Stephanie Mencimer

Randall Terry as "Sir Reginald Bling," rapping about Samuel L. Jackson as the "New Uncle Tom."

Randall Terry, who is concurrently running for president of the United States and for Congress in Florida, is suffering the wrath of actor Samuel L. Jackson, who is going after the anti-abortion activist. With a vengeance.

Jackson, you may recall, made an ad for a pro-Obama super-PAC, in which he implores voters to "Wake the fuck up!" In response, Terry made his own ad, which he says has aired on more than 100 TV stations. It accuses Jackson of "carrying water for racists," among other things. (It also contains graphic images of aborted fetuses.)

Terry also set up an accompanying website, www.uncletomjackson.com, to broadcast his "faux-Dr. Seuss rhyme" entitled, "The New Uncle Tom." In the video, Terry is dressed as "Sir Reginald Bling" and raps about Jackson's alleged betrayals of his race using lines from his own movies:

When Obama and Biden work themselves to a fit, they picked up the phone, called 9-1-holy shit. Send a man who will "Die Hard with a Vengeance" for us, and a man who will stay in the back of the bus. You’re darn right we’ll work, no you just stay calm. Get Samuel L. Jackson to play uncle Tom.

The ad, the rap (which accuses Jackson of advocating "Black genocide"), and the website haven't gone unnoticed by Jackson. He's threatening to sue Terry and the TV stations that air the ad. In the letter from his lawyers, according to Terry, Jackson's attorneys claim:

The Commercial states that Samuel L. Jackson associates himself with persons and organizations who advocate that "Blacks are human weeds" and want "to abort Black babies" and "sterilize Black men and women" and advocate "Black genocide." All such statements are false, defamatory and outrageous.

The use of Mr. Jackson's name and image to advocate the highly offensive statements in the Commercial, namely that he supposedly advocates "Black genocide," and the other such outrageous positions discussed above, has caused Mr. Jackson to suffer substantial emotional distress... Moreover, Randall Terry maintains a website at the domain name www.UncleTomJackson.com where he refers to Mr. Jackson as "Uncle Tom" and expressly states about him: 'Mr. Jackson is advocating the eradication of his own race.' Mr. Jackson may seek substantial monetary damages, including punitive damages, for this violation.

Terry seems amused by all of this. He released a statement saying he will "not be bullied or intimidated by Mr. Jackson's threats, nor will we stop running the ad. Shame on Mr. Jackson for trying to silence political dissent."

He also points out that Jackson is facing an uphill legal battle. That's because Terry is a political candidate, and FCC rules basically say he can say anything he wants in a political ad and it will be considered protected free speech. That's why he's running for office—so he can put gruesome fetus pictures in ads and stations will have no choice but to run them. In his response to the lawsuit threat, Terry essentially taunts Jackson by pointing this out. He says, "The stations are protected by FCC law from any legal action for ANY political campaign ad that runs on their stations. And I am protected by the first amendment—not to mention the truth."

On Wednesday night, I spoke with Charles Harder, an attorney with the law firm Wolf, Rifkin, Shapiro, Schulman & Rabkin in Los Angeles representing Jackson (and Hulk Hogan). He was surprised to learn that Terry had used his firm's threat letter in a press release, perhaps a sign that he neglected to do a Google search on Terry before threatening to sue him. (Of course Terry would use a legal threat for publicity!) Harder told me he hadn't seen the release so declined to comment, and after I sent it to him, he didn't respond to calls or emails. Score one for Terry.

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Update: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected an attempt by Ohio to shut down early voting the weekend before Election Day for everyone but members of the military and their families, a major victory for the Obama campaign.

The Supreme Court's highly politicized and intensely criticized decision in the landmark case Bush v. Gore was so bad for the court that it reportedly made former Justice David Souter weep and contemplate quitting. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens lamented bitterly that the majority opinion "can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land." When asked about the decision, Justice Antonin Scalia usually tells audiences, "Get over it!"

In the 12 years since the conservative court majority stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidential election to Republican George W. Bush, it has studiously avoided revisiting that decision. Bush v. Gore has become The Case That Shall Not Be Named. Not once has the court cited the opinion in another decision. By comparison, in the decade after Brown v. Board of Education, the court referenced that decision more than 25 times. But an unexpected litigant may soon force the court to confront the logic of what it did in 2000: the Obama campaign. And how the court decides that case could swing the election. Again.

Obama for America has been in court in Ohio challenging the state's move to close early voting three days before the actual election for everyone but military and overseas voters. The state had implemented early voting in 2005 after criticism of its performance in 2004, when thousands of voters faced huge lines on Election Day and many people were turned away because they didn't vote before the polls closed. In 2008, 100,000 people, many of whom might be considered to lean Democrat (women, minorities, poor people), voted early during the weekend before the election. So last year, Ohio's Republican-dominated state legislature decided to pull the plug on early voting, except for the people who might be more inclined to vote Republican, namely people in the military.

The Obama campaign challenged the move, and in August, a federal judge agreed that Ohio had violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause by allowing some people to vote early but not others. In early October, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision and ordered Ohio to keep the polls open for the weekend for everyone if they do it for the military and overseas voters. The state has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court to overturn the order. The Obama campaign, naturally, is opposed, and has filed a brief arguing that Bush v. Gore demands that the court protect the integrity of the voting process. (In that case, the court stopped the Florida vote recount because it argued that the state's procedures failed to treat all ballots equally and thus had violated the 14th Amendment.)

As a result, the court now will have to prove whether it was serious or simply partisan when it sided with Republicans by declaring that "[t]he right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise." The Ohio case could provide the court with an opportunity to "heal the wound of confidence" that Stevens so eloquently identified in his 2000 dissent. This time, though, if the court sticks with this earlier precedent, it might be helping hand the election to the Democrats, making the case a serious test of the conservatives' true commitment to the idea of equal protection at the ballot box.

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