Daily Catch: Cain Fakes Sick, ‘Shared Responsibility Payments’, and Sebelius in Denial…

Faking Sick: Sen. Dawn Hill (D-York), at last night’s meeting of the Appropriations Committee, told the audience that Sen. Emily Cain (D-Penobscot) couldn’t make the meeting because she was feeling ill. But it turns out Cain wasn’t too sick to enthusiastically fundraise for her congressional campaign. Cain put out this photo on social media at the same time she was supposedly too sick to be working in the State House.

National Republican Campaign Committee Spokesman Ian Prior leaped on Cain’s playing flunky with a press release likening her to Ferris Bueller: “Emily Cain should be absolutely ashamed of herself for skipping out on her job as a State Senator in order to attend a fundraiser for her Congressional campaign. Cain owes her constituents an apology for such an embarrassing dereliction of duty and she needs to explain why anyone would vote for someone who puts campaign cash and personal advancement over public service.”

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IRS Imposes Orwellian ‘Shared Responsibility Payment’: President Barack Obama’s IRS yesterday released a series of “Health Care Tax Tips” warning Americans about the individual mandate contained in the Affordable Care Act a.k.a. Obamacare. If individuals do not obtain “qualifying” health insurance, the IRS says, they will face a “shared responsibility payments” – the latest nomenclature ascribed to the coercive penalty designed to compel American citizens to purchase health insurance. The penalty will eventually reach 2.5 percent of Adjusted Gross Income or $2,085 – whichever is higher, according to Americans for Tax Reform.

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Playing Dumb: Democratic lawmakers are telling members of the Maine media that they’re not sure how they feel about Sen. Roger Katz (R-Kennebec)’s Medicaid expansion proposal. But their apparent ignorance is undermined by “non-partisan” committee analyst Jane Orbeton’s role in writing the legislation. On the PDF file of Katz’s bill, Orbeton is listed as the author of the document. Given Orbeton’s ideologically alignment with Democratic leadership, as revealed by The Maine Wire, it’s hard to imagine House Speaker Mark Eves (D-North Berwick) and Senate President Justin Alfond (D-Portland) got their first look at the bill this week. Members of the media should beware of attempts by Democratic lawmakers to pretend they had no role in crafting the latest expansion gambit.

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Heliocentrism Lost on Democrats: A 2012 National Science Foundation survey found that many Democrats don’t know that the earth revolves around the sun and takes a year to do so. Now, to be fair, the Earth does not revolve directly around the sun due to the gravitational pull of other planets. (All planets technically orbit the solar system’s “center of mass” – i.e. the barycenter – the location of which varies depending on the alignment of the planets.) Nonetheless, the results of the National Opinion Research Center’s survey revealed that many Democrats could not correctly say whether the sun revolves around the earth or the other way around. A smaller portion still did not know how long such a revolution takes. From the Washington Post: “In the 2012 survey, only a bare majority of adults were able to answer both questions correctly: 55 percent of adult Americans responded both that the Earth goes around the Sun and that it takes a year for that to occur…. More disturbingly, in 2012 a majority of Democrats (51 percent) could not correctly answer both that the Earth goes around the Sun and that this takes a year.” So much for settled science!

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Transportation Pivot: President Barack Obama on Wednesday called for a four-year, $302 billion transportation bill, according to Politico. The White House said at least part of the cost will be covered by “pro-growth” tax reform, though officials couldn’t comment on the details of such reform.

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Alarming CDC Stat from Mississippi: According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, 72 percent of Mississippi’s abortions have been performed on black mothers. From CNSNews.com: “Although whites outnumber blacks in Mississippi by nearly 2-to-1, 71.67% of the babies aborted in Mississippi are black, while 26.6% are white.”

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Sebelius in Denial: Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has made a number of preposterous statements regarding the troubled health care law she has been tasked with overseeing. She recently claimed, for instance, that Obamacare will have zero impact on private sector job creation — despite a report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office stating the contrary. Sebelius’ latest fib is that having seven million Americans enroll in Obamacare by March 2014 was never the administration’s goal:

Here to fact check Sebelius is… Sebelius!