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Ted "A Series of Tubes" Stevens Found Guilty
techmuse writes "According to a series of tubes sites, Senator Ted Stevens has been found guilty of lying about free home renovations that he received from an oil contractor. He faces up to 5 years in jail, and the outcome of his current reelection bid is now in doubt. 'The conviction came after a tumultuous week in the jury room. First there were complaints about an unruly juror, then another had to be replaced when she left Washington following the death of her father. Finally, jurors on Monday discovered a discrepancy in the indictment that had been overlooked by prosecutors. Jury deliberations in this historic trial have at times been as contentious as some of the proceedings The Justice Department indicted Stevens on July 29, and the Alaska Republican took a huge legal gamble and asked for a speedy trial in order to resolve the charges before Election Day. Judge Emmet Sullivan complied with Stevens' request, and in less than three months from the time of his indictment, Stevens was found guilty.'"
He faces up to five years for each count. Although most seem to agree he won't serve anywhere near that much time.
The summary indicates that he faces up to 5 years in jail. This is incorrect. He faces up to 5 years in jail *per count*. Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/27/stevens.jurors/index.html
Another bad apple is fine. We will send him to prison just like Stevens. Eventually America will get pissed enough to start hanging these crooks in the street.....then it will stop.
Shouldn't there be some law to protect the American people from legislators who commit felonies relating to their position?
if he is reelected
Didn't you answer your own question? We already have election law and it allows us to choose to replace our criminal legislators, or, if we feel that they are still able to competently serve us, choose to return them to office.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Despite being a convicted felon, he is not required to drop out of the race or resign from the Senate. If he wins re-election, he can continue to hold his seat because there is no rule barring felons from serving in Congress. The Senate could vote to expel Stevens on a two-thirds vote. Article here
WTF?!?! Seriously?
From same article, when asked about stepping down: "Put this down: That will never happen - ever, OK?" Stevens said in the weeks leading up to his trial. "I am not stepping down. I'm going to run through and I'm going to win this election.
What an absolutely arrogant bastard! It's good to know what the rule of law really means to the men in charge of this country.
The senate ethics committee can recommend that the he be expelled from senate by a 2/3 vote. The ethics committee has recommended such things before, but nobody's ever been expelled because they all resign first.
The more likely possibility, however, is that Senator Stevens' close senate race has just gone down a series of tubes because of this.
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=3975103&IDComment=45754482#c45754482
You owe Decados an apology!
The sad truth is that he'll probably pay a fine and get off scott-free otherwise.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That would be Mena, ARKANSAS. And you would be referring to Iran/Contra, which was a Regan affair.
Stevens: Allen didn't have permission to remove the furniture, we didn't want it, and it was tasteless furniture.
Prosecution: After Allen removed the furniture, Stevens didn't get back his old furniture but kept the new furniture, and didn't report Allen to the police. More importantly he didn't report this furniture among other things to the Senate. Also Senator Stevens reportedly wanted to gift this "tasteless" furniture to his newly married son.
Stevens: It was not a gift. It was a loan, and we hardly used it.
Prosecution: A loan for 7 years, interest free? Also Stevens sent a note thanking Persons for his "gift" and that he (Stevens) used it all the time.
Stevens:"Ms. Morris, I have not died yet."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Ten movies streaming across that, 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. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
if you don't think thats funny, then there is something wrong with you, btw that was from the wikipedia page on "Series of tubes"
What you read is correct: Only a 2/3 vote of the Senate can expel a member. This might seem unreasonable in the case of a felony conviction fro corruption like this. But the drafters of the constitution (rightly, IMO) wanted to make it very difficult for one branch of government to pull dirty tricks on another, or for anyone to override the will of the voters.
Based on my moderate understanding of Alaskan politics, the smart money says Stevens will lose the election now. It was already close, and corruption amongst the old-guard republicans is a big campaign issue. Stevens had put a lot on being exonerated here.
Even if he does win, resignation seems certain. None of his Republican "friends" are going to want him around generating press, and if he decides to ignore them and hang on just because he can, they might get pissed off, which is the only way you'll see 67 votes for expulsion.
So the election looks like the popular mayor of the states largest city vs. an unspecified Republican to be named by Sarah Palin. Hard to think there won't be an enthusiasm gap there.
We (or at least, I personally) would cut him a bigger break if he hadn't made that analogy /. standards would be a ridiculous automotive analogy ("The Internet is not like a big truck..." WTF?)
A) In a speech justifying his vote against net neutrality
B) If there hadn't been aspects of said speech that actually SUPPORT net neutrality, which he clearly doesn't understand at all
C) If he hadn't, in the same speech, complained of one of his aides sending him "an internet" and it getting blocked for days
D) If the context of that line hadn't been something that even by
So, no, I really don't think he's going to get to live that one down for a while. I think at least half the humor derived from the situation is that the guy CLEARLY had no idea what he was talking about, and by some miracle managed to use *almost* the generally accepted terminology.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
This alone will not remove Stevens from office. On the (slim) chance that he wins re-election, he will still be a senator, unless the Senate chooses by a 2/3 margin to remove him (which is fairly likely).
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Never mind.
the pardoned person need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime
Oh get off of it. The reason for the economic meltdown has little to do with Freddie and Fannie. It was deregulation, spearheaded by the Bush administration, which allowed financial institutions to create "mortgage-backed securities". Instead of a bank making a 30-year mortgage to someone who was a good risk, and keeping the mortgage for the life of it, now institutions could buy and trade baskets of mortgages. They could buy and sell it at any time, and therefore had little incentive to see how well any individual could pay of their personal mortgage. As the appetite for mortgage backed securities increased, lenders loosened criteria to give subprime mortgages, eventually taking people with no incomes and no assets. This had little to do with Fannie and Freddie, and much more to do with deregulation. In their greed, lenders gave loans to people who could never pay, simply because they wanted to sell another bundle of loans. If banks held individual mortgages for the life of the loan, and therefore had good lending criteria, none of this would have happened.
Here's a great "This American Life" piece on it. Banks made loans to people with no money. Banks wouldn't "regulate" themselves, the Bush administration rolled back regulation. The small way that Freddie and Fannie are related to this is because investors foolishly thought that the US gov't would prop them up. That's the investor's mistake. That's the long and short of it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
This may be news to you, but Bill Clinton hasn't been news or powerful since 20 January 2001, and you only make yourself pathetic by excusing Bush's actions by saying "but Clinton!".
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You're welcome.
So far as this mess is concerned, a good deal of it can be traced back to the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Now, some argue that this law, by repealing the much-older Steagal-Glass Act, was merely bringing the U.S. banking industry in line with Europe's. Maybe so, but considering that a goodly chunk of Europe is suffering a similar meltdown it probably wasn't such a great idea. I don't really know, I'm not an economist.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So, when did it become possible to sell mortgage-backed securities, and why did it go into overdrive around 2002, 2003?
Modern US incarnations started in 1938 with the creation of Fannie Mae.
There are a LOT of reasons why they went into overdrive lately. Low interest rates, hedge funds, deregulation, policies to encourage home ownership gone awry, big profits in securitization, lack of transparency into exotic securities, inadequate risk management policies at banks, and several other reasons come to mind.
It isn't a simple situation with a simple solution unfortunately. Any solution that does come however will need to come from regulation requiring disclosure of exotic security positions and limits on the ability to endlessly bundle and transfer risk through securitization. A better term for sub-prime is high risk. But everyone thought they could just transfer the risk to someone else and eventually there was so much high risk debt that it clogged up the credit markets.
I got modded down for pointing out that Colin Powell made a 1 hour speech of known lies to the UN to make our case for going to war with Iraq? I guess now that he endorsed Obama he must be a great guy again!
That speech he gave was from a paper written by a post-graduate student in 1990. He and others knew it but he gave the speech anyway. Without that speech there would have been a lot more people against the war from the beginning.
It really is too bad I didn't make i to a +5 troll. that would have made my day :)
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
The Real Deal on the Current Economic Crisis
So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working home owners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:
The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.