24 days to Al Gore’s ’10 years to save the planet’ and ‘point of no return’ planetary emergency deadline

From the “say your prayers, we’re gonna roast” department.

Read more at Watts Up With That?
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Does the Obamacare Deadline Apply to Me?

HERITAGE FOUNDATION/FOUNDRY - In two weeks, Obamacare’s centerpiece—the individual mandate to purchase government-approved health insurance—kicks in. Are you “covered,” as the White House keeps asking in its endless advertising? Because if you don’t have health insurance by March 31, you will have to pay a penalty on your income tax form next year.

For 2014, the penalty for not purchasing insurance will be either $95 or 1 percent of your annual income (whichever is greater). But as Heritage expert Alyene Senger explains, “Very few, if any, people will end up paying just $95, because individuals with an annual income of only $9,500 or less would likely qualify for Medicaid or a hardship exemption from the mandate.”

If you don’t make enough income to file a federal tax return, you’re already exempt. Do you think you qualify for a hardship exemption? Check out the application (subject to approval by Health and Human Services) here. For example, did you:

Receive “a shut-off notice from a utility company”?
Recently experience the death of a close family member?
Receive a notice that your health plan was being canceled, and “you consider the other plans available unaffordable”?

At the end of the list, the application form has the catch-all reason “You experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance.” To prove it? “Please submit documentation if possible.”

Despite all these possible exemptions, The Fiscal Times reports, “A new study by Bankrate.com shows that about one-third of uninsured Americans are going to remain without coverage and opt to pay the penalty.” In fact, more than half of the uninsured are “unaware of the March 31 deadline.”

If you think the penalty is no big deal right now, Heritage’s Senger warns that “The mandate increases drastically in coming years, rising to $325 or 2 percent of income in 2015, and $695 or 2.5 percent of income in 2016—whichever is greater.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that from 2015 to 2024, the mandate penalty—which the Supreme Court ruled is essentially a tax—is expected to cost Americans $51 billion.

And that was after President Obama promised not to raise taxes on the middle class.

It’s worth mentioning the official name of this tax—because it just doesn’t get any more Orwellian. Really, it’s the left’s ideal name for all taxes: the “shared responsibility payment.”

Get ready to pay up, comrades.

Source: Heritage.org/Foundry Read More......

Hoyer balks at March 18 White House healthcare deadline

THE HILL 3/9/2010 - “None of us has mentioned the 18th other than Mr. Gibbs,” Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday at his weekly meeting with reporters, referring to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. ∴ Going further, Hoyer refused to commit to House passage of either healthcare or the 2010 budget prior to the Easter recess, which is scheduled to begin on Saturday, March 27. Read more at The Hill... Read More......

Anglican's future

"The biblical drama of sin, mercy, healing, salvation and liberation will reassert itself ."
National Post, February 22, 2007 - Father Raymond J. De Souza wrote,

It has been remarked for a long time that the centre of gravity in the Christian world is shifting from north to south, from North America and Europe to Africa and Asia. The meeting of Anglican Primates this past week in Tanzania might be marked as the moment when that shift made its first global impact.

The Anglican Communion has been facing an insurmountable challenge these past few years. The small and getting smaller Anglican churches in the United States and Canada have decided, for the most part, that homosexual acts should be judged morally licit, and even sacramental. The big and getting bigger Anglican churches in Africa have kept to the constant Christian teaching that such acts are sinful. Between the two, the Archbishop of Canterbury has valiantly attempted to fashion a compromise. But of course something cannot be both a sacrament and a sin, so matters had to be resolved one way or the other.

The plain meaning of the Tanzania meeting is that the leading Anglican archbishops have given the U.S. Episcopal Church a Sept. 30 deadline to recant of their approval of same-sex marriage and actively gay bishops. If they do not recant, the apparent consequence would be that the U.S. Episcopal Church will be expelled from the Anglican Communion, and those American Episcopalians who hold to the Christian heritage on such matters will be provided for in some other way -- likely to involve the same African archbishops who have insisted on calling the U.S. Episcopal Church to account. If that indeed happens in September, the Archbishop of Canterbury will have to finally decide whether to throw his lot in with the north or the south. If he opts for the north, he might find himself the last Archbishop of Canterbury to claim leadership of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Continued... Read More......