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

After midnight last night, I got home from Orange County. Donald Segretti* is not on public view these days–and there’s little to feed anybody’s Watergate nostalgia at the Richard M Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

I’d like to write more about the funny web-enabled journey I made there with fellow-NH-blogger Chris Marcum (fix your SQL database, Chris, I want your blog to work again!)

More than the Nixon Museum, I’d have to recommend the Crystal Cove Shake Shack, and hanging out with your fellow-bloggers, wherever you meet them.

I’ll stop there, since we leave for the Galapagos day-after-tomorrow and I haven’t yet (re)packed!

* Orange County is the home of Nixon’s dirty-tricks-meister and Karl Rove’s mentor Donald Segretti. Segretti got jail time and a suspended lawyering license for his role on the dark side of Richard M Nixon’s 1972 campaign. No word on whether or not Segretti is now working for John McCain, as he did in 2000.

Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Phillip Mangones handed down a 31-page ruling on the civil suit growing out of the phone-jamming scandal. NH Republicans had asked Mangones to dismiss the suit.

Mangones dismissed 5 of 8 Democrats’ claims but said the case could go forward on these three claims:

1. That the Republicans “intentionally and repeatedly interfered with the use of their telephone systems, rendering them essentially useless, apparently over a not-insubstantial period of time on election day 2002.”
2. That there was a conspiracy to interfere with the telephones.
3. That the interference may be viewed at trial as malicious, possibly making the Democrats eligible for enhanced compensatory damages.

Mangones neither accepted nor dismissed a Republican counterclaim: that Democrats had filed the suit with no legitimate basis, intending primarily “to harm the Republican Party and/or Republican candidates during the November 2004 general election.” Instead, the judge gave Republicans 30 days to make a case that Democrats abused the system.

Republicans (and the AP) spin this as a Republican victory: “most” counts were dismissed.

Democrats have a different point of view: that Republicans have spent thousands of dollars on lawyers to shut down the Democrats’ investigation, but despite those efforts the case keeps rolling forward. NH attorney Paul Twomey told John DiStaso that the Democrats filed their suit to uncover the truth about those responsible for the phone-jamming. Said Twomey, “We can conduct the same discovery no matter how many counts there are.”

Bloggercon 4 (5? 6?) is gearing up (wish I could go!) and one of Dave’s ground rules there is “No commercials!”

I got in trouble with Dave Winer on a mail list back when I was young and naive and very full of Feedster. (Well, two out of those three, anyway.) I was bubbling over with genuine, non-commercially-motivated, sincerely-felt enthusiasm for the wonderful company I worked for and its glorious product–back then Feedster was about the only option for subscribe-to-blogsearch.

Dave explains:

…if one person talks about his or her product, then their competitors will feel they are entitled to, and pretty soon the user’s needs are drowned out by the needs of the vendors.

The fact is, it takes a lot of organization and planning to run a successful unconference. I hope that I’m on the scene for Bloggercon N + 1.

Another Frank Wilczek quote, after his June 12 lecture at UC Irvine:

I have never used the phrase “theory of everything”– except to reproach some of my colleagues for using the phrase.

I like a theory that is a theory of this, or a theory of that.

And, speaking of the University of California at Irvine, a hotspot of physics and the location of this year’s international conference on supersymmetry, I was fascinated by local legends of its founding.

The story goes that Mr. Irvine owned an enormous spread of land in between Los Angeles and San Diego, where he farmed and ranched and worried about the future business potential of farming and ranching. His ecomonic worries ended when the University of California built a university on some of the land from his ranch, making the rest of it worth millions more dollars.

And they decided to build a university here because land to build it on was a free gift from Mr. Irvine.

Allen Raymond, paid $15,600 to jam NH phones on Election Day 2002 and now fresh out of prison, gave a frank interview to Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe, saying that he felt he had to participate or risk losing business with the increasingly-aggressive Karl-Rove era RNC.

Raymond says that when James Tobin asked him to help Chuck McGee jam some phones, he assumed that Tobin had already consulted his lawyers about such a plan. (RNC lawyers, like his RNC supervisors, claim Tobin never consulted them about the phone-jamming.)

Allen Raymond, who is still a defendant in the NH Democrats’ civil suit, is understandably careful about what he says. This quote, however, deserves wider circulation:

“Republicans have treated campaigns and politics as a business, and now are treating public policy as a business, looking for the types of returns that you get in business, passing legislation that has huge ramifications for business,” he said. “It is very much being monetized, and the federal government is being monetized under Republican majorities.”

Wouldn’t you have to call that a “money quote”?

The US Chamber of Commerce? Good grief!

Were they involved in the phone-jamming scandal? According to sworn testimony (never followed up with indictments by Thomas Colantuono’s “investigation” team), they may have been called in to help jam the Democrats’ phones.

Yikes! I mean, finding out that Jack Abramoff might have been involved wasn’t really surprising. But the US Chamber of Commerce?

Oh, and the Democrats want to get sworn statements from some of the top Republicans who were paying James Tobin’s lawyers, taking his phone calls from their White House offices, etc., etc. The Associated Press has the story, while Google News is showcasing Ken Mehlman’s “media availability” as a related story.

I love algorithms that have a sense of humor…

More than 10,000 years old, tattered scrolls found in a clay pot near Jericho contain what may well be the first two-minute pitch of a business plan. The scrolls were found near the remains of nine fossilized figs, said to represent the birth of agriculture: “Eleven thousand years ago, there was a critical switch in the human mind — from exploiting the earth as it is, to actively changing the environment to suit our needs,” Dr. Bar-Yosef said in a statement from Harvard. “People decided to intervene in nature and supply their own food rather than relying on what was provided by the gods.”

Nearby scrolls reveal, however, that the creative effort of early farmers quickly inspired some early entrepreneurs:

Hark, O King, to a plan whereby we shall profit many gold shekels from the “figs” whereof all Jericho now speaketh.

And some say, user-generated foodstuff is an abomination, for how can mere mortals create food like unto Jehovah’s?

Yet others torment the fig-planter, saying where is thy revenue model? Whereat the fig-planter’s teeth are set on edge.

O King, I propose to hang scrolls upon every fig tree, whereon any peddler or merchant may hawk his wares.

Many gold shekels of revenue will they pay us!

The fig-planter may be fobbed off with a small share, and we shall prosper greatly.

Yea, verily, we should acquire even more riches, could we but find some rival to undercut the price of that rascalous, greedy scribe, the one known as Google.

Freeman Dyson has a long and thoughtful essay on religion* in the latest New York Review of Books. He takes a kindly, even-handed view–here’s just one sample:

… physicist Stephen Weinberg [said]: “Good people* * will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion.”

Weinberg’s statement is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth. To make it the whole truth, we must add an additional clause: “And for bad people to do good things—that takes religion.”

Dyson also challenges Daniel Dennett’s claim that suicide bombers should be thrown into the balance sheet against “religion.”

Someone needs to update Godwin’s Law for the Aughties, when all the opponents of hotheads are somehow like terrrorists.

* Disclosure: IANARP (I am not a religious person), but some of my best friends are, and so are/were some of the people I most admire.

* * Bonus “people” quote. No, make that a totally gratuitous “people” quote, from Singin’ in the Rain:

Miss Lina Lamont: “People”? I ain’t “people.” I am a – “a shimmering, glowing star in the cinema firmament.”

Mad scientist science at its most photogenic…

And the Internet lets us enjoy the madness from a comfortable, not-wearing-eye-protection, not-sprayed-from-head-to-toe-by-fizzy-stuff distance.

Thank you, thank you, EepyBird.com!

p.s. And thanks to Tingilinde for the link!

Steve Forbes has a few angry words about James Tobin’s trial in general and the conduct of Chief U.S. District Judge Steven McAuliffe in particular:

Before this trial Judge McAuliffe had a reputation for scrupulous fairness. Apparently, however, the Democrats’ effort to politicize this case nationally had an effect. McAuliffe’s instructions, his sentencing and his denial of bail were all thoroughly out of character, particularly when you consider that another federal court, in a case involving an activity similar to that charged against Tobin, ruled that it was not a violation of federal telephone harassment laws.

Judge McAuliffe was appointed to the court by President George Herbert Walker Bush. He seems an unlikely slave to NH Democrats. Mr. Forbes might like to read some of the remarks in the official Department of Justice press release on James Tobin’s sentence for phone jamming, remarks made by FBI Agents and others who investigated Tobin and sat through his trial. For example:

“As today’s sentencing demonstrates, .. illegal Election Election Day schemes will be prosecuted and punished appropriately.”

Steve Forbes seems to have published a personal summary of the point of view of Tobin’s defense lawyers. Do you suppose Forbes is the new white knight funding Tobin’s legal bills? The RNC has officially stepped away from the bad publicity of doing so.

One defense claim I’m pretty sure Forbes has heard wrong: Mr. Tobin’s actions weren’t “similar” to Mr. Bowker’s, the Sixth District Court turned down Bowker’s claim that “telephone harassment” was too broadly defined, and Mr. Bowker’s conviction was upheld. Yes, there is one sentence in that long verdict that could be read as “telephone harassment is about scaring people”–see page 18, and look for the words “instill fear.”

In conclusion, I’d like to refer Steve Forbes to a more relevant statement made by Steve Forbes:

Those intent on wrongdoing will easily find ways around paper barriers. In a free market this wrongdoing will eventually be found out. The best deterrent is what has already happened–stiff sentences for the guilty.

* As Senate Majority Project points out, Tobin and Raymond used to work together for Steve Forbes.