Obamacare: States Want a Delay, Too

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Photo Credit: George Ruhe‘I wish we had one more year:’ States are struggling to launch Obamacare on time

By Sarah Kliff. Facing tight deadlines and daunting workloads, states across the country are scaling back ambitions for implementing the Affordable Care Act.

At a monthly board meeting of Connecticut’s health insurance exchange, members of the standing-room-only crowd got a reminder that they, too, were behind schedule. The insurance marketplace they were working on nights and weekends won’t be completely ready on time.

“It is highly complex, it’s unprecedented and it’s not going to be smooth,” Kevin Counihan, chief executive of the state’s exchange, Access Health CT, told the group.

That’s why Connecticut — like other states across the country — has lowered the bar, doing what it can in the time it has left before the health-care law’s major programs are launched Oct. 1.

Although the states are promising to provide new marketplaces for individuals to compare and buy health insurance plans, the Web portals will be a bare-bones version of what was initially envisioned. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Karen T. BorchersCBO: Obamacare Delay Will Cost Feds Billions

By Tony Pugh. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal government will lose $10 billion in employer penalties in 2015 because of the delayed enforcement. Likewise, many expect that federal outlays to help low- and moderate-income people purchase coverage will grow with employers no longer required to provide coverage next year.

“At a minimum, the federal revenue from fines is gone. More realistically, the costs of already bloated insurance subsidies will escalate and the red ink will rise,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.

Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who helped design the federal health law, said the decision to forego the $10 billion in penalties was both pragmatic and political.

“Basically, it was their judgment that it was causing too many logistical and political headaches and it wasn’t that essential to the law, so they decided to just delay it a year and live with the revenue loss,” Gruber said Wednesday.

Obama officials said as much on Tuesday, when they announced plans to “revamp and simplify” the process of reporting the status of employee coverage and calculating appropriate penalties. “We will convene employers, insurers and experts to propose a smarter system and, in the interim, suspend reporting for 2014,” said White House special adviser Valerie Jarrett. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/GettyObama Skips Past Congress Again With Health Mandate Delay

By Steven T. Dennis and Matt Fuller. President Barack Obama’s latest legal end run around Congress — delaying enforcement of the employer health mandate — has sparked more questions about whether he’s abusing his executive discretion under the Constitution.

The move announced late Tuesday was the latest in a string of decisions where the president, facing a divided Congress unable to get much done beyond keeping the government running, has taken matters into his own hands.

Where a previous president might have asked for a legislative fix if a mandate was proving too onerous for business, the Obama administration put out a couple of blog posts saying that, in listening to the business community, it decided not to enforce a key part of the 3-year-old health law for another year.

The administration notes that parts of laws are delayed in implementation all the time — including various pieces of the tax code.

A Treasury official said the administration has “longstanding administrative authority to grant transition relief when implementing new legislation like the ACA.” Read more from this story HERE.

Catholic Bishop: Supreme Court ‘Giving Legal Protection to an Intrinsic Evil’

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Photo Credit: APBishop Thomas John Paprocki, leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, Ill., says the U.S. Supreme Court is giving “legal protection to intrinsic evil” in its decisions late last month that advanced the cause of legalized same-sex “marriage” in the United States.

“As in the case of Roe v. Wade striking down abortion laws forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court has again usurped its legitimate prerogative through a raw exercise of judicial power by giving legal protection to an intrinsic evil, this time by striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in the case of U.S. v. Windsor and in refusing to take up the defense of Proposition 8 in California in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry.

“These hollow decisions are absolutely devoid of moral authority,” said the bishop. “It is becoming increasingly and abundantly clear that what secular law now calls “marriage” has no semblance to the sacred institution of Holy Matrimony. People of faith are called to reject the redefinition of marriage and bear witness to the truth of Holy Matrimony as a lasting, loving and life-giving union between one man and one woman.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Missouri Governor Vetoes Bill that Nullified Federal Gun Laws

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsGov. Jay Nixon vetoed legislation Friday that would have made it a Missouri crime for federal agents to attempt to enforce federal gun laws in the state and could have landed journalists in jail for publishing the names of gun owners.

The Democratic governor said the bill passed by the Republican-led Legislature violated the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which generally gives preference to federal laws over conflicting state ones. He said it also infringed in the First Amendment rights of free speech and press.

Some supporters of the legislation had proclaimed it one of the most gun-friendly bills ever passed by a state legislature. Nixon, however, said it could have had extreme consequences.

Read more from this story HERE.

Al Qaeda Supporter from Kansas City has Dreams of Jihad Stolen by Yemeni Con Artists

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Photo Credit: The Kansas City StarAs a Kansas City man learned, joining the global jihad against godless imperialism is harder than you’d think.

Especially when the al-Qaeda leaders you’re dealing with are just as adept at conning their own recruits as they are at instigating mass murder.

The FBI’s recent disclosure that a Kansas City man’s terror cell once had cased the New York Stock Exchange was meant to demonstrate that the government’s electronic surveillance programs have disrupted real threats to the homeland.

But the case’s hundreds of pages of court records in Kansas City and New York also show that federal investigators broke up a long-running fraud scheme in which an al-Qaeda leader in Yemen was less interested in stoking his recruits’ passion for holy war than exploiting their bank accounts for his own gain.

In a recent letter to a New York federal judge, the lawyer representing cell member Sabirhan Hasanoff acknowledged that his client once had dreamed of jihad glory, only to get rolled by a Yemeni bunco terrorist.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Delays Employer Mandate, but Leaves HHS Mandate in Effect for Christian Companies

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President Obama’s decision to delay the implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate gives no relief to Christian business owners who object to providing contraception to employees as required by the Health and Human Services mandate, which remains in effect and on pace to reach the U.S. Supreme Court in the midst of the 2014 midterm elections.

The delay of the employer mandate does not affect religious people who oppose the HHS mandate. “They’re going to be subject to a different penalty,” Kyle Duncan of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is challenging the constitutionality of the mandate on behalf of a private company, Hobby Lobby, told the Washington Examiner. “Not the $2,000 per employee penalty that the administration has said it’s going to suspend for the year, but the $100 per employee, per day, IRS excise tax which is in a different section of the IRS code, but the administration has not said they’re going to suspend that.”

Duncan explained that “the reporting requirements that trigger the excise tax, those are different reporting requirements under different Treasury regulations; they predate the Affordable Care Act altogether.”

Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute’s health care policy expert, agreed with Duncan’s assessment. “It’s not that the Obama administration is unwilling to relax onerous mandates on employers,” he noted in an email to the Examiner. “They just don’t think religious freedom is a good enough reason.”

Read more from this story HERE.

54 Months: Record Stretch of 7.5%+ Unemployment Continues

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Photo Credit: APSince January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate.

Today, BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate for June was 7.6 percent, the same it was in May.

In December 2008, the month after Obama was first elected and the month before he was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.3 percent. In January 2009, it climbed to 7.8 percent. In February, the month Obama signed what the Congressional Budget Office would later determine was an $830 billion economic stimulus law, the unemployment rate climbed to 8.3 percent.

In the Obama era, the unemployment rate peaked at 10.0 percent in October 2010. It did not dip below 9 percent until October 2011, when it hit 8.9 percent. From August to September 2012, it dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent—the first time during Obama’s tenure it went under 8 percent.

Read more from this story HERE.

CBO on Amnesty Bill: Probably Would Not Even Stop Half of Illegal Border Crossings

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Photo Credit: Gregory BullBy Stephen Dinan. Spending $35 billion on new Border Patrol agents and fencing would keep tens of thousands of new illegal immigrants from crossing the border each year, but would still only stop between a third and half of future illegal immigration, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest analysis released Wednesday.

The CBO looked at the latest version of the Senate’s immigration bill, which cleared the chamber in a 68-32 vote last week, and said it would reduce but not eliminate illegal immigration.

The “CBO estimates that the net inflow would be reduced by between one-third and one-half compared with the projected net inflow under current law. That effect would not be immediate, as it would take several years before [the Department of Homeland Security] could hire the full number of Border Patrol agents called for in the act,” the nonpartisan agency said in the section of its new analysis dealing with future illegal immigration.

The CBO also had continued good news about an immigration bill’s effects on the federal budget, saying that the additional legal workers will boost the economy and lead to nearly $1 trillion in new tax revenue over the next 20 years.

Wednesday’s analysis was an update to the CBO’s first crack last month at the Senate bill as it emerged from the Judiciary Committee. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APTea Party groups ramp up fight against immigration bill, as August recess looms

By Fox News. After spending weeks dealing with the fallout from the IRS targeting scandal, Tea Party groups are starting to focus their energy on the immigration bill — a development that could imperil President Obama’s hopes for a speedy approval.

Before adjourning for the Fourth of July holiday break, the Senate easily approved its version of the legislation. The bill now rests with the House, where Republicans say they will take up their own version.

Obama, during his Africa trip, called on the House to “get this done” before the August recess.

But House lawmakers already are hearing conservative calls to slow things down. And if the debate leaks into August — when Congress takes a nearly month-long recess — the prospects could get even more wobbly. The Tea Party, during the 2009 August recess, famously helped stall ObamaCare by storming town hall meetings and other events.

Tea Party groups may be preparing to again mount demonstrations during the summer break. And even if the House passes a bill this month, it’s unlikely the two chambers would be able to agree on a unified piece of legislation by August — leaving the work unfinished going into recess. Read more from this story HERE.

Nugent’s 2016 Presidential Slogan: “I Have 9 Kids from 7 Women”

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Photo Credit: Raw Story Nugent’s 2016 slogan: ‘I have 9 children from 7 women, and I’m running for president’

By David Edwards. Conservative rocker Ted Nugent says he’s considering running in 2016 and already has a campaign pitch: “Hi, I’m Ted Nugent. I have nine children from seven women, and I’m running for president.”

In a Washington Post Magazine story published this week, Nugent told Steve Hendrix that he was “thinking about it.”

Nugent’s wife of 24 years, Shemane, explained that he had talked about running before, “but this time he seems more serious. People are constantly asking him to run.”

In the 1980s and the mid-2000s, 66-year-old brother brother Jeff Nugent helped him do polling for a possible run for Michigan governor. At one point, New Mexico Republicans also attempted to draft him to run for governor of their state.

In the end, Nugent said that campaigning and governing would disrupt his hunting plans. Read more from this story HERE.

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Ted, white and blue: How Ted Nugent has rocked politics

By Steve Hendrix. On the final morning of the 2013 NRA annual convention in May, the day was bright, the mood was festive and Ted Nugent was neither dead nor in jail.

It was almost exactly a year earlier that Nugent, speaking on video at the NRA gathering in St. Louis, had made headlines by predicting one or the other would be his fate should Barack Obama become a two-termer. As far as incendiary rhetoric by the rocker-hunter-conservative firebrand goes, this was pretty tame stuff.

He has referred to Obama as a “piece of s–t” and members of his administration as “criminals,” and implored the president to “suck on my machine gun.” The “dead or in jail” comment was notable mostly for prompting a visit by the Secret Service, a meeting Nugent laughed off as a pro forma check-in from agents he described as more star-struck than suspicious…

Now, the constant beseeching from fans and followers has Nugent eyeing a run for the Republican nomination, the party he aligns with as the lesser of two feebles. (He is one of the few Republicans who will disparage Ronald Reagan, mainly for signing a bill restricting machine-gun sales.)

“Things are just so wrong in the country now,” Nugent said. “And I know that my answers would make things wonderful, unless you just refuse to produce, and then I’d recommend that you move to Canada. Or Illinois.” Read more from this story HERE.

Obamacare to Punish Healthy Eaters as Insurance Rates Double or Triple for Those who Choose to Take Care of their Health

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Photo Credit: Natural NewsAccording to an analysis just published by the Wall Street Journal, healthy people will pay double or triple their current health insurance rates under Obamacare. Rates for those with chronic disease, however, will be reduced as all the healthy people subsidize their disease lifestyles.

The net effect is that people who choose to follow a healthy lifestyle — eating well, taking nutritional supplements, exercising and avoiding junk foods — will be financially punished by the federal government while those who choose to follow a disease and sickness lifestyle — eating junk foods, taking meds, refusing to exercise, etc. — will be rewarded by government.

This is the essence of socialized medicine: punish responsible citizens while rewarding those who refuse to take care of their health.

Disease is a matter of cause and effect, not luck

Obamacare, like all socialized medicine systems, is based on the false premise that health outcomes are a matter of pure luck. Disease just “randomly strikes people,” the thinking goes, and individuals have nothing to do with their own health. This false belief fits nicely with the financial interests of Big Pharma and doctors, of course, because it puts the power of health in the hands of corporations and medical personnel.

Read more from this story HERE.

71% of Americans Believe Nation’s Founders Would Be Disappointed With US

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As the United States celebrates Independence Day, most of its adult residents continue to say they are proud to be an American, including 57% who are extremely proud and 28% who are very proud. This high level of pride in being an American has varied only moderately over the past 12 years since the question was first asked, but has been lower since 2005 than it was in the years prior…

Conservatives and Republicans are also slightly more likely to say they are proud than are liberals and Democrats…

Despite their widespread national pride, Americans evince a much more negative response when asked if the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased or disappointed by the way the United States has turned out. Seventy-one percent of Americans say the signers would be disappointed, while 27% say they would be pleased.

Read more from this story HERE.