They just have to provide the specs they wrote their drivers to.
It's not just the GPL fans who think a binary interface is a bad idea...bad hardware drivers cause something like 75% of all crashes on Windows. By making people keep the binary drivers up-to-day, they are less likely to use outdated ones that kill their system, or in fact use them at all.
Seriously. Modern Windows systems have almost 100% perfect application protection, but my damn wireless Logitech keyboard/mouse radio thingy still causes a blue screen everytime I plug it in or unplug it. Why? Shitty driver.
Letting the hardware people maintain the drivers has always been a very stupid idea. Originally, they sent out specs with their devices, and the OS makers were expected to write drivers.
And then fucking Microsoft showed up, and forced hardware people to write their drivers if they wanted Windows support. This one decision has probably cost trillions of dollars to the economy. Hardware engineers write crappy drivers.
Linux people don't want hardware people to write drivers. Tell them what the hardware does, tell them how to talk to it, and they will write the damn drivers for free.
And 'proprietary information' is a red herring. If you give a trade secret out in a driver, there is a technical term for that, specifically, 'shareholder lawsuit'. No, seriously, if you give out a trade secret in a driver, you've just lost that trade secret. (No, EULAs are not enough protection for trade secrets. Signed contracts, yes, EULAs clicked by random people, no.)
What most 'proprietary information' is is the fact that model X2000 is the same as model X3000, except that the driver notices it's X3000 and turns on some features. I can see how a company would want to keep that secret, but you'll forgive me if I don't think hiding that information is incredibly important or even a good thing.
As for wifi and the FCC...if they want to bitch I need to go find my old PCMCIA card that let me broadcast on the 'illegal in the US' channels...all I had to do it was tell it I wasn't in the US during the install. That's just as illegal as broadcasting at higher-than-allowed power, and I didn't see an FCC smackdown.
And no one's suggesting they need to release source, anyway. Just release the specs. OTOH, consdering how the FCC ignored my card, it would probably be enough to release drivers with the power level hardcoded in. If someone changes that, hey, it's their business, and it's certainly harder than selecting 'UK' during the install.
So leave the damn penguin sticker off the package if you don't want to support Linux drivers. It is not your responsiblity as to what software claims to be compatable with your hardward, it is only the other way around that is true.
That doesn't absolve you of releasing the hardware specs to the kernel team. You can't say 'oh no! Someday the Linux team might release drivers for this that doesn't work exactly right, and a customer might get annoyed.', because your failure to release specs is actually much more likely to cause that exact problem, and, trust me, I and everyone else gets a lot more pissed at hardware manufacturers when it is their stonewalling that is causing problems instead of them saying 'We don't offically support Linux.', but they give info to the kernel devs.
Because, like it or not, someone will release Linux drivers. These drivers can suck, and do things 'wrongly' according to how you want your hardware to work, leaving numerous gripes all over the net about how you refuse to support Linux. Or you can hand the specs over to the dev team and wash your hands of the whole thing.
Somethign like half the people in this thread are on crack, you included.
YOU DON'T DEVELOP DRIVERS FOR LINUX.
What you do is release hardware specs, and the kernel devs develop drivers.
Yes, you can release drivers, and try to keep them synced up the kernel, just like instead of driving a car, you can just hire a bunch of people to push it down the road while you steer.
Or you can hand specs and possible some source to the devs, and they'll take over your driver, make it work, and keep it up to date.
There are three reasons to keep drivers outside the kernel: They change faster than the kernel, like the wlan drivers used to (And do not anymore. They no longer belong outside the kernel, sorry.), they contain trade secrets, or they contain licensed software.
However, trade secrets in software is just damn stupid in the first place. If you give out the software, your competitors will just, duh, take them apart to find out your secrets, and this is, incidentally, completely legal.
In the real world, these 'trade secrets' are usually 'All our hardware is basically the same, and we enable certain features in the driver based on the ID returned by the card.'. They quite rightly suspect if they turned those drivers over to the kernel devs, the devs would just turn on everything.
And the licensed software is just a red herring. If you can't release any source, you should still release the specs.
Abramoff arranged a trip on behave of his client, the Northern Marianas, to the Northern Marianas. 100% legal, except that he paid for it instead of them.
Any evidence of knowledge by Democrats that he did so? Nope.
Any evidence this influenced their voting? No, and at least one of them voted against it.
A person continued to hold fund-raisers for Reid after becoming employeed by Abramoff.
Any evidence this is even vaguely related to Abramoff? Nope.
Any evidence this influenced his voting? No, Reid basically already had to vote the way Abramoff's interests aligned.
Dorgan and Harkin both used a skybox that was owned by Abramoff.
100% legal, because, after a bit of research, I've discovered that in both cases, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians were paying Abramoff for it. So, um, no, this doesn't count. Leasing a box and letting a politician use it is is as legal as purchasing one and letting a politician use it. The only 'proof' of wrongdoing is their fucking stupid PR move by paying the tribes back for the skyboxes.
Any evidence this influenced their voting? Well, no, not that anyone has manged to come up with.
Throwing out the Reid example, which was just stupid, and you are left with two sets of Democrats who accepted something they say they thought was legally coming from one of this clients, and reported as such.
In one set, it was from a client, who paid Abramoff for the use of skyboxes as a perfectly legal and reported gift from an Indian tribe. I hate this 'give Congressment stuff all the time' crap that goes on in DC, but, like I said, if you're expanding the scandal that wide, you're past Abramoff into....well...everyone. It's not illegal unless it, at minimum, influenced a vote, and it's not an ethic's violation at all.
And the trip would have been legal if Abramoff had even slightly cared to make it so. He didn't, the Congressmen screwed up by not figuring out what was going on, but linking it with Abramoff's bribes is a bit idiotic, because the trip would have been fine if the Northern Marianas had actually reimbursed Abramoff. There's probably an ethics violation(1), it might be evidence that Abramoff was throwing around way too much money, but it wasn't any sort of bribe, especially as at least one of them actually used it as the fact-finding mission it was supposed to be to figure out the crap being attempted in the Northern Marianas and vote against it.
If you give me even the slightest bit of evidence that Abramoff's ethics violation in the Northern Marianas was known about by any one, then we can can start talking about whether or not it was an attempted bribe. If it's not known, it's a pretty damn stupid bribe, isn't it?
And I've said more than once...all the Republicans being linked ot this thing are not actually in trouble either. This is what happens when actual criminals start throwing others to the wolves...sometimes they don't pay too much attention to who they throw.
The people actually in trouble like Ney and DeLay started trying to claim Democrats do it, too, which was a brilliant PR move because, when you look at the actual Republicans involved, they really do look like they were bribed. Whereas the few Democrats they pulled in merely, at most, had slight ethics failures, and all claim they had no idea what Abramoff was doing, and absolutely none of them apparently decided their vote one way or another based on his actions. But what the GOP also accomplished was to suck in completely unrelated Republicans.
This scandal is nowhere near as far-reaching as the GOP and the media and even the blogs are attempting to claim it is. In the end, maybe ten Republicans will go down, at most. Hell, maybe a Democrat will go down, but it won't be any of the ones linked so far.
First off, anyone even the slightest bit involved in the Northern Marianas turn-part-of-the-US-into-sweatshops plan should go to jail, or at least be thrown out of office. I don't care if they are Republican, Democrat, independent, or the Pope. That whole thing was illegal and possibly unconstitutional under the Equal Protection clause.
However, I have to point out that apparently the Northern Marianas were supposed to pay for that, and the Northern Marianas is, in fact, part of the US, and can pay for whatever Congressperson they want to fly to them, no strings attached.
The fact Abramoff did so instead, and didn't fix it, is certainly bad and an ethics violation, but not a bribe if the Reps honestly didn't know about it at the time they did it. In fact, Cyburn's office still asserts they didn't know it was paid by Abramoff.
And if it was a bribe, it was a pretty crappy one, considering Clyburn voted against what they wanted. Yay him. (I can't seem to find how Thompson voted. The fact so many stoires mention Cyburn's vote and not Thompson's make me either think there is exactly one newpaper doing any sort of research and everyone else is copying, or he just didn't vote.)
The trip I was complaining about was DeLay's trip to Scotland to play golf. The Northern Marianas trip at least had a justification: Come and see out island before you vote about it, and the Northern Marianas government acted like it was paying for the trip when they got there. It really looks like they just stalled and backed out of paying for an otherwise aboveboard trip arranged by tAsheir lobbyist, and Abramoff stupidly went ahead with it anyway, hoping he'd get paid later and not telling anyone what was going on.
The golf trip, however, was blatantly a gift, one provided by a conservative think tank that DeLay was a board member of. And paid for by Abramoff, who was also a board member. Alledging that DeLay didn't know exactly what was going there doesn't really work as well, does it? And DeLay apparently misreported many things about the price of this trip, for example claiming golf was included for free, when Abramoff paid that, and all sorts of other charges, and the whole thing is so complicated that no one is sure who paid for what.
Which would be a rather absurd way to run normal a trip paid for by third party. It is, however, a great way to run a trip if you don't want anyone to know where the money came from and is going, especially if you have your own private banker along with you.
And then DeLay went and changed his vote about a tribe that just happened to donate approximately that amount to the think tank.
As for everyone else:
Both Dorgan and Harkin claim they didn't know he owned the skybox. I don't give a damn, they need investigation.
And Reid is an example of Abramoff's influence being attributed to something that already existed. Ayoob worked for Reid for years, especially fund-raising. He was then hired by Abramoff, and continued to fund-raise for Reid. The fund-raising was held at the offices of Greenberg Traurig, which has no connection to Abramoff or his firm, except that Ayoob worked there.
You can, at most, spin this into Abramoff being tolerant of Democrats, but there's no indication that Ayoob was raising money for Reid at Abramoff's orders.
And, again, Reid is from Nevada. Absolutely no one would need to bribe him into voting against casinos. He would vote to have himself shot in the foot before voting for a casino outside Nevada, because at least then he wouldn't be tore apart by a lynch mob during his re-election campaign.
Did you actually follow the links, or are you just bitching about the URL? Because, you know, they didn't write either of those. One is from the Washington Post, and one is from the Arizona Republic.
It is sufficient for my purposes that if you really believe that the mainstream media are, on the whole, controlled by (or even particularly sympathetic to) the Republican party, you are way, way outside the mainstream.
And, of course, the last lie: The liberals control the media.
And I haven't said they were controlled by the GOP. I said they were prompted to do so by the GOP. The GOP makes claims, and the media repeats them.
The Democrats, because they are fucking morons, have no ability to counter any such claims.
We don't know that the Attorney General didn't dop this. Step were taken to notify the courts and congress as defined by this law. How would that have happened if not by this proceedure? But, this doesn't mean game over, It means this law doesn't expresly forbid the actions taken. This is the important part because it counter 3/4ths the claims against Bush.
Sigh. All wiretapping specifically not in accordance with a law is illegal thanks to FISA. I thought I already explained that. The FISA forbids anything outside the law.
This is not a case of 'Well, it's not explicitly illegal'. All wiretaping is illegal to start with, thanks to FISA. FISA, or some other law, has to okay the wiretap,or it is a felony.
I don't really know how much clearer it can be. It's like delibrately killing people. That's generally illegal, unless you do it under the guise of some law allowing it. Spying, thanks to FISA, is illegal for the government(1) to do without some law okaying it.
And the Attorney General can't 'drop' this. It is a requirement for him to do, it is his responsibility. It's not something for him, it's something for the courts. If he does not do it, he is not operating under FISA. (Neither is the president, who wrote him a 'waiver', which is idiotic. You can't waive people from doing their duty to third parties.)
In were does it say warrent granted by a judge, congress or anyone else.
A warrant is an order issued by a court compelling something. That is what warrant has meant since time began. Other government officials cannot issue warrants.
That is not to say it must be issued by the judicial branch. It can be issued by a military court (part of the executive branch) or it can be issued by congress as part of the various trials they are authorized to conduct, like impeachment.
We can go into a whole bunch of technical reasons as to why it is not possible for the rest of the executive branch to issue warrants, but NSA and Justice Departments do not even pretend to operate any courts, and thus by defination cannot issue any warrants. (If they pretend to have a court, they couldn't anyway, but warrants do not even exist outside of a court, so until they set up a fake one the issue is moot.)
And my reading of FISA's defination of US Person is correct, period. I'm not going to defend it, mainly because reading what you wrote gives me a headache, but it is you who can't seem to grasp that while any entity or organization is defined as a person, that does not conversely mean saying it is okay to spy on certain organizations means it's okay to spy on certain people.
And, no, 'openly' does, indeed, apply to the thing you are spying on, and not random people associated with that thing. If Company X is openly operated by the USSR, and Company Y is secretly a KGB front, X can be spied on, and Y cannot. Likewise, if people in Afgghanistan openly work for the Taliban, they can be spied on, and that does not mean people who secretly work for the Taliban can be. (Of course, this is specific to spying on legal US residents without a warrant. Anyone can be spied on with a warrant, which is easy to get under FISA, and anyone can be spied on if they are not in the US, or are in the US illegally.)
1) Actually, it's illegal for anyone to do 'under the color of law', which not only includes the actual government, but any quasi-offical goverment-like agency, or anyone who has the power or authority of the government at the moment. But the defination of 'color of law' is not very important here.
Again, despite your repeated attempts at proof by vigorous assertion, no politicians of either party stand accused of taking money illegally from Mr. Abramoff himself.
Oh, I'm sorry. Those are, in order, donations to a scam charity, skyboxes, and airplane tickets. There is, indeed, no money there. Except the donations to a 'charity' that doesn't do anything.
Here's some actual money. Hey, look! Campaign contributions to the tune of 4000 by a tribe. And to the tune of 17,000 by Abramoff's own firm.
That is the pattern. Democrats got campaign contributes from random groups trying to make their case like they always did. As did Republicans. Some of these groups were serious about influencing people, so they hired various lobbists. Sometimes the lobbist they picked was Abramoff.
Republicans also got free unreported trips, free unreported flights, free unreported skyboxes, and reported money directly from Abramoff. Democrats did not. It is those things that, for example, Ney is indeed under investigation for.
And, yes, it is because none of those things were declared. I don't understand why you understand that, but then somehow think that reported campaign contributions have anything to do with this. The fact that Abramoff and anyone who's ever hired him, and any money they spent, have become incredibly trainted in DC doesn't mean there is any actual wrongdoing associated with those reported and, as far as we know, legal campaign contributions.
Which, incidentally, means half the Republicans linked to this scandal probably don't belong there either. But none of the Democrats do.
And, just to be through, I will explicitly answer the two questions:
If there is not even the hint of a crime in taking money from Mr. Abramoff's clients and then voting in the way he asked you to, why are politicians of both parties falling over each other to give back the money?
Because the media, at the prompting of the GOP, has made the legal campaign contributions the issue instead of the illegal bribes. Because if they try to spin it as legal contributions, well, everyone gets those.
And there's not the slightest bit of evidence that any legal campaign contribution has swayed the vote for any Democrat, or even any Republican, although there is at least one Republican vote-change that looks fishy. However, now that Abramoff has cut a deal, we shall soon see.
And, well, you want the real answer? Because Democrats are fucking morons who refuse to stand together with any sort of message. Oh no! The GOP is lying about us! We better immediately cave in instead of putting out some sort of counter to their RP!
A number of clients paid Mr. Abramoff a whole lot of money to tell them which politicians (of both parties, as I've demonstrated) to give money to in order to get votes. What were they paying for if, in fact, they had (as you claim) no expectation of getting votes in return for the outlandishly large donations Mr. Abramoff directed them to give?
So you're arguing that not only are campaign contributions evidence of wrongdoing, but hiring a lobbist is? Um, no.
You hire lobbists because the lobbists are the middlemen between you and politicians. They know the politicians, just as importantly they know thir cheif of staff, they know who's on what committee, they know who the enemies are, they know how present arguments that are likely to work, etc.
First off, there are, in fact, six parts to 1101 (a). Number (4) is 'a group engaged in international terrorism or activities in preparation therefor;'
Why'd you leave that out? Because, of course, people covered under (4) are 'United States persons', and cannot be spied on without a warrant.
(3) rather clearly says the entities have to be acknowledged. Not the 'organization
the entities belong to', or however you're trying to parse that. It doesn't matter if Al Qaeda is openly acknowledged, although it's not...if you are not openly acknowledged, it doesn't count.
However, there's a good reason for that. Even if you were openly a member, it wouldn't count. Under the law, like you pointed out, an entity can be a person for the purposes of this law. But a person can't be considered an 'entity' if the law refers to an 'entity'. I.e., you did it backwards...anything and everything can be considered a 'person', but only a certain subset of those 'people' are 'entities' or 'organizations' or 'governments'.
I.e., by reading 1101 (i), only non-human 'persons' can be excluded from 'United States persons'. All actual human beings are included if they are 'a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence'. It's merely the 'association' and 'company', if that association or company are openly acknowledged to be part of a foreign government, that have exceptions.
If you want to see the rules about people, you have to look at 1101 (b), where you will notice that people under (4), are, in fact, called 'Agents of a foreign power'. However, they are still 'United States persons' too, and cannot be spied on without a warrant.
Nothing in 1101 (a) applies to any people, it applies to organizations, and it's rather clear about that. You can spy on an embassy under 1101, you cannot follow and spy on the people in it unless authorized elsewhere. (And, yes, there are specific laws talking about what, exactly, it means to spy on a place but not people.)
However, you play games parsing definations all you want, because all you have to do is actually look at 1102 (a) (1):
(1) Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that--
Look carefully at that. It doesn't say it just have to be within the law. It also says that the Attorney General must certify in writing under oath that it is so.
He didn't. Ergo, such spying wasn't under 1102. Game over.
He didn't on purpose, because, unlike some people, he can actually read the law, and doesn't feel like a perjury rap for certifying 'there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party', when he knows damn well any lawful US resident counts as one of those and the law isn't the slightest bit unclear there.
And I think you need to reread the fourth amendment and notice the word warrant. There is a reason FISA very clearly draws the line and says 'No spying on Americans without a warrant'...it's because that is not constitutional anyway.
OTOH, if the law says:
1809. Criminal sanctions
(a) Prohibited activities
A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally--
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or; ...
(c) Penalties
An offense described in this section is punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.
He might, you know, want to actually be authorized. Here is the first step in authorization under FISA:
1804. Applications for court orders
(a) Submission by Federal officer; approval of Attorney General; contents
Each application for an order approving electronic surveillance under this subchapter shall be made by a Federal officer in writing upon oath or affirmation to a judge having jurisdiction under section 1803 of this title. Each application shall require the approval of the Attorney General based upon his finding that it satisfies the criteria and requirements of such application as set forth in this subchapter. It shall include--
There are two other ways to be authorized. You can be within 15 days of a declaration of war by Congress, which we are not unless I've missed something recently, or you can have the Attorney General swear, under oath in a disposition, that the spying will not include Americans. The right (not the Amdministration, just the ass-kissers who think it can do no harm) tired to wiggle out through there, but even if the spying did, indeed, not include Americans (Despite the administration admitting it did.), the Attorney General chose not to make said dispositions, nor were the reporting requirements followed, so the issue is moot.
The spying was not authorized under FISA, period. And under FISA, all non-allowed-by-law spying is illegal.
However, there is a slight wiggle room in that FISA can be read to mean 'it is legal only if any law allows it', although this is rather clearly not the intent of FISA, as FISA claims to be the sole law in charge of allowing spying. It was more than likely meant to be read as 'it is legal only if I allow it'. However, it can be read that way, and that is one of the claims of the administration, that the authorization to invade Afganistan can be read as authorizing the spying.
The other claim, of course, is that the president has the power under the constitution to fight wars, and laws passed by congress cannot limit him in that regard.
you have to be very careful if you ajax app is making changes to the DB, not just reading
I would argue that you have to be less careful with AJAX than traditional pages WRT that.
With traditional pages...let's say someone sees something wrong with one of the entries. They edit it. Oops, still wrong. They edit it again. Okay, there.
Later, they back up through the pages. What's this POST message? Okay, we say no there, and keep going...hey, wait, this is wrong again. Let me edit it. Hey, it's correct on this screen...
With AJAX, you can't get anything like that. The lack of going 'backwards' and 'forwards' in your editing is a good thing, because that doesn't work in the first place!
With AJAX, it's always 'here is the database'. If they leave that page, and come back, they probably get the same page(1), granted, but if that's the only way to edit the database it couldn't have changed. And they can't page around inside their own editing session, and can't end up with an inconsistent view between pages in the past and the current reality of the database.
1) And, of course, some AJAX things just always pull their info from the server, via javascript in the page onLoad, instead of generating the page with the correct info. Hence every viewing of the page will be correct as of the second the page was displayed, not when it was first downloaded into the browser.
I will second this. xajax rocks, espcially if you're actually a PHP programmer who's ended up doing AJAX by default.
Everything is trivally convertable. Like you have an order form. People write their address, submit a form, you check it, and show them an updated page?
Just change $_POST to some other variable, have it submitted via AJAX to there. All the form is in $foo['bar'], just like it used to be in $_POST['bar']. Then write out the changes to page to a div you already set up. (If you're really lazy, unset($_POST); and $_POST=$foo;)
Have a list form a database with a seperate pages for editing entries? Just make div somewhere, when they click on each entry, suck it into the div, do the editing, and clear the div when they click 'done'. You already have to code to make the page, so just strip out the surrounding HTML and use that. Feel free to make this a floating div in front of everything...you can even move it around via xajax.
And if you know Javascript, it's even better. You can pass arrays back and forth, which is incredibly useful where, for example, you formerly had to keep a Javascript and PHP array in sync. You can pass out random Javascript from PHP. (You cannot do the reverse, but that would be rather dangerous anyway.)
And with xajax 0.2, they've exposed almost all the PHP 'page changing functions' as Javascript also, so it works as a straight DHTML library too, without the round trip. This was my only annoyance with the first version...often I wanted to do something in pure Javascript, but didn't have any easy way to do that, because the user-accessable functions only existed in PHP, despite the fact all those functions did return XML telling xajax to call back-end Javascript functions!
Well, in the interesting thign is, in HTML, you can name links anything you want, even things totally unrelated to page's content.
Like, for example, you just did.
The page says, and I quote, 'dozens of lawmakers said they will donate any Abramoff-related contributions'. 'Related', as is being spun by the Republicans, means 'given by someone who paid Abramoff money'. not 'contributions from Abramoff'
And there are plenty of people who thnk this is, indeed, stupid and a few who got accused when the people making the donatation hasn't even hired Abramoff yet. But I guess the second anyone gave Abramoff a single dime, all those contributions they normally did magically became tainted somehow. (Like I said, the various donors have a hell of a libel case if they want to follow it up.)
But, as you apparently don't understand that, here you go. Where Deborah Howell explicitly says, duh, that Abramoff didn't give any money to Democrats.
However, she's still repeating the lie that he 'directed' his clients to do so, despite her complete inability to actually cite how she would know this, or why their donations in relation to Democrats dropped from the pervious year, while their donations to Republicans rose.
But you don't need stats, you can disprove that claim by simple logic. What Abramoff 'directed' his clients to do would logically be known by two people at the start of this, Abramoff and his clients. The investigation into Abramoff hasn't turned up anything suggesting this, and they certainly haven't admitted it. (No, the PR move of returning the money is not relevant here.)
So...um...how does everyone 'know' this little fact about what was going through everyone's minds when they wrote out the campaign contribution check? Because the Republicans made it up.
I think I've demostrated the campaign contributions didn't pass through Abramoff, and if you want to assert that Abramoff 'directed' donations, feel free to come up with some evidence of that, and not by citing papers that repeat GOP talking points, but actual facts.
Other presidents have used this exactly the same way but aren't going thru the ringer for it. Clinton even used it to spy on people were both parties were from the US and inside the US after the OK city bombing.
Yes. He used FISA.
Bush, however, is not using FISA. Thus he is in violation of FISA barring some sort of other statutary authorization. He was wavered back and forth between claiming the Afganistan authorization is one, and that he doesn't need one.
It is you who need to explain why we should believe that those contributions which he gave to Democrats all actually were legitimate gifts from his clients, while those he gave to Democrats were secretly out of his own pocket.
And, again. HE DIDN'T GIVE ANY MONEY TO REPUBLICANS.
Your link says 'all legislators who took money directly from Mr. Abramoff on behalf of various clients'. That is, again, a lie, because absolutely nothing at all on that page would indicate that that money was from Mr. Abramoff. In fact, all that money appears to be returned to the people who donated it. (Incidentally, if it had been donated via Abramoff, they would have just admitted to various crimes, because you explicitly cannot pass campaign contributions off through other people like that, or accept ones coming in that way.)
In other words, the story has already been distorted so much that politicans are returning totally unrelated money, merely because the media has confused the difference between illegal bribes handed out by Abramoff, and legal campaing contributes handed out by random people who happened to employee Abramoff.
If anyone was 'returning' bribes, they would be returning them to Abramoff, because he would be the damn person who paid them out. I rather seriously doubt he would say 'Oh, and vote for this bill, because I'm passing along this money on behalf of Party X.' While he was rather blatant in his bribery, there is a difference between blatant and downright stupid, and telling someone that you have entered into a criminal conspiracy with the names of other parties to the conspiracy, when they don't need to know, seems a bit on the downright stupid side. (For one thing, if they can talk to each other, you can't suck out part of the bribe while you pass it along.) No, he just told them how to vote.
And, I know you're not listening, but maybe I can get others to understand the lies: Absolutely no one involved in the investigation has accused Abramoff of any sort of 'laundering' of bribes. NO ONE. The bribes are entirely straight from Abramoff, through his companies, to the politicans, usually in the form of 'very cheap' expensive things, like houses misvalued by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The idea that he would additionally get his clients to make, at most, a legal 18,000 dollar campaign contribution is just insanity, much less the 500 dollar ones. He was fricking handing out houses, which is why he got caught. He wasn't futzing around with piddly recorded campaign contributions.
It would be possible to bribe someone via campaign contributions, and the system in Washington has often been accused of just that. But saying 'If you vote for bill X, there will probably be a big campaign contribution from X' is not what Abramoff is accused of. It's saying 'Vote for bill X, and I will give you a lot of money.'.
Oh, and some fun info: The 'Saginaw Chippewa Tribe' and 'Tigua' tribes are some of the tribes he defrauded. You are claiming wrongdoing on the part of a victim's donation.
Going Postal is, indeed, about hackers. And the pre-book off-screen corporate buyout of their company, and the aftermath in dealing with it. Which is pretty astonishing in a world without computers or electricity.
These hackers, instead, operate hundreds of miles of mechanical semaphores towers called 'the clacks' stretching over a continent. Metaphorically, it's probably closer to 30 years ago with large computers dialing each other over UUCP. (1)
They have out-of-band communication, they have compression, they have routing, they have superstitions and metaphors and speak in jargon, and they even have security issues. (At night, you don't actually know what tower is flashing at you.)
And The Smoking GNU is not only a reference to GNU, it's a homage to The Lone Gunmen.
Next up: Anhk-Morpork get a subway, thanks to the events in 'Thud'. Which is good, because people have been complaining about the traffic problems for years.
1) Although once you get into Anhk-Morpork, every street corner has a clacks tower, and people can send and receive messages from them, parodying cell phones. Instead of people talking to no one as they walk down the street, they are instead staring into space and waving flags around, which is a bit more dangerous. Currently only the cops really seem to be using these.
I find the best thing is generally writing in HTML4 + as much CSS2 that IE supports.
I never use flash. I don't use PNGs, although I'd love to.
I stopped trying to make everything work in non-Javascript browsers, but I always let you navigate with site without Javascript. If you want to do anything besides posting messages and logging in, though, you'll probably need it.
The sites where there is actually anything to do besides those things are few and far between, however. But you want webmail, you want to manage your photo gallery, whatever, you need Javascript on. I'm not writing the damn thing twice, and stuff looks a lot better with AJAX.
Peopel think the tradeoff is between time spent and the number of browsers it looks bad in, but if you know what you can't do the same way in different browsers, you can just sit down and make a page that works well in everything to start with. If you don't try to do anything that does not work exactly the same in different browsers (At least, when not hidden from view in a Javascript library you do not need to mess with.), you can make a very nice site in a very short amount of time.
I was just talking issue that the focus of a company could have anything to do with what browser they support, because what browser people use is almost always completely unrelated to any market they belong to, barring a few obvious exceptions.
I.e., the analogy was broken.
But companies certainly should figure out how much supporting a browser costs vs. sales that many viewers would have.
They've decided that Indian tribes hired Abramoff in any shape or form are somehow magically criminals(1), and thus those people giving legal campaign contributions to any politican makes those politicians criminals.
Which actually sounds like a good basis for a slander lawsuit by those tribes. They're basically being accused of commiting felonies with no indication they have anything to do with any of this.
And the reason people are screaming is that the media has been printing this lie about Democrats being involved for months. It is not a gray area, it is not a question, they are not under any sort of investigation. The very idea that Abramoff would involve the Democrats when he is part of the K Street Project, designed to exclude Democrats from the lobbying process is so utterly absurd that no newspaper should have even repeated the GOP spin, much less continued to repeat it as fact.
1) Some of these people were actually defrauded by Abramoff.
Oh, poor fellow. Do you really believe that most bribes in Washington are in the form of cash handed out in unmarked brown bags by lobbyists? Do you really believe that when an Indian casino investor hires a lobbyist to tell them which wheels to grease, and then goes out and greases those wheels -- with well-placed, and well-rewarded in votes donations brokered by their lobbyist -- this is not bribery?
Mr. Abramoff is not charged with giving his own money to members of either party
Yes, in fact, he is. Well, his company is. He is charged with handing Republicans money in return for votes. (And has pleaded guilty to something in that respect, although we do not know exactly what.)
He has exactly been charged with, indeed, handing out cash in unmarked brown bags.(1) To Republicans. In return for specific votes. That is, in fact, the story, and the fact you are willing to repeat the lies shows exactly how poorly a job the media is doing with it.
I don't doubt that you really, really believe that every Democrat who took money from Mr. Abramoff and his clients (remember that the vast majority of the money which changed hands unethically was in the form of payments Mr. Abramoff directed his clients, particularly Indian casino-related investors to give to various figures) didn't know where the money was coming from, while every Republican who a client of Mr. Abramoff gave money to did.
Of course they knew where the money was coming from. It was coming from Indian tribes, and it was the perfectly legal campaign contributions to everyone they'd been doing since long before Abramoff showed up.
The fact that everyone does these sort of seedy campaign contributions has absolutely nothing to do with the blatant bribery that Abramoff is being charged with doing to Republicans.
And, once again, Democrat campaign contributions dropped once people hired Abramoff, which makes sense as he works solely with Republicans. If you want to assert some sort of hyptherical crime where he said to a Democrat 'Vote for X, and you'll get a big campaign contribution from a casino', then, yes, that would be bribery, but no one has asserted any such thing in a court of law, he has basically no interaction with Democrats at all,
and the current trouble he's in is, indeed, due to him passing out cash and valuable things to Republicans, which he didn't do to Democrats.
And I'd like some sort of logical explaination why he'd blatantly bribe Republicans (And also legally give money to), and secretly bribe Democrats through backchannels (And legally give them no money either.), considering he is, in fact, a Republican.
1) Okay, admittedly, it wasn't usually cash. It was things like cars and houses. Which makes it worse for him, because those things are harder to hide and tougher to explain as sort of misfiled campaign contribution.
It's like saying an underwear manufacturer is stupid for eliminating 40% of their market by making underwear that is designed for women. My god! No fetish free men will buy it!
That makes sense only when the browser selection is related to the site.
If you're selling IE plugins, it might work. Or if you're selling Mac software, by all means don't worry about IE.
But if you're selling widgets, it's just stupid. The correct analogy is selling all kinds of underwear, but only letting women into the store. Or having an elevator that can only support people who weigh less than 200 pounds.
Good clarification. Yeah, K Street is just a place.
To further clarify: The K Street Project was a wildly successful attempt to install Republicans as lobbists at the top part of every single commerical lobbying organization, with the intent they would only, or at least mainly, lobby Republicans.
This rather inverted logic, that by only asking the Republicans for favors the Republicans end up with all the power, actually worked pretty. A large part of it was the party disipline of the GOP itself.
The Democrats quickly became completely irrelevant to lobbists, in a sort of self-fufilling prophecy. Even in the most lopsided times, it used to be that you could get swing votes by playing your cards right..
But now, if you did not play to the Republicans, none of them would listen to you. And without any Republican votes, you'd never get anything passed.
And the price of getting access to the Republicans? Campaign contributions. Always a rather gray legal area for lobbists, and the K Street Project made it policy.
Eventually, that policy led to the more blatant Abramoff, who literally just cut out all the wink-wink-nudge-nudge and said 'Give us money and we'll vote for your bill'.
The day is young, however, and the revealed recipients of Mr. Abramoff's largesse are quite a bipartisan bunch, so if I were you, I wouldn't stake your talking points too heavily on this remaining the case -- just a word of friendly advice, mind you.
That is a lie.
The 'revealed recipients of Mr. Abramoff's largesse' are Republicans. Period, no exceptions. Every single one of them. No Democrat has ever gotten a dime from him.
The Republicans are trying to pretend people his clients donated to are in trouble also. You know, his clients, the Indians, who paid him money and thus couldn't possible been funnelling his money anywhere? The people he was, in fact, commiting fraud on? The people who were making campaign contributions to both parties before Abramoff even showed up in town?
If you hire an unethical lobbist who bribes people, it doesn't magically make every campaign contribution you make some sort of criminal act, and it certainly doesn't make the Democrats accepting them criminals when they don't know anything about this other guy you hired who bribes Republicans.
I don't see how. They made the lie. She repeated it. It's either her fault, or it's the administration.
And her response?
Yet another lie.
She has absolutely no evidence 'he directed his Indian tribal clients to make millions of dollars in campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.'. The idea of Abramoff directing anyone to make contributions to the Democrats is completely absurd.
IT. IS. A. LIE.. Do you understand? That is why people are upset.
They had people actively deleting the inflammatory posts BEFORE they gave up on the avalanche and deleted everything.
And they did that instead of just turning off posting...why, exactly?
Citing the Washington Post as justification for claiming the Washington Post is accurate is surreal at best.
However, this is exactly the kind of lies everyone is complaining about. Democrats did, indeed, get tribal donations. They also got offices and franking priviledges, and most of them own a house! They're exactly like Republicans!
The problem is, of course, that the reason Republicans are under investigation is bribery by Abramoff, not fricking campaign contributions from people that Abramoff was defrauding. By Abramoff. He handed them money in return for certain votes. That is 100% illegal.
Campaign contributions by Indian tribes, however, are not, unless either they were trying to bribe people (Which no one has asserted), or they were bribing people in behalf of Abramoff, which makes no sense, because they were paying him money.
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They just have to provide the specs they wrote their drivers to.
It's not just the GPL fans who think a binary interface is a bad idea...bad hardware drivers cause something like 75% of all crashes on Windows. By making people keep the binary drivers up-to-day, they are less likely to use outdated ones that kill their system, or in fact use them at all.
Seriously. Modern Windows systems have almost 100% perfect application protection, but my damn wireless Logitech keyboard/mouse radio thingy still causes a blue screen everytime I plug it in or unplug it. Why? Shitty driver.
Letting the hardware people maintain the drivers has always been a very stupid idea. Originally, they sent out specs with their devices, and the OS makers were expected to write drivers.
And then fucking Microsoft showed up, and forced hardware people to write their drivers if they wanted Windows support. This one decision has probably cost trillions of dollars to the economy. Hardware engineers write crappy drivers.
Linux people don't want hardware people to write drivers. Tell them what the hardware does, tell them how to talk to it, and they will write the damn drivers for free.
And 'proprietary information' is a red herring. If you give a trade secret out in a driver, there is a technical term for that, specifically, 'shareholder lawsuit'. No, seriously, if you give out a trade secret in a driver, you've just lost that trade secret. (No, EULAs are not enough protection for trade secrets. Signed contracts, yes, EULAs clicked by random people, no.)
What most 'proprietary information' is is the fact that model X2000 is the same as model X3000, except that the driver notices it's X3000 and turns on some features. I can see how a company would want to keep that secret, but you'll forgive me if I don't think hiding that information is incredibly important or even a good thing.
As for wifi and the FCC...if they want to bitch I need to go find my old PCMCIA card that let me broadcast on the 'illegal in the US' channels...all I had to do it was tell it I wasn't in the US during the install. That's just as illegal as broadcasting at higher-than-allowed power, and I didn't see an FCC smackdown.
And no one's suggesting they need to release source, anyway. Just release the specs. OTOH, consdering how the FCC ignored my card, it would probably be enough to release drivers with the power level hardcoded in. If someone changes that, hey, it's their business, and it's certainly harder than selecting 'UK' during the install.
That doesn't absolve you of releasing the hardware specs to the kernel team. You can't say 'oh no! Someday the Linux team might release drivers for this that doesn't work exactly right, and a customer might get annoyed.', because your failure to release specs is actually much more likely to cause that exact problem, and, trust me, I and everyone else gets a lot more pissed at hardware manufacturers when it is their stonewalling that is causing problems instead of them saying 'We don't offically support Linux.', but they give info to the kernel devs.
Because, like it or not, someone will release Linux drivers. These drivers can suck, and do things 'wrongly' according to how you want your hardware to work, leaving numerous gripes all over the net about how you refuse to support Linux. Or you can hand the specs over to the dev team and wash your hands of the whole thing.
YOU DON'T DEVELOP DRIVERS FOR LINUX.
What you do is release hardware specs, and the kernel devs develop drivers.
Yes, you can release drivers, and try to keep them synced up the kernel, just like instead of driving a car, you can just hire a bunch of people to push it down the road while you steer.
Or you can hand specs and possible some source to the devs, and they'll take over your driver, make it work, and keep it up to date.
There are three reasons to keep drivers outside the kernel: They change faster than the kernel, like the wlan drivers used to (And do not anymore. They no longer belong outside the kernel, sorry.), they contain trade secrets, or they contain licensed software.
However, trade secrets in software is just damn stupid in the first place. If you give out the software, your competitors will just, duh, take them apart to find out your secrets, and this is, incidentally, completely legal.
In the real world, these 'trade secrets' are usually 'All our hardware is basically the same, and we enable certain features in the driver based on the ID returned by the card.'. They quite rightly suspect if they turned those drivers over to the kernel devs, the devs would just turn on everything.
And the licensed software is just a red herring. If you can't release any source, you should still release the specs.
Let's look at just what exactly I did admit.
Abramoff arranged a trip on behave of his client, the Northern Marianas, to the Northern Marianas. 100% legal, except that he paid for it instead of them.
Any evidence of knowledge by Democrats that he did so? Nope.
Any evidence this influenced their voting? No, and at least one of them voted against it.
A person continued to hold fund-raisers for Reid after becoming employeed by Abramoff.
Any evidence this is even vaguely related to Abramoff? Nope.
Any evidence this influenced his voting? No, Reid basically already had to vote the way Abramoff's interests aligned.
Dorgan and Harkin both used a skybox that was owned by Abramoff.
100% legal, because, after a bit of research, I've discovered that in both cases, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians were paying Abramoff for it. So, um, no, this doesn't count. Leasing a box and letting a politician use it is is as legal as purchasing one and letting a politician use it. The only 'proof' of wrongdoing is their fucking stupid PR move by paying the tribes back for the skyboxes.
Any evidence this influenced their voting? Well, no, not that anyone has manged to come up with.
Throwing out the Reid example, which was just stupid, and you are left with two sets of Democrats who accepted something they say they thought was legally coming from one of this clients, and reported as such.
In one set, it was from a client, who paid Abramoff for the use of skyboxes as a perfectly legal and reported gift from an Indian tribe. I hate this 'give Congressment stuff all the time' crap that goes on in DC, but, like I said, if you're expanding the scandal that wide, you're past Abramoff into....well...everyone. It's not illegal unless it, at minimum, influenced a vote, and it's not an ethic's violation at all.
And the trip would have been legal if Abramoff had even slightly cared to make it so. He didn't, the Congressmen screwed up by not figuring out what was going on, but linking it with Abramoff's bribes is a bit idiotic, because the trip would have been fine if the Northern Marianas had actually reimbursed Abramoff. There's probably an ethics violation(1), it might be evidence that Abramoff was throwing around way too much money, but it wasn't any sort of bribe, especially as at least one of them actually used it as the fact-finding mission it was supposed to be to figure out the crap being attempted in the Northern Marianas and vote against it.
If you give me even the slightest bit of evidence that Abramoff's ethics violation in the Northern Marianas was known about by any one, then we can can start talking about whether or not it was an attempted bribe. If it's not known, it's a pretty damn stupid bribe, isn't it?
And I've said more than once...all the Republicans being linked ot this thing are not actually in trouble either. This is what happens when actual criminals start throwing others to the wolves...sometimes they don't pay too much attention to who they throw.
The people actually in trouble like Ney and DeLay started trying to claim Democrats do it, too, which was a brilliant PR move because, when you look at the actual Republicans involved, they really do look like they were bribed. Whereas the few Democrats they pulled in merely, at most, had slight ethics failures, and all claim they had no idea what Abramoff was doing, and absolutely none of them apparently decided their vote one way or another based on his actions. But what the GOP also accomplished was to suck in completely unrelated Republicans.
This scandal is nowhere near as far-reaching as the GOP and the media and even the blogs are attempting to claim it is. In the end, maybe ten Republicans will go down, at most. Hell, maybe a Democrat will go down, but it won't be any of the ones linked so far.
And, yes, I'
However, I have to point out that apparently the Northern Marianas were supposed to pay for that, and the Northern Marianas is, in fact, part of the US, and can pay for whatever Congressperson they want to fly to them, no strings attached.
The fact Abramoff did so instead, and didn't fix it, is certainly bad and an ethics violation, but not a bribe if the Reps honestly didn't know about it at the time they did it. In fact, Cyburn's office still asserts they didn't know it was paid by Abramoff.
And if it was a bribe, it was a pretty crappy one, considering Clyburn voted against what they wanted. Yay him. (I can't seem to find how Thompson voted. The fact so many stoires mention Cyburn's vote and not Thompson's make me either think there is exactly one newpaper doing any sort of research and everyone else is copying, or he just didn't vote.)
The trip I was complaining about was DeLay's trip to Scotland to play golf. The Northern Marianas trip at least had a justification: Come and see out island before you vote about it, and the Northern Marianas government acted like it was paying for the trip when they got there. It really looks like they just stalled and backed out of paying for an otherwise aboveboard trip arranged by tAsheir lobbyist, and Abramoff stupidly went ahead with it anyway, hoping he'd get paid later and not telling anyone what was going on.
The golf trip, however, was blatantly a gift, one provided by a conservative think tank that DeLay was a board member of. And paid for by Abramoff, who was also a board member. Alledging that DeLay didn't know exactly what was going there doesn't really work as well, does it? And DeLay apparently misreported many things about the price of this trip, for example claiming golf was included for free, when Abramoff paid that, and all sorts of other charges, and the whole thing is so complicated that no one is sure who paid for what.
Which would be a rather absurd way to run normal a trip paid for by third party. It is, however, a great way to run a trip if you don't want anyone to know where the money came from and is going, especially if you have your own private banker along with you.
And then DeLay went and changed his vote about a tribe that just happened to donate approximately that amount to the think tank.
As for everyone else:
Both Dorgan and Harkin claim they didn't know he owned the skybox. I don't give a damn, they need investigation.
And Reid is an example of Abramoff's influence being attributed to something that already existed. Ayoob worked for Reid for years, especially fund-raising. He was then hired by Abramoff, and continued to fund-raise for Reid. The fund-raising was held at the offices of Greenberg Traurig, which has no connection to Abramoff or his firm, except that Ayoob worked there.
You can, at most, spin this into Abramoff being tolerant of Democrats, but there's no indication that Ayoob was raising money for Reid at Abramoff's orders.
And, again, Reid is from Nevada. Absolutely no one would need to bribe him into voting against casinos. He would vote to have himself shot in the foot before voting for a casino outside Nevada, because at least then he wouldn't be tore apart by a lynch mob during his re-election campaign.
It is sufficient for my purposes that if you really believe that the mainstream media are, on the whole, controlled by (or even particularly sympathetic to) the Republican party, you are way, way outside the mainstream.
And, of course, the last lie: The liberals control the media.
And I haven't said they were controlled by the GOP. I said they were prompted to do so by the GOP. The GOP makes claims, and the media repeats them.
The Democrats, because they are fucking morons, have no ability to counter any such claims.
Sigh. All wiretapping specifically not in accordance with a law is illegal thanks to FISA. I thought I already explained that. The FISA forbids anything outside the law.
This is not a case of 'Well, it's not explicitly illegal'. All wiretaping is illegal to start with, thanks to FISA. FISA, or some other law, has to okay the wiretap ,or it is a felony.
I don't really know how much clearer it can be. It's like delibrately killing people. That's generally illegal, unless you do it under the guise of some law allowing it. Spying, thanks to FISA, is illegal for the government(1) to do without some law okaying it.
And the Attorney General can't 'drop' this. It is a requirement for him to do, it is his responsibility. It's not something for him, it's something for the courts. If he does not do it, he is not operating under FISA. (Neither is the president, who wrote him a 'waiver', which is idiotic. You can't waive people from doing their duty to third parties.)
In were does it say warrent granted by a judge, congress or anyone else.
A warrant is an order issued by a court compelling something. That is what warrant has meant since time began. Other government officials cannot issue warrants.
That is not to say it must be issued by the judicial branch. It can be issued by a military court (part of the executive branch) or it can be issued by congress as part of the various trials they are authorized to conduct, like impeachment.
We can go into a whole bunch of technical reasons as to why it is not possible for the rest of the executive branch to issue warrants, but NSA and Justice Departments do not even pretend to operate any courts, and thus by defination cannot issue any warrants. (If they pretend to have a court, they couldn't anyway, but warrants do not even exist outside of a court, so until they set up a fake one the issue is moot.)
And my reading of FISA's defination of US Person is correct, period. I'm not going to defend it, mainly because reading what you wrote gives me a headache, but it is you who can't seem to grasp that while any entity or organization is defined as a person, that does not conversely mean saying it is okay to spy on certain organizations means it's okay to spy on certain people.
And, no, 'openly' does, indeed, apply to the thing you are spying on, and not random people associated with that thing. If Company X is openly operated by the USSR, and Company Y is secretly a KGB front, X can be spied on, and Y cannot. Likewise, if people in Afgghanistan openly work for the Taliban, they can be spied on, and that does not mean people who secretly work for the Taliban can be. (Of course, this is specific to spying on legal US residents without a warrant. Anyone can be spied on with a warrant, which is easy to get under FISA, and anyone can be spied on if they are not in the US, or are in the US illegally.)
1) Actually, it's illegal for anyone to do 'under the color of law', which not only includes the actual government, but any quasi-offical goverment-like agency, or anyone who has the power or authority of the government at the moment. But the defination of 'color of law' is not very important here.
Is that so? Interesting.
Oh, I'm sorry. Those are, in order, donations to a scam charity, skyboxes, and airplane tickets. There is, indeed, no money there. Except the donations to a 'charity' that doesn't do anything.
Here's some actual money. Hey, look! Campaign contributions to the tune of 4000 by a tribe. And to the tune of 17,000 by Abramoff's own firm.
That is the pattern. Democrats got campaign contributes from random groups trying to make their case like they always did. As did Republicans. Some of these groups were serious about influencing people, so they hired various lobbists. Sometimes the lobbist they picked was Abramoff.
Republicans also got free unreported trips, free unreported flights, free unreported skyboxes, and reported money directly from Abramoff. Democrats did not. It is those things that, for example, Ney is indeed under investigation for.
And, yes, it is because none of those things were declared. I don't understand why you understand that, but then somehow think that reported campaign contributions have anything to do with this. The fact that Abramoff and anyone who's ever hired him, and any money they spent, have become incredibly trainted in DC doesn't mean there is any actual wrongdoing associated with those reported and, as far as we know, legal campaign contributions.
Which, incidentally, means half the Republicans linked to this scandal probably don't belong there either. But none of the Democrats do.
And, just to be through, I will explicitly answer the two questions:
If there is not even the hint of a crime in taking money from Mr. Abramoff's clients and then voting in the way he asked you to, why are politicians of both parties falling over each other to give back the money?
Because the media, at the prompting of the GOP, has made the legal campaign contributions the issue instead of the illegal bribes. Because if they try to spin it as legal contributions, well, everyone gets those.
And there's not the slightest bit of evidence that any legal campaign contribution has swayed the vote for any Democrat, or even any Republican, although there is at least one Republican vote-change that looks fishy. However, now that Abramoff has cut a deal, we shall soon see.
And, well, you want the real answer? Because Democrats are fucking morons who refuse to stand together with any sort of message. Oh no! The GOP is lying about us! We better immediately cave in instead of putting out some sort of counter to their RP!
A number of clients paid Mr. Abramoff a whole lot of money to tell them which politicians (of both parties, as I've demonstrated) to give money to in order to get votes. What were they paying for if, in fact, they had (as you claim) no expectation of getting votes in return for the outlandishly large donations Mr. Abramoff directed them to give?
So you're arguing that not only are campaign contributions evidence of wrongdoing, but hiring a lobbist is? Um, no.
You hire lobbists because the lobbists are the middlemen between you and politicians. They know the politicians, just as importantly they know thir cheif of staff, they know who's on what committee, they know who the enemies are, they know how present arguments that are likely to work, etc.
Not that I like the damn system, bu
First off, there are, in fact, six parts to 1101 (a). Number (4) is 'a group engaged in international terrorism or activities in preparation therefor;'
Why'd you leave that out? Because, of course, people covered under (4) are 'United States persons', and cannot be spied on without a warrant.
(3) rather clearly says the entities have to be acknowledged. Not the 'organization the entities belong to', or however you're trying to parse that. It doesn't matter if Al Qaeda is openly acknowledged, although it's not...if you are not openly acknowledged, it doesn't count.
However, there's a good reason for that. Even if you were openly a member, it wouldn't count. Under the law, like you pointed out, an entity can be a person for the purposes of this law. But a person can't be considered an 'entity' if the law refers to an 'entity'. I.e., you did it backwards...anything and everything can be considered a 'person', but only a certain subset of those 'people' are 'entities' or 'organizations' or 'governments'.
I.e., by reading 1101 (i), only non-human 'persons' can be excluded from 'United States persons'. All actual human beings are included if they are 'a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence'. It's merely the 'association' and 'company', if that association or company are openly acknowledged to be part of a foreign government, that have exceptions.
If you want to see the rules about people, you have to look at 1101 (b), where you will notice that people under (4), are, in fact, called 'Agents of a foreign power'. However, they are still 'United States persons' too, and cannot be spied on without a warrant.
Nothing in 1101 (a) applies to any people, it applies to organizations, and it's rather clear about that. You can spy on an embassy under 1101, you cannot follow and spy on the people in it unless authorized elsewhere. (And, yes, there are specific laws talking about what, exactly, it means to spy on a place but not people.)
However, you play games parsing definations all you want, because all you have to do is actually look at 1102 (a) (1):
(1) Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that--
Look carefully at that. It doesn't say it just have to be within the law. It also says that the Attorney General must certify in writing under oath that it is so.
He didn't. Ergo, such spying wasn't under 1102. Game over.
He didn't on purpose, because, unlike some people, he can actually read the law, and doesn't feel like a perjury rap for certifying 'there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party', when he knows damn well any lawful US resident counts as one of those and the law isn't the slightest bit unclear there.
And I think you need to reread the fourth amendment and notice the word warrant. There is a reason FISA very clearly draws the line and says 'No spying on Americans without a warrant'...it's because that is not constitutional anyway.
1809. Criminal sanctions
(a) Prohibited activities
A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally--
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or;
(c) Penalties
An offense described in this section is punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.
He might, you know, want to actually be authorized. Here is the first step in authorization under FISA:
1804. Applications for court orders
(a) Submission by Federal officer; approval of Attorney General; contents
Each application for an order approving electronic surveillance under this subchapter shall be made by a Federal officer in writing upon oath or affirmation to a judge having jurisdiction under section 1803 of this title. Each application shall require the approval of the Attorney General based upon his finding that it satisfies the criteria and requirements of such application as set forth in this subchapter. It shall include--
There are two other ways to be authorized. You can be within 15 days of a declaration of war by Congress, which we are not unless I've missed something recently, or you can have the Attorney General swear, under oath in a disposition, that the spying will not include Americans. The right (not the Amdministration, just the ass-kissers who think it can do no harm) tired to wiggle out through there, but even if the spying did, indeed, not include Americans (Despite the administration admitting it did.), the Attorney General chose not to make said dispositions, nor were the reporting requirements followed, so the issue is moot.
The spying was not authorized under FISA, period. And under FISA, all non-allowed-by-law spying is illegal.
However, there is a slight wiggle room in that FISA can be read to mean 'it is legal only if any law allows it', although this is rather clearly not the intent of FISA, as FISA claims to be the sole law in charge of allowing spying. It was more than likely meant to be read as 'it is legal only if I allow it'. However, it can be read that way, and that is one of the claims of the administration, that the authorization to invade Afganistan can be read as authorizing the spying.
The other claim, of course, is that the president has the power under the constitution to fight wars, and laws passed by congress cannot limit him in that regard.
I would argue that you have to be less careful with AJAX than traditional pages WRT that.
With traditional pages...let's say someone sees something wrong with one of the entries. They edit it. Oops, still wrong. They edit it again. Okay, there.
Later, they back up through the pages. What's this POST message? Okay, we say no there, and keep going...hey, wait, this is wrong again. Let me edit it. Hey, it's correct on this screen...
With AJAX, you can't get anything like that. The lack of going 'backwards' and 'forwards' in your editing is a good thing, because that doesn't work in the first place!
With AJAX, it's always 'here is the database'. If they leave that page, and come back, they probably get the same page(1), granted, but if that's the only way to edit the database it couldn't have changed. And they can't page around inside their own editing session, and can't end up with an inconsistent view between pages in the past and the current reality of the database.
1) And, of course, some AJAX things just always pull their info from the server, via javascript in the page onLoad, instead of generating the page with the correct info. Hence every viewing of the page will be correct as of the second the page was displayed, not when it was first downloaded into the browser.
Everything is trivally convertable. Like you have an order form. People write their address, submit a form, you check it, and show them an updated page?
Just change $_POST to some other variable, have it submitted via AJAX to there. All the form is in $foo['bar'], just like it used to be in $_POST['bar']. Then write out the changes to page to a div you already set up. (If you're really lazy, unset($_POST); and $_POST=$foo;)
Have a list form a database with a seperate pages for editing entries? Just make div somewhere, when they click on each entry, suck it into the div, do the editing, and clear the div when they click 'done'. You already have to code to make the page, so just strip out the surrounding HTML and use that. Feel free to make this a floating div in front of everything...you can even move it around via xajax.
And if you know Javascript, it's even better. You can pass arrays back and forth, which is incredibly useful where, for example, you formerly had to keep a Javascript and PHP array in sync. You can pass out random Javascript from PHP. (You cannot do the reverse, but that would be rather dangerous anyway.)
And with xajax 0.2, they've exposed almost all the PHP 'page changing functions' as Javascript also, so it works as a straight DHTML library too, without the round trip. This was my only annoyance with the first version...often I wanted to do something in pure Javascript, but didn't have any easy way to do that, because the user-accessable functions only existed in PHP, despite the fact all those functions did return XML telling xajax to call back-end Javascript functions!
Well, in the interesting thign is, in HTML, you can name links anything you want, even things totally unrelated to page's content.
Like, for example, you just did.
The page says, and I quote, 'dozens of lawmakers said they will donate any Abramoff-related contributions'. 'Related', as is being spun by the Republicans, means 'given by someone who paid Abramoff money'. not 'contributions from Abramoff'
And there are plenty of people who thnk this is, indeed, stupid and a few who got accused when the people making the donatation hasn't even hired Abramoff yet. But I guess the second anyone gave Abramoff a single dime, all those contributions they normally did magically became tainted somehow. (Like I said, the various donors have a hell of a libel case if they want to follow it up.)
But, as you apparently don't understand that, here you go. Where Deborah Howell explicitly says, duh, that Abramoff didn't give any money to Democrats.
However, she's still repeating the lie that he 'directed' his clients to do so, despite her complete inability to actually cite how she would know this, or why their donations in relation to Democrats dropped from the pervious year, while their donations to Republicans rose.
But you don't need stats, you can disprove that claim by simple logic. What Abramoff 'directed' his clients to do would logically be known by two people at the start of this, Abramoff and his clients. The investigation into Abramoff hasn't turned up anything suggesting this, and they certainly haven't admitted it. (No, the PR move of returning the money is not relevant here.)
So...um...how does everyone 'know' this little fact about what was going through everyone's minds when they wrote out the campaign contribution check? Because the Republicans made it up.
I think I've demostrated the campaign contributions didn't pass through Abramoff, and if you want to assert that Abramoff 'directed' donations, feel free to come up with some evidence of that, and not by citing papers that repeat GOP talking points, but actual facts.
Yes. He used FISA.
Bush, however, is not using FISA. Thus he is in violation of FISA barring some sort of other statutary authorization. He was wavered back and forth between claiming the Afganistan authorization is one, and that he doesn't need one.
It really is that simple.
And, again. HE DIDN'T GIVE ANY MONEY TO REPUBLICANS.
Your link says 'all legislators who took money directly from Mr. Abramoff on behalf of various clients'. That is, again, a lie, because absolutely nothing at all on that page would indicate that that money was from Mr. Abramoff. In fact, all that money appears to be returned to the people who donated it. (Incidentally, if it had been donated via Abramoff, they would have just admitted to various crimes, because you explicitly cannot pass campaign contributions off through other people like that, or accept ones coming in that way.)
In other words, the story has already been distorted so much that politicans are returning totally unrelated money, merely because the media has confused the difference between illegal bribes handed out by Abramoff, and legal campaing contributes handed out by random people who happened to employee Abramoff.
If anyone was 'returning' bribes, they would be returning them to Abramoff, because he would be the damn person who paid them out. I rather seriously doubt he would say 'Oh, and vote for this bill, because I'm passing along this money on behalf of Party X.' While he was rather blatant in his bribery, there is a difference between blatant and downright stupid, and telling someone that you have entered into a criminal conspiracy with the names of other parties to the conspiracy, when they don't need to know, seems a bit on the downright stupid side. (For one thing, if they can talk to each other, you can't suck out part of the bribe while you pass it along.) No, he just told them how to vote.
And, I know you're not listening, but maybe I can get others to understand the lies: Absolutely no one involved in the investigation has accused Abramoff of any sort of 'laundering' of bribes. NO ONE. The bribes are entirely straight from Abramoff, through his companies, to the politicans, usually in the form of 'very cheap' expensive things, like houses misvalued by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The idea that he would additionally get his clients to make, at most, a legal 18,000 dollar campaign contribution is just insanity, much less the 500 dollar ones. He was fricking handing out houses, which is why he got caught. He wasn't futzing around with piddly recorded campaign contributions.
It would be possible to bribe someone via campaign contributions, and the system in Washington has often been accused of just that. But saying 'If you vote for bill X, there will probably be a big campaign contribution from X' is not what Abramoff is accused of. It's saying 'Vote for bill X, and I will give you a lot of money.'.
Oh, and some fun info: The 'Saginaw Chippewa Tribe' and 'Tigua' tribes are some of the tribes he defrauded. You are claiming wrongdoing on the part of a victim's donation.
These hackers, instead, operate hundreds of miles of mechanical semaphores towers called 'the clacks' stretching over a continent. Metaphorically, it's probably closer to 30 years ago with large computers dialing each other over UUCP. (1)
They have out-of-band communication, they have compression, they have routing, they have superstitions and metaphors and speak in jargon, and they even have security issues. (At night, you don't actually know what tower is flashing at you.)
And The Smoking GNU is not only a reference to GNU, it's a homage to The Lone Gunmen.
Next up: Anhk-Morpork get a subway, thanks to the events in 'Thud'. Which is good, because people have been complaining about the traffic problems for years.
1) Although once you get into Anhk-Morpork, every street corner has a clacks tower, and people can send and receive messages from them, parodying cell phones. Instead of people talking to no one as they walk down the street, they are instead staring into space and waving flags around, which is a bit more dangerous. Currently only the cops really seem to be using these.
I never use flash. I don't use PNGs, although I'd love to.
I stopped trying to make everything work in non-Javascript browsers, but I always let you navigate with site without Javascript. If you want to do anything besides posting messages and logging in, though, you'll probably need it.
The sites where there is actually anything to do besides those things are few and far between, however. But you want webmail, you want to manage your photo gallery, whatever, you need Javascript on. I'm not writing the damn thing twice, and stuff looks a lot better with AJAX.
Peopel think the tradeoff is between time spent and the number of browsers it looks bad in, but if you know what you can't do the same way in different browsers, you can just sit down and make a page that works well in everything to start with. If you don't try to do anything that does not work exactly the same in different browsers (At least, when not hidden from view in a Javascript library you do not need to mess with.), you can make a very nice site in a very short amount of time.
I was just talking issue that the focus of a company could have anything to do with what browser they support, because what browser people use is almost always completely unrelated to any market they belong to, barring a few obvious exceptions.
I.e., the analogy was broken.
But companies certainly should figure out how much supporting a browser costs vs. sales that many viewers would have.
They've decided that Indian tribes hired Abramoff in any shape or form are somehow magically criminals(1), and thus those people giving legal campaign contributions to any politican makes those politicians criminals.
Which actually sounds like a good basis for a slander lawsuit by those tribes. They're basically being accused of commiting felonies with no indication they have anything to do with any of this.
And the reason people are screaming is that the media has been printing this lie about Democrats being involved for months. It is not a gray area, it is not a question, they are not under any sort of investigation. The very idea that Abramoff would involve the Democrats when he is part of the K Street Project, designed to exclude Democrats from the lobbying process is so utterly absurd that no newspaper should have even repeated the GOP spin, much less continued to repeat it as fact.
1) Some of these people were actually defrauded by Abramoff.
Mr. Abramoff is not charged with giving his own money to members of either party
Yes, in fact, he is. Well, his company is. He is charged with handing Republicans money in return for votes. (And has pleaded guilty to something in that respect, although we do not know exactly what.)
He has exactly been charged with, indeed, handing out cash in unmarked brown bags.(1) To Republicans. In return for specific votes. That is, in fact, the story, and the fact you are willing to repeat the lies shows exactly how poorly a job the media is doing with it.
I don't doubt that you really, really believe that every Democrat who took money from Mr. Abramoff and his clients (remember that the vast majority of the money which changed hands unethically was in the form of payments Mr. Abramoff directed his clients, particularly Indian casino-related investors to give to various figures) didn't know where the money was coming from, while every Republican who a client of Mr. Abramoff gave money to did.
Of course they knew where the money was coming from. It was coming from Indian tribes, and it was the perfectly legal campaign contributions to everyone they'd been doing since long before Abramoff showed up.
The fact that everyone does these sort of seedy campaign contributions has absolutely nothing to do with the blatant bribery that Abramoff is being charged with doing to Republicans.
And, once again, Democrat campaign contributions dropped once people hired Abramoff, which makes sense as he works solely with Republicans. If you want to assert some sort of hyptherical crime where he said to a Democrat 'Vote for X, and you'll get a big campaign contribution from a casino', then, yes, that would be bribery, but no one has asserted any such thing in a court of law, he has basically no interaction with Democrats at all, and the current trouble he's in is, indeed, due to him passing out cash and valuable things to Republicans, which he didn't do to Democrats.
And I'd like some sort of logical explaination why he'd blatantly bribe Republicans (And also legally give money to), and secretly bribe Democrats through backchannels (And legally give them no money either.), considering he is, in fact, a Republican.
1) Okay, admittedly, it wasn't usually cash. It was things like cars and houses. Which makes it worse for him, because those things are harder to hide and tougher to explain as sort of misfiled campaign contribution.
That makes sense only when the browser selection is related to the site.
If you're selling IE plugins, it might work. Or if you're selling Mac software, by all means don't worry about IE.
But if you're selling widgets, it's just stupid. The correct analogy is selling all kinds of underwear, but only letting women into the store. Or having an elevator that can only support people who weigh less than 200 pounds.
To further clarify: The K Street Project was a wildly successful attempt to install Republicans as lobbists at the top part of every single commerical lobbying organization, with the intent they would only, or at least mainly, lobby Republicans.
This rather inverted logic, that by only asking the Republicans for favors the Republicans end up with all the power, actually worked pretty. A large part of it was the party disipline of the GOP itself.
The Democrats quickly became completely irrelevant to lobbists, in a sort of self-fufilling prophecy. Even in the most lopsided times, it used to be that you could get swing votes by playing your cards right. .
But now, if you did not play to the Republicans, none of them would listen to you. And without any Republican votes, you'd never get anything passed.
And the price of getting access to the Republicans? Campaign contributions. Always a rather gray legal area for lobbists, and the K Street Project made it policy.
Eventually, that policy led to the more blatant Abramoff, who literally just cut out all the wink-wink-nudge-nudge and said 'Give us money and we'll vote for your bill'.
That is a lie.
The 'revealed recipients of Mr. Abramoff's largesse' are Republicans. Period, no exceptions. Every single one of them. No Democrat has ever gotten a dime from him.
The Republicans are trying to pretend people his clients donated to are in trouble also. You know, his clients, the Indians, who paid him money and thus couldn't possible been funnelling his money anywhere? The people he was, in fact, commiting fraud on? The people who were making campaign contributions to both parties before Abramoff even showed up in town?
If you hire an unethical lobbist who bribes people, it doesn't magically make every campaign contribution you make some sort of criminal act, and it certainly doesn't make the Democrats accepting them criminals when they don't know anything about this other guy you hired who bribes Republicans.
I don't see how. They made the lie. She repeated it. It's either her fault, or it's the administration.
And her response?
Yet another lie.
She has absolutely no evidence 'he directed his Indian tribal clients to make millions of dollars in campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.'. The idea of Abramoff directing anyone to make contributions to the Democrats is completely absurd.
IT. IS. A. LIE.. Do you understand? That is why people are upset.
They had people actively deleting the inflammatory posts BEFORE they gave up on the avalanche and deleted everything.
And they did that instead of just turning off posting...why, exactly?
However, this is exactly the kind of lies everyone is complaining about. Democrats did, indeed, get tribal donations. They also got offices and franking priviledges, and most of them own a house! They're exactly like Republicans!
The problem is, of course, that the reason Republicans are under investigation is bribery by Abramoff, not fricking campaign contributions from people that Abramoff was defrauding. By Abramoff. He handed them money in return for certain votes. That is 100% illegal.
Campaign contributions by Indian tribes, however, are not, unless either they were trying to bribe people (Which no one has asserted), or they were bribing people in behalf of Abramoff, which makes no sense, because they were paying him money.