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Gov't Computers Used to Find Info on "Joe the Plumber"
After Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio gained fame as "Joe the Plumber" in the course of the current presidential campaign, it seems that he's drawn more than idle curiosity from people with access to what should probably be confidential information. An anonymous reader writes with a story from The Columbus Dispatch that "government insiders accessed Joe the Plumber's records soon after the McCain-Obama debate. 'Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher's driver's license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate. Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.' Welcome to 1984."
Records show it was a "test account" assigned to the information technology section of the attorney general's office, said Department of Public Safety spokesman Thomas Hunter.
Brindisi later said investigators have confirmed that Wurzelbacher's information was not accessed within the attorney general's office. She declined to provide details. The office's test accounts are shared with and used by other law enforcement-related agencies, she said.
"IT Test account". Shared by a bunch of different offices. Looks like whoever did the search was smart enough to muddy the waters a bit.
Okay, I'll bite. I'm self-employed, and have been for almost a decade. I became this way because I got tired of busting my ass to put money in someone else's pocket. I now but my ass for my own benefit. I have no delusions of grandeur, but I do enjoy my freedom.
The IRS levies a penalty against the self-employed - the Self Employment Tax. I'll wager that my tax bracket is substantially higher than a "wage earner" with the same gross income. Why? Because I get to pay the extra 15.3% tax for being self-employed.
You would be paying "self-employment tax" even if you were not self-employed. When employed you pay it as "Social Security/Medicare". The bookkeeping says that the employer pays half of the tax, but that is a technicality. If the employee paid it all then supply and demand would raise wages by the amount the employer pays. If the employer paid it all then supply/demand would lower wages by the amount the employee pays. Your tax rate is higher by around 7.5% but you should have a higher income than an employee doing the same job (by around 7.5%).
From the IRS website:
First they came for those who wanted more than 120 characters, but I did not speak out, because I did not want more tha
That has to be one of the funniest sigs I have seen. It's clever and works so well on so many levels. Bravo!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
* also the breakdown of the family and sexual relationships (which has less obvious parallels but "PolPot & the child turns their parents in" (like Winston's neighbor) would be an example)
Here you and me have read different books. 1984 describes a big governmental campagne against sexuality just for fun and for bonding, and the reduction of sexuality to a means to get children. An idea that tried to remove the bonding aspect of sexuality was tried in nationalsocialist Germany ("Lebensborn"), but I don't know of any similar communist experiment. Pol Pot's goal was not to govern sexuality, he was trying to remove parental influence and thus breaking the chain of tradition.
Um, no he's not.
It would be pretty difficult for him to be a plant, considering Obama was doing a media shoot of "walking door-to-door" to ask people for their vote. Obama happened to walk up on Wurzelbacher's house when Sam/Joe was out playing football with his son in the front yard. Obama asked for his vote, Wurzelbacher asked his question, and the rest is history...
Feel free to believe that Charles Keating knew 30 years ahead of time where the 2008 Democratic nominee would be walking for a photo op and cleverly arranged for a distant relative (by marriage) to purchase a house there in order to help his old buddy McCain (who was only peripherally involved in the Keating Five scandal in the first place), but the rest of us will put the tinfoil down...
Besides, Obama will be raising everyone's taxes. He admits as much. He wants to repeal all the tax cuts put in place over the last eight years. When he says he won't be raising taxes on the 95% of the public, he's referring to any increases above and beyond that increase.
That is why he says you "won't be paying any more than you were under Clinton." We are currently ALL paying less than we were under Clinton. I know I may be modded down for saying something negative about Obama, but it's true... go look it up.
Utter nonsense that's been debunked over and over. Quotes are false, info's bad, and you're just hoping that enough people don't bother to look at all and just take what you say at face value. You even threw in the old "I'll get modded down for saying the truth!". Unfortunately for you, it seems more likely you'll get modded down for being full of shit.
Karma: Contrapositive
No, it's not illegal. Go read the Patriot Act: there are plenty of circumstances right now in which such probing is not only legal, but reporting that you've been forced to do such probing is a criminal offense.
There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain
Bullshit. That was a figure plucked from the air by a journalist. It came from counting the number of CCTV cameras in one small section of the main street of a particularly unpleasant part of London, and then scaling that up by the total length of roads in the whole of the UK. I know I pass six cameras in total between my house and my Mum's house, most of which are concentrated in the first ten miles. For the figure of 4.2 million to be correct, I'd have to be passing a camera every few car lengths. I suspect they would be fairly conspicuous on long straight stretches of twisty moorland road, and also hard to connect up.
"Digital CCTV systems can be configured to use face-recognition and look for criminal suspects."
Yes, and of course only the UK is doing that. You wouldn't find that in, for instance, every major airport in the US, would you? Oh wait, that's where we got the idea from? Oh oops, sorry, disregard...
"Cameras that could recognises the registration plates on suspect vehicles were first used to track IRA suspects in London. Now the technology is used for speed cameras, traffic enforcement cameras and in London's congestion charging zone."
Sounds like a pretty good use for them, to me. You might not be old enough to remember this, but for a long time the UK had a serious problem with terrorism. Not the fake bullshit terrorists like people trying to set their shoes on fire, but people actually blowing up cars full of explosives and scrap metal, in busy shopping streets, and things like that. What do you suggest, leaving them to get on with it?
It is illegal not to register to vote in this country, although many people choose not to for various reasons and avoid punishment.
Bullshit. Lots of people don't register to vote, and there is no legal requirement to do so - although there should be.