FBI, IRS Raid Home of Sen. Ted Stevens 539
A while back we discussed the corruption investigation aimed at Alaska Sen. Ted "series of tubes" Stevens. A number of readers sent us word that the home of Sen. Stevens was raided earlier today by agents of the FBI and the IRS. The focus of the raid was a remodeling project at Stevens's home and the involvement of VECO, an oil company.
Nice Line from Stevens (Score:5, Insightful)
The obvious question is: What about the bills that weren't sent to you?
To me, that seems to be the heart of the investigation.
Please don't joke about prison ass-rape. (Score:5, Insightful)
mod this shit down (Score:1, Insightful)
The only reason you are getting modded up is because any and every conspiracy theory gets modded up these days.
Mods, prove me wrong. Moderate this idiot down. Prove to me Slashdot hasn't been completely lost all reason. Don't believe he is a troll? Just check out his journal entries.
Re:That's why its called Prison... (Score:5, Insightful)
Need to change campaign laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's why its called Prison... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a prisoner to come out who is neither predator nor preyed upon and who is ready to rejoin society in a responsible manner, then their prison sentences need to be spent in a way that furthers that goal. That means that their prison life needs to be as close to normal as possible. That includes education and job training to enable them to live productively on the outside.
I really don't think anyone should be released from jail or prison until they at least have a GED.
Make prison life reasonably normal instead of a concrete jungle with life threatening dangers at every turn and you will save a lot of money as well because of the reduction in the costs of keeping a prisoner there and because of a lower recividsm rate afterwards.
People are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
Re:Hey Ted (Score:3, Insightful)
The lingo part was jokable, but the implications that he had no idea what he was talking about and still debating it in a political arena as a politician was the part that was disturbing and not defendable.
how funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's why its called Prison... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:mod this shit down (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod this down. I'm killing this account anyway. I'll just use one of the several dozen others.
Re:Hey Ted (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no logical reason he is the head of the telecommunications committee. One would think the head of a technologically based committee would at least understand the technology. Instead we get a corrupt old fool who can't even function as an effective mouthpiece for the various industries who pay to keep their parrot in power. So instead of a technologically advanced telecommunications infrastructure in this country we're stuck with crap like tubes & trucks analogies, Sen. Ted wanting to be able to port his landline # to his cell phone with the flip of a switch so he can answer calls to that number while riding his motorcycle and him calling for full internet filtering to ban child pornography so the kids don't get targeted by pedophiles.
Let's break those three gems from your corrupt hero, shall we?
No, the internet isn't a truck. It isn't a series of tubes, either. It's a distributed packet switched network. That's not too hard to say, now is it?
Who in the hell would ask for a landline switch so he could talk on his cell phone using his home number while riding his motorcycle? Last time I checked it took two hands to control a motorcycle...you know that whole steering, braking, throttle, and clutch system motorcycles have. Who cares if Teddy runs over a bunch of innocent kids as long as he can talk on his phone!
Speaking of those innocent kids, explain to me how blocking pictures of child pornography is going to keep predators from trying to solicit children online? The two items aren't directly related. There's also those sticky issues of a nationwide internet filter being both simultaneously uninforceable and UNCONSTITUIONAL. Of course the legality of the idea and the fact that it's been shot down on numerous other occasions (COPA I and II, anyone?) won't stop pork-barrel Ted from wasting our tax dollars in an ultimately failed attempt to get the thing to a vote.
And now, on top of this it turns out he got the square footage of his house doubled as a bribe from an oil industry insider who was convicted of bribing officials. Who cares about laws and regulations when it means a bigger rumpus room?!
Seriously, how can you respect that man? He's as corrupt as the day is long. Or, do you just respect the money he's been taking away from the national interest and funneling to you all these years?
Re:Casting them all on the take is disingenous (Score:2, Insightful)
If they didn't know that the system was corrupt to the core before they ran for office then they sure as hell should've figured it out during the campaign process. Anyone who actually accepted the office, somehow convincing themselves that they could change something, deserves to be painted with the brush--if not for actual exploitation of their position then for the naivete which indirectly supports the position of those who do abuse their priveleges.
Re:Taxes (Score:3, Insightful)
The government doesn't "pay" us to live here (I live in Juneau, Alaska). The people receive a portion of the proceeds from the exploitation of our primary natural resource, oil; which is only fair, considering it's our resource. Frankly, I find it daft and pathetic that everyone else in the world, especially everyone else in America, doesn't demand the same deal from their governments. Look, democracy is of, by, and for the people, which means public resources are the property of the people, which means when the government sells the rights to those resources for harvest, they are literally selling the property of the people. Doesn't it stand to reason that the people should receive the proceeds? Me, I'm a little miffed that the government gets a cut at all, I think all the proceeds should be distributed, and the government should keep its grubby fingers off my loot.
Re:Conspiracy nutjob Ron Paul was Re:Power corrupt (Score:5, Insightful)
It is depressing to me that the media spins him as some psycho conspiracy nut and even more that people believe it. In the meantime we readily cheer on our warhawks who dodged the service and then vote for war, and then call those who served a full 20 cowards for voting against it.
Re:The same man... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why not build it with your own/your wife's family/the city's money instead of mine?
Nephilium
Re:That's why its called Prison... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The same man... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The same man... (Score:5, Insightful)
I see. And this second bridge, unlike the first, is a not a bridge to "nowhere" because it connects to a large area of
Thanks for clarifying.
We wouldn't want the real estate developers to have to finance their own development. Nosiree! That's what hard working american men and women are for... to finance real estate development that they'd never be able to afford themselves.
Go to hell, much? Thanks, bye.
Re:The same man... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The same man... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would also like to point out that even though this may be an insignificant number to people accustomed to the over crowded cities of the lower 48, this city's population is half the population of the state. Alaska [wikipedia.org] may be 2.5 times larger than Texas, however our largest population center is land locked by military bases, the Cook Inlet [wikipedia.org], and the Chugach State Park. The bridge to nowhere [wikipedia.org] would reduce a two hour one way commute to just a few minutes from the currently under developed land to downtown Anchorage.
I saw a few posts that talked about the state paying Alaskans every year. The one to two grand paid by the state PFD [wikipedia.org] does not provide much help to a middle income family trying to buy a home when a vacant 1.5 acre lot in Anchorage sells for about $750,000 (just went on the market a few days ago).
Re:Need to change campaign laws (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually no, because you address that by rectifying another egregious aspect of our current political/
legal system: treating corporations as individuals. If Monsanto cannot serve 10 years for manslaughter,
it's not a person.
Re:News for Nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the one hand, you have an old, corrupt fool who doesn't even understand what the word "internet" means and on the other hand you have a guy who may reasonably be called one of the most visionary mainstream politicians of our time, given his proactive, leading-edge involvement in both the internet and environmental issues.
Thanks for getting that infamous Gore quote straight. Here's a little more info from Snopes:
I think the worst you can say about Gore's involvement with the internet is that he played an instrumental role in transforming it from an academic/military tool into the thing that you and I are arguing on right now. However you want to describe it, it's no small accomplishment.
Now compare that to Ted Stevens' accomplishments. ...chirp... ...chirp... ...chirp...
By the way, since Gore was "involved in plenty of scandals", you should have no problem citing them and recounting whether or not he was vindicated.Re:The same man... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What we really need is to end "Politician"... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Power corrupts (Score:3, Insightful)
My wifes college loan is now 7%! Fasfa paid for her college totally before I married her when her exhusband made more money. Now I am finishing school with less money and fasfa can't afford to pay for all of it. I need 2k every semester and work fulltime while I go to school.
Now the government under Bush is in record debt and the biggest it ever has. Hmmm
The states are doing things now that the federal government used to provide and property taxes have went up 3% in my state alone! Why? Because the government is wasting money on wars and paying interest on our debt.
I support Ron Paul and I am very close to becoming a republican. The federal government is way too big and I have been studying Ronald Reagan's policies and they make sense. Take college economics 101?
We need less federal government and more state level government programs. States pay for most of the things you describe and thanks to high federal spending you are suffering for it
Re:Power corrupts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The same man... (Score:1, Insightful)
The whole reason the article is here and people hate him is because he made the comment about the internet being like "tubes." All the uber-nerds sat back and laughed. And then, how many of them went on a few hours later to brag about thier "fat pipe" internet connections in IRC? Somehow you're a retard if you refer to the internet as TUBES, but PIPES is just fine.
Probably the same crowd of youngsters who jump ugly with G.H.W. Bush over the word "internets" but are too young to have ever read the R.F.C.s and other basic documents written by the people who actually built the 'net. Those documents upon which this wonderful medium is based repeatedly refer to "internets." In that case, the people who built the internet must be "morans" because they wrote and envisioned "internets" but the Slashdot crowd is cool because it's ignorant.
No, I'm not a Republican. And I'm not from Alaska. I just like to point out hypocrisy when I see it.
Re:That's why its called Prison... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hey Ted (Score:4, Insightful)
Because America has become a very conservative and frankly sexually repressed nation, and pedophiles are the boogeyman that government uses to justify absolutely anything they want. Terrorism is another.
Sounds good to me. Sex offenders should be permitted to have porn with no restrictions that any other group of adults (and frankly, probably even groups of children) do. We should not be legislating morality, and we should not be treating different groups of people worse than any others--even if they are the dreaded p-word. If you're complaining about early release, then you have a problem with the parole system and it has nothing at all to do with constitutionality, pedophilia or whether or not pictures of little kids should be illegal. (I presume you mean sexually explicit pictures--though you never say that, which I think just goes to show exactly how effective this particular boogeyman is.)
While we're at it, I think sex offender registries should be unconstitutional. I think the "sex offenders can't live within 100 miles of a school, library or park" laws should be unconstitutional as well. When you get out of jail, your punishment should be OVER. You've served your debt to society. If that's not true, then let's simply never release these people to begin with--though I think you're going to be hard-pressed to explain why they shouldn't be released when sex offenders' rate of recidivism isn't very high.
I don't want to see children abused sexually, so you can put the brakes on that particular ad hominem retort right now. I'm simply not willing to single out groups of people for harsher, increasingly worse and unending punishment because society happens to think their crimes are particularly bad, and I am not willing to trample anybody's rights after their release AT ALL, much less in a vain attempt to prevent recidivism.
More than anything we, as a society, need to figure out what the hell prison is for. Punishment and deterrence are well and good, but since the majority of criminals DO end up getting out eventually there needs to be much more focus on rehabilitation. And politicians need to stop throwing people under the bus to show they're "tough on crime."
Re:The same man... (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, since I seem not to have mentioned it and no one else has either, the biggest problem with the Anchorage bridge is that it may or may not actually be technically feasible due to the crappy muddy bottom, very long distance it would span, and lots of floating ice. Thats why it costs so much, and simultaneously about the best reason to be hesitant to blow a lot of cash on it.
Re:The same man... (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, it is common for developers to offer to pay for part or all of the infrastructure. They have a financial incentive for the development to proceed, and infrastructure costs are often the biggest disincentive for city governments. So developers do what they can to minimize or eliminate that cost for cities.
While it may make one feel better to "stick it to the developers" by making them pay for the additional infrastructure, the truth is that they don't pay for it. The people buying the new housing or office space do. The costs just get passed onto them in the form of increased prices, home association fees, property taxes, and/or mello-roos [wikipedia.org].So since the people are going to be paying for it anyway, the question then becomes how do you apportion the cost. One line of reasoning is that the people buying in the new development should pay for it since they are the primary beneficiaries. Another line of reasoning is that everyone should pay because the people in the currently existing city are secondary beneficiaries (less crowding, access to facilities in the new development, more choice in living/working area, etc). The fairest solution is probably a combination of the two. But the point is that making taxpayers pay for it isn't as ludicrous as you're making it out to be; taxpayers are the eventual beneficiaries and they end up paying for it in the end anyway. The logistics of how you make them pay for it is just a matter of shifting responsibility for obtaining the funding.
Re:The same man... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's actually Congress that is in charge of determining the federal budget, not the president!!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The same man... (Score:2, Insightful)
The bridge would be a godsend to that area, which, despite it's small size, brings in a substantial amount of revenue via tourism, and is not insignificant by any means.
Re:The same man... (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you realize how large 1.5 acres is? Especially considering it's within a city. A standard inner city house lot is 5000 square feet in many cities. 1.5 acres is 65340 square feet, or the equivalent of 13 house lots! That's a house, with a yard. So $750,000 divided by 13 is a mere $57,392. Sounds like a bargain to me for a home in the city.
Put an apartment complex on that piece of land and you can easily have over 100 homes.
Too Bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is... (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Early railroad made its big bucks less from transporting people, and more by transporting goods and raw materials for the industry. In fact passengers were often the necessary evil: you wouldn't get a permit to build a railroad if you didn't haul the people too.
Hence just counting how many people were there, is highly misleading. The west was by and large the captive market and source of cheap raw materials for the east coast, in much the same way as India was to England. Building a railroad there made sense.
B) Railroads were a _major_ strategic asset for the army. I don't think these bridges to nowhere count as that.
B) More importantly, railroads were built by private capital, because they were profitable. That's a freakin' huge difference between that and pork barrel contracts to at most please a village on an island.
The laissez faire capitalism of the 19'th century was pretty vehemently against using government money on something that competed with private initiative. Plus, the government didn't even have that kind of money anyway.
I must admit, though: That doctrine was often taken to absurd extremes, such as in England where, when they _had_ to support their own population in a crisis or famine... because they couldn't just give money to people (they thought it would compete with the employment market) or build something useful (it would have competed with private industry), they paid the people to build some useless stuff like roads from nowhere to nowhere (literally, unconnected, in the middle of a field) or useless towers or such. But even then, it must be said that it was only in times of extreme necessity, instead of social security. And it was openly useless stuff. Even in its stupidity, it just wasn't the same thing.
Re:then build their own freakin bridges (Score:1, Insightful)
term limits = worst idea EVER (Score:2, Insightful)
No, the solution to corruption are hard ethics rules, sunshine laws and aggressive oversight. Term limits just make the problem worse, not better.
Re:The same man... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not the federal government that pays.. it's you and me.
Re:The same man... (Score:4, Insightful)
On one hand, you're right. On the other, you clearly don't know much about the realities of economic development in Alaska. Most of Alaska is wilderness. To develop modern local economies, modern "conveniences" like roads and docks and harbors are required. And in a wilderness those projects are incredibly expensive. Count the number of towns in Alaska. Then count the number of towns with roads connecting them.
Yes, Alaska receives many barrels filled with pig meat. Yes, that kind of investment is the deciding factor in the future sustainability of the state (and all the people in it). Everyone knows the oil and gas won't last forever. By the time that money is gone, Alaska either needs to have a sustainable economy or a population that still knows all the old subsistence ways. Halfway between the two will be a disaster.
Cruise ships make or break communities. If the ships come, you win. If the ships don't come, you lose. The cruise companies wield that power in ways that would make you cringe even if your business didn't rely on them. In this and other ways, Alaska *isn't* a reasonable place - it's a strange sort of modern frontier. That's not just marketing jargon. Go visit the Bush.
I went to a tiny bush village in Alaska with a big chip on my shoulder against Ted Stevens. I lived there for three years. I saw why people keep voting for him. It's not usually greed. Sometimes it's self-preservation.
Re:The same man... (Score:3, Insightful)
But a bridge that goes to an as yet undeveloped area really isn't going to benefit anyone in a different state and ought to be the provenance of state and or city tax dollars, not federal.
Re:The same man... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course this is what the developer would like to have you believe. The reality is not that simple.
Certainly the cost of infrastructure increases the developer's expenses. But your assertion, which is that the buyer ultimately pays for this, relies on the fallacious assumption that the developer has the unilateral ability to increase prices in order to pay for the expense. This is not true in any marketplace with a modicum of competition. Sellers do not have the ability to set prices however they please.
Therefore, there is another alternative: in order to pay for the increased cost, the developer sees a reduction in profits.
The reality of course is that increased cost to business will result in both a cut to profits and an increase in prices, though it is difficult to say exactly how the increase will be apportioned to the two.
It does get tiresome to see the "increased cost to business just gets passed on to consumers" argument. This bogus argument is seen everywhere, e.g. "all costs of shoplifting get passed on to consumers" or "all taxes to business get passed on to consumers". It's a nice argument to make if you are a business, because it goads people into forgetting that corporate profits even exist.
Re:The same man... (Score:4, Insightful)
You see, it's not a matter of who was President and who was in Congress, it's a matter of who sponsred and pushed for tax reductions and fiscal restraint.
In the 80's, Ronald Reagan and the GOP Minority pushed for overall tax reductions and reductions in spending. Reagan was able to successfully use the Presidential Bully Pulpit to push through some tax reform and reduction, leading to an economic boom in the mid to late eighties. Unfortunately, the spending reductions he wanted were largely not implemented, as Congress controls the purse strings in the Federal Government. Because spending was still so high in the early nineties when Bush Sr. (a fiscally liberal republican) came to office, the economy took a downturn when we fought the first Iraq war and he broke a campaign promise by raising taxes.
After Bush was voted out in the early nineties and Clinton was voted in during the post Iraq-war years, the economy slowly recovered. However, Clinton and the Democrat controlled congress enacted the single largest tax increase in American history shortly after the beginning of his term, further slowing economic improvement. This (along with Clinton's failed intervention in Somalia) caused a major turnover in the makeup of Congress in the 1994 elections, resulting in a Republican Congress and a Democrat President. The GOP in Congress immediately set about reversing and eliminating all the tax and spending increases set in place by Bush Sr., Clinton and the Dems. Clinton was beginning to be embroiled in scandal already at this point, and so was too politically weak to oppose the GOP. The tax reductions passed, and within 2 years the economy was booming. At about the same time the Dot Com bubble was happening, and this only served to accelerate the economy even more.
Oddly, despite his public opposition to the tax and spending reductions, Clinton still got the credit for a booming economy he had basically nothing to do with. By the time the economy was really rolling along, Clinton was so embroiled in scandal that he had taken to bombing "terrorists" (read, aspirin factories) in Africa to try and take some of the public scrutiny off himself. He was basically signing anything that came across his desk, as he was hardly involved at all in the political process.
The slump at the end of the nineties and into the early 2000's was caused by the Dot-Com bubble bursting, and the recovery since then has been largely the result of GWB's and the GOP's economic policies. However, there are many who think that both GWB and the GOP have largely abandoned their conservative economic roots in favor of liberal style big-government spending. This is what cost the GOP the 2006 elections, and has seriously slowed our economic recovery since then. While overall we are doing well, we could have been much further ahead had GWB and the GOP acted more Reagan-esqe, and less Clinton-esqe in their fiscal policy.
So credit belongs to those who push for economic reform. Reagan rightly deserves the credit for the 80's, Bush Sr., Clinton and the Dems deserve the credit for the slump in the early nineties, and the GOP deserves the credit for the boom in the mid to late nineties.
Re:The same man... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The same man... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes it is a job for government... But not the Federal Government.
Do you not understand between the roles and responsibilities of the State and Federal government? This is clearly something that falls under the jurisdiction of the state of Alaska unless of course this is an interstate project that is needed for interstate commerce.
In my state, we have crappy roads because our state has a crappy budget. Recently we've started a casino initiative that will pay for the roads.
If Alaska needs the same help, they should fund their own initiatives rather than burden the other states who actually could use the money for millions of more people who don't happen to live in Alaska.
Re:News for Nerds? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:When will /. turn on Dianne Feinstein? (Score:3, Insightful)
He actually believes that his email is stuck somewhere waiting for days because of people downloading movies, and is basing legislation on that belief.
I don't have the mechanical skills to rebuild my car, but neither do I propose a laws to dictate how the experts do it.