Obamacare Nightmare Begins: Younger Americans’ Health Insurance Premiums to Go Up a Mind-Boggling 169%!

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At his press conference Tuesday, President Obama assured Americans that, “To the 85-90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance: They’re already experiencing most of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act even if they don’t know it.”

Those benefits apparently include higher premiums. According to the Wall Street Journal, insurers are warning that premiums in the individual and small-group markets could double in the next few years. Already, they are well on their way. For example, California health insurers are proposing increases for some customers of 20 percent or more: 26 percent by Blue Cross, 22 percent by Aetna, and 20 percent by Blue Shield. In Maryland, Care First, the state’s largest insurer, has proposed a 25 percent increase for next year.

Younger and healthier Americans can expect to pay even more. According to a survey by the American Action Forum, healthy young people in the individual or small-group insurance markets can look forward to rate increases averaging as much as 169 percent.

While it is always difficult to pin down the exact reason for premium increases, a large portion is traceable to the new health care law. According to a recent study by the American Society of Actuaries, Obamacare will increase health insurance claims costs by 32 percent because of increased adverse selection in the insurance pool. That is, the law’s prohibition on medical underwriting will bring more older and sicker people into the insurance pool, while higher premiums will encourage the young and healthy to forgo insurance until they get sick. (The penalty under Obamacare’s individual mandate is low enough so that it will generally be cheaper for healthy people to “pay,” rather than “play.”)

In addition, Obamacare requires all health insurance plans to provide more benefits and have lower deductibles and co-payments than they do today…

Read more from this story HERE.

New California Law Forces Gun Owners to Fund Gun Seizure Program

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Photo Credit: APGov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday signed legislation aimed at taking handguns and assault rifles away from 20,000 Californians who acquired them legally but have since been disqualified from ownership because of a criminal conviction or serious mental illness.

The measure, the first of several gun-related bills to reach the governor, allocates $24 million in surplus funds to hire dozens of additional special agents to tackle a backlog of 40,000 weapons in the hands of people not allowed to possess firearms.

“This bipartisan bill makes our communities safer by giving law enforcement the resources they need to get guns out of the hands of potentially dangerous individuals,” said Evan Westrup, a spokesman for the governor.

The state operates a database that cross-references a list of gun owners with those disqualified later from owning guns. But, budget cuts have prevented the state Department of Justice from keeping up with the growing number of people on the list.

State Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) introduced SB 140, which takes the money from fees paid when people buy guns and allocates it to a three-year campaign to take guns from those ineligible to have them.

Read more from this story HERE.

875,000 On Suspected Terrorist Watch List

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photo credit: swankslot The number of names on a highly classified U.S. central database used to track suspected terrorists has jumped to 875,000 from 540,000 only five years ago, a U.S. official familiar with the matter said.

Among those was suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose name was added in 2011. The increase in names is due in part to security agencies using the system more in the wake of the failed 2009 attack on a plane by “underpants bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Detroit.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials acknowledged in Congress that they had missed clues to that attack despite Abdulmutallab’s name appearing in the main database, known as TIDE.

Maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, the highly classified database is not a “watchlist” but instead is a repository of information on people whom U.S. authorities see as known, suspected or potential terrorists from around the world.

The “Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment” is a master database which agencies use to build other catalogs of possible terrorists, like the “no-fly” list which prevents people who feature on it from boarding airplanes.

Read more from this story HERE.

Holder Threatens Kansas Over New Gun Law

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photo credit: USDAgovKansas Governor Sam Brownback received a letter today from Attorney General Eric Holder threatening action against the state should it enforce SB102, the pro 2nd Amendment law Brownback signed into law last month.

The new law declares that the federal government has no power to regulate guns manufactured, sold and kept only in Kansas.

Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.

The legislation made it a felony for a federal agent to enforce any law, regulation, order or treaty regulating ammunition made, sold and kept in the state because the federal government does not [have] “interstate commerce” authority over such items.

The law became effective only a week ago, but already Holder has leapt into action, firing off a letter to the governor of Kansas threatening to take “all appropriate action including litigation if necessary” to prevent the state of Kansas from protecting the 2nd Amendment. (Amazing for a guy who didn’t even know about his own department’s gun-running operation, Fast and Furious until months after a border patrol agent was killed by one of its guns.) But when a state passes a law he doesn’t like – this Attorney General is FAST!

Read more from this story HERE.

The Disappearing American Father: 60% of Women Who Give Birth in their 20’s are Unmarried

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Photo Credit: Leon FishmanMore than six out of 10 women who give birth in their early 20s are unmarried, the Census Bureau said Wednesday in a report that shows sharp discrepancies in single mothers related to income, education and race.

Census demographers said that single motherhood, while on a steady uptick since the 1940s, has accelerated in recent years. The birth rate for unmarried women in 2007 was up 80 percent in the almost three decades since 1980, the report said. But in the previous five years alone, between 2002 and 2007, it was up 20 percent.

Echoing the findings of many academic studies, the Census Bureau report said women with college degrees and higher household incomes are far less likely to be single mothers than are women who have lower household incomes and less education.

Overall, 36 percent of all births in the United States were to unmarried mothers in 2011…

Read more from this story HERE.

Pentagon Confirms that Christian Soldiers who Share their Faith may be Court-Martialed

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Religious liberty groups have grave concerns after they learned the Pentagon is vetting its guide on religious tolerance with a group that compared Christian evangelism to “rape” and advocated that military personnel who proselytize should be court martialed.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is calling on the Air Force to enforce a regulation that they believe calls for the court martial of any service member caught proselytizing.

President Mikey Weinstein and others from his organization met privately with Pentagon officials on April 23. He said U.S. troops who proselytize are guilty of sedition and treason and should be punished – by the hundreds if necessary – to stave off what he called a “tidal wave of fundamentalists.”

“Someone needs to be punished for this,” Weinstein told Fox News. “Until the Air Force or Army or Navy or Marine Corps punishes a member of the military for unconstitutional religious proselytizing and oppression, we will never have the ability to stop this horrible, horrendous, dehumanizing behavior.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told Fox News he was stunned that the Pentagon would be taking counsel and advice from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Read more from this story, including the Pentagon’s confirmation to Fox News that Christian soldiers who proselytize violate military regulations, HERE.

To sign a petition opposed to this outrageous policy, click HERE.

IRS Now Using Technology to Track All Credit Card Transactions

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Photo Credit: US NewsThe Internal Revenue Service relies on technology more than ever to sniff out tax cheats using robo-audits and data mining—but so far it has caught lot of minnows, and big fish are still eluding detection.

Even as millions of people’s accounts are screened online and matched against their digital files elsewhere, the IRS’s data-detection tools come nowhere close to collecting the $400 billion in tax dodges estimated to take place each year. The area in which its robo-audits have had the most impact is on tax returns for low-income taxpayers who try to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit. In total, fraudulent claims totaled $2 billion, just 0.01 percent of the total of individual taxes. The EITC was the biggest single compliance problem cited.

That amount is expected to rise in the tax year ahead as the IRS extends the use of data mining to include the personal data of millions more taxpayers. Its sophisticated data-matching and pattern-recognition technology, largely developed by IBM over the past decade, will reach up the income ladder to include more middle-income and small-business filers who itemize deductions, although it is unlikely to have any impact on the complicated filings of high-net-worth taxpayers in the top 5 percent of income earnings, say tax experts who have studied the IRS plans.

“Real time” audits of electronic tax returns. The IRS’s next phase in high-tech tax collection will be to create a “real-time” check of tax returns to “match them to third party information,” said U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George in testimony before Congress. Starting this year, the IRS tools will be able to track all credit card transactions, for starters. The agency has also instructed agents on using online sources such as social media and e-commerce sites including eBay, as well as the rich data generated by mobile devices. In one controversial disclosure in April, the ACLU showed documents in which the IRS general counsel said the agency could look at emails without warrants, but the IRS has said it will not use this power.

Read more from this story HERE.

The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought

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Photo Credit: APThe United States has double the amount of oil and three times the amount of natural gas than previously thought, stored deep under the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, according to new data the Obama administration released Tuesday.

In announcing the new data in a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also said the administration will release within weeks draft rules to regulate hydraulic fracturing, technology that has come under scrutiny for its environmental impact but that is essential to developing all of this energy.

“These world-class formations contain even more energy-resource potential than previously understood, which is important information as we continue to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Jewell said in a statement.

The formations, called Bakken and Three Forks, span much of western North Dakota, the northern tip of South Dakota and the northeastern tip of Montana. The last time the United States Geological Survey assessed this area for its oil and gas reserves was in 2008. But that assessment did not include the Three Forks formation, which explains the substantial increase in the estimates. USGS estimates that these two formations together hold 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered—but technically recoverable—oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Read more from this story HERE.

Study: Desperate for Attention, White House Reporters Abandon Tough Questions of Obama

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Photo Credit: Pete SouzaA groundbreaking new study of White House press conferences over the past 23 years reveals that the events are in a death spiral, especially under President Obama. Reporters, desperate to keep the press conferences alive, have switched to asking easy questions in a bid to coax the president to host more of them, the study says.

Noting that the days when reporters like Sam Donaldson and Helen Thomas pestered President Reagan are long gone, the study in the authoritative journal American Politics Research said that adversarial questions have become rare as presidents have rebelled at them.

“The press want to encourage presidents to hold more of these direct exchanges to benefit their own reputations and media’s prestige,” said the study provided to Secrets. “The press will be less adversarial in these rare meetings to encourage more of them.”

The trend started with former President Clinton as he, former President George W. Bush and Obama curtailed press conferences and especially cut back on solo meetings with the press. Joint press conferences generally feature the president with a foreign leader and are considered easier to handle, said the study. In his first term, Obama held 38 joint and 27 solo press conferences, according to the study.

Read more from this story HERE.

Report: Obama Knows Identity of Benghazi Mastermind but Does Nothing

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Photo Credit: Allison HargerBy Adam Housley. The U.S. has identified the mastermind of the Benghazi attack, sources tell Fox News, though the individual apparently is walking free in Libya.

The confirmation from multiple sources comes more than seven months after the assault on two U.S. locations in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans — including Ambassador Chris Stevens — were killed. President Obama pledged after the attack that “justice will be done.”

But one source told Fox News the government is “sitting on” information.

“We basically don’t want to upset anybody, and the problem is, if Ambassador Stevens’ family knew that we were sitting on information about the people who killed their son, their brother, on and on, then, and we could look them as a government in the face, then we’re messing up. We’re messing up,” the source said.

Fox News spoke exclusively with one special operator who watched the events unfold in real time and has debriefed those who were part of the response. He remains anonymous for his safety and has decided to talk because he says he and others connected with the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi are frustrated with the excuses and lack of a military response since Stevens and three other Americans were killed. Read more from this story HERE.

GOP says Benghazi whistleblowers will ‘expose new facts’

By Jonathan Easley and Julian Pecquet. Eyewitnesses with potentially damaging information on the Obama administration’s handling of last year’s terror attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi will testify at a hearing next week, Republicans said.

The House oversight committee is holding a hearing next week that will “expose new facts and details that the Obama administration has tried to suppress,” oversight chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Wednesday.

Two of Issa’s lieutenants said the witnesses at the hearing would include federal employees with direct knowledge of the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the oversight subpanel on national security, said people with “personal firsthand knowledge” would testify about the attack. Asked if any “whistleblowers” would be among the witnesses, Chaffetz said: “I think they will be appearing. Some of them.”

“I think you will see — again I can’t release any names to you yet, but next Wednesday I think those of us who are concerned about this issue … we’re finally going to get some answers,” Chaffetz told Fox News on Wednesday. Read more from this story HERE.