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

At the trial of James Tobin, defense attorney Dane Butswinkas objected strongly to letting telemarketer Allen Raymond testify about his work for James Treffinger’s NJ Senate Campaign.

The following discussion took place “at side bar, ” out of hearing of the jury but part of the official case transcript for December 7, 2005 (morning session), which I quote:

[Page 81]
4 MR. BUTSWINKAS: Your Honor, I just want to
5 make sure we’re not going to get into examples of prior
6 bad acts. We’ve received no 404(b) notice. It is not
7 relevant to truthfulness.
8 THE COURT: What’s the relevance?
9 MR. MARSH [US Attorney from the Public Integrity Section of the DOJ]: It’s relevant because it
10 establishes Mr. Raymond’s position in the community as a
11 player. Specifically, he was involved in something in
12 New Jersey which was an aggressive ad. He was
13 interviewed by the federal government, was never charged
14 with a crime, was never implicated in a crime, but it
15 resulted in him having to give an interview and resulted
16 ultimately in grand jury indictment unrelated to him.
17 THE COURT [Judge Steven McAuliffe]: The point of all this is what?
18 MR. MARSH: To bring it out.
19 THE COURT: If the point is to bring it out,
20 the answer is no.
21 MR. MARSH: Also to establish at the time
22 prior to when Mr. Raymond gets solicited by Mr. Tobin in
23 the fall, this incident in New Jersey has already
24 happened, is already public, and it’s something we
25 believe circumstantially Mr. Tobin would have known at
[Page 82]
1 the time that he makes the reference to Mr. McGee.
2 MR. BUTSWINKAS: There is no proof of that.
3 THE COURT: No, no, no, no. Are you kidding?
4 You mean because Raymond is involved in something, Tobin
5 necessarily knew about it?
6 MR. LEVCHUK [the lead US Attorney on the case]: It’s publicly known, the
7 aggressive hard hitting, in other words, that kind of
8 person.
9 THE COURT: Why does this jury need to know
10 that?
11 MR. LEVCHUK: Because it explains why the
12 referral to this guy [Allen Raymond] rather than somebody else. It
13 tends to make that the more likely than not route.

Unfortunately, Judge McAuliffe sustained Mr. Butswinkas’s objection, cutting off an opportunity for Allen Raymond to testify under oath about his work for James Treffinger–even though such testimony would have helped the defense’s efforts to discredit Raymond, who gave damning evidence against James Tobin.

Just one more reason why I’m reluctant to describe the Washington-based, RNC-paid lawyers on the defense bench as “Mr. Tobin’s lawyers.” In Mr. Tobin’s interest, they should on many occasions have taken a different path–beginning with counselling him (as McGee’s and Raymond’s lawyers had counselled them) to take a plea deal from the US Attorney.

And so are the cellphone records of everyone else, says the Chicago Sun-Times, which quotes $160 as the price for full phone records of an FBI agent.

Well, this is an uh-oh moment for whistleblowers–but good news for stalkers, your boss, and politcal smear-mongers.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) .. has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use…”Though this problem is all too common, federal law is too narrow to include this type of crime,” Schumer said last year in a prepared statement.”

Aldo Castañeda and I had an interesting talk at last week’s Dave Winer blogdinner about the huge buzz around digital identity. My view: “emerging transparency” is a huge unstoppable freight train headed our way.

I just didn’t know it was moving this fast.

Thanks to Crooks and Liars for the link.

The Tom DeLay scoop in today’s LA Times suggests that Tom DeLay could exorcise scary threats from the Federal Government:

“Delay and two others helped put the brakes on a federal probe of a businessman…The effort to help Hurwitz began in 1999 when DeLay wrote a letter to the chairman of the FDIC denouncing the investigation of Hurwitz as a “form of harassment and deceit on the part of government employees.” When the FDIC persisted, Doolittle and Pombo — both considered proteges of DeLay — …inserted many of the sensitive documents into the Congressional Record, making them public and accessible to Hurwitz’s lawyers, a move that FDIC officials said damaged the government’s ability to pursue the banker.

So, if you were wondering why James Tobin, when Justice Department lawyers were closing in, in June of 2004, might be advised to send a fast $2,000 to Tom DeLay…

And the only thing that finally ended the stonewalling, that finally brought James Tobin’s name out of the Justice Department’s top-secret super-duper double-good-old-boys background and into the public eye, was a lawsuit the frustrated NH Democrats finally filed on October 14, 2004.

But, as Josh Marshall points out today, NH Republicans just filed a countersuit, claiming that the Democrats had no reason at all to sue them, none whatsoever, except to interfere with the GOP’s “constitutionally protected election activities.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this whole thing pretty spooky.

“…or I should say, numerous friends who have had bot flies. They don’t all have them now.”

Our biologist daughter Amity aka Mickey aka Micks has numerous friends who live exciting biologist kinds of lifestyles. She just came home from a party where one of the guests had returned from Peru with a bot fly larva growing inside his foot.

“There are lots of ways to get rid of a bot fly larva. For instance, you can tape a piece of meat to your foot. The larva comes out to eat the meat, and you whip it away very fast. Or you can enclose the body part in a bag, and fill it with smoke…”

Amity and her husband Colin, also a biologist, are headed off tomorrow to New Zealand for three weeks, tourguiding (part of the time) for the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I expect them to come home with lots of new friends, and lots of new stories.

But no bot fly larvae, at least, I very much hope not.

(Green Day version)
I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
and I’m the only one and I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk a…

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
‘Til then I walk alone

Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Aaah-ah,
Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ah-ah

I’m walking down the line
That divides me somewhere in my mind
On the border line
Of the edge and where I walk alone

Read between the lines
What’s fucked up and everything’s alright
Check my vital signs
To know I’m still alive and I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk a…

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
‘Til then I walk alone

Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Aaah-ah
Ah-ah, Ah-ah

I walk alone
I walk a…

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I’m the only one and I walk a…

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
‘Til then I walk alone…

This is no game. You might think this is game, but, trust me, this is no game.

This is not something where rock beats scissors or paper covers rock or rock wraps itself up in paper and gives itself as a present to scissors. This isn’t anything like that. Or where paper types something on itself and sues scissors…

…and that’s just the beginning of a glorious Jack Handey rant, in this week’s New Yorker. Read all the way to the end, and just one more thing.

When you send Jack his $500, send me some too!

Thanks to Bruce Sterling* for the link. And, gratuitously except that you shouldn’t miss Bruce Sterling’s own rant-a-thon from SXSW 2003, thanks also to Cory Doctorow for transcribing it.

$3,000 per year in political donations–that was all James Tobin and his wife Ellen gave in 2002, and again in 2003, according to official FEC records.

So $2,000 in a single day is a large donation. But that’s how much Tobin gave to Texas Congressman Tom DeLay on June 30, 2004.

June 30, 2004 was also the day that Allen Raymond turned state’s evidence in the NH phone-jamming scandal.

June 30, 2004 was also the day that Federal Prosecutor Todd Hinnen first gave public details of the role played by an unnamed “official in a national political organization.” That unnamed official was, we now know, James Tobin.

Tom DeLay was not the only person to profit from a huge surge in Tobin’s donations* during 2004. Aside from $3,000 to Maine Republican candidates and that $2,000 to DeLay, Tobin made some quite interesting donations:

• $1,000* to Nevada Senator John Eric Ensign (who also got money both from Tom Delay’s ARMPAC and from Abramoff associate David Safavian)
• $500 to Senator Bob Beauprez (who got another $30,000 from DeLay’s ARMPAC.)
• $500 to Missouri Senator Kit Bond (who also got $12,500 from Abramoff)
• $500 to Texas Congressman Ted Poe (who also got $5,000 from Tom DeLay’s ARMPAC).
• $500 to Sandhills PAC, the PAC of Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel (who ran into ethics problems over undisclosed ties to the voting machines that gave him a landslide victory.)
• $1,000 to Iowa Priorities, the PAC of Iowa Senator Jim Nussle (Nussle himself got $15,020 fromTom Delay’s ARMPAC)

So, if you were wondering why the RNC shoulders the public embarrassment of paying Tobin’s legal bills, maybe his ties to the dark side of the party have the potential to embarrass them even more.

* In addition to his own donations, James Tobin was also busy in 2004 “bundling” $200,000 in other people’s contributions to Bush-Cheney 2004.

* * Tobin gave Ensign two $500 donations, the first giving his Maine address and describing him as self-employed, the other 20 days later giving a DC address and calling him an employee of DCI Group, LLC.

A Flickred and geeky time was had by all.

Here, just getting started, I’m sitting with H20Town and OPML-fan-in-chief Lisa Williams, a bunch more people and of course Dave Winer. Drupal ubergeek Moshe Weitzman is helping Lisa tune up H20Town to a fine high pitch.

Dan Bricklin is podcasting with awesome tools (“Show us your tools, Dan!”) and will later demo something new called WikiCalc. Phil Greenspun wants to teach you how to fly a helicopter.

Just some of us….

• Dave Winer (The blogfather)
• Dan Bricklin (WikiCalc and podcasting)
• Lisa Williams (OPML Fan)
• Betsy Devine (“Making trouble today for a better tomorrow”)
• Bela Labovitch (OPMLWorkstation/OPMLSearch)
• Coleman Jolley (geekster)
• Philip Greenspun (helicopter instructor)
• Tim Post
• Rahul Dave (xml-rpc is fun)
• Moshe Weitzman (drupal developer)
• Aldo Castañeda (Identity is Central)
• Jesse Baer
• Jim Moore (Arriving the last of us, but by no means the least of us!)
• David Berlind (Organizer of Mashup Camp)

And some more of us…

• Fernando Belmonte (Very curious developer)
• Larry Bouchie (RSS Rocks!)
• Mark Doerschlag

Badabing! The lowdown (and I do mean low) on Allen Raymond’s other 2002 telemarketing scandal–in New Jersey.

During the NH Phone-jamming trial of James Tobin, US attorneys tried to grill Raymond about those 2002 Superbowl phone antics. Defense attorneys blocked that testimony–I’ve backpaged the official court transcript that shows it happening.

p.s. Thanks to Josh Marshall for recruiting the clearly-very-capable Paul Kiel.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that postcards beginning “Dear customer” bode no good. And yet….

Dear customer,

I will be arriving in New Hampshire soon. I am in a freight train car in New Jersey and will be leaving soon. I am tired of being in a box and look forward to sitting on your desk.

Yours truly,
John Stark

I wasn’t expecting the postcard I got today from Revolutionary War hero General John Stark. Or maybe I should say a postcard from the John Stark bobblehead doll I ordered last month from the Museum of NH History.

If you had grown up, as I did, in Manchester, NH, near the lovely green hillside called Stark Park, then you too would have grown up admiring John Stark.

• The Hero of Bennington!
• The originator of NH’s state motto, “Live Free or Die”! Not to mention,
• “Tonight our flag floats over yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow.” (Too long for a license plate, but eloquent.)
• And now this postcard…

Bravo for the good-humored outreach of somebody at the Museum of NH History! I look forward to doing business there again.

But then, I’m not the one who was tapping my toe, keeping an ear out for the mailman’s arrival. No, that would be my Jane Austen action figure…