Senate GOP: HHS May Have Purposely Misled on Obamacare Subsidies

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Photo Credit: APA trio of top Senate Republicans have asked the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general to look at whether the agency misrepresented its ability to verify Obamacare consumers’ incomes and issue the correct amount in subsidies to help them buy coverage on the new health exchanges.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said in a letter to Inspector General Daniel Levinson that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ prior assurances to Capitol Hill are not proving true.

“We have long been concerned that Obamacare, with its complex eligibility process and access to enormous taxpayer resources, presents a grave risk for improper, inaccurate, and even fraudulent payments,” they wrote. “Those concerns were further heightened last summer when [HHS] issued regulations that would permit individuals to self-attest to their eligibility for subsidies under certain circumstances.”

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Brokers Use ‘Billions’ of Data Points to Profile Americans

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Photo Credit: AlamyAre you a financially strapped working mother who smokes? A Jewish retiree with a fondness for Caribbean cruises? Or a Spanish-speaking professional with allergies, a dog and a collection of Elvis memorabilia?

All this information and much, much more is being quietly collected, analyzed and distributed by the nation’s burgeoning data-broker industry, which uses billions of individual data points to produce detailed portraits of virtually every American consumer, the Federal Trade Commission reported Tuesday.

The FTC report provided an unusually detailed account of the system of commercial surveillance that draws on government records, shopping habits and social-media postings to help marketers hone their advertising pitches. Officials said the intimacy of these profiles would unnerve some consumers who have little ability to track what’s being collected or how it’s used — or even to correct false information. The FTC called for legislation to bring transparency to the multibillion-dollar industry and give consumers some control over how their data is used.

Data brokers’ portraits feature traditional demographics such as age, race and income, as well as political leanings, religious affiliations, Social Security numbers, gun-ownership records, favored movie genres and gambling preferences (casino or state lottery?). Interest in health issues — such as diabetes, HIV infection and depression — can be tracked as well.

With potentially thousands of fields, data brokers segment consumers into dozens of categories such as “Bible Lifestyle,” “Affluent Baby Boomer” or “Biker/Hell’s Angels,” the report said. One category, called “Rural Everlasting,” describes older people with “low educational attainment and low net worths.” Another, “Urban Scramble,” includes concentrations of Latinos and African Americans with low incomes. One company had a field to track buyers of “Novelty Elvis” items.

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Columbia University Is Spending Millions Of Tax Dollars On Fake Climate-Change Death Voicemails

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Columbia University in New York City is spending a $5.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to produce projects that show several conjectural scenarios that promoters of global-warming science swear will happen soon if the developed world doesn’t mend its evil ways.

One of the taxpayer-funded creations is a large series of fictitious voicemails in which people complain and gasp for breath, reports Campus Reform.

For example, in one of the pretend voicemails, set in 2065, a man tells his mother that he is really worried about dying from either rising temperatures or a huge tsunami.

“If the tsunami doesn’t get us, the heat might,” the man says. “I’m just calling to say I love you and I miss you and it might be the last time you hear my voice. Bye.”

In another fake voicemail, a woman struggles frantically for breath because she is “out of CO2 credits,” according to Campus Reform.

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Raises All Around? Federal Agency Scraps Employee Rating System

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Photo Credit: REUTERSAmerica’s new consumer watchdog agency has come up with a unique solution for its troubled employee-rating system: Give almost everyone a gold star.

The independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — created under the 2010 “Dodd-Frank” financial industry overhaul to serve as a consumer watchdog — says it’s scrapping its system of employee ratings in response to concerns that it was discriminatory.

That rating system assigned workers a score of between one and five. Due to concerns with the system, everyone who scored a three or above, regardless of performance, will now be getting the top rating of five — along with the corresponding retroactive pay raises that the top rating brings.

Those raises will likely cost more than $5 million, according to the American Banker, which first reported on the ratings troubles in a March 6 article.

Going forward, the bureau is looking at using a new two-tiered rating system for at least two years while officials evaluate the old system.

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Greenwald’s Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Real Clear PoliticsThe man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.

His plan to publish names will further unnerve an American intelligence establishment already reeling from 11 months of revelations about US government surveillance activities.

Greenwald, who is promoting his book No Place To Hide and is trailed by a documentary crew wherever he goes, was speaking in a boutique hotel near Harvard, where he was to appear with Noam Chomsky, the octogenarian leftist academic.

“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’,” he said.

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Colorado City Pays $25k To Man Arrested For Bringing A Gun To The Movies

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Photo Credit: Scott Olson / Getty A man who was arrested for carrying a holstered handgun into a movie theater a week after the Aurora shootings in 2012 received a $25,000 settlement check from the city of Thornton last week, according to Denver’s 7News.

Jim Mapes had a concealed-carry permit and said he’d carried his gun to the same theater several times in the past. Another theater-goer called 911, saying a man with a weapon had just entered a movie theater. He was originally charged with brandishing the weapon, which Mapes denied.

“It never left my holster,” he told the station. And although the gun was carried openly rather than being concealed, his lawyer said that’s never been against the law in Thornton.

Mapes told Denver’s Fox 31 that he was in the same Thornton theater watching “The Dark Knight Rises” on the night James Holmes opened fire in an Aurora theater across town, killing 12 people and injuring at least 70. He had his gun that night too. Police questioned him, but didn’t arrest him.

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In California, Life With Parole Increasingly Leads To Freedom

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Photo Credit: Jeremy Raff / KQEDCalifornia has more than 26,000 inmates serving life sentences with the possibility of parole. Until recently, that possibility was a slim one; “lifers,” who are mostly murderers, rarely got out of prison.

But that’s changing. Since 2009, more than twice as many lifers have been paroled in California than in the previous two decades combined.

The shift in parole policy comes as California is under orders from the U.S. Supreme Court to relieve prison overcrowding. But state officials insist the rising number of lifers being paroled has nothing to do with that. Instead, they say, it’s the confluence of several other factors, including a 2008 state Supreme Court ruling that made it harder to deny parole to inmates who are no longer considered dangerous.

Since that ruling, parole boards have recommended release at a much higher rate than in previous years — and Gov. Jerry Brown is blocking fewer paroles than his predecessors.

Today, even for murderers, the possibility of parole is more than just a pipe dream. The change is being felt on both sides of the prison walls.

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Unions, Employers Square Off Over ObamaCare Costs in Collective Bargaining

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Photo Credit: FOXNEWS.COMDisputes between unions and employers over paying for new costs associated with the Affordable Care Act are roiling labor talks nationwide.

Unions and employers are tussling over who will pick up the tab for new mandates, such as coverage for dependent children to age 26, as well as future costs, such as a tax on premium health plans starting in 2018. The question is poised to become a significant point of tension as tens of thousands of labor contracts covering millions of workers expire in the next several years, with ACA-related cost increases ranging from 5 percent to 12.5 percent in current talks.

In Philadelphia, disagreement over how much workers should contribute to such health-plan cost increases has stalled talks between the region’s transit system and its main union representing 5,000 workers as they try to renegotiate a contract that expired in March.

Roughly 2,000 housekeepers, waiters and others at nine of 10 downtown Las Vegas casinos voted this month to go on strike June 1 if they don’t reach agreements on a series of issues, the thorniest of which involve new ACA-related cost increases, according to the Unite Here union.

Flight attendants at Alaska Airlines voted down a tentative contract agreement with management in February, in part because it didn’t provide enough protection against a possible surge in ACA-related costs, union members said. They are still without a new contract.

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Final Word on U.S. Law Isn’t: Supreme Court Keeps Editing

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Photo Credit: ALEX WONG / GETTY The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice. The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a new study examining the phenomenon.

The court can act quickly, as when Justice Antonin Scalia last month corrected an embarrassing error in a dissent in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency.

But most changes are neither prompt nor publicized, and the court’s secretive editing process has led judges and law professors astray, causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the official record. The widening public access to online versions of the court’s decisions, some of which do not reflect the final wording, has made the longstanding problem more pronounced.

Unannounced changes have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law. They have also retreated from descriptions of common ground with other justices, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did in a major gay rights case.

The larger point, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford, is that Supreme Court decisions are parsed by judges and scholars with exceptional care. “In Supreme Court opinions, every word matters,” he said. “When they’re changing the wording of opinions, they’re basically rewriting the law.”

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Christian Leaders: God Is Not Finished with America…Third Great Awakening Is Need of Hour (+video)

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Photo Credit: WND Some religious leaders say America is facing a spiritually dark time.

“At the root of America’s problem, we really have a spiritual cancer that’s been eating away at our nation,” Bishop Harry Jackson, senior pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, told CBN News.

Retired Gen. Jerry Boykin used to fight America’s physical enemies overseas. He’s now working with the Family Research Council fighting spiritual foes.

Boykin said without a Third Great Awakening, forces like those that took down mighty empires of the past will also bring down the United States.

“We’re going to wind up exactly like these other great empires, which only lasted on an average about 200 years,” he said. “We’re going to completely self-destruct. And you see the beginnings of that now.”

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