Survey on Obamacare: Most Uninsured Choose Penalty Over Enrollment Offer Under Health Law

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IRSBA special enrollment period to obtain health insurance for millions of uninsured people who owe a tax penalty under the Affordable Care Act is off to a slow start.

The health law requires most Americans to have insurance or pay a fine at tax time. The open enrollment period under the health law ended Feb. 15, but the Obama administration said it would allow people who discover they owe a fine to sign up for coverage through April, at the end of the tax season.

Major tax-preparation firms say many customers are paying the penalty and not getting health insurance. It is still early, since the special enrollment period launched Sunday, but research also suggests that many people who lack health insurance will pay the penalty and not get covered this year.

Only 12% of uninsured people would buy policies if informed of the penalty, according to a survey of 3,000 adults polled through Feb. 24 by McKinsey & Co.’s Center for U.S. Health System Reform.

At H&R Block Inc., “our analysis indicates that a significant percentage of taxpayers whose household members were not covered for at least a portion of 2014 are opting” to pay the penalty, said Mark Ciaramitaro, a vice president of health-care enrollment services at the tax-preparation firm. (Read more from “Many Uninsured Choose Penalty Over Enrollment Offer Under Health Law” HERE)

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FEMA Won’t Help States That Reject Climate Change Disasters as Real Science

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femaFederal funds that help communities brace for emergencies will stop being provided to states if they ignore threats posed by climate change in their disaster planning.

States publish reports every five years or so detailing their vulnerability to natural disasters, such as floods, storms and wildfires, and how they plan to protect themselves and recover after them. Such plans are needed in order to qualify for a share of nearly $1 billion in Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants provided every year by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But those plans rarely consider climate change impacts in detail — an omission that could see states become ineligible for the grants after new guidelines take effect early next year. Under FEMA’s updated guidelines, published last week, state disaster plans will only be approved if they adequately describe how the likelihood and intensity of natural hazards could be affected by growing levels of greenhouse gas pollution.

“The risk assessment must provide a summary of the probability of future hazard events,” the new guidelines state. “Probability must include considerations of changing future conditions, including the effects of long-term changes in weather patterns and climate.”

Some states, including California and Connecticut, already consider climate change in their plans, albeit imperfectly, said Rebecca Hammer, a Natural Resources Defense Council attorney who has been pressuring FEMA to make such a change for several years. But she said there are “a lot” of states that fail to adequately consider climate change in their disaster planning, including Florida, Texas, and “a lot of the states in the middle of the country.” (Read more from “FEMA Won’t Help States That Don’t Plan for Climate Change” HERE)

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Obama Promotes Mandatory Voting for Every US Citizen and Here’s the Response from Social Media‏

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Barack ObamaBy Josh Lederman. They say the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes. President Barack Obama wants to add one more: voting.

Obama floated the idea of mandatory voting in the U.S. while speaking to a civic group in Cleveland on Wednesday. Asked about the corrosive influence of money in U.S. elections, Obama digressed into the related topic of voting rights and said the U.S. should be making it easier — not harder— for people to vote.

Just ask Australia, where citizens have no choice but to vote, the president said.

“If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,” Obama said, calling it potentially transformative. Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would “counteract money more than anything.” (Read more from “Obama Talks Mandatory Voting and Here’s the Response from Social Media‏” HERE)


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Oops! Social Media Users Point out the Biggest Hypocrisy Behind Obama’s ‘Mandatory Voting’ Idea

By Nicole Haas. Social media users are responding in force to President Obama’s latest idea for a new policy – a policy that would essentially force votes from an electorate that thinks so little of the Democratic process that they don’t bother to show up on their own.


His self-described, “potentially transformative” idea of imposing “mandatory voting” comes after a string of upsetting election losses for his party – which suffered from a combination of bad voter turnout and worse Obama policies.

Perhaps it was Tuesday’s win of Obama’s nemesis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that prompted him to speak his tyrannical desires when he addressed a Cleveland civic group Wednesday.

Whatever the trigger was, patriots on Twitter lost no time in calling out Obama’s stinging hypocrisy on mandatory voting. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Cover-Up Continues? Secret Service May Have Erased Surveillance Tapes

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secret service directorSecret Service Director Joe Clancy told lawmakers in a closed-door meeting that the Secret Service may have erased surveillance video of agents driving a car through an active bomb threat investigation at the White House.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz told CNN that on Tuesday, Clancy showed him and other lawmakers two videos, one of which didn’t show much of the action.

“We inquired if there were additional tapes and angles and the director informed us that there may not be because it’s their policy to erase them 72 hours after they record, which is just unfathomable,” Chaffetz said. “I can’t think of any good reason to do that.”

“This is not your local 7-11. This is the White House,” he said.

Chaffetz said he was frustrated Clancy didn’t know if more tapes existed and wondered how two tapes survived while others might not have. (Read more from “Secret Service May Have Erased Surveillance Tapes” HERE)

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23 Dreamers from Obama Amnesty Snared in Criminal Dragnet

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deportationBy Stephen Dinan. Nearly two dozen of the illegal immigrants picked up in a nationwide sweep for criminal aliens earlier this month had previously been approved for President Obama’s deportation amnesty, the Homeland Security Department said Wednesday.

All 23 were part of Mr. Obama’s original program for so-called Dreamers, which began in 2012 and which had granted tentative legal legal status to nearly 640,000 as of the end of last year.

Of the 23, 15 were still actively part of the amnesty, while eight had been approved once but had not gotten their status renewed after the first two-year period expired.

The department is trying to deport all of them now.

The Dreamers were snared as part of Operation Cross Check, which saw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents go after top-priority targets for deportation in a move the administration said proved that they were still trying to deport dangerous illegal immigrants, even as Mr. Obama moves ahead with his amnesty. (Read more from “23 Dreamers from Obama Amnesty Snared in Criminal Dragnet” HERE)

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Texas Judge Threatens Justice Department over Obama’s Immigration Plan

By David Zucchino. A federal judge threatened Thursday to sanction the U.S. Department of Justice if he finds that government lawyers misled him about the rollout of President Obama’s plan to shield up to five million people from the threat of deportation.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen, visibly annoyed, confronted a U.S. deputy assistant attorney general over previous government assurances on the timing of the program.


He asked why he shouldn’t grant a discovery request for internal federal immigration documents, a request filed Thursday by 26 states that are suing over Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Hanen ordered a freeze on the Obama plan on Feb. 16 in response to the lawsuit, which accuses the administration of overstepping the president’s executive authority.

At a one-hour hearing in Brownsville, Hanen gave the Department of Justice 48 hours to file a motion in response. He said he would then rule promptly on whether to require the government to produce immigration documents concerning applications under Obama’s deferred action program. (Read more from “Texas Judge Threatens Justice Department over Obama’s Immigration Plan” HERE)

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New Dashboard Tracks Which Federal Sites You Visit, and How You Got There

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federal siteBy Nextgov. At 11:23 a.m. on Thursday, 150,980 people — more than the population of Alexandria, Virginia — were browsing U.S. federal websites. Five thousand of them visited an IRS.gov page called “Where’s my Refund?” Another 2,091 were checking forecasts on Weather.gov.

These stats come from a new dashboard tracking user behavior on federal websites — what they’re looking at, what device they use, as well as their browser and operating system. The White House’s U.S. Digital Service, along with two General Services Administration’s tech teams, 18F and the Digital Analytics Program, launched the site Thursday.

Created over the course of two to three weeks, the site debuted during Sunshine Week, a national effort dedicated to government transparency.

The data could help federal digital service teams focus on the “services that matter most to the American people” by helping government agencies “understand how people find, access and use government services online,” a White House blog post announcing the site said. (Read more from “New Dashboard Tracks Which Federal Sites You Visit, and How You Got There” HERE)


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ACLU Sues for Airport ‘Behavior Detection’ Program Records


By My FoxNy. A civil rights group is trying to force the federal government to turn over information about airport “behavior detection” programs designed to spot passengers who are potential threats.

A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in New York City.

The American Civil Liberties Union says the government has been slow to respond to its request to learn more about behavior detection programs that have been used nationwide since 2003. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Rand Paul 2016 Announcement Date: Senator Eyeing April 7 To Launch Presidential Campaign

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Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is expected to announce plans to join the party’s 2016 presidential field on April 7, multiple sources inside Paul’s camp told MSNBC on Tuesday. The announcement, scheduled to take place in Louisville, Kentucky, will serve as the official campaign launch for Paul, who has spent months traveling to early voting states to assess whether his largely libertarian message will catch fire with the party’s conservative base.

“This will be an official announcement, not an exploratory committee,” said a source close to Paul who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his plans. “Everything will happen pretty quickly over the next couple of weeks,” another source close to Paul told msnbc.

Doug Stafford, executive director at RandPAC, Paul’s political action committee, had no comment.

Paul is set to travel to the four major early voting states immediately after the announcement, aides said. He will host events in Milford, New Hampshire, April 8; Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina on April 9; Iowa City, Iowa on April 10; and Las Vegas, Nevada on April 11.

Paul, a 52-year old ophthalmologist, is the son of Ron Paul, the well-known Texas libertarian congressman who sought the presidency three times, in 1988, 2008 and 2012. The younger Paul has worked to reassemble his father’s passionate supporter base while also extending his reach into more traditional Republican audiences. Rand Paul has also courted voters not traditionally allied with the GOP, including young people and African-Americans. He recently joined Democrats including Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Cory Booker of New Jersey to introduce legislation loosening federal restrictions on the use of medicinal marijuana. (Read more from “Rand Paul 2016 Announcement Date: Senator Eyeing April 7 To Launch Presidential Campaign” HERE)

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Tom Cotton Calls for ‘Global Military Dominance’ in Maiden Senate Speech [+video]

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Over the course of just a few days last week, Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) went from relatively anonymous freshman senator to what seemed like the tip of every tongue in Washington — thanks to the letter he wrote and got 46 fellow Republicans to join, warning the ruling Iranian regime to be wary of negotiating a nuclear deal with President Obama.

But here’s a fun fact: Cotton made his big splash before even giving his first speech on the Senate floor.

That occasion came late Monday, when Cotton delivered his “maiden speech,” which is typically given after a period of silence and as a statement of principles or objectives rather than a comment on the partisan issue of the day.

Cotton’s address has gotten a lot less attention than his Iran letter, and that is not surprising: Where the letter was terse and seemingly calculated to influence the multiparty nuclear negotiations now underway, the half-hour speech was dense, rich in historical references, and calibrated to further establish Cotton as the Republican Party’s young leading light on foreign affairs and defense — positioning him to assume the mantle now worn by elders like John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“An alarm should be sounding in our ears,” Cotton said. “Our enemies, sensing weakness and hence opportunity, have become steadily more aggressive. Our allies, uncertain of our commitment and capability, have begun to conclude that they must look out for themselves, even where it is unhelpful to stability and order. Our military, suffering from years of neglect, has seen its relative strength decline to historic levels.” (Read more from “Tom Cotton Calls for ‘Global Military Dominance’ in Maiden Senate Speech [+video]” HERE)

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Obama: If I Could Do It Again, ‘I Think I Would Have Closed Guantanamo on the First Day’ [+video]

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President Barack Obama slammed Republicans’ latest budget proposals on Wednesday, saying funding for research, education and infrastructure would be better for economic growth than tax cuts.

In a speech at the City Club of Cleveland, Obama mocked Republicans for turning to tax cuts in a budget that “doubles down on trickle-down” economics..

“Republicans in Congress have put forward the same proposals year after year after year regardless of the realities of the economy,” Obama said. “When the economy’s in a slump? We needed tax cuts. When the economy’s doing well? You know what – let’s try some tax cuts,” he said.

In another issue that has divided Washington, Obama said he wished he had closed the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on his first day in office. His efforts to close the controversial facility have since been thwarted largely because of Republican opposition.

Obama said the budget plan put forward this week by Republicans in the House of Representatives would cut funding to centers that help manufacturing, a sector critical to the economy of northeast Ohio, home to plants owned by Ford, GM, Goodyear and Sherwin-Williams Co. (Read more from “Obama: If I Could Do It Again, ‘I Think I Would Have Closed Guantanamo on the First Day’ [+video]” HERE)

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Republican Lawmaker: Sodomy Law Needed for Public Health

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[Editor’s note: This excerpt is biased but is included for its news content] Texas Republican state Rep. James White has said that the state’s unconstitutional ban on same-sex sodomy should not be repealed for “public health” reasons and to stop bestiality.

The San Antonio-Express News recently asked White if he would support repealing the ban since he had filed a bill to rollback regulations on hair braiding.

Even though the Supreme Court struck down the sodomy law in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, White insisted that it should be kept on the books. The law specifically bans “deviant sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.”

“Absolutely, there is a difference,” White said, arguing that hair braiding regulations were “a way of disenfranchising them out of the marketplace. I don’t necessarily think this was the case with sodomy.”

According to the Republican lawmaker, the anti-gay law represented “a community coming together and having a moral standard, per se, as opposed to using the regulatory environment to disenfranchise people.” (Read more from “Republican Lawmaker: Anti-Gay Sodomy Law Needed for ‘Public Health’” HERE)

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