Does Obamacare Give The IRS Direct Access To Bank Accounts? NO. Here’s Why.

Making the rounds lately has been a meme regarding the IRS somehow procuring direct, real-time access to American citizen’s savings accounts as a result of Obamacare legislation.

The only connections I can find any reference to, concerning Obamacare and this accusation, specifically reference a list of claims about a bill called H.R.3200, or America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.

The forward had been fairly widely distributed via email forwards and message board posts, and included such criticisms as, “Page 58 and 59: The government will have real-time access to an individual’s bank account and will have the authority to make electronic fund transfers from those accounts,” a summary which was penned by a gent by the name of Peter Fleckenstein.

The actual Obamacare bill that DID pass is called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and was H.R.3590, not H.R.3200. H.R.3200 was only a proposal, never passed, and did not become law. I can’t find any well-documented link between Obamacare/PPACA and the IRS claim, except for just memes such as above. All other sources that try to document the link refer to the failed proposal of H.R.3200, rather than the actual Obamacare document of H.R.3590.

Is 11-year-old Thomas Lobel Getting a Sex Change? NO. Here’s Why.

Word seems to be spreading like wildfire about an article written two years ago, about a boy who supposedly is undergoing a sex-change procedure at the advice of his lesbian mothers. I first encountered the story on Facebook, Shared by someone who researches stories in the same fashion that Abraham Lincoln draws breath (if ever, it was long ago and not anymore).

I paid a visit to the post she shared (found here), only to discover that the Facebook Page that posted it (“100 Percent FED Up”) seems to do about the same degree of research and actually just cut-and-pasted only a portion of the full article it sourced from.

That article came from UniversalFreePress.com (tagline, “In-Your-Face News, For Those Who Aren’t Afraid of the Truth”, which is odd because a lot of mistruth seems here to be published thru their forum.

That article listed a Facebook Page of its author, Rick Wells, which I visited to discover that he recently linked to an October 2013 repost of his own article from 2 years ago, onto another “free press” type site FreePatriot.org, without even bothering to change the age of the kid in question.

Fed up with the circles this guy was putting me through, I trying to hunt down the earliest even-slightly more-credible Thomas Lobel articles I could find. One such article from FoxNews.com (though I am not saying FN is exactly credible) in October 2011, paints a completely different picture.

Writer Perry Chiaramonte suggest that the parents are actually quite against the sex-change procedure, and are using the hormone thearapy as a preventative measure so that Thomas can delay making a decision about whether to have sex-change procedures.

The two female guardians (whose gender identity I feel is irrelevant since they are of the position that the boy should remain a boy) say Thomas has threatened self-mutilation in response to having been seen as a boy instead of the girl Thomas insists being, and the guardians wish to give Thomas more time to consider the truth to that claim.

This context is also reflected in a Sept 27, 2011 CNN Video article, which might be among the earliest known references. Most of the criticism Fox News describes, is actually only concerning the use of puberty-delaying treatments on Thomas, rather than in a context of performing sex-change operations on someone that young.

So where did the huge spin come from, that the lesbian couple was changing the sex of their adopted son?

That seems to have come from an article that the Fox News article cites — by none other than UK tabloid The Daily Mail. For those outside of the Daily Mail’s regular influence, TDM is on a similar playing field as the National Inquirer (from the US) which reports of matters along the lines of Aliens-Ate-My-Baby and Elvis sightings.

That Sept 30, 2011 article, which reaches a rather wide audience, makes mirror-opposite claims of the CNN video, and seems to have fueled all of the sensationalized banter. Give it a look, if you dare.