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

NBC’s Hardball talked phone-jamming with disgraced GOP phone-jammer Allen Raymond. A partial transcript, posted at MediaMatters:

NBC’s LISA MYERS: In an exclusive interview, Raymond admits that, four years ago, he went beyond pushing the envelope and actually crossed the line. He spent three months in prison. Now, in a civil suit, Democrats are trying to tie his misdeeds to the White House.

It all happened during a hard-fought battle for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire between then-Democratic Governor Jean Shaheen and Republican John Sununu. Raymond was running a telemarketing firm. He says an old friend from the Republican National Committee, James Tobin, came to him with an idea: use nonstop hang-up calls to tie up Democratic phone lines on Election Day.

So, you were trying to create chaos and keep Democrats from getting out their vote?

RAYMOND: That’s right. We were trying to create chaos and prevent the Democratic Party from operating efficiently.

MYERS: On Election Day, the plan worked until nervous state Republicans pulled the plug. And the Republican candidate won, though there’s no evidence that phone jamming made the difference.

How common are dirty tricks in both Republican and Democratic politics?

RAYMOND: I think they’re fairly common, but let’s be clear on something. New Hampshire phone jamming was not a dirty trick; it was criminal.

Raymond understands the distinction, but does NBC?

Apparently not.

The frame story for NBC was that Republicans and Democrats are equally dirty.

Uh huh. So here we have a Republican felony reaching high enough that, after consulting the White House, the Republican National Committee spent $3 million and counting for high-priced defense lawyers. And here we have an unsupported statement that Democrats also engage in dirty tricks.

In our major media, that’s what passes for balance.

NBC’s Hardball talked phone-jamming with Allen Raymond. A partial transcript, posted at MediaMatters:

NBC’s LISA MYERS: In an exclusive interview, Raymond admits that, four years ago, he went beyond pushing the envelope and actually crossed the line. He spent three months in prison. Now, in a civil suit, Democrats are trying to tie his misdeeds to the White House.

It all happened during a hard-fought battle for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire between then-Democratic Governor Jean Shaheen and Republican John Sununu. Raymond was running a telemarketing firm. He says an old friend from the Republican National Committee, James Tobin, came to him with an idea: use nonstop hang-up calls to tie up Democratic phone lines on Election Day.

So, you were trying to create chaos and keep Democrats from getting out their vote?

RAYMOND: That’s right. We were trying to create chaos and prevent the Democratic Party from operating efficiently.

MYERS: On Election Day, the plan worked until nervous state Republicans pulled the plug. And the Republican candidate won, though there’s no evidence that phone jamming made the difference.

How common are dirty tricks in both Republican and Democratic politics?

RAYMOND: I think they’re fairly common, but let’s be clear on something. New Hampshire phone jamming was not a dirty trick; it was criminal.

Lovely and mysterious photo shows tender blue sky with crescent moon and crescent Venus.

(Thanks to Tingilinde for the link! )

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science…

It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man…”

Albert Einstein

The little boy on the right grew up to be José Raúl Capablanca–playboy, celebrity, and (computers now tell us) the best chess player our planet ever saw, says ChessBase News. How do you compare chessplayers who never played against one another? Matej Guid and Ivan Bratko used the open-source program Crafty to analyze games played over the course of more than 100 years by 14 World Champions. They scored players move-by-move, comparing each move played against the “best” move Crafty could find with a search depth of up to 12 “plies.” (Read their scholarly article for the whole story.)

It’s a fascinating example of the way scientists crack problems that most people assumed would forever remain undecidable.

Found poetry, from the Yahoo Time-Capsule project, New Orleans schoolteacher’s message to the future:

I’m skeptical about the existence of God, but I’m way more skeptical about evangelizing a worldwide monoculture of all the ideas most cleverly put forward on this exact Friday morning in October.

My own sincere religious belief is that Ms. Vinny is doing much more good on this needy planet.

a taste of fruit

Originally uploaded by monkeyc.net.

If you know the answer to “What’s yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice, this corny a cappella YouTube video is just for you:

The path of love is never smooth
But mine’s continuous for you
You’re the upper bound in the chains of my heart
You’re my Axiom of Choice, you know it’s true…

Oh, and the answer is “Zorn’s Lemon.”

OK, well, I thought it was funny. Maybe, somehow, you just had to be there.

Breaking news!

Republicans will give US juries a brand-new new option–to find a defendant “Not guilty by reason of sounding sincerely sorry. ”

Rove’s latest PowerPoint playbook (leaked yesterday) tells GOP lawmakers it’s getting too hard to play on the heartstrings of people who find out you’ve been abusing their trust.

“I want to make it very clear I am remorseful. I accept the responsibility. There’s no way that I can turn back the clock. And I’m not that individual that I was years ago.” (Statement to the court by yet one more wealthy defendant, quoted in the NYT.

Until the new law gets passed, Rove urges his new crop of GOP felons-to-be to avoid the over-familiarity of “I take responsibility.”

There’s even an online playbook, Rove points out, of less hackneyed ways to say “I don’t want anything bad to happen to me as a result of the bad things I already did to you”:

It was a very very bad thing to have done and I’m really very ashamed of myself. I can only say it won’t happen again. To have murdered so many people in such a short space of time is really awful, and I really am very, very, very sorry that I did it, and also that I’ve taken up so much of the court’s valuable time listening to the sordid details of these senseless killings of mine…

Yep, that’s Episode 27 of Monty Python.

Elsewhere in the leaked file, Rove suggests a new law requiring judges to hand out probation, not prison, when a defendant’s lawyer uses this magic formula:

“Hasn’t my client already been punished enough?

Homecoming band practice at UNH

Originally uploaded by Edward Faulkner.

I wasn’t thinking about football until MontaukRider blogged it:

Tomorrow is Homecoming at my alma mater. I’ve attended the Homecoming Football game with my family since I was in my teens. It was my Uncle Shane who started the tradition. He’d buy reams of tickets and arrange huge tailgating parties. Shane was exceedingly gregarious, and nothing pleased him more than to have family and friends all together for food and quaff.

His children have continued going to the annual festival, as have I and my children. My two sons went to every Homecoming Game that’s been held since they were born. Now they both attend the University: Now I travel to see them at the Game. There’s a satisfying symmetry in this.

Autumn may be a season of change for some things…not for others!

A “shadowy group pouring untraceable millions into this fall’s campaign”–that’s how one reporter describes “Progress for America.” One thing that isn’t shadowy about this group? Close ties to the felons who brought us the PhoneJammerGate:

• The names of president of Progress for America Brian McCabe and its executive director Chris LaCivita both figured in reports of the trial of convicted phone-jamming felon James Tobin.
• Convicted phone-jamming felon Chuck McGee made a point of contacting “veteran strategist Brian McCabe” to describe his idea of blocking Democrats’ phone lines. (John DiStaso, Manchester Union Leader, August 11, 2006) Of course, as Tobin’s lawyers repeatedly told the jury, knowledge that a crime is being planned is not, in itself, a criminal offense.
• Tobin’s phone records show multiple phone calls and attempted phone calls with Brian McCabe’s NH-based company.
• Chris LaCivita was James Tobin’s boss at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2002, (although he’s more often mentioned for his later work with the Swift Boat Vets.)
• McCabe, LaCivita, and Tobin are all current or former associates of Washington’s powerhouse GOP lobbying firm DCI Group, most recently outed for trying to pass off a polished hit-job on Al Gore as an amateur YouTube video.

More about the DCI Group and its phone-jamming ties from a recent New York Sun:

Progress for America’s fund-raising and ad buying is run by employees of a Republican political consulting firm, DCI Group, which also helped run another anti-Kerry organization, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth…DCI Group is a regular landing spot for Republican Party loyalists. The firm has employed some people other GOP firms might have turned away, such as a former Northeast regional political director for the Republican National Committee, James Tobin.

Tobin took a job at DCI Group while under investigation for involvement in a scheme involving jamming of Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks in New Hampshire during the 2002 election. Last year, he was convicted on two felony charges relating to the case and sentenced to 10 months in prison. Tobin is free pending appeal, but a DCI employee said yesterday that he is no longer working for the firm.

…Mr. McCabe, who was not available for an interview for this article, was not charged in connection with the voter-suppression scheme.

Yes, the moral values that brought us NH phone-jamming are now spreading millions all over the current election.