Bayosphere

Los Angeles Times: Gary Hart Moves Closer to Making Presidential Bid. Hart spent much of the (last) decade out of the public eye before reemerging as the co-chairman, with former Republican Sen. Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, of a commission that warned of America’s vulnerability to terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks.

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I’m heading down to Austin later today for the SXSW gathering. It’s my first time there, amazingly, given the widespread praise the event gets every year from people I trust.

I’m on Sunday panel about weblogs and journalism. I’m confident the session will transcend the usual “is, is not” argument, because the panelists get it.

I also plan to attend the EFF’s Monday party and Bruce Sterling’s Tuesday party, barring the necessity to get back early for some unexpected reason.

Much more later…

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The Mercury News has volumnious coverage today of the latest charges to hit notorious investment banker Frank Quattrone. I particularly urge you to read this story by Deborah Lohse, who obtained some of the most detailed information yet about the “Friends of Frank” operation, in which executives and others who could steer business to Quattrone’s bank were given essentially free money in the form of insider stocks that were sold for big profits during the bubble. It will make you sick, unless you’re already so jaded that nothing seems bad anymore.

I added these thoughts in a special Friday column.

For full coverage check SiliconValley.com today.

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Mercury News: Ex-CSFB banker charged with `spinning’ violations. The key evidence of this allegation revolves around the timing of a December 2000 e-mail message Quattrone sent to employees endorsing a colleague’s suggestion to purge company files. Quattrone’s e-mail was sent two days after he had learned of a grand-jury probe into the firm’s allocations of hot initial public stock offerings. That triggered federal and state criminal probes into whether he was trying to obstruct justice, a charge he denies.

Quattrone’s defense on the spinning charge is that everyone else was doing it. Did they do it to the same degree?

Whatever, it seems likely that Quattrone is in more and more serious trouble as time goes by.

Oh, he may escape serious punishment, at least in the legal sense. He can spend a few of his ill-gotten millions on legal help, and he’ll undoubtedly continue to have a certain amount of PR support from some of the people he enriched through his infamous “Friends of Frank” operation.

But history will remember him in a deservedly negative way — though you have to wonder if someone who took home hundreds of millions of dollars in the process of a tainted career will care very much.

Quattrone, an enormously talented man by all accounts, could have succeeded honorably. He understood technology’s potential long before almost anyone else on Wall Street, and his efforts helped bring to life some companies that will stand the test of time and markets.

But he came to personify the worst of Silicon Valley — the rampant greed, the “screw the little guy” mentality that pervaded technology’s epicenter in the late 1990s. His reputation is stained for good reasons.

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John Gilmore sends along a link to the Boycott Delta site. Why boycott Delta Airlines?

“Starting later this month, Delta passengers will be asked a lot more than