Ted Stevens, the most accomplished politician in Alaskan history and the longest-serving Republican senator ever, has been indicted by a grand jury on 7 charges relating to money he received from a company that made major renovations to his private home. He is the first sitting senator to face indictment charges since 1993.

The fact that Stevens is corrupt should not be news to anyone who pays attention, or even the lazy few of you who don’t pay attention but stumble into this site every once in a blue moon. What is really surprising is that he thought he could get away with receiving a quarter of a million dollars from an oil services contractor that he supported time and again with favorable legislation without reporting any of those monetary gains.

Even if Stevens avoids prison time, he will likely lose his re-election bid this November. He will face Mark Begich, the current mayor of Anchorage. The senate seat is seen as one of the key steals that the Democrats are eyeing as a real possibility this election year.

Ted Stevens included $209,900,000 for projects in Alaska in last year’s defense spending bill. I think it’s time we exposed all of this pork. Today we will focus on a short railway extension between two towns 82 miles apart that already have a highway directly connecting them.

The Northern Line Extension is no different than Stevens’ infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”, the project that would have had the federal government spending hundreds of millions of dollars for a bridge to an island that was largely unpopulated. The name of that bridge: Ted Stevens Bridge. I think it’s great that he wants his legacy to be useless pork projects.

Ted Stevens gets upset when anyone in Congress tries to block his many earmarks. He’s been known to verbally attack people on the floor of the Senate, just because they don’t think we should be spending 10 times more federal dollars per Alaskan than we do on the average American from other states.

An old Eskimo tradition had them putting their old and enfeebled out in the cold, allowing them to die. This was done for the benefit of the rest of the tribe, who could not spare resources to care for an individual who could not provide for himself. I think it’s high time we put Ted Stevens out in the cold, for the benefit of ourselves.

Technorati Tags: ted, stevens, pork, evil

Ted Stevens, whose Deleting Online Predators Act what shot down in the Senate last year, is back with another bill that goes even further. Fearing that children might choke on the tubes, Stevens introduced the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, which would ban sites like MySpace and Facebook in schools.

It’s not just popular socializing sites that are the target of this bill, but also interactive websites like Digg and del.icio.us. Video sharing sites would have to develop a way to prevent material that could be harmful to a child from making its way on to their site. I guess Mr. Stevens would decide what content is objectionable. He’d probably ban things like that video of himself telling the Senate that the internet is not a dump truck, it’s full of tubes. In addition, he’s ban the 3,956 other videos on various video sharing sites that make him look like a jackass.

If you’re viewing this site right now, it means Ted Stevens is losing, because he’d surely shut this rant down.

Technorati Tags: ted, stevens, myspace, internet, tubes

The Ted Stevens-sponsored bill that threatened to end net neutrality has likely died a very quiet death as the 109th Congress ended its session. The next Congress, with a Democrat majority, will likely be more favorable to net neutrality.

For those who haven’t kept up with this issue, net neutrality is basically the regulation of telecoms so that they sell internet bandwidth at market prices for everyone. Ted Stevens’ bill would have allowed telecoms to charge prices much higher than market equilibrium to bandwidth users it wishes to single out.

There is very little choice as far as bandwidth suppliers go. Let’s say Wikipedia.org buys bandwidth from Comcast. Chances are there are no other companies it can buy bandwidth from, unless they change the location of their servers. With Ted Stevens bill, Comcast could single out Wikipedia and say “you’ve got to pay 50% more than the price we’re charging everyone else.” For big sites that have no other source of revenue offline, it would basically be extortion. They can either pay what Comcast charges them, or they can shut down their site.

The telecoms make massive amounts of revenue selling bandwidth at market prices. They also have regional monopolies, which means they could make even more money if they charged extra to companies they know have the money to pay for it. They’ve used a lot of their excess cash to pay lobbyists to influence strong politicians with a weakness for ill-gotten money.

Enter Ted Stevens.

Ted Stevens has never said “no” to anyone with enough cash. If lobbyists could find a way to funnel a few million bucks into his coffers, he’d back a bill to enslave every hybrid car driver in the country. His rationality for this particular bill was dumbfounding. He claimed net neutrality slows down the internet, and he couldn’t get an email from a staff member because the intertubes were clogged.

The fact is, although big internet companies do use a lot of bandwidth, they create higher demand and thus increase the market rate naturally. This creates an incentive for the telecoms to lay down more cables and increase bandwidth capacity. Do you see how that works? When the government regulates the industry and makes the monopolies play the economics game in a natural way, everyone wins, including the telecoms! Sure, they could probably make a few more bucks if they were allowed to behave like a monopoly a fix prices higher than the natural rate for select buyers, but they’d also destroy a large part of the internet. In the long run, they’d probably lose revenue because they killed off some of their biggest customers.

Of course, the alternative scenario would have the bigger internet companies banding together to create their own “information superhighway,” as they used to say in 1994. Google is worth over $100 billion, which means they’d have a lot of money to spend to build a new internet backbone. The telecoms would likely be hurt very badly by this kind of thing, so they’d probably spend a great deal of money to convince Ted Stevens to bail them out.

And he’d do it, for the reasons stated above.

Technorati Tags: ted, stevens, congress, net, neutrality

Some Comcast users on the East Coast are learning what the world is like without Net Neutrality, as attempts to connect to Google and Gmail have failed throughout the day. Ted Stevens (Republican Senator/idiot from Alaska, for those of you not paying attention) fought against Net Neutrality on the Senate floor, even attempting to explain how the internet works to Senators who are 40 years his junior. His heart nearly exploded during the tirade, which included the classic line, “it’s not a truck, it’s a series of tubes.”

Net Neutrality prevented internet providers from charging premiums for bandwidth used by high-traffic websites. Imagine a fueling station charging truck drivers an extra $.50 per gallon because they use a lot of fuel. There is no reason why the internet providers need to charge this extra amount. If they excessive bandwidth (which all websites are buying at the market rate) is costing them lots of money, raise the price! Essentially, Ted Stevens’ anti-Net Neutrality bill allows cable companies to target any website, block them from their service, and then extort money from the website before unblocking them.

Ted Stevens, who like a starfish can split into many pieces and fit into the pockets of dozens of corporate executives, has no problem with the legal extortion of some punk website as long as it benefits his buddies at the cable company.

It’s unclear at this time if the problems with Comcast and Google (and also the Firefox browser, from what I’ve heard) are a deliberate attempt by Comcast to make some money off the Internet giant or if it’s just a problem with their servers. Either way, it’s a look at what the future of the Internet may be like, thanks in part to Ted Stevens.

Technorati Tags: Ted Stevens, net neutrality, google, comcast, republicans

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska has become quite a popular guy in the past couple of years. First, he had a tantrum when fellow senators tried to block his $500 million pork project as part of a federal transporation bill. The money would have built a bridge named after Stevens. The bridge connected mainland Alaska to an island populated by a few dozen people.

Most recently, Ted Stevens attempted to explain how the internet works to the rest of the Senate. The speech was part of his effort to allow telecom companies to create special fees for websites that want their service to remain the same. Anyone who didn’t pay would be put on a lower “tier” of the internet, meaning the telecoms would use their machines to intentionally make those sites run slower.

Senator Stevens, showing his devine wisdom, explained that the internet is not a dump truck, it’s a bunch of tubes. He also claimed that the internet tubes were getting so clogged that an email he sent took over a day to be delivered. He claimed that the email was delayed by one of these clogs.

This blog will focus on many more topics than just the Ted Stevens Bridge or Net Neutrality. The fact is, Ted Stevens does something just about every day that will outrage most Americans. He’ll also get re-elected as many times as he wants, because Alaskans have very few taxes and receive huge benefits from the oil companies, even if they don’t work for them. Basically, the oil companies pay off Alaskans so they don’t make a fuss about the environmental damage… and to keep their friend Ted Stevens in power.

Coming Soon… The Ted Stevens video collection