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How Obamacare raises your taxes if you don’t buy health insurance

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Story here from the Daily Caller. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, Shulman downplayed the IRS’s role in enforcing the recent overhaul of the health insurance industry by claiming the agency would not aggressively target individuals who don’t purchase coverage. He noted that the health-care bill expressly forbids the agency from freezing bank accounts, seizing assets or pursuing criminal charges, but when pressed said the IRS would most likely use tax refund offsets to penalize those that don’t comply with the mandate. The IRS uses refund offsets to collect from individuals that owe the federal government a delinquent debt.

“These are not the kinds of things we send agents out about,” Shulman said. “These are things where you get a letter from us. Congress was very careful to make sure there was nothing too punitive in this bill.”

Many reports have claimed that enforcement of the individual mandate will be non-existent, but Shulman’s answers indicate differently. According to BusinessWeek, starting in 2015 Americans who don’t purchase insurance will be subject to a fine of $325 and that sum increases to $695 in 2016. However, the commissioner seemed confident that in most cases individuals would either receive subsidies to purchase insurance or simply do so on their own in order to comply with the law.

Here’s my previous story explaining how Obamacare is a bad deal for young men because they are forced to pay for the elderly, who use a lot of health care, and they also have to pay for coverage for treatments they will never need, like breast implants and in vitro and abortions. If you young men, and young people in general who are healthy, don’t want to pay for other people’s abortions, then you can kiss your tax refund goodbye.

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How good is Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell”?

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Here’s a new book review (in Scribd format) is here. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

Stephen C. Meyer changes the game in the intelligent design fight with Signature in the Cell, a big book that methodically, but agreeably, constructs an argument that intelligence in some unspecified form, is responsible for the bio-molecular machinery in the cell and, therefore, for first life. Meyer’s argument is, at its heart, logical and statistical but also strives for a reality check by engaging the reader’s day-to-day experience of cause and effect.

[…]His long argument is encyclopedic yet lively and persuades that science is at an impasse in explaining the origin of life as the product of undirected processes. The work overall, technical at times, is directed to the general reader. The scientifically trained reader must decide whether a popular work is “trying to pull a fast one,” preferably guided by criteria that are consistently and dispassionately applied across historical sciences. The author’s passion for his argument is palpable but scrupulously controlled; he is ever mindful that it is the target of scornful attacks by opponents who are, to put it gently, not disinterested. Meyer delivers his argument in the manner of a dish best served cold, yet forcibly enough to shake the base of the materialistic paradigm.

The review appeared in The Journal of the International Society of Philosophical Enquiry.

The review is written by a software engineer, so he understands code, algorithms and specified complexity. His name is Harry Kanigel, and he is the former executive director of Information Technology at UBS Investment Bank. (!)

This book is an excellent science book – the best book on intelligent design available today.

What is intelligent design?

You can read about it here!

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Investigation shows RPGs and RPG rounds found at “Collateral Murder” site

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The Weekly Standard explains the story.

Excerpt:

Wikileaks, the website devoted to publishing classified documents on the Internet, made a splash today with a video claiming to show that the U.S. military “murdered” a Reuters cameraman and other Iraqi “civilians” in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. But a careful watching of the video shows that the U.S. helicopter gun crews that attacked a group of armed men in the then Mahdi Army stronghold of New Baghdad was anything but “Collateral Murder,” as Wikileaks describes the incident.

The Weekly Standard article states, “several of the men are clearly armed with assault rifles; one appears to have an RPG”.

Now consider this post from the Jawa Report, which talks about the after action investigation of the events, and has a clip showing a man holding a long object that looks like an RPG. If you look as the frames from the video, it looks more like an RPG than an AK-47 assault rifle, since there is no curved magazine, but instead a short, stubby grip and a round warhead on the end of it.

Here’s the smoking gun frame:

That looks like an RPG-7 warhead not a curved AK-47 assault rifle magazine

In my judgment, it looks like a Russian RPG-7 or a Chinese Type 69. An RPG is an unguided rocket-propelled grenade that can destroy a Humvee (Hummer) and kill everyone in it with one shot.

An RPG-7/Type 69 looks like this:

And an AK-47 looks like this:

And what’s more, the investigation report (cited by Jawa) says that RPGs and live RPG rounds were found next to the bodies.

The investigation report states:

We remained above the engagement site while Bushmaster sent ground forces to the site. Bushmaster arrived and reported 11 x AIF KIA and found RPGs and RPG rounds at the site. We also witnessed a loaded RPG lying 2-3 blocks south of the engagement site. Bushmaster reported that the first child was wounded and pulled from the van. We were unable to determine that there were children in the vehicle and never saw any children prior to or during the engagement. After viewing the gun tape, were able to determine that both wounded children came from the van. Bushmaster immediately MEDEVAC’d both girls to FOB Loyalty for medical care.

Bushmaster is the call-sign for the ground force that was being covered by the helicopter. The ground force was composed of Humvees. Humvees that would likely be destroyed by an AT RPG round. (And probably by an HE round, too.) At the Jawa Report post, you can see a photo taken from the dead journalist’s camera of the Humvees rounding the corner and coming into line of sight to the RPG-armed terrorists.

I’m sorry, but this is war. This. Is. War. Bad things happen in wars. The world is not a perfect place.

Journalists like those who were killed should not be embedding with terrorists and then expecting to be immune to collateral damage. Our American military forces are the most honorable and moral soldiers in the world. They do their best to follow the rules of engagement. In this case, they acted appropriately. I am thankful and proud of their self-sacrificial service to protect my liberty and the liberty of the Iraqi people. Shame on those in the leftist media who question their judgment. Shame! Shame!