You are not allowed to take and redistribute pictures of copyrighted works of art in public.
This applies to both sculptures and paintings.
However, as the GP pointed out, this does not apply to 'mixed' worked...someone might be able to copyright the look of external elevator of a building, and that, indeed, would stop people from duplicating that look, but as an 'elevator' has utility, pictures can be taken of it and redistributed.
The rules are pretty strict...the moment anything has a use besides 'looking pretty', you can take and copy pictures of it, unless there's some logical way to exclude the copyrighted part from your picture.
A car, while design portions of it can be copyrighted and other people stopped from building cars with that look, is entirely utilitarian, and hence you can logically take and copy whatever pictures of it you want. Unless you do something like remove the car's logo (which doesn't have any use) from it and try to take pictures of just that.
They do, in fact, have to collect that information, and turn it over to the FEC. They just don't make it public.
Moreover, as I've already mentioned, they clearly do collect it, because there are a lot of people with donations under that amount that show up when their total donations hit $200.
But, hey, keep alleging fraud with absolutely no factual basis at all.
Oh, and incidentally, they have released his birth certificate, repeatedly, and the state of Hawaii has confirmed it. You fucktard.
Actually, the only thing it requires besides your name (So it can call you something) is your data of birth, and that's so it can deny access to people under 13 or whatever that stupid law is.
Oh, and your email address, so you can recover the password, duh.
And note you can stop it from showing your birthday. (Or just the date and not the year, if you want that instead.)
You don't even have to lie on the rest of the stuff, nothing's making you fill it out at all. So you can have a profile that literally just shows your name and no other information, with facebook only additionally knowing your birthday and email. That's less than slashdot knows about me.
Although note that if you don't, people could have a hard time finding you and their automatic 'friend suggester', which goes off things like your high school and hometown, won't work very well.
Within a week of making a profile there, I had 5 or 6 friend requests, all legitimate and from people I really lost touch with. I was impressed.
Exactly. I'm almost 30, and I felt the same way for the longest time. I just missed facebook in college, and had see the ghetto-geocities look of myspace.
But I went to my high school reunion a year ago and a guy I knew was like 'Get on myspace. I know it's lame, but just get on it so I can find you again.' I did, and it was lame for a while. I think I still have less than eight friends there, and two of them are family.
And then when I was trying to track someone down I got on facebook...and it turned out literally half the people I know were on there.
What's more, it started snowballing, with people friending people I hadn't seen since HS that I'd been looking for, but had no idea they were in touch with...or maybe they weren't, and just happened to search for them at the right time, who knows.
I fact, I've actually made a prediction about the future WRT this: The current generation of children will reverse decades of the trend in this 'mobile society', and actually keep in touch with friends their entire life. Which is an incredibly huge societal shift that almost no one has noticed.
Granted, this was supposed to happen with email, heck, it was probably supposed to happen with telephones or even postal service, but 'social networking' has changed the rules because it lets people actually find each other and get themselves put in each other 'address books', where writing a message literally takes five seconds, and people can actually stay current on their friend's life.
Even if facebook goes away, it doesn't matter. As people become used to such sites, they might move to a different one, but the point is they will sign up, and reconnect with everyone again, their entire life.
he knew he was able to get aound campaign finance laws by turning off the credit card validating scheme on his website's processing system just so no flags would be thrown up when someone donated ten times with the same credit card but in different names or when the names didn't match the name and addresses of the credit cards.
Except that, as has been pointed out repeatedly, Obama is not in charge of that. That was, in fact, run by a third party.
Just because you could make a donation without the information matching doesn't mean that said money would actually get to Obama. First Data would look at the transaction, see it didn't match, and refund it.
If they would devote a fraction of resources into tracking down all spammers that they do into tracking down a single bank robber, there would be no more spam originating in this county, and all the spammers would be jail.
Yeah, spamming might be a slap-on-the-wrist crime, but in actuality something like 90% of the spammers out there have hijacked hundreds of thousands of Windows computer to send their spam.
Doing that once is a felony. Forget the actual spam...that should just be used to track whoever paid for the spam, and they should arrested for conspiracy to commit felony computer hijacking, and allowed to plea out if they turn over the spammers.
Hell, that one case: Hire a spammer, get charged with hundreds of thousands of conspiracy-based felonies, really should reduce the amount of spam out there.
McCain cannot stop 527s from doing anything, if he coordinated anything with them, even if attempting to make them stop negative campaigning, he has to count their efforts against his expenditures. I don't mean to call you a moron seeing how this was Obama's claim, but he knows full well that you can't control 527s and keep them as 527s. McCain has and did admonish them when they stepped out of line but he cannot exert any control over them as Obama knows.
Obama managed to get moveon.org's 527 shut down, got Progressive Media USA vastly scaled back, and he also asked people not to donate to 527s.
Saying 'I don't want to see any 527 ads on my behalf' is not illegal. Saying 'Do not donate to 527s' is not illegal.
That is probably what he was wanting McCain to do.
The amazing thing is that Republicans understood this '527' condition five months ago, and were mockinghisconcern about Republican 527s by saying they hadn't shown up and claiming his worries about them were an excuse to not accept public financing.
As it turns out, of course, Obama was right, and they did show up, and Obama spent his money countering them. Money he wouldn't have had if he'd opted into public financing.
Okay. You absolutely know nothing about S corps, and nothing about small business. First, your assertion that a business making 250K / year is not a "small business". This is ridiculous. If you have 10 or more employees, there is a good chance that your business is making $250,000,
Dude. The question isn't if 'the business' is making $250,000 a year, it's whether or not the owners are making income of that much. I repeat: if you've got a 'small business' that's pulling $250,000 a year in income for you, it's not actually a 'small business'.
Businesses with profits in the range of $250,000 up and over what they plow back into the business are not 'small businesses'.
Until you face this fundamental reality, where you keep talking about how much a business 'makes' and I (and the law) keep talking about how much a business owner earns in income, we're just not going to continue this discussion.
Because the word 'makes' can mean a lot of things. If you mean 'income', yearly, businesses often 'make' $250,000. Of course, no one here is actually talking about business income.
What we are talking about is shareholder dividends, in fact. Which is income, minus expenses, (Aka profit), minus money plowed back in to grow the business, with the end divided among all the owners.
If that reaches $250,000, you're talking about a fucking 20 million dollar company owned by a single person, or a 200 million dollar company owned by 10.
We're not talking about a guy running a team of three who charges people $300,000 for roof repairs in a year. Once he pays people off and buys for materials, his actual income, which is what the income tax applies to, is maybe $100,000. Which means he'd pay less under Obama.
Unbecoming a S corp is simple? You do realize that S corps can have up to 75 shareholders? You don't actually have an S corp, do you? In fact, you really haven't ever had to run a business with employees. Never had to cut a payroll tax check, right?
Holy shit. You have a S Corp with 75 shareholder and some of them make over $250,000 a year in income from their shares? So the company is turning over a ten million dollar profit?
So, what you are saying, is Obama never promised anything, just made it seem like he did. He made an empty promise that couldn't be fulfilled to make it sound good, then turned around and made a mockery of the very campaign finance reform he was purporting himself to be a champion of.
Correct, Obama never promised anything except trying to work out an agreement. But, then again, he's not the one who made out that it was more than that.
The media constantly repeated that he had 'promised' to 'take public financing', as soon as he could 'work it out', which as you point out is nonsense.
What he had promised to do from the start is he and McCain would work on an agreement about financing, and that is all he's ever stated. Every time he's asked about if he'd take public financing, it's 'I will work on an agreement with McCain', with more details about 527s forthcoming when more questions are asked.
It is very doubtful that a politician running for president will ever use public funds again. There is no benefit to it anymore, all thanks to Obama's narrow victory and ability to flood the airwaves with unanswered infomercials. He has personally set campaign finance reform back decades.
Ah, yes, I see the problem. You're in an alternate universe where Obama had a narrow victory. I don't know what statements he might have made in that universe. For all I know, he promised to personally fly to the moon and defeat the moonmen.
I'm really just talking about our universe, where almost the entire damn country (Outside Appalachia, which shifted right) was marked by a huge leftward shift and Obama won by 200+ EV and would have still won even if, at the last minute, the voters had shifted 7% back towards McCain.
And, frankly, I'm not the least bit worried that more elections will be funded by millions of small donors.
Besides, an agreement to work out public financing?? What agreement, either you do or you don't. There was nothing to 'work out'.
The agreement was to be about 527s, which would not be subject to public financing. (And aren't subject to the FEC rules for private financing, either.)
527 were abused in the last presidential election, with tons of unaccounted for 'soft money' pouring into, for example, the Swift Boat ads.
Obama made it very clear that he would not accept public financing unless McCain agreed to attempt to reel those in.
Although, legally, 527s have to operate independent of a candidate, so it's unclear how possible it would be reel them in, especially with the Republicans in disarray.
Obama managed to get them to shut down a few on a Democrat side, though, like moveon.org's 527.
Meanwhile. Obama is unlikely to undergo any scrutiny because of the millions in anonymous, sub-$200 donations and the unlikelihood they would audit a sitting president.
No donation to a presidential candidate is anonymous. There's no such thing. All names are recorded and turned over to the FEC.
What Obama is not doing is simply not making donations under $200 public, as the law allows. You can tell he's tracking them because when small donations reach $200 in total all the previous donations magically show up in the system.
Oh, and as for insinuations about 'fraud' and whatnot, it's worth pointing out that it's not the Obama campaign that's doing any of this. It's a company called 'First Data'. They collect donations, match names and addresses to credit cards, etc. And then gives the money to Obama. The FEC has no problems with their behavior at all.
As for the audit, McCain triggered an automatic one, so no getting around that. Whereas Obama is unlikely to get one simply because of the fact the FEC tends to gridlock on partisan issues.
Which is damn stupid, but there you go. Personally, I think we should always audit both of them.
As for "if you don't like blah blah blah", your position assumes that people should choose one type of corporation with one set of circumstances, and then shut their mouths when someone wants to change the rules in a way that negatively affects them.
Dude, it's not that difficult to change from filing as a S Corp to some other form. It's just a tax change. Becoming an S Corp can be tricky in the first place cause you have to fit in the rules, but unbecoming one is simple.
Small business owners should pay more taxes. That will never get passed on to their customers, right?
Whereas, of course, if they get taxes less, they shrug off profits and reduce prices for no obvious reason.
Wait, that's a stupid an idea as yours is. That's not how prices get set at all. In capitalism, prices are set by something called 'supply and demand', not 'Oh, they taxed me more, I better raise prices that I could have raised all along, but didn't for some reason.'.
All taxes get 'passed' on to everybody. Money gets removed from the economy, until it gets spent again, in which case it's passed back to everyone. It's, like, magic! Oooooo, spooky!
Taxes hurt most at the point they are removed from the system. And everyone who interacts with those entities, who now have slightly less money, in turn are slightly harmed, but much less than the entities that were actually taxed. And so on, and so on.
Likewise, when tax money is spent, the entity that receives it is help, and they in turn pass some of the benefit on to others. And so on, and so on.
God knows how you think taxes work, though. I guess when you tax lower income people, magically they don't spent less money. Cause that would, you know, hurt small businesses. In fact, by your logic, taxing people is just taxing businesses.
And, frankly, it's easier to tax businesses, if, by your logic, taxing one entity is the same as taxing everyone else. Let's just get rid of the income tax and only tax business, because, hey, it wouldn't hurt business, right? They'll just 'pass it on', right?
This is, of course, ignoring the fact that, like I said, if you've got a 'small business' that's pulling $250,000 a year in income for you, it's not actually a 'small business'.
And if it's an S Corp, so all incoming money is 'income', instead of just actual income it pays you, you should stop running it as a damn S Corp, you lunatic. S Corps are designed for actual small businesses, ones whose finances are not very separate from your own. Duh it's going to have problems if you're pulling a lot of money through it, but, hell, you're probably already paying more in taxes than you would be if it a normal corporation because of your stupid filing.
And this is all ignoring the fact this 'tax increase' is like 5% for $250,000. Ooo, scary.
Obama's spokesman Bill Burton said "and it was immediately clear that McCain's campaign had no interest in the possibility of an agreement.".
Now, you can feel free to dispute how much Obama pursued it, but, frankly, at this point you're rather obviously uninformed about the facts. There was an attempt made, and it failed.
McCain could have explained a proposal he had, but never bothered to do so, simply because there's no way he would have been willing to restrict the 527s, which Obama repeatedly said would be part of the deal.
Okay, I don't know what this website is, and maybe it actually needed $1.2 million to develop, and $956,000 for hosting and support services.
But how the hell do you spend $928,000 spent on software and $661,000 on hardware?
Yes, not everyone uses free software for web hosting, but last I checked the most expensive version of Cold Fusion was under $10,000. I don't know how much the most expensive version of Oracle costs, but I'm rather doubting it's six fucking figures. (Remember, that doesn't include support.)
Likewise, for $661,000, you could build a damn hosting building. (And what was the $956,000 for if you've got your own building?)
Look, another moron who didn't bother to look up what authority the 'president of the Senate' has.
Which is none at all.
I have almost as much authority in the Senate as the VP does: Both of us cannot: Vote, propose legislation, sit on committees, raise points of order, address the Senate, etc, etc. We both can't even address the President pro tempore without permission from a Senator.
The two powers that the VP has in the Senate that every other schmuck in the country doesn't have is: 1) The right to be on the Senate floor and not get kicked out (Which actually can be extended to anyone the Senate lets in, so that's only half a power.), and 2) vote if there is a tie.
They are as much 'in charge' of the Senate as you are. Being 'in charge' would imply more power than Senators, when in actuality they have a good deal less. They only have fractionally more power than random people wandering around the Senate floor!
Oh, and that 'fact checker' column managed to conclude he lied...before the general election. Which is a really neat trick for any promise made about his behavior during the general election.
They 'concluded' this by pointing out Obama didn't actually say what people think he did. Aka, people like you thought he'd promised to opt out, and he did not do so, and hence, somehow, he lied, in advance, because he had never even promised to do what you morons think he promised.
A much better conclusion is that, in fact, you're idiots who can't understand simple English. A promise to work towards an agreement on something can only be broken if it's demonstrated the other side at least attempted to reach an agreement, and he rejected this proposal (1), and there's not any evidence of that at all.
1) And, at that point, you'd have to demonstrate McCain's proposal was rejected out of hand by Obama, and that Obama never had an intent to consider it...but considering there never was such a proposal, that's fairly moot. You can't claim one side is 'dishonest' about indicating they'd be ready to reach an agreement on something if the other side doesn't bother to show up to the bargaining table.
The linked PDF: My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.
Seriously, do you have some sort of mental disability or something? That's exactly what I said....that he was willing 'pursue an agreement', it's almost exactly my exact words except I said 'work out' instead of 'pursue', which is why he's running for president and I'm not.
McCain said he'd accept the pledge during the primary, and then didn't actually bother to actually agree to it once he had won, (Despite the fact McCain was already locked into public financing.) probably because Obama was going to require him to reign in the right's 527, like Obama did with moveon.
Many of them are S corps, and despite some people's assumptions, it's not all deductible when it comes to expenses.
Um, yeah. If you decide to have a S Corporation, you have traded off corporate income tax for personal income tax.
If you don't like what this does to your income tax, feel free to actually start paying corporate income tax instead.
And I have no idea what you're talking about when you say it's not all 'deductible'. If you're talking about company purchases that can also be for personal use, that doesn't really have anything to do with anything.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not allowed to take and redistribute pictures of copyrighted works of art in public.
This applies to both sculptures and paintings.
However, as the GP pointed out, this does not apply to 'mixed' worked...someone might be able to copyright the look of external elevator of a building, and that, indeed, would stop people from duplicating that look, but as an 'elevator' has utility, pictures can be taken of it and redistributed.
The rules are pretty strict...the moment anything has a use besides 'looking pretty', you can take and copy pictures of it, unless there's some logical way to exclude the copyrighted part from your picture.
A car, while design portions of it can be copyrighted and other people stopped from building cars with that look, is entirely utilitarian, and hence you can logically take and copy whatever pictures of it you want. Unless you do something like remove the car's logo (which doesn't have any use) from it and try to take pictures of just that.
Please make that a car analogy.
But, seriously, you actually have the legal right to trespass to save someone's life. Ask firefighters about that one.
In fact, it's a general legal defense to any crime that you were acting to stop a greater crime, or greater injury.
They do, in fact, have to collect that information, and turn it over to the FEC. They just don't make it public.
Moreover, as I've already mentioned, they clearly do collect it, because there are a lot of people with donations under that amount that show up when their total donations hit $200.
But, hey, keep alleging fraud with absolutely no factual basis at all.
Oh, and incidentally, they have released his birth certificate, repeatedly, and the state of Hawaii has confirmed it. You fucktard.
Contact your old high school, make sure they have your address and telephone number.
In fact, you can probably find out contact information for the class president and just send them an email.
Actually, the only thing it requires besides your name (So it can call you something) is your data of birth, and that's so it can deny access to people under 13 or whatever that stupid law is.
Oh, and your email address, so you can recover the password, duh.
And note you can stop it from showing your birthday. (Or just the date and not the year, if you want that instead.)
You don't even have to lie on the rest of the stuff, nothing's making you fill it out at all. So you can have a profile that literally just shows your name and no other information, with facebook only additionally knowing your birthday and email. That's less than slashdot knows about me.
Although note that if you don't, people could have a hard time finding you and their automatic 'friend suggester', which goes off things like your high school and hometown, won't work very well.
Within a week of making a profile there, I had 5 or 6 friend requests, all legitimate and from people I really lost touch with. I was impressed.
Exactly. I'm almost 30, and I felt the same way for the longest time. I just missed facebook in college, and had see the ghetto-geocities look of myspace.
But I went to my high school reunion a year ago and a guy I knew was like 'Get on myspace. I know it's lame, but just get on it so I can find you again.' I did, and it was lame for a while. I think I still have less than eight friends there, and two of them are family.
And then when I was trying to track someone down I got on facebook...and it turned out literally half the people I know were on there.
What's more, it started snowballing, with people friending people I hadn't seen since HS that I'd been looking for, but had no idea they were in touch with...or maybe they weren't, and just happened to search for them at the right time, who knows.
I fact, I've actually made a prediction about the future WRT this: The current generation of children will reverse decades of the trend in this 'mobile society', and actually keep in touch with friends their entire life. Which is an incredibly huge societal shift that almost no one has noticed.
Granted, this was supposed to happen with email, heck, it was probably supposed to happen with telephones or even postal service, but 'social networking' has changed the rules because it lets people actually find each other and get themselves put in each other 'address books', where writing a message literally takes five seconds, and people can actually stay current on their friend's life.
Even if facebook goes away, it doesn't matter. As people become used to such sites, they might move to a different one, but the point is they will sign up, and reconnect with everyone again, their entire life.
Yes, the professional way...of finding old classmates? Cause I've never actually seen that as part of any job description.
Plenty of normal people have facebook. It's a good way to keep in touch with people regardless of changing email addresses.
LinkedIn is just the Facebook for professional relationships, instead of friends. It's not magically 'better', it's for a different set of people.
As for 'information all over the internet', I have no idea what you're talking about.
he knew he was able to get aound campaign finance laws by turning off the credit card validating scheme on his website's processing system just so no flags would be thrown up when someone donated ten times with the same credit card but in different names or when the names didn't match the name and addresses of the credit cards.
Except that, as has been pointed out repeatedly, Obama is not in charge of that. That was, in fact, run by a third party.
Just because you could make a donation without the information matching doesn't mean that said money would actually get to Obama. First Data would look at the transaction, see it didn't match, and refund it.
Frankly, the government doesn't care.
If they would devote a fraction of resources into tracking down all spammers that they do into tracking down a single bank robber, there would be no more spam originating in this county, and all the spammers would be jail.
Yeah, spamming might be a slap-on-the-wrist crime, but in actuality something like 90% of the spammers out there have hijacked hundreds of thousands of Windows computer to send their spam.
Doing that once is a felony. Forget the actual spam...that should just be used to track whoever paid for the spam, and they should arrested for conspiracy to commit felony computer hijacking, and allowed to plea out if they turn over the spammers.
Hell, that one case: Hire a spammer, get charged with hundreds of thousands of conspiracy-based felonies, really should reduce the amount of spam out there.
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
No one will be able to fund the guy or collect money from someone who owns a building? Um, okay.
McCain cannot stop 527s from doing anything, if he coordinated anything with them, even if attempting to make them stop negative campaigning, he has to count their efforts against his expenditures. I don't mean to call you a moron seeing how this was Obama's claim, but he knows full well that you can't control 527s and keep them as 527s. McCain has and did admonish them when they stepped out of line but he cannot exert any control over them as Obama knows.
Obama managed to get moveon.org's 527 shut down, got Progressive Media USA vastly scaled back, and he also asked people not to donate to 527s.
Saying 'I don't want to see any 527 ads on my behalf' is not illegal. Saying 'Do not donate to 527s' is not illegal.
That is probably what he was wanting McCain to do.
The amazing thing is that Republicans understood this '527' condition five months ago, and were mocking his concern about Republican 527s by saying they hadn't shown up and claiming his worries about them were an excuse to not accept public financing.
As it turns out, of course, Obama was right, and they did show up, and Obama spent his money countering them. Money he wouldn't have had if he'd opted into public financing.
You mean, beside McCain's loan, right?
Okay. You absolutely know nothing about S corps, and nothing about small business. First, your assertion that a business making 250K / year is not a "small business". This is ridiculous. If you have 10 or more employees, there is a good chance that your business is making $250,000,
Dude. The question isn't if 'the business' is making $250,000 a year, it's whether or not the owners are making income of that much. I repeat: if you've got a 'small business' that's pulling $250,000 a year in income for you, it's not actually a 'small business'.
Businesses with profits in the range of $250,000 up and over what they plow back into the business are not 'small businesses'.
Until you face this fundamental reality, where you keep talking about how much a business 'makes' and I (and the law) keep talking about how much a business owner earns in income, we're just not going to continue this discussion.
Because the word 'makes' can mean a lot of things. If you mean 'income', yearly, businesses often 'make' $250,000. Of course, no one here is actually talking about business income.
What we are talking about is shareholder dividends, in fact. Which is income, minus expenses, (Aka profit), minus money plowed back in to grow the business, with the end divided among all the owners.
If that reaches $250,000, you're talking about a fucking 20 million dollar company owned by a single person, or a 200 million dollar company owned by 10.
We're not talking about a guy running a team of three who charges people $300,000 for roof repairs in a year. Once he pays people off and buys for materials, his actual income, which is what the income tax applies to, is maybe $100,000. Which means he'd pay less under Obama.
Unbecoming a S corp is simple? You do realize that S corps can have up to 75 shareholders? You don't actually have an S corp, do you? In fact, you really haven't ever had to run a business with employees. Never had to cut a payroll tax check, right?
Holy shit. You have a S Corp with 75 shareholder and some of them make over $250,000 a year in income from their shares? So the company is turning over a ten million dollar profit?
Yeah, I think that should actually be taxed.
So, what you are saying, is Obama never promised anything, just made it seem like he did. He made an empty promise that couldn't be fulfilled to make it sound good, then turned around and made a mockery of the very campaign finance reform he was purporting himself to be a champion of.
Correct, Obama never promised anything except trying to work out an agreement. But, then again, he's not the one who made out that it was more than that.
The media constantly repeated that he had 'promised' to 'take public financing', as soon as he could 'work it out', which as you point out is nonsense.
What he had promised to do from the start is he and McCain would work on an agreement about financing, and that is all he's ever stated. Every time he's asked about if he'd take public financing, it's 'I will work on an agreement with McCain', with more details about 527s forthcoming when more questions are asked.
It is very doubtful that a politician running for president will ever use public funds again. There is no benefit to it anymore, all thanks to Obama's narrow victory and ability to flood the airwaves with unanswered infomercials. He has personally set campaign finance reform back decades.
Ah, yes, I see the problem. You're in an alternate universe where Obama had a narrow victory. I don't know what statements he might have made in that universe. For all I know, he promised to personally fly to the moon and defeat the moonmen.
I'm really just talking about our universe, where almost the entire damn country (Outside Appalachia, which shifted right) was marked by a huge leftward shift and Obama won by 200+ EV and would have still won even if, at the last minute, the voters had shifted 7% back towards McCain.
And, frankly, I'm not the least bit worried that more elections will be funded by millions of small donors.
A blade server array? For a website? Who the fuck are you, Google?
Besides, an agreement to work out public financing?? What agreement, either you do or you don't. There was nothing to 'work out'.
The agreement was to be about 527s, which would not be subject to public financing. (And aren't subject to the FEC rules for private financing, either.)
527 were abused in the last presidential election, with tons of unaccounted for 'soft money' pouring into, for example, the Swift Boat ads.
Obama made it very clear that he would not accept public financing unless McCain agreed to attempt to reel those in.
Although, legally, 527s have to operate independent of a candidate, so it's unclear how possible it would be reel them in, especially with the Republicans in disarray.
Obama managed to get them to shut down a few on a Democrat side, though, like moveon.org's 527.
Meanwhile. Obama is unlikely to undergo any scrutiny because of the millions in anonymous, sub-$200 donations and the unlikelihood they would audit a sitting president.
No donation to a presidential candidate is anonymous. There's no such thing. All names are recorded and turned over to the FEC.
What Obama is not doing is simply not making donations under $200 public, as the law allows. You can tell he's tracking them because when small donations reach $200 in total all the previous donations magically show up in the system.
Oh, and as for insinuations about 'fraud' and whatnot, it's worth pointing out that it's not the Obama campaign that's doing any of this. It's a company called 'First Data'. They collect donations, match names and addresses to credit cards, etc. And then gives the money to Obama. The FEC has no problems with their behavior at all.
As for the audit, McCain triggered an automatic one, so no getting around that. Whereas Obama is unlikely to get one simply because of the fact the FEC tends to gridlock on partisan issues.
Which is damn stupid, but there you go. Personally, I think we should always audit both of them.
As for "if you don't like blah blah blah", your position assumes that people should choose one type of corporation with one set of circumstances, and then shut their mouths when someone wants to change the rules in a way that negatively affects them.
Dude, it's not that difficult to change from filing as a S Corp to some other form. It's just a tax change. Becoming an S Corp can be tricky in the first place cause you have to fit in the rules, but unbecoming one is simple.
Small business owners should pay more taxes. That will never get passed on to their customers, right?
Whereas, of course, if they get taxes less, they shrug off profits and reduce prices for no obvious reason.
Wait, that's a stupid an idea as yours is. That's not how prices get set at all. In capitalism, prices are set by something called 'supply and demand', not 'Oh, they taxed me more, I better raise prices that I could have raised all along, but didn't for some reason.'.
All taxes get 'passed' on to everybody. Money gets removed from the economy, until it gets spent again, in which case it's passed back to everyone. It's, like, magic! Oooooo, spooky!
Taxes hurt most at the point they are removed from the system. And everyone who interacts with those entities, who now have slightly less money, in turn are slightly harmed, but much less than the entities that were actually taxed. And so on, and so on.
Likewise, when tax money is spent, the entity that receives it is help, and they in turn pass some of the benefit on to others. And so on, and so on.
God knows how you think taxes work, though. I guess when you tax lower income people, magically they don't spent less money. Cause that would, you know, hurt small businesses. In fact, by your logic, taxing people is just taxing businesses.
And, frankly, it's easier to tax businesses, if, by your logic, taxing one entity is the same as taxing everyone else. Let's just get rid of the income tax and only tax business, because, hey, it wouldn't hurt business, right? They'll just 'pass it on', right?
This is, of course, ignoring the fact that, like I said, if you've got a 'small business' that's pulling $250,000 a year in income for you, it's not actually a 'small business'.
And if it's an S Corp, so all incoming money is 'income', instead of just actual income it pays you, you should stop running it as a damn S Corp, you lunatic. S Corps are designed for actual small businesses, ones whose finances are not very separate from your own. Duh it's going to have problems if you're pulling a lot of money through it, but, hell, you're probably already paying more in taxes than you would be if it a normal corporation because of your stupid filing.
And this is all ignoring the fact this 'tax increase' is like 5% for $250,000. Ooo, scary.
His plan was nothing more then following the rules.
Oh, so that's why they couldn't reach an agreement! McCain did, indeed, refuse to follow the FEC rules. Now I see.
He didn't even attempt to negotiate with McCain or anyone.
Yes, he did.
Obama's spokesman Bill Burton said "and it was immediately clear that McCain's campaign had no interest in the possibility of an agreement.".
Now, you can feel free to dispute how much Obama pursued it, but, frankly, at this point you're rather obviously uninformed about the facts. There was an attempt made, and it failed.
McCain could have explained a proposal he had, but never bothered to do so, simply because there's no way he would have been willing to restrict the 527s, which Obama repeatedly said would be part of the deal.
Okay, I don't know what this website is, and maybe it actually needed $1.2 million to develop, and $956,000 for hosting and support services.
But how the hell do you spend $928,000 spent on software and $661,000 on hardware?
Yes, not everyone uses free software for web hosting, but last I checked the most expensive version of Cold Fusion was under $10,000. I don't know how much the most expensive version of Oracle costs, but I'm rather doubting it's six fucking figures. (Remember, that doesn't include support.)
Likewise, for $661,000, you could build a damn hosting building. (And what was the $956,000 for if you've got your own building?)
It always seemed a waste to me after we had Metal Gear.
What do you mean, that was just a game?
Look, another moron who didn't bother to look up what authority the 'president of the Senate' has.
Which is none at all.
I have almost as much authority in the Senate as the VP does: Both of us cannot: Vote, propose legislation, sit on committees, raise points of order, address the Senate, etc, etc. We both can't even address the President pro tempore without permission from a Senator.
The two powers that the VP has in the Senate that every other schmuck in the country doesn't have is: 1) The right to be on the Senate floor and not get kicked out (Which actually can be extended to anyone the Senate lets in, so that's only half a power.), and 2) vote if there is a tie.
They are as much 'in charge' of the Senate as you are. Being 'in charge' would imply more power than Senators, when in actuality they have a good deal less. They only have fractionally more power than random people wandering around the Senate floor!
Oh, and that 'fact checker' column managed to conclude he lied...before the general election. Which is a really neat trick for any promise made about his behavior during the general election.
They 'concluded' this by pointing out Obama didn't actually say what people think he did. Aka, people like you thought he'd promised to opt out, and he did not do so, and hence, somehow, he lied, in advance, because he had never even promised to do what you morons think he promised.
A much better conclusion is that, in fact, you're idiots who can't understand simple English. A promise to work towards an agreement on something can only be broken if it's demonstrated the other side at least attempted to reach an agreement, and he rejected this proposal (1), and there's not any evidence of that at all.
1) And, at that point, you'd have to demonstrate McCain's proposal was rejected out of hand by Obama, and that Obama never had an intent to consider it...but considering there never was such a proposal, that's fairly moot. You can't claim one side is 'dishonest' about indicating they'd be ready to reach an agreement on something if the other side doesn't bother to show up to the bargaining table.
Can you not actually read or something?
The linked PDF: My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.
Seriously, do you have some sort of mental disability or something? That's exactly what I said....that he was willing 'pursue an agreement', it's almost exactly my exact words except I said 'work out' instead of 'pursue', which is why he's running for president and I'm not.
McCain said he'd accept the pledge during the primary, and then didn't actually bother to actually agree to it once he had won, (Despite the fact McCain was already locked into public financing.) probably because Obama was going to require him to reign in the right's 527, like Obama did with moveon.
Many of them are S corps, and despite some people's assumptions, it's not all deductible when it comes to expenses.
Um, yeah. If you decide to have a S Corporation, you have traded off corporate income tax for personal income tax.
If you don't like what this does to your income tax, feel free to actually start paying corporate income tax instead.
And I have no idea what you're talking about when you say it's not all 'deductible'. If you're talking about company purchases that can also be for personal use, that doesn't really have anything to do with anything.