Jackson Jr. charged with illegal use of campaign funds

Former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) on Friday was formally charged with illegally spending campaign funds.

Jackson was charged with spending about $750,000 of campaign funds on personal purchases, making false statements and wire and mail fraud. Jackson and prosecutors have reportedly agreed to a plea deal that includes less than five years in prison.

Jackson pleaded guilty to a felony count of misusing campaign funds. Under the agreement with prosecutors, a federal judge will decide Jackson's punishment, which ranges from probation to five years imprisonment, according to CBS News.

Jackson said in a statement that there was no excuse for his conduct.

"Over the course of my life I have come to realize that none of us are immune from our share of shortcomings and human frailties," Jackson said in a statement according to the Chicago Tribune. "Still I offer no excuses for my conduct and I fully accept my responsibility for the improper decisions and mistakes I have made. To that end I want to offer my sincerest apologies to my family, my friends and all of my supporters for my errors in judgment and while my journey is not yet complete, it is my hope that I am remembered for the things that I did right."

Previous reports said Jackson could face as much as much as 57 months in jail for making personal purchases with the campaign funds. Those purchases include an expensive Rolex watch, memorabilia previously owned by a Michael Jackson, Malcolm X and Bruce Lee, furnishings for his home and fur coats. The indictment against Jackson orders him to forfeit the memorabilia, which is valued at roughly $60,000. He must also give up the mik coats.

According to the indictment, Jackson and a co-conspirator spent about $582,772 of money on personal purchases through campaign-issued credit cards.

Jackson has reportedly been in talks with federal investigators over a plea agreement to reduce his jail time.

He is also expected to have to pay a fine as part of the agreement.

Jackson currently faces multiple charges, including giving false statements to federal officials and conspiracy.

Former Chicago Alderwoman Sandi Jackson (D-Ill.), Jackson's wife, is also expected to plead guilty to tax violations. She resigned from office in January citing "health matters."

The former congressman, prior to resigning from Congress, admitted that he was receiving treatment for severe bipolar disorder and cited his battle with depression as a reason for stepping down from Congress.

Read the indictment below.

-— Updated at 4:47 p.m.

Indictment charges against Jesse Jackson Jr. by

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Mayors Against Illegal Guns Calls Out NRA In Dramatic Super Bowl Ad

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a gun violence prevention group chaired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, will air an advertisement during the Super Bowl calling on Congress to pass universal background checks. The ad is part of the group’s “Demand A Plan” campaign, which focuses on convincing elected officials that stronger gun regulations are needed.

The spot features pictures and voices of children — a harsh reminder of the 20 first-graders killed in December in Newton, Connecticut. The kids single out the National Rifle Association for backtracking on its earlier support for background checks on all gun sales.

Watch it:

Current U.S. law allows people to buy guns through private sales without undergoing the otherwise-mandatory background check. That means that anyone who finds a firearm through Craigslist — or shops for one at a gun show — can walk away with a weapon undetected. Eighty percent of guns used in crimes seem to have been bought privately, and 40 percent of all gun sales are purchased without a check.

What’s more, universal background checks are widely supported. Just eight percent of the country agrees with the NRA’s position against such a measure; 92 percent support background checks for all. That’s likely to make the Super Bowl ad — which will air “on CBS, the network broadcasting the Super Bowl, in the Washington DC market in the third-quarter break coming out of halftime” — quite popular.

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Tech at Night: Illegal Amazon Taxes fail, DeMint modernizing cable, thorny copyright issues

Monday night, as promised, we still have some catch up work to do. So let’s start with those Amazon Taxes, those Internet sales taxes of dubious Constitutionality. Colorado’s got tossed in federal court and Illinois’s didn’t raise any money. Obeying the Constitution counts, folks. Pass a true interstate compact through the Congress first.

Also as promised, there’s the matter of the Next Generation Television Marketplace Act. This is the one where ACU has come out against Jim DeMint, and that caught my attention. I have to side with the bill DeMint is sponsoring. I think ACU simply misunderstood what’s at stake here and had good intentions, but the excessive complexity of the regulations defeated them here.

The bill does not let cable providers become free riders, retransmitting others’ streams for free. It just stops the law from trying to dictate the parameters of the negotiations on retransmissions. I see no harm in that, and potentially much good.

Here we go again. Apparently we’re supposed to be unhappy with the CISPA information sharing bill by Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger because it potentially could be used against copyright infringement. And SOPA is invoked against that. SOPA wasn’t defeated because everyone hates copyright. It was a power grab. Take your anti-copyright anarchy battles home, Reddit kiddies. You and your Anontard buddies.

More cybersecurity still: We cannot and must not have DHS start regulating the Internet. Government can’t even secure itself yet and so has no standing to dictate to others. Information sharing in the private sector, without government gatekeepers, is far more useful for protecting our country’s Internet resources. Further, with the irrationality and secrecy of TSA and its regulations, how can we trust them at all?

Going back to SOPA, Comcast was apparently for it, which doesn’t surprise me. Comcast is an ISP particular vulnerable to Bittorrent users flooding the network with high volume copyright infringement dragging down service for everyone.

Is a problem with tech patents, including software patents, that the system isn’t scaling well? Size, not just speed?

Apparently all the fuss over FCC reform, using white spaces as an excuse to oppose all FCC reform out of the Congress, was resolved with white space use marching on. This could be interesting. We’ll have to watch and see how it works, or whether we just get a tragedy of the commons.

An interesting development in the Do Not Track saga: Radicals and businesses are interpreting them differently, but frankly, the interpretation of the radicals is stupid. There already is a way to not be tracked at all, and not just exclude third parties: Disable cookies, dummies. The radical agenda apparently to be promoted by the FTC is out of touch with the actual technologies involved.

Apparently the FTC folks don’t understand that if you don’t want tracked by, say, Amazon’s recommendations, then you simply shouldn’t log into Amazon all the time.

LightSquared may be on the verge of bankruptcy, but Chuck Grassley is still fighting tenaciously for FCC transparency with respect to LightSquared, and is going to maintain his holds on the new FCC appointees. Go Chuck Go!

Here’s a potentially huge deal in the tech/copyright nexus that I hadn’t heard about at all Google is under concerted attack by a number of copyright holders in a move that potentially risks undermining the whole DMCA safe harbor system. Google has taken many steps to curb copyright infringement on YouTube, but they’re being dogpiled upon anyway by firms going after those deep pockets. If being a rich and popular website that gets taken advantage of by copyright infringers is enough to knock down the Safe Harbor, then it seems to me that the entire Safe Harbor system of the DMCA is at risk. That’s not good, as that was a careful balancing of interests in that bill. We cannot let the scales get tilted one way.

If the Youtube case goes too far, new legislation may be needed, and that’s going to be a big old mess. Especially when the MPAA and RIAA interests will inevitably be comingled with legitimate international concerns of Chinese and other foreign firms ignoring US copyrights

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