The Republican Thread

[Y2HH]

Jonah Hill also went through with what seemed like a genuine act of contrition

 

This was kind of Oldman's point...of which I happen to agree. Jonah Hill got caught, and that's that. If he [Hill] hadn't said things like that in the past, in private, or elsewhere, he WOULD NOT have suddenly decided to use the word "f**" in a derogatory way at that point, either. But that doesn't necessarily make him a bad person...perhaps ignorant in some ways, but not necessarily a bad person.

 

People make mistakes. Some people make 2 or 3, or even 4 mistakes. A good friend of mine was outcast due to relapsed and repeated drug abuse in his past, and had it not been for me, he would have been left with nobody, probably leading him to a unceremonious end...but because I insisted he get a second, third and even a fourth chance, he's still here today, clean, sober and back with the group as if nothing had ever gone wrong. He's a completely different person now than he was under the influence. The things he said and did during that time WAS NOT him, and I knew that because I grew up with him.

 

The only thing any of us know about Baldwin and Gibson is what the media has told us and decided to allow us to know ... PERHAPS Oldman knows them both a bit better than anyone here, and better than the media decides to portray them. f*** anything good either of them EVER did because of a few public f***ups...but I know, Jonah Hill is "genuinely sorry"...for getting caught speaking as he usually does when the media isn't around...or like I said, there's no way he would have suddenly decided to start talking like that.

Edited June 25, 2014 by Y2HH

[StrangeSox]

So is there a threshold then of when you use that kind of language that you become the racist/bigoted f***? I'm a little confused. Jonah Hill - 1, not enough. Gibson/Baldwin, 2-3+, definitely racist/bigoted f***s. So everyone gets one free pass?

 

And yeah, Bill Mahr is criticized, I guess. But he's still got his soap box. Mel was run out of town (rightly or wrongly, i'm not defending him).

 

Something I just read reminded me that Bill Maher did, in fact, lose his soap box for a while and went from network television to cable pay channels. And how about the Dixie Chicks being kicked off of most of the radio and out of a lot of record stores for daring to criticize Bush?

[Jenksismyhero]

Something I just read reminded me that Bill Maher did, in fact, lose his soap box for a while and went from network television to cable pay channels. And how about the Dixie Chicks being kicked off of most of the radio and out of a lot of record stores for daring to criticize Bush?

 

He lost his ABC show because he called terrorists "warriors" shortly after 9/11 and specifically said the 9/11 hijackers weren't cowards by flying a plane into the WTC, whereas our troops WERE cowardly for lobbing missiles from hundreds of miles away. He didn't get fired for calling some woman a c*** or some homosexual a f**. Dixie Chicks too were more political, not social, in context.

Edited June 25, 2014 by Jenksismybitch

[Texsox]

You can't honestly be comparing 70's taping technology to what we are talking about here. These are two massively different things, and one of them has all kinds of checks and balance to NOT be erased as public record.

 

If you mean erasing computer files is easier, I agree. When his secretary demonstrated how she would have had to sit for 18 minutes it was laughable. But, things happen.

[southsider2k5]

If you mean erasing computer files is easier, I agree. When his secretary demonstrated how she would have had to sit for 18 minutes it was laughable. But, things happen.

 

maybe for you... but for a federal agency, it isn't nearly the same.

[StrangeSox]

They had a 6 month retention period. It's pretty easy to delete things after 6 months when that's what your archive policy explicitly calls for. Once it was deleted from the archive tapes, the only place the emails might still reside would be on an individual computer, and there's no retention/backup requirements there. I have lost about 3 months worth of work emails the exact same way. They were old enough that they were outside of the server retention period, and then my hard drive crashed, losing any of the local copies I might have had.

 

Whether or not the 6 month retention policy was good policy is a separate question, but it isn't a question of malice or cover up. Lehrner's hard drive crashed before there were any congressional inquiries. The closest thing is a letter that was sent 10 days prior to the crash, but was not very specific. There's contemporaneous documentation of her reporting the crash and the IRS's attempts at recovery of the lost data on the drive back in 2011.

[southsider2k5]

They had a 6 month retention period. It's pretty easy to delete things after 6 months when that's what your archive policy explicitly calls for. Once it was deleted from the archive tapes, the only place the emails might still reside would be on an individual computer, and there's no retention/backup requirements there. I have lost about 3 months worth of work emails the exact same way. They were old enough that they were outside of the server retention period, and then my hard drive crashed, losing any of the local copies I might have had.

 

Whether or not the 6 month retention policy was good policy is a separate question, but it isn't a question of malice or cover up. Lehrner's hard drive crashed before there were any congressional inquiries. The closest thing is a letter that was sent 10 days prior to the crash, but was not very specific. There's contemporaneous documentation of her reporting the crash and the IRS's attempts at recovery of the lost data on the drive back in 2011.

 

The federal government has a six month retention policy? Are you kidding me? They require the financial industry to save almost all records for 3-7 years. The IRS itself requires 7 years of tax retention. What a f***ing joke.

 

[Jake]

There's a difference between making some mistakes, saying an off-color joke, maybe not realizing the ramifications of your words and some of the stuff these people have done. As we have said before, there's a difference between saying "f**" in anger after a history of public and private actions that suggest you don't often use such a word and telling your wife that you hope she's "raped by a pack of n*****s." There's also a difference between immediately accepting all responsibility and admitting fault and...

 

Well let's just look at Mel Gibson's body of work:

-1992: what are your thoughts on gay people? He does say "I like them" but then insists that "they take it up the ass" and then goes so far as to stand up, point to his ass, and say "this is for s***ting only." He fought hard against the blowback for this one. In 1999, he finally said he regretted it, saying, "I was tickling a bit of vodka during that interview, and the quote came back to bite me on the ass."

 

-2006: Hey police officer pulling me over for a DUI, are you a f***ing Jew? Because "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” He said through his publicist that he said bad things that he doesn't believe to be true and he's going to rehab.

 

-2010: Tells his partner, among a whole hell of a lot of other stuff, that he hopes she's "raped by a pack of n*****s." Mel responds by accusing her of extortion.

-2010: Deserves its own line. Mel Gibson, at the least, punched his partner in the face twice and knocked her teeth out.

 

-2010: Former latino employees complain of being called "wetbacks," a recording is produced to prove the assertion.

 

I'll just leave it to the Rabbi who reacted to Gibson's first crazy anti-Jewish comments: “If it’s true what’s reported, frequently hatred, bigotry and prejudice, which is controlled, explodes at moments of stress and crisis. Liquor loosens the tongue of what’s in the mind and in the heart, and in his mind and in his heart is his conspiracy theory about Jews and hatred of Jews.”

 

 

[StrangeSox]

The federal government has a six month retention policy? Are you kidding me? They require the financial industry to save almost all records for 3-7 years. The IRS itself requires 7 years of tax retention. What a f***ing joke.

 

The IRS had a six-month retention policy on emails. It changed that somewhat recently. I don't know if the old retention policy violated any sort of legal requirements such as FOIA. I've seen conservatives in the comments section on sites like Volokh saying it did, but no actual citation. I don't know what other federal agency retention policies are or were.

 

Saving every email of all 90,000 employees is not the same thing as saving tax records.

[Jenksismyhero]

The IRS had a six-month retention policy on emails. It changed that somewhat recently. I don't know if the old retention policy violated any sort of legal requirements such as FOIA. I've seen conservatives in the comments section on sites like Volokh saying it did, but no actual citation. I don't know what other federal agency retention policies are or were.

 

Saving every email of all 90,000 employees is not the same thing as saving tax records.

 

Wasn't that 6 month policy only limited to non-work emails? I thought I read that work emails and non-work emails, or important work emails v. non-important work emails, were supposed to be kept longer and it was up to the discretion of the employee.

[southsider2k5]

The IRS had a six-month retention policy on emails. It changed that somewhat recently. I don't know if the old retention policy violated any sort of legal requirements such as FOIA. I've seen conservatives in the comments section on sites like Volokh saying it did, but no actual citation. I don't know what other federal agency retention policies are or were.

 

Saving every email of all 90,000 employees is not the same thing as saving tax records.

 

It is a MUCH smaller burden than the retention policy the government forces on the trading industry though. They are required to save all emails, any recorded phone calls, any trading data, and all compliance information and supporting data. It dwarfs what the IRS requires of itself. It if a f***ing joke.

[StrangeSox]

Wasn't that 6 month policy only limited to non-work emails? I thought I read that work emails and non-work emails, or important work emails v. non-important work emails, were supposed to be kept longer and it was up to the discretion of the employee.

 

Their IT archiving policy was to back everything up to tape, and then reuse those tapes after six months. There was also a limit of how large any one employee's email storage could be on the server side (500MB), so they couldn't just keep everything forever. When they got to that 500MB limit, the files could either be deleted or moved to your local computer. The archiving process didn't automatically delete any data, it's just a typical backup operation in case of a hardware failure.

 

Given that the IRS has already turned over something around 80,000 emails from Lerner, I'm sure she was maxed out on her server-side storage. That meant that a lot of her email would have been stored locally, which is how it was lost when her drive crashed. So Lerner was keeping important work-related emails on her local computer, but her hard drive failed, as they sometimes do. The IRS attempted to recover what it could off of the drive when it crashed, but were unsuccessful. This all occurred back in 2011, well before the whole issue blew up.

 

IT departments often don't get the funds they need to do the missions they're tasked with, and that's especially true with the government. That's not an argument that the IRS needs better funding, maybe they could have better utilized resources or made IT a higher priority, but they didn't have the resources to keep indefinite backups of all of the emails of 90,000 employees. If you're instead relying on some of those emails being stored on 90,000 individual machines, you're going to have a decent amount of hard drive failures and loss of data.

 

The WaPo details it more here:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fi...ss-lois-lerner/

[StrangeSox]

It is a MUCH smaller burden than the retention policy the government forces on the trading industry though. They are required to save all emails, any recorded phone calls, any trading data, and all compliance information and supporting data. It dwarfs what the IRS requires of itself. It if a f***ing joke.

 

The IRS no longer has a six-month retention policy, but there's no obvious reason that a regulatory agency needs to have the same records retention policies as the bodies it is regulating.

[southsider2k5]

The IRS no longer has a six-month retention policy, but there's no obvious reason that a regulatory agency needs to have the same records retention policies as the bodies it is regulating.

 

lol. Yes, because the IRS has never been used as a public weapon or anything. Absurd. Regulatory agencies do need to be held accountable, for really obvious reasons.

[StrangeSox]

They can and should be held accountable, but that doesn't mean that they need to have the same retention policies. Note that nowhere have I said that the six-month retention policy was good policy.

[Jenksismyhero]

I can only imagine SS' response would be the exact same if the parties in the situation were reversed.

[southsider2k5]

I can only imagine SS' response would be the exact same if the parties in the situation were reversed.

 

The federal governments actions are public record per the Freedom of Information act, and should be treated as such. Any short retention of information is a joke, especially when you consider what they require of certain sectors of the private sector, who do not have such public records retention considerations. The only reason they do that is so they cannot be held accountable for as much as possible.

[StrangeSox]

Yes, my technical response that it's not wizardry or magic when a hard drive crashes and data is lost would remain the same. Whether or not Federal Agency XYZ should have the same retention standards as whatever industry it imposes some retention standards on is not related to any current political issue.

[southsider2k5]

Yes, my technical response that it's not wizardry or magic when a hard drive crashes and data is lost would remain the same. Whether or not Federal Agency XYZ should have the same retention standards as whatever industry it imposes some retention standards on is not related to any current political issue.

 

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? Even getting past the fact that it was very likely intentionally deleted.

[StrangeSox]

The federal governments actions are public record per the Freedom of Information act, and should be treated as such. Any short retention of information is a joke, especially when you consider what they require of certain sectors of the private sector, who do not have such public records retention considerations. The only reason they do that is so they cannot be held accountable for as much as possible.

 

1) Again, they changed the policy already.

 

2) No, there are legitimate IT reasons to choosing a given retention policy. Storage takes space and energy, which costs money. The larger the archive, the harder it is to find anything you need as well (such as appropriate responses to litigation requests or FOIA requests).

 

3) Corporations typically have retention policies as well, or at least they should. Yes, legal often has a say in there because they don't want to keep things that can come bite them in the ass indefinitely. What they will typically do is put a litigation hold on any data potentially related to an ongoing lawsuit so that it remains in the archives longer than the standard period. But again, there are legitimate IT concerns when determining your data retention period.

[southsider2k5]

1) Again, they changed the policy already.

 

2) No, there are legitimate IT reasons to choosing a given retention policy. Storage takes space and energy, which costs money. The larger the archive, the harder it is to find anything you need as well (such as appropriate responses to litigation requests or FOIA requests).

 

3) Corporations typically have retention policies as well, or at least they should. Yes, legal often has a say in there because they don't want to keep things that can come bite them in the ass indefinitely. What they will typically do is put a litigation hold on any data potentially related to an ongoing lawsuit so that it remains in the archives longer than the standard period. But again, there are legitimate IT concerns when determining your data retention period.

 

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?

[Cknolls]

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......also A hard drive failing? Sure.....but a total of seven hard drives all relating to people who were involved in the 501C4 cases? Highly suspicious.... Usually if it smells like s***, it probably is s***.... And this whole subject does not pass the smell test...

[StrangeSox]

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.

 

Even getting past the fact that it was very likely intentionally deleted.

 

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.

[StrangeSox]

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).

[Jake]

I got a chuckle out of the notion that the government would hold Goldman Sachs's feet to the fire over something