Senate bill fines people refusing health coverage

WASHINGTON (AP) - Americans who refuse to buy affordable medical coverage could be hit with fines of more than $1,000 under a health care overhaul bill unveiled Thursday by key Senate Democrats looking to fulfill President Barack Obama's top domestic priority.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the fines will raise around $36 billion over 10 years. Senate aides said the penalties would be modeled on the approach taken by Massachusetts, which now imposes a fine of about $1,000 a year on individuals who refuse to get coverage. Under the federal legislation, families would pay higher penalties than individuals.

In a revamped health care system envisioned by lawmakers, people would be required to carry health insurance just like motorists must get auto coverage now. The government would provide subsidies for the poor and many middle-class families, but those who still refuse to sign up would face penalties.

Called "shared responsibility payments," the fines would be set at least half the cost of basic medical coverage, according to the legislation.

The European Space Agency (Esa) has released a stunning image of the spiral galaxy M51, otherwise known as the Whirlpool Galaxy.

It is a composite of images taken by Europe's Herschel space observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.

The picture combines views of the galaxy captured at visible and far-infrared wavelengths.

It highlights the cool, dusty and gaseous regions of M51, where the process of star formation is underway.

Professor David Southwood, director of science and robotic exploration at Esa, commented: "It's a wonderful image. It gives you some sense of the resolution we're going to get (with the Herschel telescope).

"The red areas are those we have detected where we know star formation is going on. We're seeing the birth of stars already."

A WOULD-BE thief made the worst mistake of his career after breaking into the house of a retired Army boxer.

Gregory McCalium, 23, fronted court yesterday with a black eye and a fat lip after he was busted - and subsequently bashed - by 71-year-old Frank Corti in Mr Corti’s house in Oxford, UK.

Mr Corti said he was woken in the middle of the night by noises in his house and was confronted by the knife-wielding McCalium when he went to investigate.

He said McCalium “took a slash” at him, but Mr Corti ducked and threw two big right hooks at the lout.

And Mr Corti knows how to throw a right hook – he was famous for it as a featherweight in the Royal Engineers.

The blows almost knocked McCalium out, allowing Mr Corti to perform a citizens’ arrest and wait for the police.

McCalium’s lawyer told the court his client “looked like a car accident”.

The controversial climate bill that is set to be taken up by the Senate on Monday after its passage in the House will legislate home inspections by government regulators who will demand to audit every aspect of your property under the threat of substantial and repeated fines if their visits are denied or their demands not satisfied.

The climate legislation is written in a manner that automatically assumes that global warming is taking place and that it is attributed to rising CO2 levels, despite the fact that this is a highly contentious question and is being rejected by more and more scientists as time goes by.

As Tony Pacheco writes in his excellent article today, the bill will “audit every aspect of your home and life”.

The bill states every home owner will receive an energy audit. What is a home energy audit? It is an intrusive visit made by the bureaucrats at the Home Energy Team or a similar group. They will examine and report the way you live your life directly to RESNET (Residential Energy Services Network) . Light fixtures, socket types, spas, hot tubs, windows, appliances, walls and roofs will all be under review. Energy tests will be conducted throughout your house. At the end of the visit you will receive a report and a rating. The report will focus on the changes you need to make and the rating is called a HERS rating (Home Energy Rating System). RESNET will perform the audits through authorized contractors. RESNET has adopted the Mortgage Industry National Home Energy Rating Standards. The standards set the national procedures for home energy ratings.

According to RESNET, an audit consists of:
Comprehensive Home Energy Audit - A level of the RESNET Home Energy Audit process defined by this standard to include the evaluation, diagnosis and proposed treatment of an existing home. The Comprehensive Home Energy Audit may be based on a Home Performance Assessment (“Comprehensive Home Performance Energy Audit”) or Home Energy Rating (“Comprehensive HERS Audit”), in accordance with the criteria established by this Standard. A homeowner may elect to go through this process with or without a prior Home Energy Survey or Diagnostic Home Energy Survey.

Regulations already in place in some cities for non-residential buildings already carry fines of $2000 a time for preventing bureaucrats from carrying out inspections. These will simply be expanded to cover all premises under the new climate bill.

The sweeping new bill which just passed the House last Friday, the Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, is ostensibly about climate change, but it is in fact a bill of staggering economic ramifications that is going to accelerate the takeover of the economy by the well-placed financiers who have already plundered the Treasury and the Fed of $12+ trillion and counting. It was rushed through the House in the tradition of such nightmarish legislation as the Patriot Act and the banker bailout of last October: hundreds of pages were added to it at the last minute and it was humanly impossible for anyone to have read it before they voted on it. This, of course, is exactly what Obama promised his administration would never allow to happen, and for good reason; bills passed in this manner are always the result of fear and panic and inevitably results in legislation that would never be passed upon sober second thought.

In this case, the rush to pass this new bill was an attempt to stop any scrutiny of a plan that is going to utterly transform the American economy, further centralize control of citizens’ lives in the hands of unaccountable federal bureaucrats and complete the transfer of the American economy from Main Street to Wall Street. And all of this in the name of fighting a threat which itself is a demonstrable fraud. In short, the banksters and bureaucrats are sharpening their knives, preparing to butcher what’s left of the carcass of the United States, and a good portion of the public are not only willing to allow it but are actually clamoring for it.

The first thing that needs to be understood about the brand new trillion dollar carbon-trading commodities market that will be brought into existence if this bill passes the Senate is that it is a ripoff designed by and for the very corporate interests the environmentalists claim to be fighting. For an historical precedent of what is being proposed under this cap-and-trade scam one can look to Enron, which immediately found ways to plunder billions of dollars from new energy market legislation passed by the Clinton Administration in 2000. They gave schemes for manipulating billions of dollars out of Californians funny little names like Death Star and even went so far as to rig up a completely fake trading floor in their offices in order to bamboozle investors who were interested in the company’s remarkable success. They got away with it because they were The Smartest Guys in the Room, much brighter than the government bureaucrats who were supposed to stop them from committing such blatant fraud (assuming the regulators weren’t simply paid to look the other way). And now supporters of this new bill are putting their blind faith in these same bureaucrats to regulate a scheme to create a vastly more complex market with hundreds of times as much money at stake. Is it any wonder Enron was a booster for cap-and-trade?

US opens 'major Afghan offensive'

The United States army says it has launched a major offensive against the Taliban in the southern Afghan province of Helmand.

The US military says about 4,000 marines as well as 650 Afghan troops are involved, supported by US warplanes.

Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, said this operation was different because of its "massive size" and speed.

Officers on the ground said it was the largest marine offensive since Vietnam.

As the US moves away from a gasoline-only auto culture, researchers and the government are investigating alternative taxes to fund road-building and maintenance, the Kansas City Star reports. The leading idea to supplant the gas tax is a by-the-mile approach endorsed by a federal commission. “If you’re committed to the system being improved then it was a no-brainer,” the chairman said.

The commission prefers a high-tech approach utilizing GPS trackers in cars to report mileage back to a central database, which would then prepare a monthly bill. With gas mileage improving and all-electric cars on the horizon, the commission wants the system in place by 2020. “The Chevrolet Volt won’t pay a penny of fuel tax,” a transportation official noted.

Veteran actor Karl Malden, who won an Academy Award for his role in "A Streetcar Named Desire," has died at age 97, his manager said Wednesday. Malden also starred in the 1970s television crime drama "The Streets of San Francisco," along with Michael Douglas. Malden was the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1989 to 1992.

The ATF recently dispatched 100 veteran agents to its Houston division, which reaches to the border.

On this day, agents weren’t wearing raid jackets or combat boots and weren’t armed with warrants. Guns were hidden under civilian shirts.

Reporting from Indianapolis and Denver -- The last time Indiana missed its deadline for passing a budget and had to shut down the government was during the Civil War.

But on Monday, as lawmakers raced to hammer out an agreement over school funding, state agencies began preparing 31,000 workers to be temporarily out of a job. Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels has warned residents that most of the state's services -- including its parks, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and state-regulated casinos -- would be shuttered unless a budget is passed today.

Indiana is one of five states -- along with Arizona, California, Mississippi and Pennsylvania -- bracing for possible shutdowns this week as time runs out for lawmakers to close billion-dollar gaps in their fiscal 2010 budgets.

Of the 46 states whose fiscal year ends today, 32 did not have budgets passed and approved by their governors as of Monday afternoon, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Although the majority of those are expected to pass eleventh-hour budgets, the fiscal futures of a handful remain uncertain, said Todd Haggerty, an NCSL research analyst.

"It's a lot of states that are coming down to the wire," Haggerty said. "It's far more than we've seen in the past, and it's because of the state of the economy."