‘LIBERTY TAX’: White House, Media Attack After Drudge Pays ObamaCare Opt-Out Penalty

Associated PressA White House aide set off a stampede of liberal media criticism for Internet news pioneer Matt Drudge over Obamacare – but his critics don’t seem to understand how small businesses pay taxes.

The brouhaha started when Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not ‘getting covered’… I’M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX.”

Jesse Lee, the Director of Progressive Media at Barack Obama’s White House, responded that that was a “Flat lie, no fee for previous year,” adding, “Scary how much influence he once had.”

Lee’s response to Drudge set off a firestorm in the liberal media, with many mainstream media and left-wing reporters countering him on Twitter and in their own articles to claim he does not have to pay Obamacare’s Individual Mandate tax until next year. The individual mandate went into effect Jan. 1 of this year, and most people paying their taxes right now are paying taxes for 2013…

Drudge indicated in his followup tweets that since he is self-employed as the proprietor of The Drudge Report, he files as a small business. According to the IRS’s website for self-employed individuals, they are required to pay taxes quarterly.

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State That Has Long Been Disgraced by Some of the Strictest Gun-Control Laws, Now Has ‘Shall-Carry’

Photo Credit: HeatherMG / Creative Commons Hawaii, a state that has long been disgraced by some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country, now has “shall-issue” concealed-carry — for now, at least. Per Guns.com:

In a decision released Thursday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case of Baker v. Kealoha, the court followed the lead of the recent Peruta case to declare Hawaii’s restrictions on firearms carry unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.

The case was heard by the same trio of judges who sat on the earlier Peruta and Richards cases in California, which challenged the state’s restrictive ‘may issue’ policies that required concealed carry permit applicants to show “good cause” to warrant a permit. The judges, Diarmuid O’Scannlain, Sidney Thomas and Consuelo Callahan, heard Baker in December 2013 and issued their findings Thursday.

“In Peruta, we concluded that the Second Amendment provides a responsible, law-abiding citizen with the right to carry an operable handgun outside the home for the purpose of self-defense,” wrote O’Scannlain for the two-judge majority decision in a memorandum.

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Physicist: To Deny Creation is To Deny Scientific Fact

Photo Credit: WNDAn Israeli physicist says the breakthrough scientific discovery of further evidence of the Big Bang theory, which some are calling “cosmology’s missing link,” confirms the universe was created.

“One thing the announcement does do is make it clear that the universe had a definite starting point – a creation – as described in the book of Genesis,” Bar Ilan University physics Professor Nathan Aviezer told the Times of Israel.

“To deny this now is to deny scientific fact.”

A team of scientists headed by astronomer John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced Monday it had found the evidence it was seeking to support the theory that the universe had a beginning.

The New York Times’ headlined it story “Space ripples reveal Big Bang’s smoking gun.”

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Judge Rules On Obama Eligibility

Photo Credit: WNDOne of the last remaining court battles over Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility has gone down in flames in a 7-2 decision by the Alabama Supreme Court to render “no opinion.”

However, the dissenting minority of Justice Tom Parker and Chief Justice Roy Moore concluded the case has serious constitutional significance, warranting an investigation of the qualifications of 2012 presidential candidates by Alabama’s secretary of state.

Moore wrote in his dissent that the circuit court should have granted the plaintiffs’ request to order the state secretary of state “to implement the natural-born-citizen requirement of the presidential-qualifications clause in future elections.”

“Although the removal of a president-elect or a president who has taken the oath of office is within the breast of Congress, the determination of the eligibility of the 2012 presidential candidates before the casting of the electoral votes is a state function,” Moore argued.

He said the case was of “great constitutional significance in regard to the highest office in our land.”

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Religion Is Your Business

Photo Credit: National Review Religious freedom used to mean that religion was none of the government’s business. Now it is being changed to mean that religion is none of your business.

Pundits such as law professor Adam Winkler insist that the Supreme Court should rule against the Hahn and Green families and their businesses in next week’s Obamacare cases. Their theory is that if you engage in business, religion is not “essential” to your work. Instead, you can pursue only “profit.”

Says who? Not American law or any authority that Winkler or the government can cite. Winkler simply asserts that religion and business don’t belong together; therefore, family businesses have no right to pursue religion. Winkler even ignores Hobby Lobby’s co-plaintiff in this case, Mardel, a Christian-bookstore business.

Every relevant legal authority contradicts Winkler’s view that religion can have no place in business. The laws of all 50 states and the District of Columbia explicitly allow businesses to pursue all lawful purposes. Religion is still lawful in America, however much some may lament it.

No Supreme Court case says that when a family engages in business, it cannot also pursue its religious beliefs. Instead, whenever the high court gets close to this question, it repeatedly rules that groups such as Jewish merchants and Amish farmers exercise religion while simultaneously pursuing profit, and that they can therefore bring religious-freedom claims. This doesn’t mean that the businesses always win their claims, but it does mean that religion can be exercised in business.

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Judge Strikes Down Michigan’s Voter-Approved Ban on Gay Marriage

Photo Credit: Getty Images Michigan’s ban on gay marriage, approved by voters in a landslide in 2004, was scratched from the state constitution by a federal judge who said the ballot box is no defense to a law that tramples the rights of same-sex couples.

Clerks who handle marriage licenses in Michigan’s 83 counties said they would start granting them to gays and lesbians — three as early as Saturday — although Attorney General Bill Schuette asked a higher court Friday to freeze the landmark ruling while an appeal is pursued. It was not known when a federal appeals court in Cincinnati would respond.

Schuette noted that the U.S. Supreme Court in January stepped in and suspended a similar decision that struck down Utah’s gay-marriage ban.

“A stay would serve the public interest by preserving the status quo … while preventing irreparable injury to the state and its citizens,” he said.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman was historic, following a two-week trial that explored attitudes and research about homosexual marriage and households led by same-sex couples. The judge rejected the conclusions of experts hired by the state to defend the rationale behind a constitutional amendment that recognizes marriage only as between a man and a woman.

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Federal ‘Motor Voter’ Forms In KS, AZ Must Include Proof of Citizenship (+video)

Photo Credit: APA federal judge ordered the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to immediately add state-specific instructions requiring documented proof of citizenship to mail-in federal “Motor Voter” registration forms used in Kansas and Arizona.

Both states have laws requiring applicants to prove they are U.S. citizens before they are registered to vote. The federal form only requires them to swear under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens.

“Because the Constitution gives the states exclusive authority to set voter qualifications under the Qualification Clause, and because no clear congressional enactment attempts to preempt this authority, the Court finds that the states’ determination that a mere oath is not sufficient is all the states are required to establish,” U.S. District Court Judge Eric Melgren said in his March 19th ruling in Wichita. (See EAC – 2014-03-19 US Dist Ct Decision Kobach v EAC.pdf)

“This is victory not only for Kansas and Arizona, but for all 50 states,” Kansas Secretary of State Kobach told CNSNews.com. “Any one of those 50 states may now choose to follow our example and require proofs of citizenship when people register to vote. There are two other states that are doing it already, Alabama and Georgia, for a total of four states.

“And I would encourage more states to do so because anytime an alien votes, it effectively cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen.

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Is Obama Too Busy to be President?

Photo Credit: American ThinkerIs Barack Obama simply too busy to be Chief Executive of the United States? Apparently. One of the primary functions of the president is to keep the nation safe, to preserve it from its enemies. To do that effectively, one would actually have to maintain something of a consistent level of attention to the moving pieces that directly influence how future events will unfold.

None other than the truly sycophantic thinks for a second that President Obama cares a whit for anything that does not involve fundamentally altering the social composition of this country. Or golf. During the five-plus years that we have been without a real president, meaning one who actually was aware of all aspects of the position and tried, even just a little, to perform them, everything that was predicted to occur during his tenure has materialized. We are weaker, less respected, less feared, less liked and, well, just less. No surprise there, really. Conservatives had this guy figured out early in the first campaign, and they were spot on. No record, no experience, no consistency, no integrity, no background, no evidence of morals, no normal friends or associates, and no supporters who cared more about their country than about their silly self-congratulation over electing the first black man who seemed just like them: unserious.

If we assume that the president is even half as smart as we’ve been told he is, which would still make him the smartest person ever to live, you’d think he would have picked up some skills along the way, or gained some firsthand experience that might come in handy. You know, maybe how to read the tea leaves to foresee the bad things that could happen if you take a certain action, or what might happen if you decide to take no action at all when action is necessary. Perhaps you’d think that someone that smart would be open to what more informed people in fields like intelligence and foreign relations have to say, and would use his smarts to discern which advice seemed most sage to plot his course, and ours. He could still claim credit for the successful final decision, after all, which is really all that matters.

But you’d be wrong. In every single crisis that has arisen since the beginning of Obama’s reign of error, he has had something else to do, something that was so much more important than the grenade going off behind him that he just could not find the time to address the crisis of the moment. The celebrity and the trappings of the position have always been vastly more important to this man than the responsibilities, so much so that when faced with the choice of focusing on something hard requiring judgment and decisiveness, and giving in to something easy and self-indulgent, he always goes with easy and self-indulgent.

Read more from this story HERE.

Holder Denies Cruz’s Request for Special Prosecutor in IRS Targeting

Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyAttorney General Eric Holder has denied Sen. Ted Cruz’s demand for a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS’s targeting of tea party groups – a rejection the Texas Republican is slamming as “the height of hypocrisy” by the Obama administration.

The tea party favorite had called for the appointment on Jan. 22, writing the nation’s top prosecutor that it had been eight months “since both you and President Obama professed outrage at the IRS’s wrongful conduct,” and yet no legal action had been taken.

But in a March 10 reply, the Department of Justice curtly asserted “such an appointment is not warranted” because the case doesn’t present a conflict of interest, adding that “career prosecutors and law-enforcement professionals” were conducting the probe.

“The Department remains committed to integrity and fairness in all of its law-enforcement efforts, without regard to politics,” the letter stated. It was signed by Peter Kadzik, principal deputy assistant attorney general.

Republicans have pointed out the investigator in the Justice department probe is a partisan donor to President Obama and Democratic causes.

Read more from this story HERE.

WATCH: Kevin Bacon Reprises ‘Footloose’ in Grand Entrance to Fallon’s ‘Tonight Show’

NBC’s “The Tonight Show” Thirty years after playing Ren McCormack in the iconic eighties film “Footloose,” Kevin Bacon put on his dancing shoes once again for a dramatic entrance to NBC’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, complete with that burgundy tux jacket and sparkles in the air.

As in the 1984 film, the powers that be (this time apparently the executives at NBC) issue an edict stating that dancing is no longer allowed on the Tonight Show. Fallon announces the new rule to his incredulous and upset audience as Bacon watches on television from his dressing room. His reaction, “Jump back, this is the Tonight Show, there has to be dancing.” He pulls a cassette tape out of his jeans back pocket, pops it into a handy nearby wall-mounted player, and the rest, as they say, is movie re-creation history.

Bacon proves once again the words of Solomon (quoted by Ren in “Footloose”) are true. Despite what any human ordinance may decree, in the divine scheme of things, “There is a time to dance.”