The unions sure do...Opensecrets.org tracks political spending. In the top 25 organizations donating to candidates over the last few years, unions dominate the list and tilt almost exclusively Democrat. On the other hand, the few corporations in the top 25 tend to donate fairly evenly, favoring the ruling party.
Heavy Hitters: Top All-Time Donors, 1989-2014
This list includes the organizations that have historically qualified as "heavy hitters" — groups that lobby and spend big, with large sums sent to candidates, parties and leadership PACs. Individuals and organizations have been able to make extremely large donations to outside spending groups in the last few years.
Rank Organization Total '89-'14 Dem% Repub% 1 ActBlue
$102,669,137 99% 0% 2 American Fedn of State, County & Municipal Employees
$61,819,929 80% 1% 3 National Education Assn
$58,988,290 56% 4% 4 AT&T Inc
$57,026,335 41% 57% 5 National Assn of Realtors
$55,559,528 41% 44% 6 Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
$45,572,151 91% 2% 7 Goldman Sachs
$45,270,985 53% 44% 8 United Auto Workers
$41,923,428 71% 0% 9 Carpenters & Joiners Union
$41,577,299 71% 9% 10 Service Employees International Union
$38,711,298 84% 2% 11 Laborers Union
$38,401,420 83% 7% 12 American Federation of Teachers
$37,271,825 89% 0% 13 Communications Workers of America
$36,472,773 86% 0% 14 Teamsters Union
$36,355,957 88% 5% 15 JPMorgan Chase
"The vast, vast majority of them inherited their wealth"
cnbc.com: Forbes says that 30 percent of the Forbes 400 members inherited their wealth and the remaining 70 percent are entirely “self-made.” And even by United for a Fair Economy's calculations, the number of "self-made" rich is rising. In 1997, the group calculated that 50 percent of the Forbes list inherited all or part of their fortune.
wikipedia: Sixteen percent of millionaires inherited their fortunes. Forty-seven percent of millionaires are business owners. Twenty-three percent of the world's millionaires got that way through paid work, consisting mostly of skilled professionals or managers.
cato institute: Roughly 80 percent of millionaires in America are the first generation of their family to be rich. They didn’t inherit their wealth; they earned it. How? According to a recent survey of the top 1 percent of American earners, slightly less than 14 percent were involved in banking or finance. Roughly a third were entrepreneurs or managers of nonfinancial businesses. Nearly 16 percent were doctors or other medical professionals. Lawyers made up slightly more than 8 percent, and engineers, scientists and computer professionals another 6.6 percent. Sports and entertainment figures — the folks flying in on their private jets to express solidarity with Occupy Wall Street — composed almost 2 percent. By and large, the wealthy have worked hard for their money. NYU sociologist Dalton Conley says that “higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do.”
The clearance documents that he signed clearly expressed the expectations, laws, and penalties. And there are whistleblower channels within the government and contracting agencies that he should have known about and utilized -- I have not seen any reports that he made any effort to use these before packing up his stolen classified information and fleeing to Hong Kong.
No, that the illegal things he exposed make him a sort of whistleblower--going to the press first instead of the authorized channels was not cool, but that we might be willing to overlook for the good that came.
But the removing copies of thousands of classified documents regarding legal NSA operations (like tracking Taliban) and giving those to the press and foreign governments means he committed espionage and having knowingly violated many US laws regarding classified information. For that he should be prosecuted, especially since it seems that he entered his position specifically to get access to those documents.
If a guy saves your cat from a tree but then rapes your daughter, you don't give him a pass because of the good thing he did.
It doesn't really matter why he did it. He's effectively confessed to a number of espionage crimes. If he was a *just* a whistelblower about NSA's metadata collections, there were ways he could have done that
18 U.S. Code 798 - Disclosure of classified information
(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information— (1) concerning the nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government; or (2) concerning the design, construction, use, maintenance, or repair of any device, apparatus, or appliance used or prepared or planned for use by the United States or any foreign government for cryptographic or communication intelligence purposes; or (3) concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government; or (4) obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government, knowing the same to have been obtained by such processes— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. (b) As used in subsection (a) of this section— The term “classified information” means information which, at the time of a violation of this section, is, for reasons of national security, specifically designated by a United States Government Agency for limited or restricted dissemination or distribution; The terms “code,” “cipher,” and “cryptographic system” include in their meanings, in addition to their usual meanings, any method of secret writing and any mechanical or electrical device or method used for the purpose of disguising or concealing the contents, significance, or meanings of communications; The term “foreign government” includes in its meaning any person or persons acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of any faction, party, department, agency, bureau, or military force of or within a foreign country, or for or on behalf of any government or any person or persons purporting to act as a government within a foreign country, whether or not such government is recognized by the United States; The term “communication intelligence” means all procedures and methods used in the interception of communications and the obtaining of information from such communications by other than the intended recipients; The term “unauthorized person” means any person who, or agency which, is not authorized to receive information of the categories set forth in subsection (a) of this section, by the President, or by the head of a department or agency of the United States Government which is expressly designated by the President to engage in communication intelligence activities for the United States. (c) Nothing in this section shall prohibit the furnishing, upon lawful demand, of information to any regularly constituted committee of the Senate or House of Representatives of the United States of America, or joint committee thereof. (d) (1) Any person convicted of a violation of this section shall forfeit to the United States irrespective of any provision of State law— (A) any property constituting, or derived from, any proceeds the person obtained, directly or indirectly, as the result of such violation; and (B) any of the person’s property used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part, to commit, or to facilitate the commission of, such violation. (2) The court, in imposing sentence on a defendant for a conviction of a violation of this section, shall order that the defendant forfeit to the United States all property described in paragraph (1). (3) Except as provided in paragraph (4), the provisions of subsections (
And how about the countries he admires, those stalwarts of freedom and liberty?
He thanked the nations that had offered him support. “These nations, including Russia [communist/socialist], Venezuela [socialist dictatorship], Bolivia [socialist], Nicaragua ["social democrat"] and Ecuador [socialist], have my gratitude and respect,” he proclaimed, “for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful.” Earlier, Snowden had said that he sought refuge in Hong Kong [China, communist] because of its “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.”
China has a “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent?” Bwahahaha.
I also consider myself to be a sane citizen. While I am grateful that the NSA's metadata collection activities were exposed, Snowden did much more than that. If he'd been some low-level NSA worker who stumbled on the NSA's meta-data collection operations in the US in the normal course of duty and felt compelled to blow the whistle and stand up to take the consequences...well, that'd be one thing. As it looks now, he's not much more than a deliberate spy who knowingly committed espionage with a "good reason" who lied, stole data, and fled prosecution, much like Jonathon Pollard (q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J..., Pollard sold classified data to Israel because he didn't think it was right to withhold intelligence information from our ally).
Saw this in Slate magazine of all places, not exactly a right-wing publication:
It is true that Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens—far vaster than any outsider had suspected, in some cases vaster than the agency’s overseers on the secret FISA court had permitted—have triggered a valuable debate, leading possibly to much-needed reforms. If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing.
But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.
*Correction, Jan. 6, 2013: This article originally stated that Edward Snowden had not released any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries. In fact, he leaked documents that detail the cyber-operations of Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand.
These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”
Among other things, Snowden signed an oath, as a condition of his employment as an NSA contractor, not to disclose classified information, and knew the penalties for violating the oath.
In fact, as Snowden himself told the South China Morning Post, he took his job as an NSA contractor, with Booz Allen Hamilton, because he knew that his position would grant him “access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked.” He stayed there for just three months, enough to do what he came to do.
Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel of Reuters later reported, in an eye-opening scoop, that Snowden gained access to his cache of documents by persuading 20 to 25 of his fellow employees to give him their logins and passwords, saying he needed the information to help him do his job as systems administrator. (Most of these former colleagues were subsequently fired.)
[Snowden] gets himself placed at the NSA’s signals intelligence center in Hawaii for the sole purpose of pilfering extremely classified documents. (How many is unclear: I’ve heard estimates ranging from “tens of thousands”
I have little interest in seeing most movies more than once. But some get watched over and over. If I'm flipping channels and see Jaws on TV, I'll stop and watch it. I have it on DVD too. 5th Element, The Waterboy, Tin Cup, Aliens, A Christmas Story, maybe a dozen more DVD/BluRay are watched over and over in my family. And that's not counting kids crap that gets watch 5000 times.
I like to have the media in my grubby little hands so that when the powers-that-be decide the lose my purchases in the cloud or decide that I need to purchase the same movie/music once per device, or...
I generally buy used CDs and DVDs from Amazon, rip them to FLAC (for music) and.mp4 for movies then put them on my in-home NAS for streaming. So the discs are touched once by me. I also convert the FLAC files to mp3 for portable devices like iPhone. I have a closet in my house that holds nothing much more than CDs and DVDs. A fire-proof safe holds a 2TB USB drive with a backup of the media just in case.
When I RIAA comes after me, I will be able to put my hands on media proving I didn't pirate anything.
I still pay for a netflix DVD delivery, too, because the PTB will not agree to let netflix stream all the movies that are available on DVD. The streaming selection sucks relative to the disc availability. Oh, and I don't rip the netflix discs 'cause that'd be stealing. I use netflix to watch a movie for the first time, if there's replay value, I'll go to amazon.
The NRA magazines like America's First Freedom regularly carry articles about the abuses of the government, although Fast & Furious and Operation Fearless (being gun-related) do tend to overshadow more generally political issues like Benghazi and the NSA/CIA wiretaps.
Elaine: This is an emergency! Power and Light man: It always is. Elaine: [Lying] No, I am serious. My mother is a very sick woman. She's in the bed next to me with her kidney machine, which has kept her alive for seven years. This wonderful 84-year-old woman! Elaine: [pretending to talk to "mama"] What's that mama? The machine isn't going "ta-pocketa ta-pocketa ta-pocketa" anymore? Oh my God! No, I'm not talking to Oral Roberts on the phone mama, it's too late for that. But the man on the other end of the phone cares. You do care, don't you? You will turn the power back on, won't you? Power and Light man: Lady, that was beautiful, really terrific. I've been here seven years, and that's the best I've heard yet. Great performance. But look, all is not lost. Thrifti-Mart is open 24 hours. Elaine: What good will that do? Power and Light man: They sell beautiful candles! [hangs up the phone and laughs hysterically]
Oh, there are reams of paper we could devote to detailing Republican hypocrisy, I did not mean to imply otherwise. Further, if there is some example of Republicans complaining about big data while using big data, by all means, share this information so we can mock further Republican hypocrisy.
The original tu queue claimed that Republicans use big data, too. Which is certainly the case, but there is no Republican hypocrisy on this topic (yet?). If the only defense for Democrat hypocrisy is to toss out some Republican hypocrisy, at least make sure the Republican actions being flamed is actually hypocrisy.
At least on this topic, I am unaware of any Republicans decrying the use of big data while simultaneously using big data. OTOH, we have Obama complaining about the inadvertent racist bias of numbers while simultaneously exploiting the racist bias of numbers.
Some of Tesla's 'wins" were dismissals of lawsuits brought by the NADA for lack of status. They did not overturn laws. Your New York and Ohio links reference more Tesla's lobbying ability to prevent new laws from being passed than "winning a lawsuit". The Washington law seems unconstitutional as a bill of attainder since it applies only to Tesla (albeit not by name). Your Mass. link was a dismissal for lack of standing and did not overturn the law.
I am unaware of Tesla successfully challenging an existing law in court.
"Yet that's exactly how cars have been sold in this country for decades - the government telling auto makers, "you can't sell directly to the public, you have to set up dealerships."
Not really a decent summary of the situation. The manufacturers long ago chose to use dealerships rather than direct sales channels. The dealership franchise laws came about *after* a number of situations where the manufacturers were seen to be abusing their relationships with their dealers.
From FTC.gov
"When the automobile industry was in its infancy, auto manufacturers recruited independent, locally owned dealers to reach consumers in localities across the country. State laws progressively embraced wide-ranging protections for these dealers due to a perceived imbalance of power between the typically small local dealers and major national manufacturers. Dealers persuaded lawmakers that they needed protections from abusive practices by manufacturers. Federal laws, too, developed to protect auto dealers from abuse.
Those laws expanded to include more protectionist clauses over time, again as a result of perceived abuses by manufactures like trying to drive dealerships out-of-business by opening company stores directly competing and undercutting with franchisees. There's certainly some level of conflict of interest there, and states sided with the local franchisees. Imagine if you bought a McDonalds franchise and built up a successful local business for the brand, then corporate came in a built a new McDs across the street from you in violation of the franchise contracts, but you could not afford the lawsuit needed to back them down? You'd probably have Occupy folks begging for protectionist laws for you.
But you're right saying " It seems to me the real issue at hand is that Tesla wants an exception made to the law, just for them." The laws may be obsolete or even have a negative impact, but they're still the law until legislatures change them.
It would be ironic for Tesla to get the laws changed, succeed in selling lots of cars, shift to a dealership model (for the same reasons Ford did way back when), then end up abusing the dealers and causing the reinstatement of the franchisee laws.
This is not about Tesla or electric cars. This is 100% about the protectionist laws in place in most states requiring cars to be sold through independent dealerships with layers of legal assistance against the power of the manufacturers to arbitrarily make changes that would negatively impact dealers. These were sought out because the evil corporate giants at Ford and GM kept sticking it to the little guys. So the solution was: government control!
Back in the day, cars were sold directly by the manufacturers. At some point though, between 1900 and 1920 the realized that selling through dealerships had a lot of benefits. "The irony in all this is that G.M. and Ford adopted the dealer system because they thought it would make their lives easier. A dealer who owned his own business would work harder than a mere employee, the thinking went, and would not require a lot of outside monitoring."
"...historically, the automakers were not good partners. In 1920, for instance, the U.S. economy went into a deep recession. But Henry Ford kept his factories running at full tilt, and forced thousands of Ford dealers around the country to buy new cars that they had little chance of selling. The dealers knew that if they said no they’d never see a Model T again, so they ate the inventory. A decade later, when the Great Depression hit, Ford and G.M. used the same strategy to help keep the production lines going. They turned their dealers into a cushion against hard times.
In the long term, this was a disastrous tactic, because it inspired mistrustful dealers to look to the government for help. (The first franchise law was passed in 1937.) Dealers recognized that much about their businesses was always going to be out of their control—automakers not only decide what cars get made but also dictate sales strategies and incentive plans. So they decided to protect what they could, using laws to insulate themselves from competition and from the risk of being dropped by the manufacturer. And that’s what has made life so hard for the automakers today....in the late nineties, both G.M. and Ford tried to start buying up dealerships. But, at this point, the system is self-protecting; dealers revolted, state regulators started nosing about, and the automakers gave up. They made a devil’s bargain some eighty years ago, and now they’re stuck with it.
There's not a lot of new laws being passed that prohibit this distribution model. Rather, most states long ago prohibited the direct distribution model because automakers had a tendency to use dealerships to create a market in a region, then drop into the market with a factory-owned distributor killing the local dealership. This was deemed to be an unfair business practice, and states were happy to provide protectionist laws favoring the local guys over the Detroit manufacturers.
Tesla is newly getting hoisted by those laws, but generally speaking the laws themselves are pretty much old laws. IOW, these laws are not new laws being passed by anti-Tesla, anti-green, pro-pollution, what have you today. Until the legislatures change the laws, they will need to continue to be enforced. After all, those laws are just trying to make sure the business practices are "fair".
When will we have enough regulation? Is there even a theoretical limit to the level of regulation possible? Are there any conceivable regulations for which the above argument or a variant thereof cannot be made?
The pattern is
1. Government policy and poor regulation cause (or invents) a crisis. 2. The government publicly and violently searches for culprits, aided by the MSM, and names the wrong parties--usually in the private sector. 3. The government then rolls out a massive new law and its regulatory children to "fix" the problem as they defined it. 4. The new law doesn't solve the real problem, costs a lot, and has massive unintended (but fully predicted) consequences, including setting the stage for the next crisis, which will be bigger and more damaging. 5. Memory of the past crisis fades and everybody reluctantly adjusts to the massive new regulatory overhead.
6. A new crisis occurs. The government publicly and violently searches for the culprits, aided by the MSM--looking exclusively in the business community... and so it goes.
The Bush tax cuts were poised to expire. The 111th Congress, which was held by Democrats (Pelosi was Speaker and Reid was Senate Majority Leader) send an extension to Mr Obama's desk. All the Democrats had to do to kill the Bush tax cuts was...nothing. Not a thing.
But even Democrats seemed to think that the Bush tax cuts, which relieved millions of households from any tax liability (producing a large chunk of the "47% who pay no federal income taxes"), were not so evil after all, for most people. They wanted to keep the Bush tax cuts in place for a majority of "middle" income people. Yes, they wanted to raise taxes on some of the rich, but when they couldn't manage that, they kept the Bush tax cuts in place in toto for another 2 years.
Two years later, the Bush tax cuts might have expired again, for everyone. Again, Democrats didn't want the Bush tax cuts to expire for everyone. Only the rich. This time they managed by extending the Bush tax cuts for almost everyone "permanently" (removing any further sunset), while increasing taxes on the rich.
Want to blame anyone for extending the Bush tax cuts permanently? Look to the Democrats.
The OP said "whatever the French call la dolce vita" as in "I don't know the words the French might use, but there's a phrase 'la dolce vita', which is Italian; I'm sure the French have a similar phrase, I just don't happen to know it".
Slashdot Mirror
The unions sure do...Opensecrets.org tracks political spending. In the top 25 organizations donating to candidates over the last few years, unions dominate the list and tilt almost exclusively Democrat. On the other hand, the few corporations in the top 25 tend to donate fairly evenly, favoring the ruling party.
Heavy Hitters: Top All-Time Donors, 1989-2014
This list includes the organizations that have historically qualified as "heavy hitters" — groups that lobby and spend big, with large sums sent to candidates, parties and leadership PACs. Individuals and organizations have been able to make extremely large donations to outside spending groups in the last few years.
Rank Organization Total '89-'14 Dem% Repub%
1 ActBlue
$102,669,137 99% 0%
2 American Fedn of State, County & Municipal Employees
$61,819,929 80% 1%
3 National Education Assn
$58,988,290 56% 4%
4 AT&T Inc
$57,026,335 41% 57%
5 National Assn of Realtors
$55,559,528 41% 44%
6 Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
$45,572,151 91% 2%
7 Goldman Sachs
$45,270,985 53% 44%
8 United Auto Workers
$41,923,428 71% 0%
9 Carpenters & Joiners Union
$41,577,299 71% 9%
10 Service Employees International Union
$38,711,298 84% 2%
11 Laborers Union
$38,401,420 83% 7%
12 American Federation of Teachers
$37,271,825 89% 0%
13 Communications Workers of America
$36,472,773 86% 0%
14 Teamsters Union
$36,355,957 88% 5%
15 JPMorgan Chase
"The vast, vast majority of them inherited their wealth"
cnbc.com: Forbes says that 30 percent of the Forbes 400 members inherited their wealth and the remaining 70 percent are entirely “self-made.” And even by United for a Fair Economy's calculations, the number of "self-made" rich is rising. In 1997, the group calculated that 50 percent of the Forbes list inherited all or part of their fortune.
wikipedia: Sixteen percent of millionaires inherited their fortunes. Forty-seven percent of millionaires are business owners. Twenty-three percent of the world's millionaires got that way through paid work, consisting mostly of skilled professionals or managers.
cato institute: Roughly 80 percent of millionaires in America are the first generation of their family to be rich. They didn’t inherit their wealth; they earned it. How? According to a recent survey of the top 1 percent of American earners, slightly less than 14 percent were involved in banking or finance. Roughly a third were entrepreneurs or managers of nonfinancial businesses. Nearly 16 percent were doctors or other medical professionals. Lawyers made up slightly more than 8 percent, and engineers, scientists and computer professionals another 6.6 percent. Sports and entertainment figures — the folks flying in on their private jets to express solidarity with Occupy Wall Street — composed almost 2 percent. By and large, the wealthy have worked hard for their money. NYU sociologist Dalton Conley says that “higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do.”
The clearance documents that he signed clearly expressed the expectations, laws, and penalties. And there are whistleblower channels within the government and contracting agencies that he should have known about and utilized -- I have not seen any reports that he made any effort to use these before packing up his stolen classified information and fleeing to Hong Kong.
Sure, and they can and do, once they follow "due process" it's Constitutional. Who gets to decide what is due process? The government (the courts).
No, that the illegal things he exposed make him a sort of whistleblower--going to the press first instead of the authorized channels was not cool, but that we might be willing to overlook for the good that came.
But the removing copies of thousands of classified documents regarding legal NSA operations (like tracking Taliban) and giving those to the press and foreign governments means he committed espionage and having knowingly violated many US laws regarding classified information. For that he should be prosecuted, especially since it seems that he entered his position specifically to get access to those documents.
If a guy saves your cat from a tree but then rapes your daughter, you don't give him a pass because of the good thing he did.
It doesn't really matter why he did it. He's effectively confessed to a number of espionage crimes. If he was a *just* a whistelblower about NSA's metadata collections, there were ways he could have done that
18 U.S. Code 798 - Disclosure of classified information
(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information—
(1) concerning the nature, preparation, or use of any code, cipher, or cryptographic system of the United States or any foreign government; or
(2) concerning the design, construction, use, maintenance, or repair of any device, apparatus, or appliance used or prepared or planned for use by the United States or any foreign government for cryptographic or communication intelligence purposes; or
(3) concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government; or
(4) obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government, knowing the same to have been obtained by such processes—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
(b) As used in subsection (a) of this section—
The term “classified information” means information which, at the time of a violation of this section, is, for reasons of national security, specifically designated by a United States Government Agency for limited or restricted dissemination or distribution;
The terms “code,” “cipher,” and “cryptographic system” include in their meanings, in addition to their usual meanings, any method of secret writing and any mechanical or electrical device or method used for the purpose of disguising or concealing the contents, significance, or meanings of communications;
The term “foreign government” includes in its meaning any person or persons acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of any faction, party, department, agency, bureau, or military force of or within a foreign country, or for or on behalf of any government or any person or persons purporting to act as a government within a foreign country, whether or not such government is recognized by the United States;
The term “communication intelligence” means all procedures and methods used in the interception of communications and the obtaining of information from such communications by other than the intended recipients;
The term “unauthorized person” means any person who, or agency which, is not authorized to receive information of the categories set forth in subsection (a) of this section, by the President, or by the head of a department or agency of the United States Government which is expressly designated by the President to engage in communication intelligence activities for the United States.
(c) Nothing in this section shall prohibit the furnishing, upon lawful demand, of information to any regularly constituted committee of the Senate or House of Representatives of the United States of America, or joint committee thereof.
(d)
(1) Any person convicted of a violation of this section shall forfeit to the United States irrespective of any provision of State law—
(A) any property constituting, or derived from, any proceeds the person obtained, directly or indirectly, as the result of such violation; and
(B) any of the person’s property used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part, to commit, or to facilitate the commission of, such violation.
(2) The court, in imposing sentence on a defendant for a conviction of a violation of this section, shall order that the defendant forfeit to the United States all property described in paragraph (1).
(3) Except as provided in paragraph (4), the provisions of subsections (
And how about the countries he admires, those stalwarts of freedom and liberty?
He thanked the nations that had offered him support. “These nations, including Russia [communist/socialist], Venezuela [socialist dictatorship], Bolivia [socialist], Nicaragua ["social democrat"] and Ecuador [socialist], have my gratitude and respect,” he proclaimed, “for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful.” Earlier, Snowden had said that he sought refuge in Hong Kong [China, communist] because of its “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.”
China has a “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent?” Bwahahaha.
I also consider myself to be a sane citizen. While I am grateful that the NSA's metadata collection activities were exposed, Snowden did much more than that. If he'd been some low-level NSA worker who stumbled on the NSA's meta-data collection operations in the US in the normal course of duty and felt compelled to blow the whistle and stand up to take the consequences...well, that'd be one thing. As it looks now, he's not much more than a deliberate spy who knowingly committed espionage with a "good reason" who lied, stole data, and fled prosecution, much like Jonathon Pollard (q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J..., Pollard sold classified data to Israel because he didn't think it was right to withhold intelligence information from our ally).
Saw this in Slate magazine of all places, not exactly a right-wing publication:
It is true that Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens—far vaster than any outsider had suspected, in some cases vaster than the agency’s overseers on the secret FISA court had permitted—have triggered a valuable debate, leading possibly to much-needed reforms.
If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing.
But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.
*Correction, Jan. 6, 2013: This article originally stated that Edward Snowden had not released any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries. In fact, he leaked documents that detail the cyber-operations of Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand.
These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”
Among other things, Snowden signed an oath, as a condition of his employment as an NSA contractor, not to disclose classified information, and knew the penalties for violating the oath.
In fact, as Snowden himself told the South China Morning Post, he took his job as an NSA contractor, with Booz Allen Hamilton, because he knew that his position would grant him “access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked.” He stayed there for just three months, enough to do what he came to do.
Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel of Reuters later reported, in an eye-opening scoop, that Snowden gained access to his cache of documents by persuading 20 to 25 of his fellow employees to give him their logins and passwords, saying he needed the information to help him do his job as systems administrator. (Most of these former colleagues were subsequently fired.)
[Snowden] gets himself placed at the NSA’s signals intelligence center in Hawaii for the sole purpose of pilfering extremely classified documents. (How many is unclear: I’ve heard estimates ranging from “tens of thousands”
I have little interest in seeing most movies more than once. But some get watched over and over. If I'm flipping channels and see Jaws on TV, I'll stop and watch it. I have it on DVD too. 5th Element, The Waterboy, Tin Cup, Aliens, A Christmas Story, maybe a dozen more DVD/BluRay are watched over and over in my family. And that's not counting kids crap that gets watch 5000 times.
I like to have the media in my grubby little hands so that when the powers-that-be decide the lose my purchases in the cloud or decide that I need to purchase the same movie/music once per device, or...
I generally buy used CDs and DVDs from Amazon, rip them to FLAC (for music) and .mp4 for movies then put them on my in-home NAS for streaming. So the discs are touched once by me. I also convert the FLAC files to mp3 for portable devices like iPhone. I have a closet in my house that holds nothing much more than CDs and DVDs. A fire-proof safe holds a 2TB USB drive with a backup of the media just in case.
When I RIAA comes after me, I will be able to put my hands on media proving I didn't pirate anything.
I still pay for a netflix DVD delivery, too, because the PTB will not agree to let netflix stream all the movies that are available on DVD. The streaming selection sucks relative to the disc availability. Oh, and I don't rip the netflix discs 'cause that'd be stealing. I use netflix to watch a movie for the first time, if there's replay value, I'll go to amazon.
The NRA magazines like America's First Freedom regularly carry articles about the abuses of the government, although Fast & Furious and Operation Fearless (being gun-related) do tend to overshadow more generally political issues like Benghazi and the NSA/CIA wiretaps.
Seems like any moron can manage to get elected President, even twice.
nm
Elaine: This is an emergency!
Power and Light man: It always is.
Elaine: [Lying] No, I am serious. My mother is a very sick woman. She's in the bed next to me with her kidney machine, which has kept her alive for seven years. This wonderful 84-year-old woman!
Elaine: [pretending to talk to "mama"] What's that mama? The machine isn't going "ta-pocketa ta-pocketa ta-pocketa" anymore? Oh my God! No, I'm not talking to Oral Roberts on the phone mama, it's too late for that. But the man on the other end of the phone cares. You do care, don't you? You will turn the power back on, won't you?
Power and Light man: Lady, that was beautiful, really terrific. I've been here seven years, and that's the best I've heard yet. Great performance. But look, all is not lost. Thrifti-Mart is open 24 hours.
Elaine: What good will that do?
Power and Light man: They sell beautiful candles!
[hangs up the phone and laughs hysterically]
Oh, there are reams of paper we could devote to detailing Republican hypocrisy, I did not mean to imply otherwise. Further, if there is some example of Republicans complaining about big data while using big data, by all means, share this information so we can mock further Republican hypocrisy.
The original tu queue claimed that Republicans use big data, too. Which is certainly the case, but there is no Republican hypocrisy on this topic (yet?). If the only defense for Democrat hypocrisy is to toss out some Republican hypocrisy, at least make sure the Republican actions being flamed is actually hypocrisy.
At least on this topic, I am unaware of any Republicans decrying the use of big data while simultaneously using big data. OTOH, we have Obama complaining about the inadvertent racist bias of numbers while simultaneously exploiting the racist bias of numbers.
Your tu quoque response basically failed.
Tesla wants an exemption from the laws.
Some of Tesla's 'wins" were dismissals of lawsuits brought by the NADA for lack of status. They did not overturn laws. Your New York and Ohio links reference more Tesla's lobbying ability to prevent new laws from being passed than "winning a lawsuit". The Washington law seems unconstitutional as a bill of attainder since it applies only to Tesla (albeit not by name). Your Mass. link was a dismissal for lack of standing and did not overturn the law.
I am unaware of Tesla successfully challenging an existing law in court.
"Yet that's exactly how cars have been sold in this country for decades - the government telling auto makers, "you can't sell directly to the public, you have to set up dealerships."
Not really a decent summary of the situation. The manufacturers long ago chose to use dealerships rather than direct sales channels. The dealership franchise laws came about *after* a number of situations where the manufacturers were seen to be abusing their relationships with their dealers.
From FTC.gov
"When the automobile industry was in its infancy, auto manufacturers recruited independent, locally owned dealers to reach consumers in localities across the country. State laws progressively embraced wide-ranging protections for these dealers due to a perceived imbalance of power between the typically small local dealers and major national manufacturers. Dealers persuaded lawmakers that they needed protections from abusive practices by manufacturers. Federal laws, too, developed to protect auto dealers from abuse.
Those laws expanded to include more protectionist clauses over time, again as a result of perceived abuses by manufactures like trying to drive dealerships out-of-business by opening company stores directly competing and undercutting with franchisees. There's certainly some level of conflict of interest there, and states sided with the local franchisees. Imagine if you bought a McDonalds franchise and built up a successful local business for the brand, then corporate came in a built a new McDs across the street from you in violation of the franchise contracts, but you could not afford the lawsuit needed to back them down? You'd probably have Occupy folks begging for protectionist laws for you.
But you're right saying " It seems to me the real issue at hand is that Tesla wants an exception made to the law, just for them." The laws may be obsolete or even have a negative impact, but they're still the law until legislatures change them.
It would be ironic for Tesla to get the laws changed, succeed in selling lots of cars, shift to a dealership model (for the same reasons Ford did way back when), then end up abusing the dealers and causing the reinstatement of the franchisee laws.
This is not about Tesla or electric cars. This is 100% about the protectionist laws in place in most states requiring cars to be sold through independent dealerships with layers of legal assistance against the power of the manufacturers to arbitrarily make changes that would negatively impact dealers. These were sought out because the evil corporate giants at Ford and GM kept sticking it to the little guys. So the solution was: government control!
Back in the day, cars were sold directly by the manufacturers. At some point though, between 1900 and 1920 the realized that selling through dealerships had a lot of benefits. "The irony in all this is that G.M. and Ford adopted the dealer system because they thought it would make their lives easier. A dealer who owned his own business would work harder than a mere employee, the thinking went, and would not require a lot of outside monitoring."
"...historically, the automakers were not good partners. In 1920, for instance, the U.S. economy went into a deep recession. But Henry Ford kept his factories running at full tilt, and forced thousands of Ford dealers around the country to buy new cars that they had little chance of selling. The dealers knew that if they said no they’d never see a Model T again, so they ate the inventory. A decade later, when the Great Depression hit, Ford and G.M. used the same strategy to help keep the production lines going. They turned their dealers into a cushion against hard times.
In the long term, this was a disastrous tactic, because it inspired mistrustful dealers to look to the government for help. (The first franchise law was passed in 1937.) Dealers recognized that much about their businesses was always going to be out of their control—automakers not only decide what cars get made but also dictate sales strategies and incentive plans. So they decided to protect what they could, using laws to insulate themselves from competition and from the risk of being dropped by the manufacturer. And that’s what has made life so hard for the automakers today. ...in the late nineties, both G.M. and Ford tried to start buying up dealerships. But, at this point, the system is self-protecting; dealers revolted, state regulators started nosing about, and the automakers gave up. They made a devil’s bargain some eighty years ago, and now they’re stuck with it.
[http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/04/060904ta_talk_surowiecki]
There's not a lot of new laws being passed that prohibit this distribution model. Rather, most states long ago prohibited the direct distribution model because automakers had a tendency to use dealerships to create a market in a region, then drop into the market with a factory-owned distributor killing the local dealership. This was deemed to be an unfair business practice, and states were happy to provide protectionist laws favoring the local guys over the Detroit manufacturers.
Tesla is newly getting hoisted by those laws, but generally speaking the laws themselves are pretty much old laws. IOW, these laws are not new laws being passed by anti-Tesla, anti-green, pro-pollution, what have you today. Until the legislatures change the laws, they will need to continue to be enforced. After all, those laws are just trying to make sure the business practices are "fair".
When will we have enough regulation? Is there even a theoretical limit to the level of regulation possible? Are there any conceivable regulations for which the above argument or a variant thereof cannot be made?
The pattern is
1. Government policy and poor regulation cause (or invents) a crisis.
2. The government publicly and violently searches for culprits, aided by the MSM, and names the wrong parties--usually in the private sector.
3. The government then rolls out a massive new law and its regulatory children to "fix" the problem as they defined it.
4. The new law doesn't solve the real problem, costs a lot, and has massive unintended (but fully predicted) consequences, including setting the stage for the next crisis, which will be bigger and more damaging.
5. Memory of the past crisis fades and everybody reluctantly adjusts to the massive new regulatory overhead.
6. A new crisis occurs. The government publicly and violently searches for the culprits, aided by the MSM--looking exclusively in the business community...
and so it goes.
The Bush tax cuts were poised to expire. The 111th Congress, which was held by Democrats (Pelosi was Speaker and Reid was Senate Majority Leader) send an extension to Mr Obama's desk. All the Democrats had to do to kill the Bush tax cuts was...nothing. Not a thing.
But even Democrats seemed to think that the Bush tax cuts, which relieved millions of households from any tax liability (producing a large chunk of the "47% who pay no federal income taxes"), were not so evil after all, for most people. They wanted to keep the Bush tax cuts in place for a majority of "middle" income people. Yes, they wanted to raise taxes on some of the rich, but when they couldn't manage that, they kept the Bush tax cuts in place in toto for another 2 years.
Two years later, the Bush tax cuts might have expired again, for everyone. Again, Democrats didn't want the Bush tax cuts to expire for everyone. Only the rich. This time they managed by extending the Bush tax cuts for almost everyone "permanently" (removing any further sunset), while increasing taxes on the rich.
Want to blame anyone for extending the Bush tax cuts permanently? Look to the Democrats.
How can she narrate something and not understand what it's about?
The OP said "whatever the French call la dolce vita" as in "I don't know the words the French might use, but there's a phrase 'la dolce vita', which is Italian; I'm sure the French have a similar phrase, I just don't happen to know it".