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

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.

Reward for sore muscles after stacking firewood

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

It’s October–people who live in NH are just entering fireplace-marshmallow season!

This old fireplace was built in the 1890s by grad students of a Yale classics professor. The legend goes that he’d take “bad” boys to NH for a summer and have them build a small house from start to finish, with marshmallows and Latin verbs at night.

amo
amas
amat
amamus
amatis
amant

I love October, marshmallows, and fireplace fires.

Our logpile, or what Frank and I did this weekend…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

…otherwise, the red squirrels who live in your neighbors’ yards will tease the red squirrels in your yard about what a slipshod homeowner you are.

Winter’s long and hard enough for the little squirrels. They shouldn’t have to get through it without their own woodpile.

One more phony excuse from the GOP got tossed out of court last week–and the civil case against NH phone-jamming lives on! Here’s the story from this week’s Manchester Union Leader: Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Philip Mangones has dismissed a Republican Party counter-claim against the Democrats’ civil suit over the 2002 phone-jamming scandal. The GOP action contended the Democratic suit was part of a nationwide effort by the party to use the courts as part of an election strategy to manipulate the court system and media for political gain. Mangones didn’t buy it.

Meanwhile, in more recent news, Republican spinners are floating the same exact claim about the recent Congressman Foley scandal–that the real sinners here are Democrats who seek political advantage by pointing out the latest GOP disgrace.

Who buys such a story? Not even the conservative Union Leader:

With L’affair Foley threatening to ruin his plans for another two years in power, U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert … blamed the scandal on the Democrats.

“(T)he Democrats have — in my view — have put this thing forward to try to block us from telling the story. They’re trying to put us on defense.”

At this point, there is not one shred of evidence to back up that claim. Yet even if the release of Foley’s e-mails and Internet chats were the fruit of a partisan plot, that does not change the facts of what happened, or rather what did not happen, before their release.

…Hastert’s obsession with maintaining power has corrupted his judgment and he can no longer be trusted to put the interests of the country above the interests of his party. Republicans must insist that he resign.

The same should be said of the Republican stonewallers still working hard, four years later, to cover up the truth behind the 2002 NH phone-jamming scandal.

So, who’s reporting it? Only John DiStaso: This week, Superior Court Judge Philip Mangones denied GOP motions to dismiss the Democrats’ civil suit. The judge rejected the GOP’s arguments that the Democrats’ suit was barred by the statute of limitations on Nov. 5, 2002, three years after the date of phone-jam operation. Mangones noted favorably that Democrats had argued that “critical information regarding the potential involvement of national political figures, and other information, came to light” in June 2004. Tomorrow, Mangones is scheduled to hear the Democrats’ motion to dismiss a Republican counter-claim alleging the Democrats’ suit is part of a ploy orchestrated from the national level to manipulate the court system and media for political gain.

Yes, you read that right. NH Republicans claim that their behavior should face no legal reprimand–because Democrats nationally made a stink about it. What a great argument–I’m sure it will later get applied to the latest NH Republican telephone hijinks.

In related news, NH Republican Senator Charlie Bass admitted his top policy director Tad Furtado had been trolling liberal blogs from US Government computers in defiance of federal law prohiting use of taxpayer funds for politicking. Using aliases like “IndyNH”, Furtado posed as a Democrat who felt Bass was unbeatable and basically a good guy. He urged others to give up on Bass’s opponent and direct their resources to other elections.

Funny that Charlie Bass’s policy director, after eight years of working for Charlie Bass, didn’t think that the NH GOP had a policy forbidding deceptive campaign tactics…

Maybe Tad Furtado just forgot to sign the famous NH Republican post-phone-jamming ethics pledge forbidding any activity that would “corrupt or degrade the political process.”

The Christian Right gears up for 2006–but telling the truth isn’t one of their “family values”: Connie Marshner, a veteran organizer, distributed a step-by-step guide that recommended obtaining church directories and posing as a nonpartisan pollster to ask people how they planned to vote. “Hello, I am with ABC polls,” a suggested script began…

Confronted by reporters about such deception, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, declared himself mildly “upset.” Meanwhile, Ms. Marshner defended phone call deception as “a common campaign tactic,” which indeed it is–for example, in New Hampshire and in Indiana, to quote two examples from September, 2006.

And Connie (Connaught) Marshner is no clueless newbie, ignorant of the way Christian Conservatives like to campaign. She has been plying her trade for “pro-family” policies for thirty-plus years–check out this praise of her work and ponder the mindset behind the compliment that “she even reached out to black churches.” What a gal.

In fact, I’m wondering what role Connie Marshner might have played in the NH State Republican party’s 2004 effort enlisting NH churches to hand out Republican flyers while deceiving reporters about their actions.

You’d think Connie Marshner would have her heart in the right place, considering her stated objections to the church of Sun Myung Moon

“They’re not on our team because they don’t have the same agenda,” said Connaught Marshner, executive vice-president of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation. “They’ve said things suggesting that their goal is to take over the U.S. government.”

Funny, I have exactly the same concern about Connie Marshner and her unscrupulous pals from the Religious Right…

Jewelweed

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

This beautiful wildflower signals the end of summer in NH.

Sadly, jewelweed is too delicate to put into a vase. If you cut the stem, it wilts almost instantly.

I’m glad memories have so much more staying power!

The Irregular Times scolded this blog and others for interfering with Ellen Tobin’s “work in her career as a political consultant.” What darn career as a political consultant? Ellen Tobin has never had a career as a political consultant. The idea that she has suddenly acquired such a career, and become so good at it that she’s already worth $386,000 to struggling Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, is pretty ludicrous.

The idea that the RNC is using Chafee to funnel continuing hush money to James Tobin seems much more likely.

The Washington Post and the Providence Journal give conflicting accounts of Ellen Tobin’s role in Northeast Strategies. Neither one suggests that she is working as a political consultant.

I’d be very curious to know if the RNC’s generosity to Lincoln Chafee included a recent donation of, oh, $386,000 or thereabouts with private instructions of just where to spend that amount…

35 minutes on my battery here in this NH webcafe, so I will be brief and link-full…

• Paul Kiel (TPMmuckraker): Dems document broad conspiracy among NH GOP on phone-jamming
• Evidence: Multipage NH Superior Court filing by NH Dems, posted in full Paul Kiel
• Evidence: Full text of Chuck McGee’s 2003 interview with the FBI, posted in full Paul Kiel
• John diStaso of the Manchester Union Leader reports this story but with less detail.

Fascinating stuff in those docs–that McGee claims he didn’t know phone-jamming ever started–that he told many others of his plan beforehand–that several other (un-prosecuted) NH GOP figures particpated–that the NH GOP gave McGee a $6,000 bonus in 2003 not (as they later claimed) in ignorance of the phone-jamming but as part of a deal that he would resign quietly because phone-jamming started making the news…

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.