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

Why is the Republican National Committee still paying ninja DC lawyers to defend James Tobin, now that he’s been convicted for his role in the NH phone-jamming scandal? Is Tobin repaying them by keeping quiet? Was there some dark secret that needs to be kept quiet, something Tobin knew about when he headed the Bush Cheney 2004 campaign for all of New England?

Mark Karlin raised these question. It didn’t take much digging to find one obvious candidate for a smoking gun that Tobin might know about.

• Item: The Nader campaign got illicit help in Oregon, both from Bush-Cheney 2004 and from “Citizens for a Sound Economy.” Were similar tricks played in New England?
• Item: The NH Executive Director for Citizens for a Sound Economy was Chuck McGee — James Tobin’s co-conspirator in the phone-jamming.
• Item: NH Republican bigshot Dave Carney gave illicit help to Nader’s campaign–and the FEC’s general counsel urged them to prosecute him. Instead, the FEC simply dropped all charges.
• Item: Dave Carney and Grover Norquist were also closely involved with Sununu’s 2002 Senate campaign, the campaign where Tobin was helping promote the election phone-jamming.
• Item: Carney and Norquist also worked together in the 2004 election.

Hello, real reporters, I know you’re out there somewhere!

* Interesting: This CSE phone script.

Rebecca Blood asks good questions and David Weinberger gives great answers:

Whose writing do you particularly admire?

Questions that ask me to name favorites put me into a neurotic tailspin because of what I’ll forget to mention. I will say that that Shakespeare guy has a way with a phrase.

What is your advice for a new blogger?

Links lots. Have fun. When in doubt, press the “publish” button.
…
Would you read your site?

That’s like asking me if I’d marry myself. I don’t know and I’m real glad I don’t have to find out.

If only Vince Foster, or Bill Clinton’s necktie, had been involved in the NH phone-jamming scandal! But they were not; Mark Karlin details the result:

I think it’s significant that James Tobin, who ran Bush/Cheney’s re-election campaign in New England, was indicted for wrongdoing not in that race but in the one two years before. It was the off-year election in 2002 – the Senate race in New Hampshire. So, after the 2004 election, the RNC spends big-time on the legal fees of an operative who stood indicted of malfeasance only in the previous election.

Why does this not a raise a certain question in the press? No inquiring journalist has asked why the Republicans spent so much on Tobin’s legal fees for a crime that he committed in 2002. Would it be improper to suggest that maybe Tobin also broke election laws in 2004, and that the party paid his tab because they wanted him to keep his mouth shut on the subject? Given all the loony speculations that the press was unafraid to air about Bill Clinton – the “murder” of Vince Foster, the secret signal Bill tried to send Monica through his necktie, etc. – why can such a question not be asked about the GOP?

David Weinberger says maybe CSI, West Wing, etc., are your soul’s remedy against uncertainty:

When we are facing an enemy with massive power, it’s good to believe that a single individual can make the difference, especially if he’s played by Sylvester Stallone. When the enemy is the pulling apart of everything we know, it’s good to believe that we can form teams that cannot be pulled apart.

Is doom rolling toward the Internet as we know it?

For Mark Cuban the threat is our insatiable need for more and more bandwidth:

Sure, new bandwidth is being added on networks every day. But guess what, our ability to consume bandwidth is growing far, far faster than the speed at which it is being added… The bigger and more powerful our PCs become, the more specialized processors that are enabled with internet connectivity, the more bandwidth we all consume.

Meanwhile, in Jakob Nielsen’s nightmares, so much Internet revenue gets picked up by giant search engines that there’s nothing left for the people who create web content:

There’s no doubt that search engines provide a valuable service to users. The issue here is what search engines do to the companies they feed on — the companies that fund the creation of original information. Search engines mainly build their business on other websites’ content. The traditional analysis has been that search engines amply return the favor by directing traffic to these sites. While there’s still some truth to that, the scenario is changing…Paid search confiscates too much of a website’s value.

Are you starting to flash on one of those Jolt-Cola nightmares where your web-powered Indiana Jones persona starts getting chased by a huge Katamari Damacy* rolling ball?

The truth is, lots of people have created real value all over the huge gift economy of “The Internet as we know it.” And lots of other people are working for changes that will let them roll up that value into their own pockets.

I’m glad that two such different web-giants are having such similar nightmares.

* I found this via Boing Boing. Bonus link: Google results for all their Katamari Damacy blogging.

When I was working for Feedster, I drank all their Koolaid. I played with every feature and got excited about all the new ways that other people dreamed up to use it. Reading what Robert Scoble and Dave Winer have to say about product “evangelism,” I’m wondering if I should try to change my style.

Robert Scoble speaks out for low-key, rational evangelism:

[Guy Kawasaki] looks at the products he’s evangelizing as a “cause.” I don’t look at the world that way….But, go even further. I really don’t want religious customers. I want skeptical, educated, pragmatic customers.

Dave Winer adds:

Scoble’s method works better. I’m tired of hearing about your religion. I’m not that way. I think computers are tools, not causes. My use of the computer, that’s a cause.

Now I’m working for Ookles.com. Love the people, love the product, excited about the company. Well, I wouldn’t be working for them if it wasn’t so. But Ookles is not a cause, not a religion, not something that my friends all “have to” believe in. It’s an unexplored tech opportunity that I’m looking forward to becoming an expert on playing with.

But if, once the whole thing starts playing out in public forums–if you see me guykawasaki-ing in a way that make you uncomfortable, please let me know. And let’s still be friends. I mean, Feedster was far from perfect but every complaint we got helped us make the product better.

p.s. One day later, one more reason to admire Scoble’s Microsoft evangelism, his contribution to the “Is Google Evil?” meme:

“Hey, Larry and Sergey, can you please return our evil where it belongs?”

“Life is a fountain.” For some reason, this catch-phrase always brings me comfort. It comes from a long shaggy-dog tale I once heard:

A man sold all his possessions and left his family to travel the world, because he wanted to know the meaning of life. After many years of seeking, and near despair, his last hope was a guru who lived high up on a very dangerous mountain. Up the mountain our seeker went, through a thunderstorm, tired and desperate and hungry–his food was all gone, he injured one foot but struggled on with a cane out of a tree branch. Finally, on top of the mountain, there sat the guru, surrounded by tame animals, with bright sunlight breaking through a hole in the clouds to shine all around him.

The seeker staggered forward. “O holy guru, I have given up everything to seek the truth, but it will all be worthwhile if you can answer my question: What is the meaning of life?”

The guru smiled and said, “My son, here is the answer you seek: Life is a fountain.”

After a long pause, the seeker shook his head. “A fountain? I have come thousands of miles to hear your words–my possessions are all gone, I’m starving, I’ll probably die on this mountain–and all you have to say is, life is a fountain?”

The guru trembled. “You mean…it’s not a fountain?”

And, I have to admit, I like the tale even better now that I’ve read these variants by philosopher Robert Nozick:

A man goes to India, consults a sage in a cave and asks him the meaning of life. In three sentences, the sage tells him, the man thanks him and leaves. There are several variants of this story also: In the first, the man lives meaningfully ever after; in the second he makes the sentences public so that everyone then knows the meaning of life; in the third, he sets the sentences to rock music, making his fortune and enabling everyone to whistle the meaning of life; and in the fourth variant, his plane crashes as he is flying off from his meeting with the sage. In the fifth version, the person listening to me tell this story eagerly asks what sentences the sage spoke. And in the sixth version, I tell him.

Anyway, thanks to Jeanne Kane who just sent me email saying how much she enjoyed “It reduces to a problem previously solved”–one of my favorite catch-phrases, which popped up in my podcast with Dave Winer. Jeanne, here’s another favorite, hope you can use it!

Heh. So on top of the usual holiday madness including a brand-new “baby” with Frank, I got Scott Johnson’s hilarious and impossible invitation to Ookles.

Ookles, in case you’re confused, is a project to develop a product (which won’t be named Ookles), something we’ve all sworn on our grandmothers not to describe yet.

Except to say that it’s great, which of course it is. Still, it’s just a little bit tough to blog Ookles.

Okay, how about this? Ookles (to me) is like that secret treehouse you helped to build when you were maybe ten. (Only this time nobody will fall out and fracture his coccyx. At least, not once Scott and Mike and Colin get a few more bits of it nailed together.)

And showing people how to work its rope ladder and secret compartments (once it gets built) is something I’m really, really looking forward to.

But figuring out how to blog about Ookles was hard enough that I kept on putting it off–until
Adam Kalsey scooped the story today.

See you all in the treehouse–soon I hope…

The hypothetical deal James Tobin could still make to spill the beans in exchange for a lighter sentence shouldn’t be called a plea bargain.

During the trial, his lawyers were very cocky and I think they persuaded him that the jury would find him not guilty–no reason, they probably told him, to think of a plea bargain.

The lawyers’ current strategy to keep Tobin from flipping is appealing his conviction. I don’t think that appeal will succeed in anything except tying Tobin up in courts for the next few years. I’ll be curious to see which of the many ludicrous objections they threw at the judge they actually try to use.

BTW, Judge Steve McAuliffe was appointed to the federal bench by Bush Senior in 1992, six years after the death of his wife Christa McAuliffe in the Challenger disaster. Interestingly, another of the NH Bush Senior appointees, Judge DiClerico, recently made headlines and infuriated the current Bushies by declaring the NH parental notification law unconstitutional.

If Tobin were smart enough to realize that his RNC-paid attorneys are working for the RNC and not for him, he would run, not walk, to the prosecutor’s office and cut a deal tomorrow. Then the prosecutor would ask the judge to go easy on sentencing, and I think the judge would comply if Tobin has anything useful to spill.

(Sentencing is March 21, IIRC.)