Democrat Lawmakers Laugh at Pain ObamaCare Causing Families (+video)

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Let’s all go “Off The Record” for just a minute. Do you know what I find absolutely disgraceful? People laughing at other people’s fears and misfortunes, or even potential misfortunes.

But there’s something even worse than that — something more disgraceful. That’s when the ones laughing are also the very ones who caused the fears and misfortune. Case-in-point: Three politicians from Minnesota, all Democrats – two congressmen, Collin Peterson and Tim Walz, and U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar. Congressman Walz and Senator Klobuchar voted yes for ObamaCare. And now, well, they are laughing at what it’s doing to so many Americans. Listen to this exchange at a recent forum.

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock Study: ObamaCare Taxes on Insurance Companies Will Be Pass On to Consumers

By Philip Klein.

A multibillion-dollar tax that President Obama’s health care law imposes on the insurance industry will be passed onto consumers, according to a new study by American Action Forum, costing individuals and families hundreds of dollars annually starting this year.

As one way of financing the $2 trillion cost of expanding insurance coverage, Obamacare imposes a tax on the health insurance industry, which is assessed to each insurer based on their share of annual premiums collected by the industry.

But according to the study by Robert Book of the center-right policy group American Action Forum, “insurers will have to pass most of this tax along to policyholders in the form of higher premiums, or possibly higher average out-of-pocket costs or reduced benefits.”

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IRS is Overwhelmed by Identity Theft Fraud

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Photo Credit: DREW ANGERER FOR THE GLOBERashia Wilson bought a $92,000 Audi, proclaimed herself a millionaire, and announced on her Facebook page that she was “the queen of IRS tax fraud,” as prosecutors told the story.

But even more than her flamboyance, it was the seeming ease of her crime that was most stunning: She and an accomplice were alleged to have hijacked the identities of other taxpayers to get fraudulent refunds. They used stolen Social Security numbers, a computer, and basic knowledge of how to file a tax return, according to the government.

After the Florida mother of three was caught and pleaded guilty last year to crimes totaling at least $3 million, her defense attorney, Mark O’Brien, made his own plea. He said in court that he hoped the “IRS will figure out a way to prevent this from happening in the future, so someone with a sixth-grade education can’t defraud them so easily.”

Across the country, the theft of taxpayer identities has taken off, while receiving far less attention than the loss of credit card information. Even some drug dealers, always with an eye out for easy profits, have turned to taxpayer identity theft after hearing how uncomplicated it was to scam the IRS. A medical assistant at a nursing home stole the identities of hundreds of patients. A prison guard stole the identities of inmates and filed false returns under their names.

All told, in just the first six months of last year, 1.6 million taxpayers were affected by identity theft, compared with 271,000 for all of 2010, according to a recent audit by the Treasury Department’s inspector general. While the IRS said it discovered many of the incidents, the cumulative thefts have resulted in billions of dollars in potentially fraudulent refunds, according to an array of government reports.

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Court: No Reprieve for Notre Dame on Contraception Coverage Rule

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Photo Credit: APA federal appeals court has turned down the University of Notre Dame’s request for immediate relief from complying with Obamacare provisions relating to contraceptive coverage.

In a 2-1 decision issued late Friday afternoon, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit rejected Notre Dame’s appeal of a district judge’s order denying a preliminary injunction the Catholic school requested to avoid having to complete a form stating that Notre Dame had a religious objection to providing the contraceptive coverage normally required under the Affordable Care Act.

Judge Richard Posner, one of the country’s best known jurists aside from the Supreme Court, largely dismissed Notre Dame’s objection to filling out the government-issued form.

“If the government is entitled to require that female contraceptives be provided to women free of charge, we have trouble understanding how signing the form that declares Notre Dame’s authorized refusal to pay for contraceptives for its students or staff, and mailing the authorization document to those companies, which under federal law are obligated to pick up the tab, could be thought to ‘trigger’ the provision of female contraceptives,” Posner wrote in an opinion joined by Judge David Hamilton.

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McCain: ‘Hate to Admit It,’ But Hillary Would Win Presidential Election if Held Tomorrow (+video)

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Photo Credit: APWe’re still three years out from the 2016 presidential elections, and that works in Republicans’ favor, said John McCain. Reason being, Hillary Clinton would win the White House if the elections were soon.

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Michelle Obama Calls Young People “Knuckleheads” Rejecting Obamacare

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Photo Credit: VeoozMichelle Obama appeared on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night and shared her and her husband the president’s concerns about young people who were not signing up for Obamacare reported Fox News. She vented to Fallon that “Young People are knuckleheads!” Well could say that she may have missed out on the class on how to win friends and influence people, by targeting young people for her derisive remarks.

The First Lady must be channeling the nervousness that Obama administration officials are facing and do not have a clue on how to fix. According to their own projections before the Affordable Care Act launched, the health plan needed at least 40 percent of the total seven million enrollees to be young people between the ages of 18 and 34-year-olds.

Currently that total is a little over 807,000 as of the beginning of February. Yet, the supporters in the administration, including the president had hoped that the number would be closer to the targeted 1.6 million that should be signed up by now, according to KipSat Sun News.

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New York McDonald’s Manager Buys Food for Firefighters; Terminated Next Day

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Photo Credit: Raw StoryKindness and consideration is something to be admired especially when helping firefighters who have spent hours in subzero weather battling a local fire. So when McDonald’s Manager Heather Levia saw a way to help them by donating food and paying for it out of her own pocket for them, being fired never occurred to her. But that is exactly what followed for the New York former manager at an Olean, NY t McDonalds, according to Fox 44.

Total disbelief is one of the motions that had to have come across the young woman’s face when her immediate bosses at the fast food restaurant sent her packing for her kind gesture. All she did was take their order of 25 breakfast sandwiches and hash browns, and then promptly took $83 out and pay for their order herself.

This selfless act was not welcomed by management and instead she was treated with utter contempt and even claimed that that was not the policy of the restaurant or of the corporation. This of course seemed a bit odd to Levia, since, “she claims they regularly give free meals to police officers who stop by,” reported Fox 44.

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Senior UK Defense Advisor: Obama Is “Chronically Incapable” Of Military Strategy

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Photo Credit: The Right News On the heels of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates stinging assessment of Barack Obama’s leadership ability when it comes to our military, a Senior UK defense advisor has said that President Obama is “chronically incapable” of being a military leader and he, “has no sense of what he wants to do in the world…”

Read more below from The Daily Beast:

Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the president’s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America’s position in the world.

President Obama is “chronically incapable” of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain’s most senior military advisors.

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels “has left them in a far worse position than they were before.”

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Hypocrisy, Thy Name is John Kerry

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Photo Credit: APFleeing his failed diplomatic Middle East efforts, noted nonscientist Secretary of State John Kerry flitted off to Indonesia where he exuded hot air bloviating about (hu)man caused climate change as a weapon of mass destruction as noted here earlier.

However, by Kerry’s reasoning, the ongoing slaughter in Syria is nothing compared to Kerry’s own contribution to manmade climate change/worse than any weapon of mass destruction, blah, blah, blah. How so? John Kerry is not a flappy bird moving from place to place under his own power. So how does he get around? Why, by planes. Big ones. As Jim Geraghty of National Review Online helpfully pointed out, Kerry’s whirlwind travels from continent to continent to continent plus intracontinental short hops accelerate the very climate change he decries.

In case you’re wondering, flying first class from Washington to Seoul to Beijing to Jakarta to Abu Dhabi and then back to Washington runs up roughly 12.16 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to CarbonFootprint.com, which uses data from the EPA and Department of Energy.

The average American generates about 19 tons of carbon dioxide in a year.

So in one week, just from flying from meeting to meeting, Kerry generated about two-thirds the carbon output of the average American in one year.

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Snowball Thrown at Officer Draws Felony for Boy, 13, Outrage From Residents

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Photo Credit: DNA Info A day after a boy was arrested and charged with a felony for throwing a snowball at a police officer, students outside George Leland Elementary continued to build snowmen and throw snowballs at each other after school.

According to police, a 13-year-old boy was charged as a juvenile with felony aggravated battery against a police officer Wednesday after he hit the officer in the arm with a snowball while the officer was parked in his vehicle in the 4900 block of West Congress Parkway about 3:20 p.m.

Residents sounded off on the crime and punishment the next day, many describing the charge as police “going overboard.”

“It’s not fair,” said Mary Grant, a longtime resident of the block. The boy “was being hardheaded, but that’s very harsh. The officer should’ve tried something different than arrest.”

The boy is believed to be a student at Leland Elementary School, formerly May Elementary, which sits at the southeast corner of the intersection near where the snowball was thrown. Officials at the school acknowledged that the incident occurred but declined to comment.

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Hagel Misstates Administration Policy on Iran Nukes (Again)

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Photo Credit: APDefense Department officials acknowledged to Fox News that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, while speaking to a Jewish congregation at a Maryland synagogue on Tuesday, appeared to have misstated the administration’s policy on Iran — by saying the country should not be allowed the “capacity” to develop a nuclear weapon.

“So that’s the position of this administration; it was the position of the Bush administration — that’s unequivocal. That’s stated — it’s clear,” Hagel said at the Beth El synagogue in Bethesda, Md.

But Hagel was mistaken, and it’s not the first time he has misspoken about the United States’ nuclear policy on Iran. What he described on Tuesday would be a much firmer stance than either administration has taken. The current policy is that Iran should be prevented from obtaining a nuclear weapon, rather than preventing its capacity to make a weapon.

Just last month the Director of National Intelligence released “The Worldwide Threat Assessment” to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Page five states clearly that Iran already has the capacity to build and deliver a nuclear weapon should it decide to do so.

“Tehran has made technical progress in a number of areas — including uranium enrichment, nuclear reactors, and ballistic missiles — from which it could draw if it decided to build missile-deliverable nuclear weapons,” DNI James Clapper wrote. “These technical advancements strengthen our assessment that Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons. This makes the central issue its political will to do so.”

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