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

How quickly Kathie Summers seems to forget…

For the sentencing phase of James Tobin’s trialin April, 2006, she wrote a five(!)-page letter full of warm memories of her eight years as his friend and business associate, including…

• Living in the Tobin house for months
• The Tobins’ frequent offers of personal, professional, and financial help
• Being an intimate part of the Tobins’ family life, to the point of going along on their son’s looking-at-college tour this spring

And yet, only 4 months later, when the Washington Post‘s David Farenthold starts asking questions about why Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee recently sent $386,000 to the home address of convicted phone-jammer James Tobin, Kathie Summers steps up to say that money is hers. Oh, ok, maybe she worked just a little bit with Ellen, but Ellen is just “a friend whom she recruited..during a ski trip.”

So does she know the Tobins a little bit, or a lot? Or does how well she knows them depend on who asks her that question?

On December 8, 2005, Kathleen Summers appeared as a defense witness at James Tobin’s trial, swearing under oath that she knew exactly why James Tobin had phoned Allen Raymond on October 18, 2002. Her testimony was probably vital in making the jury decide to find Tobin not guilty on the most serious charge against him.

Update: I now have that day’s official transcript. Summers testified that she was close to the Tobins, both politically and personally. Her testimony about the phone call in 2002 came as a surprise to prosecution attorneys, who complained repeatedly that the defense kept blindsiding them with new “evidence”–in this case, an email from October, 2002, which mentions neither James Tobin nor Allen Raymond, but which allegedly inspired Summers to ask Tobin to phone the RLC, where Raymond served as executive director.

Meanwhile, Chafee’s campaign is also having some memory problems, telling the Providence Journal on Monday that they knew nothing about Summers or Tobin, and were happily paying $386k to “Ellen Hall”, which I assume is the maiden name of Jim Tobin’s wife Ellen.
The Chafee team needs to get their story straight, because the Washington Post story, just one day earlier, quotes their campaign manager saying the money went to buy expertise from Summers.

Republican memory loss–is it contagious?

I uploaded page 1 of Kathie’s five-page letter to my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=210205681&size=o

This letter appears as pp 126-130 of Docket item 186 (part 4, if you download it from Pacer), in the federal criminal trial US vs. James Tobin, Case 1:04-cr-00216-SM.

Item: Sunday’s Washington Post breaks the story that Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.) sent $386,000 in payments for “consulting services” to convicted felon James Tobin’s address in Maine. So is Chafee hiring James Tobin? Of course not–all services were provided by James Tobin’s wife Ellen (whose career has involved paper mills rather than politics) and to a political consultant named Kathleen Summers–no connection to James Tobin at all. (The story is archived here, if that other link breaks.)

Item: Kathleen Summers–that name rings a bell, because she showed up at the trial of James Tobin as a surprise witness for the defense, testifying that she (and not phone-jamming) was the reason for a phone call logged between Tobin and already-convicted phone jammer Allen Raymond on October 18, 2002.

In December, 2005, she was able to give testimony under oath about exactly what she and James Tobin discussed in October, 2002. What a memory she must have! No wonder she’s worth so much to Lincoln Chafee! Summers also wrote feelingly in praise of Jim Tobin’s character for his sentencing hearing.

Item: In related news, the NH GOP, which swore it would no longer do business with Chuck McGee’s company Spectrum Printing, just got outed Thursday by John DiStaso for doing business with GOP Print and Mail, a new company just created in the same building as Spectrum Printing (where convicted phone-jammer Chuck McGee is vice president of political and corporate communications) and doing exactly the same kind of work–but of course no affiliation with Mr. McGee.

Same building, same work, but no connection of course to the actual convicted felons who in the same building who specialize in the exact same kind of work.

You have to wonder if these guys could find their ethics using both hands, GPS, and several bloodhounds.

Update: Checking out quarterly FEC filings for NH GOP officials. “Bass for Victory” paid $2160.75 to Spectrum Monthly as recently as 3/28/2006.

So, you didn’t go to journalism school–and nobody but WordPress is going to publish your findings?

If you find a story you care about, stick with it–you’ll be doing what “real reporters” too often can’t do.

Here are some of the things that I did with the NH phone-jamming scandal:

1. Create a timeline with lots of hyperlinks, to help new readers figure out what happened when.
2. Create a reference page with a who’s-who list.
3. Go to public court hearings and
   report on what you find out.
4. Blog quotes from local papers or citizen opinions. That way, even if they disappear into some newspaper’s invisible archives, people can still read the copy that you’ve preserved.
5. When you see something that’s wrong, blog it loud and clear.
6. When you see something that’s fishy, dig into it and blog your discoveries.

Lisa Williams wants me to make the point that “blog journalism” doesn’t just mean copying stuff real journalists dig up. Here are some phone-jamming discoveries I dug up for myself with the help of Google:

• Convicted felon Chuck McGee still depends on NH Republicans for his livelihood.
• James Tobin made major donations to Republican “fixer” Tom Delay and others in the anxious run-up to his indictment.
• Was there a smoking gun in 2004 that would explain the RNC’s eagerness to keep Tobin happy by paying his legal bills?
• Should US Attorney (and Bush appointee) Thomas Colantuono have recused himself from the Tobin investigation?

Soon after my Colantuono blogpost, the senior Democrat in the House Judiciary Committee raised some of the same questions I did, and asked Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor.

So you never know just who, out there, might be reading your blog!

I’ve been blogging the NH phone-jamming scandal since February of 2003.

On Election Day, 2002, Republicans in NH paid telemarketers in Idaho to make hang-up calls to Democrats in NH, jamming their telephones and blocking rides to the polls. In fact, Republicans felt so strongly about winning that election that they also jammed the non-partisan get-out-the-vote phones of the Manchester, NH, firefighters’ union–but that’s not the scandal here.

Nearly all the $15,600 to pay for those phone calls arrived in NH just before Election Day, from two of the dirtiest names in GOP politics–$10,000 from clients of convicted-felon Jack Abramoff and $5,000 from criminally-indicted Tom DeLay–but that’s not the scandal here.

The Republican National Committee spent more than $2 million on partner-level Washington, DC lawyers for their former employee James Tobin–now also a convicted felon, despite all those lawyers, paralegals, and jury consultants.

NH and national Republicans continue to stonewall and to blame NH Democrats for persisting in asking still-unanswered questions about who did this, who paid for it, who knew about it–but that’s not the scandal here.

The scandal is that this has never received the national news coverage it deserves. No Woodward, no Bernstein, has tried to dig into this story. James Tobin made 75 calls to the White House while this was in progress–the RNC decision to pay for Tobin’s lawyers was cleared through the White House–the US Attorney for the State of NH helped NH Republicans block the inquiries of NH Democrats–and each new revelation gets hidden away as a regional NH story, or shoe-horned into four paragraphs from the AP.

That, to my mind, is the real phone-jamming scandal.

For Dan Gillmor’s unconference on citizen media (at Harvard Law School tomorrow, H20Town’s Lisa Williams will call for a few words about how this citizen-reporter has followed the NH phone-jamming scandal for 3+ years.

Update, many many thanks to Lisa and Dan for letting me share this story with such a wonderful audience. Doc Searls live-blogged it .

That’s the question Seth Anthony asked Wikipedia’s data. From my notes of his Wikimania talk…Seth first looked at a sample of 250 recent edits:

• Outside article namespace 28% (various administrative frou fra?)
• Article talk namespace 10%
• Vandalism 5%
• 45% tweaking minor small changes, stylistic.
• Substantive changes, additions 10%
• Creating new articles 2%

Looking just at “high-content” edits, that last 12%:

• Not one by a Wkipedia admin. (They’re too busy elsewhere, Seth guesses.)
• Not one by someone with a barnstar.
• 69% by someone with a username–so, almost a third were made by an anon!
• Only 53% by someone with a userpage.
• Median date of first edit (for a registered user), April 2006 (only 3-4 months ago)

My research also (my talk’s at 2 today, aaaaaargggh!) showed that even in a “vandal wave” almost all the anonymous editors were, in fact, trying to add value to the project. It’s pretty inspiring when you think about it.

And so are the people at this conference–though I’m amazed to be one of so few women. The proportion of women speaking here is much higher than the proportion of women in the audience.

Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia wikimania

Never be too cool to try something new.

That’s my excuse for finding the Wikimania Speakers’ Lounge, though I was sure that everybody but me would be way too cool to hang out here.

But this room is not empty, although it is by no means as full of speakers as the #wikimania online chat, where the conversation includes some terrifying (to a potential speaker) realtime critiques of speakers onstage.

ai yi yi! This is scary stuff.

In case you, like me, have never been in a speakers’ lounge, there’s good stuff in here. Coffee and juice and ice and bottles of water. And a big bowl of popcorn, and another big bowl (I kid you not) of teentsy-tiny Hershey’s chocolate bars.

I can see I could get myself in big trouble in here. So I’m going to unplug now, turn away from those chocolate bars and the scary stuff in IRC and go hear the 4 p.m. workshop on vandal-fighting.

Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia wikimania

One tree squished Frank’s car

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

…blew out the power, closed our road, dropped trees everywhere…just a little bit busy today as a result, and Wikimania starts tomorrow…more details and photos in Flickr.

Meanwhile, a pile of people will rehearse IgNobel operetta in my living room in one hour, so maybe I’d just better get organized….