StrangeSox

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 12:32 PM) I don't have the time to look this up right now, but I think there are court precedents that spell out that 1st amendment religious freedoms do not supersede basic preservation of life. Parents have been jailed for failing to seek appropriate medical attention for their kids and hiding behind religious freedom. FWIW the court refused to rule on 1st amendment grounds. This was strictly a RFRA ruling. The court said in its opinion that this ruling couldn't be extended to racial discrimination RFRA claims (e.g. "my religion means I don't have to follow EEO or other labor laws" or undermining public accommodations laws), but they notably didn't mention anything other than race. More importantly, the RFRA isn't just about medical claims or requirements. A substantial number of people work without any form of employer-provided health insurance at all as it is. Either way, that's more of a public policy argument than a legal rights argument. They probably won't. We'll just be subsidizing their newly found religious objections now.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 12:19 PM) Well, for one, a blood transfusion is in most cases a necessary life-saving procedure. I'm not aware of any situations where birth control pills are a requirement to save a life. So? You're violating their religious beliefs. What about anti-vaccination people? Or Christian Scientists?

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 12:02 PM) Ugh, I hate this court. Yeah, I'm not sure why evangelical objections to some forms of contraceptive drugs that they were providing a few years earlier on the grounds that they're abortifacients (they're not) is more legitimate of a claim than Christian Scientists rejecting most modern medicine all together, or Jehovah's Witnesses rejecting blood transfusions. I don't see how they could allow Hobby Lobby's objection to stand but still require a for-profit company owned by JW's to provide insurance with blood transfusion coverage.

That is how it works in RTW states. The unions still have to represent everyone in contract negotiations and they still have to provide grievance service for non-members.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 11:52 AM) So, say a closely held family corp is against vaccines and refuse to cover them, could they do that? No, right? Gov't would need to pick up bill for that too. I understand when splitting down to individual policies they can argue there are less intrusive ways, but in my mind this is just regulating insurance by hitting a basic minimum coverage. They explicitly said in the ruling that they were ruling solely on a religious objection to contraceptives. It seems silly that they refused to provide any guidance on obviously related claims, but that's what they did.

QUOTE (Brian @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 11:06 AM) Imagine if Mac had to work an actual job for a living. nice job if you can get it

either way he said for months that he wasn't working this summer, this wasn't an unplanned rehab absence or anything.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 10:54 AM) Feder reported that McNeils contract ended June 15th. His last day on air was the 13th. So, technically he took 2 days of vacation, and isnt currently being paid. He might have taken a payout for accumulated vacation time. So while he's not currently under contract, he got paid for 8 weeks (or whatever) of vacation and is enjoying it before signing a new contract.

to be fair, we're talking about Chuck E. Cheese pizza, they were really doing you a favor.

Illinois has this home healthcare worker program wherein the primary caretakers for someone who is sick can get paid by the state (I think through Medicare?) for caring for someone. E.g. your mother is terminally ill and requires substantial in-home care which you're providing. These people are considered to be public employees, or "partial" public employees as this ruling differentiates. Because of their unique status, they cannot be required to join the public union. It doesn't apply to your case since you're a regular, full public employee. What this could be, though, is one step towards gutting previous SCOTUS rulings and essentially making the whole country Right-to-Work (a man to death) states wherein you can get all of the benefits of union representation (contract negotiations, termination hearings etc.) without having to pay into the union. It creates pretty obvious free rider problems and undermines the ability of unions to fund themselves.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 09:33 AM) Makes sense to me. If the government thinks that anything, in this case low or no cost birth control, is important, then the onus is really on the government to provide it and not to force private companies to subsidize it. That's not what the ruling says. It's specifically that a closely-held corporation has a RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) exemption if they're religiously opposed to contraceptions (though Hobby Lobby was providing them until a few years ago). In order to go around the RFRA objection, the government has to show that there's a legitimate public policy goal (not in dispute in this case) and that this is the least-intrusive means of doing it. This only works in the case of some sort of religious objection. The government still can and does force private companies to subsidize things. This doesn't strike down the employer mandate or anything like that. Though if we really want to go down the path that Medicare-for-all would be preferable to the ACA/mandate/employer-provided insurance, I'm all for that.

An important point about this ruling is that it applies only to closely-held corporations. Hobby Lobby may be a huge nationwide chain, but it's still owned by one family. A publicly traded company like Walmart couldn't make the same arguments.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 09:25 AM) Did Sotomoyor remove herself? She joined on to Ginsburg's dissent. Breyer and Kagan both joined on to her dissent in part, as well.

Hobby Lobby ruling in just now, closely-held corporations can claim RFRA exemptions to regulatory requirements like providing contraception to all employees . Alito wrote the opinion, and the Court says that the government has failed to show that the mandate is the least restrictive means of advancing its interest in guaranteeing cost-free access to birth control (SCOTUSblog). This ruling is strictly about the contraception requirement and does not necessarily apply to other requirements, such as blood transfusion or vaccination requirements. Kennedy, in a concurring opinion, says the government could just pay for it. edit: comment from SCOTUSblog: Breyer and Kagan filed a dissent and Ginsburg filed a separate dissent.

I think this abreu guy has twtw and a good aura

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 05:49 PM) With the background I have in trading compliance, this honestly made me laugh. A private firm would be look at millions of dollars in fines for lapse record retention with an excuse like this. You keep saying "excuse" but I'm not sure why. An explanation is not an excuse. But apparently the only thing you'll consider is deliberate deduction of evidence that obviously have confirmed everything issa has been saying. Pointing out that there's a much more plausible and actually documented explanation of what happened than "conspiracy!" isn't saying that what happened is okay or acceptable.

QUOTE (Jake @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 05:00 PM) Can someone fill me in here - they have almost, but not all, of the emails? Or none? Why can't they get the emails from the recipients? How do they know which ones are missing? Can the NSA help? They have tens of thousands, but they don't actually know how many hve been lost. It's over a time period from 2009 to 2011. Her drive failed in July 2011. They have attempted to recover them by getting them off of other senders or recipients computers, but six (or seven?) of those also experience drive failures at some point, though I can't seem to find good information on when. They know that a big chunk was missing from that time period, but they don't know of any specific emails that are missing. One of the Republicans has asked for the NSA to get involved.

Hopefully what comes of this is that these and other federal agencies examine their retention/backup policies and adjust according so that they're in compliance with whatever the legal requirements are.

There's nothing implausible about the explanation given by the IRS. It matches contemporaneous documentation of drive failures, recovery attempts and retention policies. When a faux-scandal involving every person that Lerner emailed or received email from over the period of several years has a few of those drives crash within the window, going with the simplest, documented explanation (drive failure, not cover up) is your best bet. The IRS should turn over any contemporaneous documentation it has of the other drive crashes.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 04:39 PM) So just coincidence that the EPA is now using the same excuse to not turn over emails? http://www.nationaljournal.com/energy/issa...ersary-20140625 Who would have ever guessed that the biggest cause of hard drive failure would be subpoenas. Yes, it's just a coincidence. Are you guys really unaware that hard drives do, in fact, crash? And that when your sample size is hundreds or, if we're dragging every federal agency into it, hundreds of thousands over the period of multiple years, you will see many drive failures?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 04:37 PM) My assumption is these people worked in the same office or the same department at the IRS. It's not as if you have a secretary in New York and an investigator in Florida and 5 other random people at the IRS whose hard drives crashed. If that were the case I would agree with you that it's unlikely there was some shenanigans going on. But again, from my understanding these are all people who are implicated in the probe. So it's not 7 random hard drives out of 90,000. It's seven out of a relatively small sub-set of IRS employees. Show your math. If anything, them all working out of the same office only increases the odds that they all had similar machines of similar vintage which would mean sequential failures would be more likely, not less. I can't seem to find good details on who's computers crashed and when, but this NYT article offers some insight. It was a secretary of the deputy commissioner (Lerner's boss), which I believe is a Washington, DC based position. The other was the person who became acting IRS commissioner, which is definitely a DC-based positioned. I'm not sure where Lerner worked out of, but the office that handles the Tax Exempt stuff is out of Cincinnati. The IRS is looking for the computers of anyone that Lerner emailed or who emailed Lerner during a time span of several years because those emails might still reside on those local machines. That will be, at a minimum, hundreds of employees' computers to check. The odds that six or seven drives out of hundreds will fail within the period of a year or more isn't that bad.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 04:30 PM) Pssh, it absolutely is. It's not seven people out of the 90,000, it's seven people who happen to be at or near the center of this probe (so tens or maybe hundreds max). Show your math. Also consider that if the people were using computers/drives of the same age and model, it's even more likely that they'd begin failing around the same time.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 04:12 PM) IIRC the head of the Archives said they did not follow the law. also I thought I heard they, the IRS employees, were suppose to print out, hard copies of certain work related emails...... Yes, that was their policy, but it was poorly defined and left up to individual discretion. Lerner may not have been following it properly. Hard drive failure rates are anywhere from 3-25%. It depends on the brand, model, the manufacturing run, the conditions they're used in (e.g. constantly overheated), and where they're at in their lifecycle (high failure rates are right out of the box and after about 5 years with really low failure rates in between). It's not all that unlikely that, in an agency with 90,000 employees, seven of those employees would have hard drives that would fail within the span of several months to several years. I haven't seen an actual timeline of the drive failures other than an article that mentioned that at least two of them happened several months apart, again all going back about three years.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 04:11 PM) The federal government should not have a lesser data retention policy because of "IT concerns". That is a BS excuse. It is a public entity. Especially because, again, they REQUIRE THESE THINGS OF PRIVATE COMPANIES. If it were that big of a concern, why do they think it is OK to require MUCH more data retention than they do of themselves, at an exponentially higher cost? You're not actually explaining why the retention policies need to match here. You're just saying that they should. Maybe the retention policies of public agencies should be even longer, given FOIA. But you're not making that case. I presume that there are reasons that the retention length regulations are what they are and that they didn't pick completely arbitrary numbers. You'd need to show what those reasons are and how they're equally applicable to the IRS (or every government agency? I'm not clear on what you're looking for here).

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 26, 2014 -> 04:05 PM) There is zero chance that the federal government would accept such an answer from Goldman Sachs. Why is it is a good enough answer from the IRS? It's not whether it's "good enough." I have to say it again, apparently: an explanation of what happened is not justification for any particular retention policy. If something similar happened at Goldman Sachs, they may be fined for not being in compliance with regulatory requirements, but if their non-complying archiving policies and a local hard drive crash were all well-documented, there'd be no reason to suspect let alone assume that foul play was "very likely". The IRS's policy, clearly, was not good enough. But bad IT policy doesn't indicate criminal activity or obstruction of justice. This is why there's no reason to take conservative whining about this seriously. There's no "fact" that something was "very likely" done. It's either fact or not. In this case, it's an evidence-free assertion that doesn't match up well with contemporaneous documentation of their email archive retention policy (6 month rolling) and Lerner's computer crash in mid-2011 and attempted recovery. Unless you think they've fabricated those emails and the existence of their IT program, there's nothing to "get past" here. Their policy was what it was, good or bad, and hard drives do in fact fail catastrophically. It might even look more suspicious if the drive happened to crash shortly after the House requested the documents, but it crashed three years ago.