An audit report published this month by the inspector general for the Social Security Administration says that the Internal Revenue Service’s reluctance to penalize employers who consistently file W-2s on which the Social Security Number and name do not match has “hindered” the SSA’s efforts to stop “unauthorized noncitizens” from using Social Security Numbers that are fake or belong to someone else.
The audit report looked at “inaccurate wage reporting”—or the filing of W-2 forms on which the name and the Social Security Number do not match. The SSA has long said these no-match W-2s are frequently filed on behalf of illegal aliens. According to the IG audit report released earlier this month, a senior IRS official admitted to the IG that the service knows this is the case.
“Furthermore,” said the report, “a senior employment tax official at the IRS acknowledged that unauthorized noncitizens accounted for a high percentage of inaccurate wage reporting.”
[…]The IG’s audit report said SSA staff believed employers had an incentive to file bad W-2s because they were not worried about the IRS doing anything about it.
[…]“SSA senior staff did not believe employers had an incentive to submit accurate annual wage reports because the IRS rarely enforced existing penalties,” said the report. “SSA staff believed applying penalties would deter SSN misuse. Furthermore, SSA senior staff believed the Agency could provide the IRS with sufficient evidence to show an employer knew or should have known its employees’ SSNs were incorrect. For example, a reasonable person should recognize that hundreds of workers could not have the same or consecutively numbered SSNs.”
The IRS is commonly known as one of the most left-wing, socialist departments in the government – these are the guys who punished Tea Party groups in order to get Obama re-elected.
The Justice Department will file a lawsuit against Texas on Thursday, arguing that the state’s voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act.
Attorney General Eric Holder vowed to fight state voting laws that the DOJ views as unfair or in violation of federal law, despite a recent Supreme Court decision striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
[…]The Texas law requires voters to produce one of the following before casting a ballot: a driver’s license, a personal ID card, a military ID card, a citizenship certificate with a photograph, a U.S. passport or a license to carry a concealed handgun.
Opponents of the law argue that it unfairly discriminates against minority voters who might not have a photo ID and might not able to obtain one easily.
Many Republicans, especially the Texas delegation, have balked at the possibility of the DOJ’s lawsuit against Texas.
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, blasted the DOJ’s decision to move against Texas.
The congressman said he talked with Holder and asked him to withdraw the lawsuit, arguing Congress should be the one to resolve discrepancies within the Voting Rights Act.
“I regret that the Department of Justice announced its intent to file a lawsuit against Texas’ Voter ID law citing Section 2 to the Voting Rights Act,” said Sensenbrenner in a statement. “Voter ID laws are an essential element in protecting the integrity of our electoral process and do not have a discriminatory intent or effect.
Some of my readers in other countries often ask me – “if Obama is such a bad President, then how come the majority of Americans voted for him”. Well, first of all, a lot of these people are simply voting for Obama in order to get a share of what their working neighbors earn. They want the government to give them money, in short. But a lot of the votes for Democrats are simply fraudulent votes. People voting twice in two different states, dead people’s names being used by fraudulent voters, etc. Voter fraud is a Democrat specialty. It’s so sacred to them that even Attorney General Eric Holder is suing anyone who tries to take away voter fraud. This is about what you would expect from an administration that facilitated the sale of weapons to drug cartels and covered up Benghazi by blaming a Youtube video.
Because Richard Dawkins doesn’t understand basic logic:
That’s the latest video from Peter Byrom, aka BirdieUpon. (H/T Peter S. Williams)
And don’t take my word for it, look at what sensible atheist Jeffrey Jay Lowder has to say about it:
I find myself in an odd situation. I agree with Dawkins’ decision not to debate Craig, but not for the reasons he has given (more on that in a moment). With all due respect to Dawkins, I don’t think he should debate Craig because he simply isn’t qualified to do so. If The God Delusion is any indication, Dawkins clearly isn’t familiar with contemporary philosophy of religion, whereas Craig is an expert on the philosophy of religion.
The idea of Dawkins debating Craig would would be like a championship bodybuilder, who just happens to have a green belt in Taekwondo, agreeing to a fight with an eigth-degree black belt. Bodybuilding is not completely irrelevant to Taekwondo and the bodybuilder may be the best bodybuilder in the world, but bodybuilding and Taekwondo are clearly not the same thing. The black belt would easily and decisivelybeat the bodybuilder.
There is no shame or dishonor in declining a mismatch. If the black belt challenged the green belt (bodybuilder) to a fight, the bodybuilder would be rational–indeed, wise–to decline the invitation. The bodybuilder needs to clearly acknowledge, however, that he is declining because it would be a mismatch.
And if Dawkins did decline the invitation on the grounds it was a mismatch, theists shouldn’t act as if they’ve scored some major victory, just as, say, Billy Graham’s refusal to debate an atheist philosopher of religion shouldn’t be viewed as a victory for atheism.
Billy Graham shouldn’t debate Peter Millican the same way that Richard Dawkins shouldn’t debate William Lane Craig. Exactly!
But I don’t even agree with Mr. Lowder that Dawkins can do biology, either.
Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is being touted as a scathing rebuttal to intelligent design (ID), yet an actual response to mainstream ID thinking can hardly be found in the book. Though the book makes passing mention of “irreducible complexity” in a couple places, there are zero mentions of leading ID proponents like Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, Stephen Meyer, or any other well-known ID proponent. Instead, Dawkins refers extensively to “creationists,” repeatedly attacking young earth creationism, while also making heavy use of fallacious (and dubious) “poor design” examples that rebut no argument made by a leading advocate of design since perhaps the 19th century. It seems that Dawkins didn’t have the stomach to tackle the actual modern theory of intelligent design in his new book.
Mr. Dawkins, when he isn’t busy pushing for infanticide and adultery and aliens causing the origin of life, hasn’t bothered to engage at all with recent criticisms of evolution – he is still stuck in the 19th century. This is not a person who is credible about anything related to evolution and biology. He cites professors of German language as an authority on the historical Jesus, for goodness’ sake.
The reason why atheists like him is because he is rude, crude and insulting. And that’s what popular atheism is all about. Blindly believing in eternal universes, unseen aliens and untestable multiverses, and being insulting to real scientists, real historians and real philosophers. If you are a science-respecting person, then you are reading Stephen C. Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell” and “Darwin’s Doubt”. That’s where the real science is being done – not using faked embryo drawings from the 19th century.
WINTERY KNIGHT 