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

Take one former Republican rising star, whose years spent “pushing the envelope” on campaign tactics have left him cynical–and very ready to talk. Allen Raymond spent three months in prison for phone-jamming crimes, telling the Boston Globe later that Republicans were now so “ultra-aggressive” and “ruthless” that he feared saying no to RNC-bigwig James Tobin could shut his consulting firm out of future business.

Add one former Page-Six gossip-bigwig, Ian Spiegelman. Gawker printed (I won’t even quote it) the blistering letter that got him fired from the New York Post. He’s said to describe himself as a “revenge fetishist.”

Put them together and what you get might be a real page-turner–How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Law Breaker. Coming out soon from Simon and Schuster.

More on this in Blue Hampshire. It’s quite a story

Outdoors playing with cold wet leaves

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Today’s NYT says that even monkeys “rationalize” past decisions–so that, for example, expressing mild preference for blue candy rather than red quickly transforms itself into strong preference for those blue candies.

In my American middle-class life, my car is blue candy. It’s so easy to drive to the grocery store instead of walking, to drive into Boston instead of taking the subway, even to drive the kilometer to Harvard Square if I know Harvard Book Store will tempt me to buy lots of books.

Living in Stockholm, my car got turned into red candy. Parking is expensive. Buses and subways go everywhere, and go there often. Besides, walking and biking and busing are what people do here. So the one-plus kilometer walk back and forth to work, time spent outside in every kind of weather, is no longer an “inconvenience” to avoid, it’s just something I do–and more-or-less enjoy.

Because I can rationalize, just like anyone else!

Swedish packet for Lipitor tablets

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

… (people I’ve sat next to at various dinner tables in various countries)–every one of the ones taking cholesterol meds (every one that I asked, btw) takes Lipitor, and not its generic sibling simvastatin.

Yes, yes, I know this is grossly unscientific. Maybe more grossly unscientific than (er, grossly bit follows, skip to next paragraph?) my art historian friend who claimed “scientific” proof that shaving one’s legs made leg hair grow faster–she had shaved only the front of her leg-fronts for years, and found (in her 40s) that now her leg-fronts (shins) were hairier than her leg-backs (calves.) She was not happy when I counter-exampled (do you want to read this?) that I saw the same shin-to-calf difference despite shaving (or not) both, year after year.

Grossly bit ended; on to new-but-unscientific addition. My US doctor says that Lipitor is no better than Simvastatin, and my HMO makes me pay more for L-not- S. But when I needed prescription pills here in Stockholm, a Swedish doctor looked at my near-empty bottle of Lipitor and remarked, “Oh, so they found Simvastatin didn’t work for you and had to upgrade you to Lipitor?”

My US doctor to the contrary, I’ve been happy to pay extra for Lipitor. And can it be totally coincidence that she used to criticize me regularly, when I took Simvastatin, for not “doing enough” to reduce my cholesterol? But now I keep getting good marks for cholesterol virtue?

Just my very unscientific two cents on NY Times story.

Old Sink

Originally uploaded by artsyevie

Amazingly, the guy who said this asked the New York Times to keep his name a secret.

”He brings you the entire kitchen sink, and says, ‘Look what I brought you, a kitchen sink. Let’s throw it at the guy.’ You have to have a grown-up around who says, ‘Well, I’m not sure we should throw the entire kitchen sink at the guy, but what an interesting brass spigot you found.’ ”

The “he” in question is Christopher Lyon, an opposition researcher perhaps most noted for claiming a NH politician’s wife was part of an “orgasm cult.” But our need for grown-ups has much wider relevance.

Any campaign can attract somebody who sees nothing wrong with tearing up opponents’ signs, disrupting their events, or even jamming their phones on Election Day.

So campaigns need experienced “grown-ups” to slow down such hotheads. The tragedy of Republicans under Karl Rove is that experienced politicians were afraid they would be fired if they stood in the way of dirty tricks, which had been admiringly re-christened “pushing the envelope.”

What the world needs now is fewer pushed envelopes and a lot more grown-ups.

“The central premise of Moneyball,” (says Wikipedia) “is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed.”

Moneyball charts the rise of Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s by looking beyond “instinctive wisdom” about who does or does not “look like a ballplayer.”

Which brings me to a small blip from the Mercury News, on the conference She’s Geeky:

A venture capitalist who rejected Mary Hodder’s start-up for funding later told her he did so in part because Hodder had no male co-founder, and he thought she would quit because she’s a woman. Hodder didn’t quit. Her video search and social networking Web site, dabble.com, is doubling its registered users every 2 1/2 months.

Mary herself says the VC was not “a bad guy,” adding that “we all have our stereotypes, our biases, our prejudices.”

But how much more money, it seems to me, a VC will make who can Billy-Beane his (or her) bias. I’m sure Harvard drop-out Bill Gates didn’t “look like” success. To quote some statistics from Score:

• Women represent more than 1/3 of all people involved in entrepreneurial activity. (Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2005 Report on Women and Entrepreneurship)
• Between 1997 and 2002, women-owned firms grew by 19.8 percent while all U.S. firms grew by seven percent (Source: SBA, Office of Advocacy)
• The number of women-owned firms continues to grow at twice the rate of all U.S. firms (23 percent vs. 9 percent). (Source: SBA, Office of Advocacy and Business Times, April 2005)

Score adds that “The greatest challenge for women-owned firms is access to capital, credit and equity.” I’m sure the big-money players who did bet on Mary will do very well.

Mt. San Miguel continues to burn. San Diego wildfires.

Originally uploaded by slworking2

Good news for exhausted firefighters and refugee California residents–a change in the weather has now slowed the spread of the flames.

The LA Times says that back in 2004, a “Blue Ribbon Panel” said California firefighters needed some 150 new firetrucks, but as of 2007 only 19 new trucks had ever been ordered…and zero delivered. Risking their lives in Vietnam-era helicopters, because recommended replacements for those had also never been purchased, California firefighters deserve enormous gratitude…

…which should be expressed by giving them tools that they need to do the hard dangerous job that they are doing on our behalf. Are you listening, all you tax-cutting Republicans whose SUVs are spackled with bumper stickers saying how much you respect soldiers, firemen, and policemen?

In funnier news, there’s a spoof piece at Daily Kos with photos of FEMA marshmallow distribution and a Bush “fireside” photo-op.

Corbett Court, Mitchelstown

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Dave Winer has been improving the New York Times for as long as I’ve known him. First he convinced them to put stories out in RSS–then to let bloggers “permalink” down into their archives.

Now he’s propagating their work in a skinnied-down format he calls a newsriver, where (to quote Dave), “The stories age, and are removed after 24 hours. After all this is news, not olds. “

Playing on this, Doc Searls says news organizations should “jump in the river”:

News is a river, not a lake. It is active, not static. It’s what’s happening, not what happened. Or not only what happened.

Yes, of course readers also want well-written stories with careful analysis. But when we’re anxious to know what’s happening now, we don’t want that information slowed down and jumbled up with lots of stuff we don’t care about.

When I’m starving for a hot quick Egg McMuffin, I don’t want to wait for some Oeuf au Jambon de Ronald.

Oh, oh, oh–shall we stop the presses?

Cranky DNA pioneer James Watson–who seems to have no clue that making oneself widely hated is not very clever–has worked out that headlines ensue when he says something rude enough about any random large group of human beings. (So far, he’s confined himself to insulting groups not male-plus-macho-plus-white, but probably only because that’s where the headlines are.)

I think headline writers should take a strong clue from my headline.

“New leak shock,” says today’s Irish Independent.

Yesterday’s shock was a civil servant (male), who passed on private government data that got used for attempts at blackmail. Today’s story is a civil servant (female) who repeatedly accessed the files of prominent people–often just days before their “confidential” data showed up in newspaper reports about them.

According to the Independent, nine different newspaper stories revealed private details that this civil servant leaked to them from government files. She also “improperly accessed” the private files of many others.

Only by chance was this ongoing abuse discovered, while officials were investigating a separate matter. And the woman remained in her job for almost a year before offering her resignation and taking her departure.

If only the private data of Irish citizens were half as secure as the job of a civil servant “protecting” that data!

In other news from today’s Irish Independent.

There were only 12 people entitled to view the personal data of Dolores McNamara. After she won the lottery, 106 curious officials made a point of accessing all her “private” information.

Although a ‘digital fingerprint’ is created every time a worker accesses a file, the breach confirms that illegal activity is not detected until a third party brings it to the department’s attention.

Even more frightening is the fact that the illegal activity has occurred a number of times since the mole was sacked…

The lowest ranking workers in the department have access to everything — from your name to date of birth to how much you earn — which is kept on a file for your entire life.