report that Sarah and Todd are having marital problems is going to "injure" Sarah Palin's reputation in any measurable way.

And let us look at that reputation shall we? Palin has been served with somewhere in the vicinity of 22 ethics complaints, she was accused of exposing her family to ridicule, she was also accused of using the GOP money for clothes shopping to the tune of around $150,000, she was called a "diva" and a "whackjob" by the McCain campaign, she was accused of having an affair by both the National Enquirer and the National Examiner, and she just quit her job as Governor of Alaska! And that final move has opened up a potpourri of potentially malicious comments and defamatory statements from almost every single media outlet in the country!

So can my report that Todd and she are having marital problems really compete with all of that?

I simply cannot imagine that it could.

As for the other parts of my post?

They will be reported on in the near future by more mainstream media, count on it. If they are not then I definitely have some asses to kick and some crow to eat. But as of right now I have every confidence that I will be vindicated.

Update: The Huffington Post has caught wind of this now too. (I swear I did not send it to them.)