Feds are Building a Detective Squad to Target Consumers and Companies that Don’t Follow Obamacare’s Rules

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

More than 1,600 new employees hired by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources in the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage include just two described as ‘consumer safety’ officers, but 86 tasked with ‘criminal investigating’ – indicating that the agency is building an army of detectives to sleuth out violations of a law that many in Congress who supported it still find confusing.

On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, HHS received authority from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to make as many as 1,814 new hires under an emergency ‘Direct Hiring Authority’ order.

The Obama administration ordered that employment expansion despite a government-wide hiring freeze.

A total of 1,684 of those positions were filled. An analysis by MailOnline shows that at 2010 federal government salary rates, the new employees’ salaries alone cost the U.S. at least $138.8 million every year.

Had the agency filled all its available jobs, that cost would have been a minimum of $159 million.

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Top ‘LGBT Friendly’ Colleges Offer ‘Gender-Free’ Bathrooms, ‘Queer Studies’ Minor

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Campus Pride, a gay rights advocacy group, released its annual list of the “Top 25 LGBT Friendly Colleges and Universities” on Tuesday, which includes schools with gender-neutral bathrooms and a minor in “queer studies.”

The top 25 schools had to achieve five stars in overall, sexual orientation, and gender identity/expression categories in order to be listed in the top 25. Each school also had to be 4.5 stars or above in eight LGBT-friendly factor areas.

The final Top 25 had the highest percentage ratings and reflects colleges with student populations from 2500 to over 25,000, both public and private schools.

The University of Oregon is the only institution in the state to offer Queer Studies as a minor in their Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.

“Help change the world with your newfound critical thinking skills by promoting respect in the workplace. Aid a city as it institutes its new gay-marriage law. Promote diversity in adoption rights. You’ll be able to create and foster a culturally responsive community wherever you go,” the university said its website.

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Obama’s Brother Linked to Muslim Brotherhood

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

President Obama’s half-brother in Kenya could cause the White House more headaches over new evidence linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and establishing that controversial IRS supervisor Lois Lerner signed his tax-exempt approval letter.

Malik Obama’s oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood’s international investments is one reason for the Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali.

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like “to inform the American people that their president’s brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“We will carry out the law, and the Americans will not stop us,” she said. “We need to open the files and begin court sessions.

“The Obama administration cannot stop us; they know that they supported terrorism,” she continued. “We will open the files so these nations are exposed, to show how they collaborated with [the terrorists]. It is for this reason that the American administration fights us.”

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UPS Drops Health Insurance for Employee Spouses, Blames Obamacare

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Photo Credit: zyphbear

Photo Credit: zyphbear

United Parcel Service, the nation’s largest package delivery company, plans to drop health insurance coverage for thousands of employees’ spouses in a cost-cutting move it blames partially on President Obama’s health care law.

Of 33,000 spouses on UPS’s plan, about 15,000 are eligible for health coverage through their own employers and won’t be covered by the company beginning next year, according to a memo to employees published by Kaiser Health News.

Since the Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide affordable coverage, the shipping giant says those 15,000 spouses should be covered by their own employer “just as UPS has a responsibility to offer coverage to you, our employee,” the memo said. “Limiting plan eligibility is one way to manage ongoing health care costs.”

UPS said the coverage shift is “consistent with the way many large employers are responding to the costs associated with the health-care reform legislation.”

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Gallup: Unemployment Rate Jumps from 7.7% to 8.9% in 30 Days

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By John Nolte.

Outside of the federal government’s Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation’s unemployment rate. While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven’t been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today.

This is an 18-month high.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Number of Long-Term Unemployed ‘Unprecedented’ Under Obama

By Bill McMorris.

The economy has seen an “unprecedented” number of long-term unemployed under the Obama administration, according to a liberal think tank, and economists say plans pursued by Democrats in Washington are unlikely to curb the problem.

Nearly 5 million workers are classified as long-term unemployed, while 900,000 more have stopped looking for work altogether, according to a new series of reports issued by the Urban Institute.

Three percent of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months, an improvement of only one percentage point since unemployment spiked in October 2009, according to the study.

“That long-term unemployment would rise during a recession is not at all surprising, but the extent of the increase and its persistently high level since the start of the recovery are both troubling and unprecedented,” the report states. “The U.S. economy is now well into its fourth year of recovery, the unemployment rate is below 8 percent, yet the long-term share of unemployment is still near 40 percent.”

The center-left think tank said that those startling figures are unlikely to change unless the United States can achieve dramatic job growth, rather than the middling 2 percent overall economic growth figures the Obama administration has averaged.

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Rush Limbaugh Eviscerates Media: Thrill Kill of White Athlete is ‘Trayvon Martin in Reverse, Only Worse’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went after the mainstream media over its shallow coverage of the racial details in the Oklahoma shooting of student Chris Lane “for the fun of it.” On his radio show Wednesday, he said the case is like “Trayvon Martin in reverse, only worse.”

“This is nowhere near self-defense…this was cold-blooded, first-degree, recreational, for the fun of it because they were bored, murder,” Limbaugh said.

As TheBlaze previously reported, Lane, a 22-year-old Australian student and baseball player, was shot by three teenagers who were reportedly bored. Two of the suspects are black and one is white.

James Edwards, 15, and Chancey Luna, 16, were reportedly charged with first degree murder and face life in prison if convicted. They are being held without bond. Michael Jones, 17, was reportedly charged with using a vehicle to facilitate the discharge of a weapon and accessory after the fact of murder in the first degree.

“No matter where you look in the media, it’s not a racial event. This is the epitome of media irresponsibility,” Limbaugh reflected. “This is a classic illustration of just what role the mainstream media is playing in the destruction of American culture and society.”

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Boehner Super-PAC Aides Push Senate Amnesty Bill

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Photo Credit: Business Insider

Photo Credit: Business Insider

Senior GOP aides of a super PAC linked to Speaker John Boehner are lobbying House Republicans to pass the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, legislation that Boehner has said he will not bring to the House floor.

The lobbying effort is coming under the umbrella of the American Action Network, a nonprofit 501(c)(4) “action tank” led by former senator Norm Coleman, which is touting the “major positive economic impact” of the Senate bill in e-mails sent to individual House Republican offices.

AAN is housed in the same office as the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with Boehner, and the two organizations share senior aides, including Brian O. Walsh, the president of both organizations, and Dan Conston, the spokesman for both.

Boehner spoke at a fundraiser for CLN earlier this summer and also headlined the organization’s inaugural event. The group’s website has posted links to numerous news stories that refer to the group as “Boehner’s” super PAC.

The AAN’s e-mail, sent to GOP offices, touts the number of jobs the group estimates the Senate bill would create for the congressional district and state of that office. The group also released an embeddable “widget” that allows users to find out how many jobs the Senate bill would create in the district of their representative.

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Corker: Lawmakers Learn More about NSA from Newspaper than Briefings

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) is demanding a new round of briefings on U.S. domestic surveillance operations.

In a blistering critique of past briefings, Corker argued lawmakers learning more on the front page of the newspaper than behind closed doors with security officials.

In a Wednesday letter to the White House, Corker said briefings by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency (NSA) chief Gen. Keith Alexander and others have not provided a full account of U.S. surveillance.

Briefings have “generally been limited to simply discussing the facts underlying specific public disclosures” of domestic surveillance operations, he said.

“As a result, members of Congress regularly read new revelations on the front pages of various newspapers,” Corker wrote.

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Al Gore Explains Why he’s Optimistic about Stopping Global Warming

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Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Ezra Klein: In 2005, when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, I remember that the hope was we could keep the carbon load in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, and the fear was we would hit 400ppm. Now we’ve hit 400ppm and people are hoping to avoid 450ppm. This seems to be getting out of hand, and fast.

Al Gore: We have already crossed the 400 parts per million mark. We crossed it earlier this year. The question now is how high it will go before we begin bending the curve. But in spite of the continued released of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.

The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world. You mentioned my movie back in the day. The single most common criticism from skeptics when the film came out focused on the animation showing ocean water flowing into the World Trade Center memorial site. Skeptics called that demagogic and absurd and irresponsible. It happened last October 29th, years ahead of schedule, and the impact of that and many, many other similar events here and around the world has really begun to create a profound shift.

A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements. The difference between 32 degrees fahrenheit and 33 degrees fahrenheit seems larger than just one degree. It’s the difference between water and ice. And by analogy there’s a similar difference between renewable electricity that’s more expensive than electricity from coal and renewable electricity that’s less expensive. And in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold and in the next few years we’re going to see that crossed in nations and regions containing most of the world’s population.

Another way to think about this is that back when mobile telephones first appeared, the market projections for how quickly they would increase market share turned out to be not just wrong but way wrong. This is a point made by Dave Roberts at Grist, but the projections made 5-10 years ago for the installation of solar and wind technologies were, similarly, not just wrong but way wrong. We’ve seen a dramatic increase that’s far more rapid than anybody projected and it’s accelerating — not just in the United States but even more rapidly in developing countries.

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New Audit Finds IRS Can’t Keep Track of its Own Software

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Photo Credit: WatchDog

Photo Credit: WatchDog

The Internal Revenue Service soon will have a larger role to play in managing the health records of Americans. But they’re having a hard time managing their own records, it seems.

A new audit report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which oversees the IRS, found the agency was not keeping track of its software licenses and did not employ specialized tools to track and manage the multitude of licenses being used daily at the IRS.

“Efficient and cost-effective management of the IRS’s software assets is crucial to ensuring that information technology services continue to support the IRS’s business operations and help it to provide services to taxpayers efficiently,” auditors wrote in their report.

The division of the IRS charged with managing the licenses could not provide auditors with the proper licenses for 24 of the 27 software products reviewed.

The IRS spent $235 million on computer software products during 2011, according to the audit. Keeping better records of licenses could save the agency money by preventing unnecessary duplicate purchases of the same software, the auditors noted.

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