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To: unclewest who wrote (491704)	6/19/2012 10:13:30 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793672

Just outrageous. That's was the problem from the get-go, and we both knew it. I'd like to put the S.O.B. Military Lawyers in that situation. The big difference would be no casualties. They couldn't hit the blind side of a barn.

To: unclewest who wrote (491704)	6/19/2012 10:21:13 PM
From: LindyBill	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793672

Daniel Fisher Full Disclosure My Profile My Headline Grabs My RSS Feed Jun. 18 2012 — 5:37 pm \| 517 views \| 3 comments Was The Clemens Jury A Hotbed of Tea Partiers? Roger Clemens (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The Justice Dept. struck out again in a big way today when a jury acquitted baseball great Roger Clemens of committing perjury by denying steroid use. The shutout against the feds came just days after prosecutors dropped all charges against former presidential candidate John Edwards in the wake of a mistrial over charges he’d concealed payments from contributors to his pregnant mistress. In both cases the feds spent years and untold attorney-hours assembling evidence of crimes that fit well outside the typical courtroom fodder of murder and kidnapping. Those are tough cases to win, and an argument can be made that by bringing them, the feds win even if they lose by deterring white-collar crime elsewhere. But there might be something else going on, a former federal prosecutor told me. Jurors could be sending a message to Washington they don’t like the awesome firepower of the Justice Dept. brought to bear on borderline cases without an obvious victim. “In the same way we see in the Tea Party movement a revival of federalism and distrust of the central government, juries are responding to what they see as federal overreach,” said Mark Osler, who teaches criminal law at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and won the famous 2009 case Spears vs. U.S., which gutted mandatory sentencing guidelines. “There’s that old phrase, don’t make a federal case out of it — well, when I was trying cases in Detroit we did face that in juries.” “They did have a problem with the federal government making cases that were a stretch,” he said. continue » Buzz Up! Reddit StumbleUpon Facebook Twitter Email this 3 Total Comments. Get the full story: SportsMoney Taxes and Law Jun. 18 2012 — 11:24 am \| 14,332 views \| 5 comments Supreme Court Rejects Labor Dept. View On Sales-Rep Overtime Alito: Labor Dept., you're wrong on this one. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected the Labor Department’s interpretation of federal law and ruled that thousands of SmithKline Beecham sales representatives were exempt from overtime rules. The decision is a rebuke to the Obama administration, which argued that some 90,000 drug reps and so-called detailers across the pharmaceutical industry should be covered under the 1938 law designed to protect workers from exploitation and excessive hours. In a 5-4 decision along traditional conservative/liberal lines, the court ruled that the Labor Dept. deviated from long practice by determining that sales reps who in this case earned more than $75,000 a year were equivalent to hourly workers on an assembly line. It also could help stem the tide of wage-and-hour cases that have seen courts award overtime to such traditionally exempt employees as stockbrokers and loan officers. The Obama administration has been helping out private lawyers by filing amicus briefs in some of those cases — including this one — stating how the Labor Dept. has shifted its interpretation of certain key regulations to support their claims. The high court’s decision will make it harder for the department to change the rules without giving the affected industries notice and opportunity to respond, said Richard Alfred, a partner in Seyfarth Shaw’s Boston office. “This should put an end to the DOL’s regulation-by-amicus-brief program,” said Alfred. The Labor Dept. has changed its approach toward loan officers, for example, and also tightened its interpretation of the rules for how much individual discretion an employee has to have to fall under the administrative exemption. Instead of “some” discretion, Alfred said, the administration now says they have to have a “significant amount.” The changes help the White House in its efforts to gain the support of labor unions, which have been struggling to increase white-collar membership as their industrial base shrinks. Drug reps were a rich target for wage-and-hour suits because they are prohibited by law from selling anything directly to physicians, and tend to follow predetermined scripts instead of devising their own marketing strategies. In January, Novartis paid $99 million to settle overtime claims brought by the company’s pharmaceutical sales representatives. The decision by Justice Samuel Alito says the Obama administration sought to change long-settled rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act in 2009, by pushing pharmaceutical reps out of the category of “outside salesmen” exempt from overtime pay. The law says employees can be considered salespeople if they are involved in a sale “in any sense.” The administration argued for a stricter definition where the salesperson “actually transfers title to the property at issue.” Congress leaves broad discretion to administrative agencies to decide how to implement the law, the court noted, but businesses also have a right to be protected against sudden and arbitrary changes. To defer to the agency’s interpretation in this circumstance would seriously undermine the principle that agencies should provide regulated parties “fair warning of the conduct [a regulation] prohibits or requires.” Indeed, it would result in precisely the kind of “unfair surprise” against which our cases have long warned. continue »