The Supreme Court had severely limited the honest services doctrine in #Skilling v. United States, by deciding that the “intangible” right to honest services required a very
👉tangible exchange of money or property from a person to an official for some precise action as part of a bribery or kickback scheme.
And in United States v. #Sun-#Diamond#Growers,
a case with facts eerily reminiscent of those uncovered in recent Supreme Court ethics scandals,
the justices significantly limited the reach of another public corruption law,
the illegal gratuities statute, 18 USC § 201(c), in similar fashion.
In Sun-Diamond Growers, the Court overturned a conviction against a trade association for giving then-Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy $5,900 in illegal gratuities–including items such as tickets to the 1993 U.S. Open Tennis Tournament and thousands of dollars of luggage and meals.
The unanimous Court interpreted that statute to apply only to situations where officials accept or are given gifts “for or because of some particular official act.”
♦️Until Sun-Diamond, the government could establish an illegal gratuities violation by showing that a gift was based on the official’s position;
♦️but after Sun-Diamond, prosecutors were required to establish a “link between a thing of value conferred upon a federal official and a specific ‘official act’ for or because of which it was given.”
Based on this analysis, gifts or money,
-- even when they’re given by an advocacy organization to an official explicitly in charge of regulating that advocacy group,
-- are not problems in themselves; rather, they only become problematic when they are linked to a very specific set of actions. @panamared27401
Sun and moon combo: I finally got some OK skies overnight last night and few enough clouds to shoot through during the day today to get another moon/sun combo. These images were captured a little over 9 hours apart.
Today's H-alpha #Sun in good seeing conditions at 17:00 UTC.
There are not many days on which H-alpha views of the Sun include prominences that visualize the magnetic field lines above active regions particularly well, but today is definitely one of those days.
"The sun produced its biggest flare in nearly two decades Tuesday, just days after severe solar storms pummeled Earth and created dazzling northern lights in unaccustomed places."
AP reports: "The good news is that Earth should be out of the line of fire this time because the flare erupted on a part of the sun rotating away from Earth."
I'm afraid grandpa Sun Ultra 10 might have booted his last. He simply turned off and never turned back on over the period of however long my expire record in my DNS zones are (which is when I noticed).
It spent over 25 years computing quietly and never exhibiting any issues prior, it will be missed if I can't resurrect it.
Seeing the northern lights with my own eyes was an amazing experience this weekend! I wrote up a blog post about it and assembled a new video. Check it out!
3664
is headed 'round the bend
no knowing when
we'll see its like again
for a short time
it lit up the night
so wave to it goodbye
as it heads around the limb
of the Sun
Not a great image, because I was shooting around the clouds but I had to capture the source of our Aurora fun. That big chunk on the right side has been blasting us with solar mass to light up the sky!