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

“Valdivia is a little city with some big rivers flowing to the Pacific Ocean, not very far away. The riverfront market every day has lots of very fresh fish as well as farm vegetables, and raspberries for about 35 cents a basket. If you buy fish from one of the kind fisher-ladies, she guts them on her wood table and tosses the skin back over her shoulder to happy sea lions who wait in the river below.

We have a nice two-bedroom apartment, to get hot water you need to light the special hotwater heater, but it is really quite modern with a tv, lots of US shows with Spanish subtitles which (I like to think) will improve my Spanish if I watch them.”

That’s from some email I sent in 2001, during a previous visit to Valdivia, in southern Chile. In about an hour, we’re headed there again (three changes of airplane, about 24 hours door to door).

All absolutely worth it to be part of the party celebrating the inauguration of Chile’s wonderful Centro de Estudio Ciéntificos.

Then we head a bit further south, because we’ve been invited to ride around below Tierra del Fuego on a converted Chilean navy ship–a few days there, then another 24-hour trip home, then 24 hours to do all the laundry, and a 24-hour-ish flight to Japan.

If my younger self, who longed to travel the world, could see me now she’d be very satisfied.

Tobin’s appeal was already in process when I arrived this morning at Boston’s US Court of Appeals. A subset of the usual small crowd was there–no reporters, so far as I could tell, so let me be the first to tell you that Chief Judge Michael Boudin (Harvard Law, class of 1964) seems completely in tune with the arguments of James Tobin’s attorney John G. Kester (Harvard Law, class of 1963). In his summation, Kester (former president of the Harvard Law Review, Law Clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, 1963-1965) addressed Boudin (former president, Harvard Law Review, Law Clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, 1965-1966) in a tone of utmost relaxed collegiality. Kester boiled down all the multiple pages of documents supplied by his younger helots at Williams and Connelly, into three points. Tellingly, every one of Kester’s very different three points seemed to meet with approval from Judge Boudin:

1. Tobin never entered any agreement with McGee or Raymond. Criminality doesn’t extend to “but for” causation. If it did, every criminal’s mother would be in the dock.
2. This same panel of appeals court judges (Boudin, Torruela, and Lynch) set a precedent in the appeal of Garcia-Torrés which must be followed now.
3. The government decided that the 2002 phone-jamming was bad and unsavory–“We might agree”, added Kester. But there was no statute against it. The government “concocted” a case from a statute made to prevent quite different behavior.

It took Kester all of three minutes to make his three points–then he sat down. He could afford to relax because Judge Boudin had been very excitably haranguing US Attorney Andrew Levchuk with the defense’s own points when I got to the courtroom.

“You have taken advantage of the vagueness of the statute,” Boudin proclaimed. One key defense contention throughout the case has been that the law against telephone “harassment” should not be construed using the plain dictionary meaning of harassment. They claim the law is either so specific that it forbids only calls made for a few specific motives or else so vague that nobody could guess that jamming phone lines is harassment.

Levchuk pointed out, with considerable tact, that he’d submitted documentation of many examples and precedents for the plain commonsense interpretation of “harassment” by other courts with regard to the statute. This statement met no approval from Judge Boudin. “You’re taking almost as extreme a broad view as the narrow view that you claim the defense is taking,” he reproached Levchuk. “Well, thank you, Mr. Levchuk, your appearance here has been very helpful.”

Well, I’m waiting to hear what the three-judge panel decides, although Torruella and Lynch had very little to say at this morning’s hearing.

Caveat–I am not an official court stenographer, just somebody trying to reconstruct lots of court action from the few notes I scribbled down into my notebook. According to the Appeals Court Clerk, nobody transcribes these court sessions–but a tape is available for $26.

A panel of three federal judges in Boston is scheduled to hear more about phone-jamming this morning. According to court documents, Tobin will be represented by John G. Kester, former Deputy Ass’t Secretary of the Army, Harvard Law alum, and a partner from the same DC law firm that was paid millions by the RNC to represent Tobin during his criminal trial. The RNC says it no longer pays Tobin’s lawyers. What nobody says is who now pays them.

On the table this morning are three different appeals. (Here’s a Flickr set of the relevant documents.) Williams and Connelly claim that the Appeals Court should 1) overturn the NH jury’s finding that he was guilty and/or 2) cancel his sentence to 10 months in prison and/or 3) grant him a second trial.

I am genuinely sorry for Mr. Tobin.

In related, interesting news…

Remember the tantalizing sworn testimony from Chuck McGee that Darrell Henry helped to engineer a post-phone-jam phone jam? And later stories that Henry said he’d get help from the US Chamber of Commerce?

James Tobin’s NRSC boss during the 2002 phone-jamming was Chris LaCivita. In 2006, LaCivita’s official bio at the website of Terry Nelson’s consulting firm, Crosslink Strategy Group makes a big point of LaCivita’s earlier work–for the Chamber of Commerce.

I find that information very interesting.

Cherry tree blossoming in January, Cambridge, MA

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

… was this cherry tree, blooming five months ahead of schedule after a warm, almost freezeless, almost snowless December.

El Niño at work? Maybe…

Beautiful sunny day today, after another beautiful sunny day yesterday. Frank and I went for a glove-less stroll through one of America’s first garden cemeteries, dedicated in 1831.

Lots of beautiful monuments, lots of peace, lots of birdsong. My favorite monument was a white sphinx said to combine “the strength of the lion with the beauty and benignity of woman.” The eagle growing out of her head is an unexpected plus on both of these.

We did not disturb the peace of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Buckminster Fuller, Isabella Stuart Gardner, B.F. Skinner, Fannie Farmer, or the salamanders who lurk under vernal pools.

But this cherry tree! It reminded me of something Dave Winer said…

The joy of an old, forgotten photo

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

I stumbled across this long-forgotten photo–it was like having a magic window back into my mother’s 1988 kitchen. She looks so happy, so full of life. And my little dog Marianne making her very first entry onto the Devine family stage–with years of family love and mischief ahead.

The wonderful thing about a forgotten photo is that all the things in it take you by surprise again, just the way real life does.

The tragedy of a beloved photo is that, eventually, the photo itself becomes what you remember.

God bless disorder, which causes us to lose some photos of people we love, and find them again.

Roses are as good as chocolate…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

… and beautiful, beautiful half-price, post-holiday roses were on sale today in Hallie’s Flower Garden.

And, most likely, at some flower shop near you!

Gentlemen, start your engines!

I am Spider-Man

Spider-Man 90% Wonder Woman 88% Green Lantern 85% Superman 80% Iron Man 80% Supergirl 73% Robin 60% Catwoman 60% The Flash 50% Hulk 45% Batman 40%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…

Five things you don’t know about me, since Elaine of Kalilily tagged me ….

1. I wanted to be a car hop when I grew up. The short-skirted, majorette-booted teen waitresses in 1950s drive-up restaurants were my ideal of beauty, competence, and freedom.
2. I fell in love when I was 12 with an 18 year-old boy who (I hope!) never noticed. In an agony of love, one night in my bedroom, trying to think of something that I could do to make myself so beautiful that he’d notice me, I poured three different kinds of perfume into a teacup and dipped the ends of all my ten fingers in the mixture. At that point, my sense of humor must have kicked in, because I don’t remember ever thinking about that boy again. Well, I still remember his name–but I won’t tell Google.
3. You might think I bounce around a lot–next month I’ll be blog-posting from Chile and Japan. But I’m one of the least exotic members of my NH diaspora. One of my dearest NH friends is visiting us right now from Vienna. Another just moved from London to Hong Kong. And a bunch of my favorite NH-ites now gather each Christmas for what is (among them) a convenient, central location…Cairo, Egypt.
4. So I shouldn’t be blogging right now, I should be entertaining Diane! OK, my desk is so messy it would make Steve Rubel faint.
5. I asked Frank if I could instead tell you five things you don’t know about Frank Wilczek–he said, “I haven’t been tagged, and you have.”

So now I tag Frank–he can post his five answers here, if he’s willing. And Dave Winer, if he’ll play. And Julie and Lisa and Dervala, because I miss them!

Oops, Dave was tagged last week–of course!

Whew–the presents and parties are over, the cooking (except for some cookies yet to come) a memory.

Merry post-Christmas, friends. This is the best of times, not the worst of times. Best because the exhausting hubbub is over. Everyone liked the presents we gave them (or at least claimed they did.) Whew. And I really liked getting presents myself!

What we want is to love and know we are loved and to imagine a world that lives up to the purity of that feeling.

Thus today’s Christmas editorial in the NYT. So undeniably true that it’s pretty generic.

A different article spoke to my Christmas spirit, about a once-rural church that no longer wants to be called Hog Mountain Baptist. “Hamilton Mill”, the name of a nearby suburb, sounds better to them.

Yes, I celebrate Christmas now with presents and parties and family and cooking and more talk of winter solstice than of religious solace. But in offering my chosen a la carte Christmas to family, in a sense I’m re-naming my childhood’s Hog Mountain as “Hamilton Mill.”

Another day, another happy iguana

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

… I’m just very busy thinking about Christmas.

Wishing you too a lovely solsticean holiday of your own choosing!