Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Today’s DOJ press release contains what they may not realize is a NH-Abramoff bombshell:

White House Office of Political Affairs (OPA) staff member Leonard Rodriguez … told the OIG that he kept Abramoff aware of information relevant. to Guam, including potential nominees for the U.S. Attorney position. Rodriguez said he did so at the behest of Ken Mehlman, the White House Political Director, who “recommended or suggested that I reach out to “make Jack aware” of issues related to Guam…

On October 23, 2002, Rodriguez sent an e-mail to Abramoff, with a copy to Ken Mehlman, in which Rodriguez stated that he had tried to reach Abramoff by telephone to introduce himself. Rodriguez also stated that he oversaw the U.S. territories for OPA and invited Abramoff to “feel free to contact me directly for any requests from Guam.”

So on

Ken Mehlman lets Abramoff know that the White House Office of Public Affairs is handing his Guam sweatshop clients control of the island. A mere five days later, on

Abramoff clients started pouring thousands of dollars into the hands of NH Republicans, money that ultimately helped pay for the phone-jamming.

I think this may be what Allen Raymond meant when he told the Boston Globe that the federal government was being “monetized.”

My dad never talked about World War II or the Purple Heart he came home with. My mom told me the story, once, so he must have told her. My dad captained an ship in the Pacific, carting US soldiers around to various islands that were occupied by soldiers from Japan. One day my dad was with his two first officers when shell fragments swept the bridge. The other two men died instantly, my father survived with a tiny wound on his cheek. My brother Mark was named for one of the men killed by the shell that spared my father. The shell didn’t leave any physical scar on my father. The military makes no distinction about the severity of a wound when setting the standards for a Purple Heart. If you are wounded in action, you get a Purple Heart. It’s a way to distinguish people whose service puts their lives at risk.

Before they started sneering at Representative Murtha’s Purple Heart, Republicans mocked John Kerry in 2004 with Purple Heart bandaids, and CNN explained that Purple Hearts like my father’s were fair game for mockery:

Although he was grievously wounded in a later battle, [Senator Bob] Dole wrote in a 1988 biography that the first of his two Purple Hearts was the kind of wound the Army treated “with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart.”

Maybe the military should add a warning label to Purple Hearts:

Caution: This decoration can and will be used against you by people claiming to “Support Our Troops.”

From my email outbox:

Hi all–We did the island tour extreme Saturday, including a brisk one mile hike up to a crater lake (El Junco) and a meander through a giant tortoise sanctuary. We saw a bunch of three-week old tortoises, soooo cute. One five-incher managed to tip himself over trying to climb up a stone. I wanted to help put him right side up but of course I’m not allowed to touch him. He soon did it himself.

That was this afternoon. We spent the morning sailing around to some nearby islands–or should I say some nearby rocks–and snorkeling there. Lots of fish, the boobies and frigatebirds won´t go hungry! At Isla Lobos, a bunch of young sea lions came over to play with us. One tickled my foot with his whiskers and another peered into my mask from about an inch away. We´d been told they wouldn’t hurt us, and indeed they didn’t.

Later, after I got out of the water, one moved on from playing around the boat to jumping up onto the back flat part by the engine. I guess my foot must smell better than I knew, because he also wanted to tickle it with his whiskers. Then he hung around until someone shooed him away. Yes, I have photos.

Wish you biologists were here to tell us more about all the plants and birds and animals, and that all of you were here just for the heck of it. Send me email, I miss you!

Love and xxx
Mom

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Swimming with sea lions isn’t like dancing with wolves.

On the human side, you don’t need special zen talents. You do your swimming around and they do theirs, only their side is fast and sleek and splashy. It’s a bit like swimming with big furry powerful toddlers who somehow have learned how to fly around under the water.

Meanwhile, unconcernedly sharing the shallows, a huge brown pelican stood, preening his feathers.

It’s one thing to read in a book that Galapagos animals don’t fear human beings. It’s something different to walk among birds, mammals, and reptiles that hardly spare you a glance as they go about their busy animal business.

Of course, if you get too, too, too close…the magic tranquility shatters. And if the Galapagosian you got too close to is a huge black marine iguana, it will signal discomfort by spurting out salt from the salt glands inside its nose.

Whoosh!

Then it’s the human’s turn to be disconcerted.

Long slow cocktail evening on the Galapagos–but my feet got tired, and the Internet beckoned.

Frank and I shared a beach with two physicists and three playful sea lions this afternoon. As we walked along the San Cristobal harbor, other sea lions yapped and frolicked among the little boats floating at anchor. Because the Galapagos had few pre-people predators, animals here are incredibly tame and friendly. I also played eye-tag with several of Darwin’s  finches, but no blue-footed boobies or frigate birds. At least not yet…

My photos will take some time to upload at the glacial Internet speeds here. While you’re waiting, I recommend Jude’s amazing bumble bee on a soft lambs-ear flower.

Earth bulges at the equator–and shows some sympathy for those of us who do likewise. Apparently a scale is one of the big attractions at the equator display, a few kilometers from Quito–because of the bulge, your weight gets measured as less.

I’m glad of this because last night I discovered locro!

Another way to fight bulges might be a squeeze from “the “boa del publico” at the Quito Vivarium.

In sadder news, Ecuador lots today’s match with Germany–but they still move forward to the next stage of the World Cup. So the people in bright yellow T-shirts who populated the early-morning view from my hotel window are still full of bright hope, and so am I.

Tomorrow at 4 a.m., we leave for the Galapagos!.

After midnight last night, I got home from Orange County. Donald Segretti* is not on public view these days–and there’s little to feed anybody’s Watergate nostalgia at the Richard M Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

I’d like to write more about the funny web-enabled journey I made there with fellow-NH-blogger Chris Marcum (fix your SQL database, Chris, I want your blog to work again!)

More than the Nixon Museum, I’d have to recommend the Crystal Cove Shake Shack, and hanging out with your fellow-bloggers, wherever you meet them.

I’ll stop there, since we leave for the Galapagos day-after-tomorrow and I haven’t yet (re)packed!

Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Phillip Mangones handed down a 31-page ruling on the civil suit growing out of the phone-jamming scandal. NH Republicans had asked Mangones to dismiss the suit.

Mangones dismissed 5 of 8 Democrats’ claims but said the case could go forward on these three claims:

1. That the Republicans “intentionally and repeatedly interfered with the use of their telephone systems, rendering them essentially useless, apparently over a not-insubstantial period of time on election day 2002.”
2. That there was a conspiracy to interfere with the telephones.
3. That the interference may be viewed at trial as malicious, possibly making the Democrats eligible for enhanced compensatory damages.

Mangones neither accepted nor dismissed a Republican counterclaim: that Democrats had filed the suit with no legitimate basis, intending primarily “to harm the Republican Party and/or Republican candidates during the November 2004 general election.” Instead, the judge gave Republicans 30 days to make a case that Democrats abused the system.

Republicans (and the AP) spin this as a Republican victory: “most” counts were dismissed.

Democrats have a different point of view: that Republicans have spent thousands of dollars on lawyers to shut down the Democrats’ investigation, but despite those efforts the case keeps rolling forward. NH attorney Paul Twomey told John DiStaso that the Democrats filed their suit to uncover the truth about those responsible for the phone-jamming. Said Twomey, “We can conduct the same discovery no matter how many counts there are.”