WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- It was 3 a.m. on a Monday when Wendy Del Monte awoke to a thud.

Thinking it was one of their cats, she wandered into her daughter's bedroom. There, she found her daughter Ally in the throes of despair, shaking, gripping onto a bottle of her father's heart medication. The thud had been the bottle falling to the ground.

"The world just stopped," Del Monte recounted. "She said, 'Mom, I don't think I want to live anymore.' "

Ally was 13 and in eighth grade.
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Use this tool from the Kaiser Family Foundation to figure out how much health coverage might cost you on the new online marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act. Pressing 'submit' will take you to your results on kff.org.

Read our Q&A on the Affordable Care Act or see full coverage.

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The National Review Online is trying to push back on the mea culpa of a judge who now thinks strict voter ID does in fact impermissibly discriminate, maintaining its long-standing position as supporters of election changes that have been widely denounced as blatant forms of voter suppression.

In 2007, well-known and respected conservative Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld a voter ID law in Indiana that was the first in a wave of increasingly stricter restrictions on the right to vote passed by Republican-controlled legislatures. Affirmed by a splintered Supreme Court, as the sole high-profile legal decision on the sort of unnecessary and redundant voter ID laws that are now widely promoted by the GOP, Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board has been incessantly trumpeted by right-wing media as the legal underpinning for their obsession with election changes that are documented to suppress the vote.

Now that Posner has bluntly admitted he was wrong and the evidence shows that strict voter ID is "now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention," NRO is resorting to smearing the judge's integrity and intelligence.

Legal contributor Hans von Spakovsky, the repeatedly discredited champion of photo voter ID laws as the alleged "solution" to the virtually non-existent "problem" of in-person voter fraud, responded to the news of Posner's recent admission by claiming the judge had "been taken in" by the "Left's well-oiled propaganda machine." NRO's in-house legal expert, Ed Whelan, asserted that a switch in judgment by the judge was "weak" and praised a Washington Post columnist who attacked the judge as unethical for speaking publicly.
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NEW YORK, July 29 (Reuters) - Oil drillers in North Dakota's Bakken shale fields are allowing nearly a third of the natural gas they drill to burn off into the air, with a value of more than $100 million per month, according to a study to be released on Monday.

Remote well locations, combined with historically low natural gas prices and the extensive time needed to develop pipeline networks, have fueled the controversial practice, commonly known as flaring. While oil can be stored in tanks indefinitely after drilling, natural gas must be immediately piped to a processing facility.

Flaring has tripled in the past three years, according to the report from Ceres, a nonprofit group that tracks environmental records of public companies.

"There's a lot of shareholder value going up in flames due to flaring," said Ryan Salmon, who wrote the report for Ceres. "Investors want companies to have a more aggressive reaction to flaring and disclose clear steps to fix the problem."

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R3 Sciences announced today that they are building a commercial scale, skid mounted gas process system capable of producing up to 500,000 gallons per year of methanol. The R3 Sciences methanol production system is the first of its kind to employ several key advancements in micro-plant and gas-to-liquid technology. This gas-to-methanol micro plant represents the culmination of several years' work by both internal as well as external research team at R3 Sciences.

A world bank review states that "over 5.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are wasted annually" which equals about 25% of the United States total gas consumption. This gas flaring releases over 400 million tons of greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide annually.

Methanol is considered an essential chemical intermediate for many consumer products and fuel components. It is a building block for biodiesel and fuel cells are now using methanol as a hydrogen source worldwide to generate electricity. Here in the U.S. methanol production moved offshore years ago, taking advantage of cheap natural gas feedstock in other parts of the world. Methanol can serve as a valuable energy storage resource, allowing stranded natural gas to be converted into a more easily transportable liquid. Today, very little methanol is produced in North America, with most methanol produced in other regions around the world where large volumes of natural gas are stranded. In North America and in other regions, considerable volumes of smaller gas sources are simply flared releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The R3 Sciences gas to methanol micro plant process offers an alternative to simply wasting natural gas by burning it in a flare.

Until now, the predominant method for producing methanol has involved feeding large natural gas volumes into refinery scale, Fischer-Tropsch systems to produce methanol. These systems typically operate at high pressures and high temperatures. The R3 Sciences gas-to-methanol micro-plant will operate at much lower pressures and temperatures, which lower the cost and complexity of operations.
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The testing conducted by the Coordinating Research Council (CRC) neither captures nor represents the reality of the U.S. car market. More than 80% of the miles driven in the United States are on cars that are less than 10 years old, yet 7 of the 15 cars tested were past their “product useful life” of 10 years. Only one car was a late model year – a 2009 Honda Accord. It should not be surprising that a 1996 Toyota Camry, 5 years past its useful life, with a Kelley Blue Book value of $3,750, did not perform well under stringent testing conditions.

The test did not use the 15% ethanol blend (E15) that new standards call for. Instead, they used Aggressive E20. The word “aggressive” means the addition of sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid to the fuel mix (ph of 2.8). Needless to say, standard car parts were never built to withstand acid in the fuel. Moreover, ethanol in water is a slight base; hence any resulting corrosion does not resemble corrosion due to acid exposure. (Note: Off-the shelf E10 that was NOT “aggressive” was used for the control test.)

Water in the fuel is a strong abrasive. The water content of their Aggressive E20 blend was raised to the top of the legal limit. Commercially sold ethanol has about half of that water content.

The study specifies that: “The project oversight panel specified the aromatic level of the base gasoline (prior to ethanol blending) to approximately 40% volume.” In other words, per the request of non-scientist auto and oil representatives, CRC increased the percentage of octane-enhancing aromatics in the fuel to 40% – 10% more than the normal fuel aromatics content of 30%. This change, in turn, enabled CRC to use 80-octane fuel, which has less tolerance for water, despite the fact that the minimum sold in the U.S. is 84-octane. Running the test on 80-octane fuel caused the water they added to the fuel to become an even stronger abrasive.

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The life of the $600 million figure appears to be the latest example of how misinformation is fermented within the right-wing media and then adopted as quasi-policy by the Republican Party. After all, Rep. Camp is holding a hearing specifically to determine why the government's $600 million health care website doesn't work, even though the site didn't cost $600 million.

The eye-popping $634 million figure was first trumpeted in a piece by Andrew Couts at Digital Trends on October 8. It pointed out that the Montreal-based company awarded the contract to build healthcare.gov, CGI Federal, had received $634 million in government contracts related to health care. (Digital Trends later amended the article and lowered the figure to "more than $500 million" that was allegedly spent "to build the digital equivalent of a rock.&quot


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Independently, the Sunlight Foundation estimated it cost $70 million to build the much-maligned website, not $634 million. (Officially, CGI was awarded a $93 million contract for the healthcare.gov job.)

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Despite those red flags, the bloated figure has been widely embraced as factual within the conservative press.
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What GAO Found

Effective tax rates (ETR) differ from statutory tax rates in that they attempt to measure taxes paid as a proportion of economic income, while statutory rates indicate the amount of tax liability (before any credits) relative to taxable income, which is defined by tax law and reflects tax benefits and subsidies built into the law. Lacking access to detailed data from tax returns, most researchers have estimated ETRs based on data from financial statements. A common measure of tax liability used in past estimates has been the current tax expense--either federal only or worldwide (which comprises federal, foreign, and U.S. state and local income taxes). The most common measure of income for these estimates has been some variant of pretax net book income. GAO was able to compare book tax expenses to tax liabilities actually reported on corporate income tax returns.

[font size="3"]For tax year 2010 (the most recent information available), profitable U.S. corporations that filed a Schedule M-3 paid U.S. federal income taxes amounting to about 13 percent of the pretax worldwide income that they reported in their financial statements (for those entities included in their tax returns). When foreign and state and local income taxes are included, the ETR for profitable filers increases to around 17 percent. The inclusion of unprofitable firms, which pay little if any tax, also raises the ETRs because the losses of unprofitable corporations greatly reduce the denominator of the measures. Even with the inclusion of unprofitable filers, which increased the average worldwide ETR to 22.7 percent, all of the ETRs were well below the top statutory tax rate of 35 percent.[/font] GAO could only estimate average ETRs with the data available and could not determine the variation in rates across corporations. The limited available data from Schedules M-3, along with prior GAO work relating to corporate taxpayers, suggest that ETRs are likely to vary considerably across corporations.

Why GAO Did This Study

Proponents of lowering the U.S. corporate income tax rate commonly point to evidence that the U.S. statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent, as well as its average effective tax rate, which equals the amount of income tax corporations pay divided by their pretax income, are high relative to other countries. However, GAO's 2008 report on corporate tax liabilities (GAO-08-957) found that nearly 55 percent of all large U.S.-controlled corporations reported no federal tax liability in at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

Given the difficult budget choices Congress faces and its need to know corporations' share of the overall tax burden, GAO was asked to assess the extent to which corporations are paying U.S. corporate income tax. In this report, among other things, GAO (1) defines average corporate ETR and describes the common methods and data used to estimate this rate and (2) estimates average ETRs based on financial statement reporting and tax reporting. To conduct this work, GAO reviewed economic and accounting literature, analyzed income and expense data that large corporations report on the Schedules M-3 that they file with Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and interviewed IRS officials.

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