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Sen. Ted "Tubes" Stevens Is Indicted
Many readers are letting us know about the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens on seven counts of making false statements on his financial disclosure forms. We discussed the raid on the senator's house a while back. Everyone's favorite technologically challenged senator is the longest-serving Republican in the history of the upper house. An Alaskan paper gives deep background on the probe that has ensnared Stevens and a number of other Alaska political figures.
Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) offered up this bizarre explanation for why he voted against net neutrality laws. In it, he explains how the internet works...
"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
But this service isn't going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.
We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people [...]
The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time.
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
Do you know why?
Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.
[...]
Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.
Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.
It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.
The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a violation of net neutrality that hits you and me."
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The Democratic challenger to Steven's seat has actually been out-polling him in the last couple of weeks. The timing of this indictment means it is far more likely that Stevens will lose the primary next month, and Mark Begich will be facing a Republican without all of the baggage.
If he's convicted, there's a good chance he'll lose his Congressional Pension - given that the charges are essentially bribery & corruption.
his technological incompetence is the least of anybody's problems (yes, he's on the committee for regulating our future livelihoods and should understand this stuff..)
He's the guy who wanted the bridge to nowhere.... let's be frank that's a much larger problem than his blustering.
This is good - maybe the system works? It's too early to see
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
:x
Actually, Chappaquiddick happened 7 years after Kennedy first joined the Senate. As far as I know, he plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, but was never charged, let alone convicted or murder or even manslaughter.
Kennedy was hardly senior in the Senate when this happened, though of course as a Kennedy he likely had more deference paid than had he been from a lesser known family.
"a few" is right. The vast majority of criminals in federal prison are still non-violent offenders, while state prisons have a much higher percentage of violent criminals.
Maybe the fact that it's true? The fact that federal prison is filled with people who can't be charged under state laws, which includes lots of tax-related crimes, and the like. That's not to say there aren't major criminals, but they are in small enough numbers that federal prisons don't become one big balkanized gang-war zone, like state prisons.
And for the record, I work down the street from (what used to be until recently) the highest-security federal prison anywhere.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Federal prison is mainly big-time drug users and drug dealers.
Correct. Well, I dunno that it's all big-time, but it mainly drug users/dealers.
State prison is mainly small-time drug users and drug dealers
Incorrect. There are far more violent criminals than drug users/dealers in state prisons.
I can't find a link in 2 minutes of googling, but the proportions haven't changed much since 2000:
-- http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm
rage, rage against the dying of the light
If he simply said "the Internet is like a series of tubes and if too much stuff is going through it, it will slow down", then he might have been right, generally speaking.
However, his speaking style was garbled and it frequently looked like he was trying to make a point, didn't know what it was, and was confused about technical details that shouldn't confuse someone basically in charge of setting Internet policies for the USA. Here are a few gems (thanks to the previous poster who posted this text):
Ok, talking about Netflix here. So far, so good. You order movies online and they arrive at your door.
Now he, all of a sudden, leaps from movies delivered to your door to movies streamed online. He seems to think that: 1) you would order ten movies at once, 2) you would stream those ten movies at the same time, and 3) you would be surprised when your connection speeds dropped into the basement.
Obvious misuse of terminology. I might be nitpicking if the person in question was an 80 year old grandmother who just got online, but this guy was in charge of setting Internet policies in the US. Can't he call it an "e-mail" and not an "Internet." (Unless his staff really was sending him an interconnected network of computers. I'd like to see the shipping charges on that!)
Or because the mail server was slow. These things happen and they're almost never due to commercial internet traffic slowing things down.
He seems to be of the mind that sites like YouTube just dump their content onto the Internet and it somehow clogs up the works for everyone. The reality is that YouTube, and sites like it, take up 0 content all by themselves. When you request a video from YouTube, the server responds by sending you the video and just that video, not YouTube's entire collection. If a lot of people on your network are viewing a large number of YouTube videos, then, yes, YouTube traffic will account for a fair amount of the total traffic going over the network. However, this traffic is initiated by the user, not the site.
Or, more likely, because the DOD isn't dumb and doesn't want to deliver sensitive and classified information over a public network.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
When will it be Reid's Turn?
It's credit mobilier all over again except this time it's housing instead of rail roads. Fannie Mae and Mac are schemes to buy votes with tax payer dollars and use more tax payer dollars to fund electoral campaigns.
Both parties are in it up to their neck.
My respect for Dick Durbin just went WAY up (he already had my respect, and my vote). I just found out a couple of weeks ago that he lives about ten blocks west of me. Five blocks east of my house is where the ghetto begins! The neighborhood he lives in is normal houses; the million dollar homes are on the far west side.
Is it possible that not only do we have an honest politician, but an honest politician in the state where we're so patriotic that even being dead doesn't keep us from voting?
Wow.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Nixon was piss-poor until well after his becoming vice-president, as his voluntarily disclosed tax returns show.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The simple truth is that Ted Stevens has been sent back repeatedly because he is effective at ensuring that Alaskans get overrun as little as possible by the Will of the People (who live SOMEWHERE ELSE), and that when they must bow to the Will of the People From Somewhere Else, that those peolpe pay mightily for the privilege. Ted Stevens has never pretended to have any other mission in the Senate, in fact.
Dear old Ted has been an Alaskan senator for a long time, during which Federal control over Alaska has escalated. He's good at telling you he fights for Alaskan autonomy, not actually doing it.
Incidentally: most of the charges in this case are bullshit, as anybody who thinks about it for a minute can tell you; in a state that is "sparsely populated", exactly how many choices of company do you have for things like home construction? Very few. Who benefits from legislation? Likewise very few people. There are not that many people in these circles; it's difficult to avoid "benefiting" one of them.
The charges revolve around Ted getting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods and services for free. Is that normal? Does that sound legal to you?
Incidentally, I live in another state where people from the rest of the country are called "outsiders," and I've come to find that use of the term correlates very strongly to an inability to see things from other perspectives and think flexibly. The more you recognize that you live in a small part of a large continuum of geographical and cultural diversity, the less you'll fall into the sad trap of dividing the world into Us and Them.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Depends, I happen to live next to the second most visited national park, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It's a great resource for the people of northern Ohio. A bike trail through the national park is obviously a federal matter since only the federal government can build in the park. That's the difference between a national forest and a national park, the government does things to make the park accessible and useful for the citizens.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Here's an obnoxiously laid out page that shows many dollars a state received per dollar paid out in 2005. I'm sure you can find a red state/blue state map somewhere and do the comparison yourself.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html
Actually, if you would compare that to the 2004 election and post red/blue totals, that would be great.
Fnord.
Something like that. If you are convicted of violating a federal law then you will go to a federal prison, if you are convicted of violating a state law then you will go to a state prison. Typically it does deal with whether or not state borders were crossed, but it isn't necessarily a strict rule.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The Senate's rules require that Stevens immediately give up his committee chairs or "ranking member" status that gives him privileges in controlling most Senate business:
Indictments should be a lot more common for that gang of crooks.
--
make install -not war
Check the federal funds report (latest data is 2006, published early July). Note that Louisiana and Mississippi figures are abnormal compared to historical data due to Katrina, and this only covers expenditures, not federal taxes paid from the state in question.
If you want to see balance of payment figures, check this link out. New Jersey (my home state), for example, only receives $0.61 for every dollar remitted to the federal government.
Here's a nice slideshow that shows 25 years of historical BOP rankings for each state (flash required).
The correlation between "red state" and "high ranking in funds received vs. remitted" is extremely strong... I'd seen a map of red/blue states where the data was plugged in that made it ridiculously apparent, but couldn't find the link quickly & can't be bothered to do the same myself right now. I'm sure it's around somewhere if you care to spend some time googling.
Funny, though, how it's primarily due to the higher incomes in the blue states and the progressive tax system... and the Republicans are the ones against a progressive tax system that benefits their states. Just goes to confirm that the rural poor in the US vote against their own economic interests.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Didn't that "bridge to nowhere" actually go to the town's AIRPORT? Yep.
Sounds like a legitimate need to me.
No, I'm getting at the fact that people that are drug users or drug dealers may be imprisoned solely for other crimes because that's what they are convicted of
That would fall under my second option ("If what you're getting at is that these people may be drug users/dealers independent of the crimes that they were convicted for").
the prohibition of drugs (whether that policy is on balance justified or not) makes it more likely that any drug user or seller will be involved in violence
Absolutely true. Still, we don't say that people are in jail for poverty when they get busted stealing stuff, or for alcohol use when they commit violent crimes after having several drinks.
My main interest in correcting the GGP is that I'm in favor of re-examining drug prohibition, and I think the numbers are stark enough when presented without an obvious bias.
Trying to claim that state prisons are mostly in for drug use/dealing makes opponents of reform likely to turn a deaf ear when they look at the numbers and see that that is certainly not obviously true, and requires drawing a lot of tenuous implications to defend.
It undermines the argument to present contorted conclusions as fact, and if you want to make the more complex case you should take the time to do so fully; if you just want a quick stat, saying that more than half of our federal prisoners are in for drug crimes and another quarter-million prisoners in state prisons are there for drug crimes (1 in 5 state prisoners).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
The bridge was not to nowhere, it linked the town's population to the town's airport. Also, there were a few people living on the island, and more people would move to the island if there were a bridge to it. (I know this, and more, because I live in that region of Alaska.)
Still, it wasn't worth nearly as much as it was going to cost, so it was right and proper to kill the project (and would be right and proper to kill a zillion other similarly not-worth-the-cost federal projects).
But, to be clear, "bridge to nowhere" is a marketing term, and like most marketing terms, describes exactly the opposite of reality.
For what it's wroth, Uncle Ted has a longstanding reputation for two things: first, he is amazingly effective at getting federal funds for projects in my state; second, he is very careful to keep his ethical nose clean. But, it seems like after so long in the Senate, he may have messed up and crossed the line; if so, we'll have Senator Begich.
The point you missed is that their net worth was that high before they became Senators.
And after they are Senators, they can earn more from giving a single speech then the median American makes in a year. How is that not still an insulting rate of income?
We are all just people.
Given that the population it serves is 7,000 whole people, that comes to around 50K/person spent just in case they might prefer a bridge to the existing ferry service.
50K will buy a LOT of ferry rides!
According to the link you posted, the Vietnam war did indeed begin "during the Eisenhower administration", but it was LBJ that got us into the war: (from the 3rd paragraph: "The United States entered the war to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam (as part of a wider strategy of containment during the Cold War), beginning with military advisory missions in the early 1960s and escalating to full warfare with the deployment of combat units from 1965 onward. By 1973, almost all U.S. troops had left the theater and in 1975, communist forces assumed control of South Vietnam. North and South Vietnam were reunified shortly thereafter.")
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