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

Dethroned St. Michael in Castel Sant’Angelo

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

In 590 AD, the archangel Michael decided to sheath his sword and stop killing Romans with plague.

The expression on this statue by Raffaello da Montelupo (1504–1566) says so much. Immortal Michael can’t really understand why puny humans care so much about whether their lives end with plague or with some other horror.

I would like to see a new kind of Peace Corps created, even a short one, for politicians whose decisions shape people’s lives. Just for a week or two, I’d like these powerful guys to be assigned randomly to some not-prosperous neighborhood and given not quite enough money to meet all their needs.

Let them cope with public transportation and busted-up second-hand cars instead of a limousine, chauffeur, and police escort. Let them argue with tired emergency room personnel on behalf of a sick kid whose parents don’t have good insurance. Heck, let them stand in line to buy macaroni with food stamps.

I wish Democrats would move a little bit faster to shore up the American infrastructure of schools, streets, bridges, buses, and decent jobs that pay a decent wage to people who work hard–all things our parents took for granted but that the rich “archangels” of Team Bush have heartlessly plundered because none of these things mattered to their own lives and families.

It won’t be in bookstores for another week but that didn’t stop two “reviewers” last week from posting low-ball reviews on Amazon. The book is How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, a colorful, profane, and surprisingly frank memoir of sleazy politics.

Media mentions of Allen Raymond’s book have mostly talked up his phone-jamming, for which his RNC pals threw him under the bus. The book details many stunts more colorful. Deceptive robocalls to Democrats from “scary black men” or “actors putting on thick Spanish accents” worked wonders at keeping them home on Election Day. Swapping soft money for hard–funneling GOP dollars to leftwing splinter candidates–engineering repeat contributions from donors who had already given their legal limit–Raymond names names and shows how each trick works.

Adam Cohen in the NYT says that this book may finally force Senate action on the long-delayed Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act. I hope it will.

I got an advance copy just a few days ago in response to my longtime phone-jamming blogging, and just posted my own review on Amazon too. It would be quite a job to track GOP lowballers around the two-way web but you may find it an interesting hobby. (On Barnes and Noble: “Pitiful and poorly written,” some prescient reviewer claimed on Christmas Day.)

Probably the biggest reason that GOP insiders want you not to read this book is not the rude first-person memories of Bush, Rove, Feather, Synhorst, et al. but the way showcases in-crowd contempt for their freeper supporters — “the Jesus-loves-guns crowd” — “the knuckle-draggers, the gunnies, and the committed ideologue nuts.” “The mouth-breathers who who decide GOP primaries might allow people to steal their money and send their children to impossible wars but they’ll cut no such slack for baby-killers.”

The book’s quite a read, and it could just make politics better.

According to the Washington Post, George W Bush did something different this year when he “met” with Nobel Prize winners.

He actually met with them, or at least with one of them. And that one he met with was the President-elect of the year 2000 (at least by popular vote), Peace Prize winner Al Gore.

It’s easy to let eyes get hazy over this photo–just imagining how the whole world would be different if Al Gore had become US President back in 2000 instead of George W. Bush–starting, maybe, with a President who paid attention to memos with titles like “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.” Or at least a President

• more focused on Bin Laden than on Saddam Hussein
• with nobler priorities than cutting rich people’s taxes and killing Social Security
• whose patriotism cares more about our Bill of Rights and less about flag pins

But that’s not how it turned out, and doesn’t George Bush look delighted!

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

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.

“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!

Big companies and big governments would find their lives so much more convenient if you and I would just let them put all our personal data into one giant pile where they can sift through it.

For them and for all of us– just this morning in Ireland, the Irish Independent reports that Ireland’s national collection of personal data has been raided by various government employees for various reasons.

One “civil servant mole” (the Independent’s words) passed on private data that his brother used to burgle one businessman and try to blackmail others.

When confronted, the ‘mole’ told police that

it is a common practice amongst civil servants to check up on the financial status of friends, family, and acquaintances…Other records accessed out of ‘curiosity’ included those of a politician, pop star, and a ‘notorious criminal.’

The department was unaware of the breach until detectives..told them the criminal had sensitive information in his possession and he had received it from his civil servant sibling.

If you wonder why the “Data Protection Section of the Department of Family and Social Affairs” didn’t flag these ongoing abuses of personal data–that happens to be the department that employed the mole.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this morning that Al Gore will get 1/2 the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Washington insiders say that lawyers for President Bush have quietly filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court, seeking to have that decision overturned.

“Don’t let those @$*?*!! Norwegians mess with Texas” says a memo being circulated to right-wing bloggers. The appeal will argue that Bush reduced hot air by keeping government scientists quiet about global warming, that Michael Crichton told Bush global warming is bunk, that Al Gore once claimed he invented the Internet, and that Bush looks sexier than Gore in a flight suit.

“I’m convinced already,” said a Supreme Court Justice who asked that his name not be used. “I just hope this moves fast enough so that in December we all get on Bush’s guest list for Stockholm, Norway! My wife says the Alps are lovely at that time of year.”

The House Judiciary Committee has a new and better way to unravel the long, tangled phone-jamming coverup. Thats the real news in this letter from Conyers to Attorney General (pdf)–something reporters seem to have missed, so far.

“What did the White House know and when did they know it?” Several million Republican dollars and years of Department of Justice “slow-walk” (detailed timeline here) kept investigators from tracking NH’s phone-jamming scandal up into Washington.

Meanwhile, Republicans who were in NH in 2002 all seem to have lawyered up and/or lost lots of memory.

So Conyers will pull on the string’s other end, at last! He will pull on the DC end, not the NH end.

On behalf of the House Judiciary Committee, he wants to get answers from the US Department of Justice about incident after incident in their non-pursuit of the Republican phone-jammers.

• Why did all decisions regarding the phone-jamming prosecution have to be referred directly to the US Attorney General’s office?
• Why was the FBI agent assigned to the phone-jamming case (there was only one, and she worked part-time on it) ordered not to trace any leads that led to Washington?
• Why did the US Department of Justice help Republicans block enquiries in the NH Democrats civil suit in 2004?

Thanks to Congressman Paul Hodes (NH-Dem), a member of Conyers’ committee, for setting this investigation in motion. Let’s hope Congress goes further and faster than the DOJ!

Thomas “TheWorld Is Flat” Friedman (with whom I rarely agree) wrote something good in today’s New York Times. “9/11 is over“:

9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

Friedman was inspired by an Onion article, “Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11.” The Onion article notes that, if elected,

“Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world’s conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions.”

The bullhorn of 9/11 has been used to justify Iraq and Guantánamo, political corruption of government function, huge national debts run up while rich people’s incomes soar and their taxes tumble. The bullhorn of 9/11 has been used to justify torture and to dilute habeas corpus.

And anyone who speaks out against any of this is quickly accused of treason to 9/11.

I agree with Friedman, 9/12 is long overdue.