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Ted Stevens

2008-08-16T15:37:22Z

SoCash: /* U.S. Senate */

[[Image:Stevens.jpg|right|thumb|Ted Stevens]]

'''Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens''' (born November 18, 1923) is the senior [[United States Senate|United States Senator]] from [[Alaska]]. He is a [[liberal]] [[Republican Party|Republican]] having a pro-[[abortion]] voting record. Among [[conservatives]] he is known as a "[[RINO]]" who has long favored more government spending, particularly for his own state.<ref>Stevens' lifetime ACU rating is only 64.45, far lower than [[John McCain]]'s rating of 82.16. Most [[conservatives]] rank over 90 on this rating.</ref>

As the longest serving [[Republican]] in the Senate, Stevens served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate from January 3, 2003, to January 3, 2007. Stevens chaired the Senate [[Appropriations Committee]] from 1997 to 2005, except for the 18 months when [[Democrat]]s controlled the chamber. The chairmanship gave Stevens considerable influence over fellow Senators, who relied on him for home-state project funds.

Stevens has a six-decade career of public service, beginning with his service in [[World War II]]. In the 1950s, he held senior positions in the Interior and Justice departments during the [[Eisenhower]] administration. He has served continuously in the Senate since 1968.

On July 29, 2008, Stevens was indicted on 7 felony counts related to making false statements in relation to a Justice Department investigation of business dealings in Alaska. According to Republican Senate caucus rules, Stevens will have to step down from his post as ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.

==Early years==

Ted Stevens was born in [[Indianapolis]], [[Indiana]], in 1923. During World War II, he was an Army Air Forces C-47 pilot in the China-Burma-India theater with the "Flying Tigers" of the Fourteenth Air Force from 1943 to 1946, holding the rank of First Lieutenant. There he received two Distinguished [[Flying Cross]]es and two [[Air Medal]]s, as well as the [[Yuan Hai]] medal awarded by the Republic of [[China]].

After the war, Stevens attended UCLA, where he was a member of [[Delta Kappa Epsilon]], and [[Harvard Law School]]. In the early 1950s he moved to Alaska, then a territory.

In Fairbanks, Stevens practiced law, and he was appointed U.S. Attorney for Fairbanks in 1953.

In 1956, Stevens was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he worked as legislative counsel and assistant to Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton. He also pushed for the statehood of Alaska and Hawaii, which occurred in 1959. In 1960, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower promoted Stevens to solicitor of the Department of the Interior.

After returning to Alaska, Stevens practiced law in Anchorage. He was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives in 1964, and became House majority leader in his second term.

==U.S. Senate==

In December 1968, Governor Walter Joseph Hickel appointed Stevens to the U.S. Senate after the death of Democrat Bob Bartlett. In 1970, Stevens was elected to finish the term in a special election, and has been reelected six times since, in 1972, 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996 and 2002. His current term will expire in 2009.

Stevens served as the Assistant Republican Whip from 1977 to 1985. In 1994, Stevens was appointed Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee. Stevens became the Senate's president pro tempore when Republicans regained control of the chamber as a result of the 2002 mid-term elections, during which the previous most senior republican senator and former president pro tempore Strom Thurmond retired. He is a former Chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. In the past, Stevens also has served as Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, the Arms Control Observer Group, and the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress.

His campaign political action committee is called the "Northern Lights PAC."

Ted Stevens was criticized when he attempted to [[earmark]] the "Bridge to Nowhere," a bridge in Alaska which would have connected the town of [[Ketchikan]] (population 8,900) with its airport on the island of Gravina (population 50) at a cost to federal taxpayers of $320 million, by way of three separate earmarks in a highway bill. A ferry service runs to the island, but some in the town complained about its wait (15 to 30 minutes) and fee ($6 per car). The Heritage Foundation maintained that "the Gravina Island bridge project is an embarrassment to the people of Alaska and the U.S. Congress...fiscally responsible Members of Congress should be eager to zero out its funding."<ref>http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/wm889.cfm</ref>

Ol' Teddy became a laughingstock around the world after making a speech which claimed that the [[Internet|Internets]] were not "something you dump something on -- [they're not] a big truck. [They're, they're] a series of tubes!" This produced epic [[Conservatives|lulz]] for the rest of the world.

In July of 2008, Stevens was indicted on charges of taking gifts from the oil servicing company VECO and its CEO Bill Allen who benefited from his legislation. Stevens' son Ben, the leader of the state senate, and other state politicians have also been implicated in corruption related to VECO.<ref>[http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/07/31/vo.stevens.court.depart.cnn?iref=videosearch Stevens pleads not guilty]</ref>

== External links ==
*[http://stevens.senate.gov/ United States Senator Ted Stevens] '''official Senate site'''
*[http://www.ontheissues.org/Senate/Ted_Stevens.htm On the Issues - Ted Stevens] issue positions and quotes

{{DEFAULTSORT: Stevens, Ted}}
[[Category:United States Senators]]
[[Category:Republican Party]]
[[Category: 110th United States Congress]]

Internet

2008-08-16T15:34:37Z

SoCash:

The '''Internet''' is a global hate machine which is home to [[Anonymous|hackers on steroids]]. AIDS is transmitted between computers and networks in small packages [[Ted Stevens|using a series of tubes]]; they are reassembled at their destination. It originated in the work of DARPA, a research division of the [[United States Army]].

==Origin==
The conceptual foundation for the internet's creation was significantly developed by three individuals and a research conference, each of which changed the way we thought about communication, business and the exchange of technology:

*Vannevar Bush wrote the first description of the potential uses for information technology with his description of the "memex" automated library system.
*Norbert Wiener invented the field of Cybernetics, encouraging future researchers to focus on the use of technology to extend human capabilities.
*The 1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence conference defined the concept that technology was improving at an exponential rate, and provided the first serious consideration of the consequences, the benefits and advantages or such a network.
*Marshall McLuhan made the idea of a global village interconnected by an electronic nervous system part of our popular culture. <ref>http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii.htm </ref>
*Ethan K. Heinz (cousin of Teresa Heinz), originally developed Internet as ARPANET in the US as a means for various institutes to communicate with each other even in an event such as war. <ref>[http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com]</ref> The Internet has grown into a worldwide computer network where anyone can have a chat with anyone else almost anywhere in the world, and is a vast source of free information.

==Description==
The Internet is sometimes also known as "[[cyberspace]]." Sometimes it is inaccurately referred to as the Web or the [[World Wide Web]], because the Web is only one of numerous protocols that operate on the Internet.

The common protocol used to access websites (including this one) is the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The creator of this is [[Sir Tim Berners-Lee]], who recently in an online magazine article claimed that given the opportunity, he wouldn't use the HTTP format for websites. Berners-Lee is currently the director of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

[[Ted Stevens]] famously referred to the internet as "a series of tubes" during a panel on [[network neutrality]]. While the statement was technically inaccurate, it is a reasonable depiction of the internet as an interconnected system to a lay person. The internet is formed from two basic elements, routers and connections. A router is basically a small computer that acts like a switching station, similar to the pumping stations of public water utilities. The connections are the pipes themselves, acting as a means to move packets from one router to another, and eventually from server to client.

==Controversy==
Although the Internet has been shown to contain valuable information, it also contains pornographic or otherwise vulgar material. Therefore, some conservatives would like to see tighter controls on the Internet which would limit what can be hosted and what can be downloaded.

In 1999, [[Democratic]] presidential candidate [[Al Gore]] misspoke when intending to take partial credit for the development of the internet when he referenced his High Performance [[Computing]] and Communication Act of 1991, commonly known as the "Gore Bill":<ref>http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/</ref>

:CNN's WOLF BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now.

:Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

:AL GORE: Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.

:But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

In response to [[Al Gore|Al Gore's]] comments, [[Robert Kahn]] and [[Vinton Cerf]], the two men responsible for the creation of the [[TCP/IP]] protocol which the internet uses for most of its communication and two men often credited as the creators of the internet along with [[Sir Tim Berners-Lee]], said the following:
<blockquote>
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively “invented” the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore’s contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening.<ref>http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200009/msg00052.html</ref>
</blockquote>

Their letter continued to go on to enumerate Al Gore's involvement in the early periods of the internet.

==See Also==
*[[Digital Philosophy]]

== References ==
<references/>

[[Category:Information technology]]
[[Category:Internet]]