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A consultant considered an architect to the federal health care law who said a “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter” were critical to getting it passed reportedly received $481,050 from the state of Michigan, and a recently elected state representative said he wants an investigation. Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who created an econometric model intended to project health care spending and costs under different assumptions, along with his team, was granted a $481,050 contract by the state of Michigan, according to the Washington Post. He was paid that to help set up state...

The son of a former Virginia state senator has told federal investigators that U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner discussed the possibility of several jobs, including a federal judgeship, for the senator’s daughter in an effort to dissuade him from quitting the evenly divided state Senate.

Previously unpublished data from the last big election in Burlington, Vt., reveals a significant number of votes were cast by individuals whose names were not on the statewide checklist. In the 2012 presidential election, 17,383 votes were cast in Burlington, according to city-published data. According to data not published by the city, but made available to a reporter, 639 of those votes, or 3.7 percent, came from election day walk-in voters whose names were not on the voter rolls and whose registration status was unknown. As previously reported, votes by individuals whose names don’t appear on the checklist count whether...

While strong cases can be made for both Benghazi and Fast and Furious, most voters consider Barack Obama’s misuse of the IRS to be his administration’s worst scandal so far. But, as we wrote last year, targeting of conservative non-profits for harassment is not the only dimension of the IRS scandal. In addition, there is strong reason to believe that one or more White House political appointees have illegally accessed private taxpayer information and used it for political gain.Austan Goolsbee directed Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and later chaired his Council of Economic Advisers. In August 2010, Goolsbee conducted...

Washington, DC – Despite early refusals to make available IT professionals who worked on Lois Lerner’s computer, Ways and Means Committee investigators have now learned from interviews that the hard drive of former IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner was “scratched,” but data was recoverable. In fact, in-house professionals at the IRS recommended the Agency seek outside assistance in recovering the data. That information conflicts with a July 18, 2014 court filing by the Agency, which stated the data on the hard drive was unrecoverable – including multiple years’ worth of missing emails. “It is unbelievable that we cannot get...

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country. The finding, located on page 11 of the report, states that 44% of the remaining 2,611,780 application "inconsistencies" are related to verifying "Citizenship/national status/lawful presence." Another 960,492 application inconsistencies were related to verifying whether subsidy applicants provided accurate income information.

"If a judge is told by a party to decide his cases in a certain way, or one party can threaten the judge’s job if the case is not decided in that party’s favor, then this central pillar of our democratic society is corroded,” Petersen said at a recent hearing called by the Senate Law and Justice Committee.

According to a report published late last night in POLITICO, the hard drive belonging to Lois Lerner where the IRS claims her emails to outside agencies and groups like the White House, Department of Justice, FEC, Democrat members of Congress, etc. were stored has been...destroyed. Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources. “We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the...

The IRS’ inability to locate a trove of emails belonging to Lois Lerner, the former agency official at the center of the department’s targeting scandal is “mind-boggling,” according to an expert in electronic discovery. Bruce Webster, who has served as a consulting and IT expert in more than 80 civil lawsuits, is astonished by the fact that the IRS could lose two years’ worth of emails. “It is very well known in both legal and IT circles that as soon as litigation and/or criminal investigation is likely -- not actually initiated, but merely likely -- it is imperative to preserve...

If there is one thing I learned in the 2012 election cycle, it was about voter fraud. My conservative warrior associate, Katherine Engelbrecht, and her organization, True the Vote, took up the mantle against the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections, Gertrude Walker, who admitted to sending “questionable” results to the Florida Secretary of State. It was somewhat disheartening that the Florida Secretary of State and Attorney General sat back, watched the news reports, and did nothing. With that background, I’d like to share a story written by Gregg Prentice: “Voter Fraud? If they’re not catching the easy stuff, what...

RICHMOND, Va. – A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections. George acknowledged that the number of voters who actually cast multiple ballots is relatively small. In the case of Maryland and Virginia, he revealed that 164 people voted in both states during the 2012 election....

If you didn't realize it, yesterday was Earth Day. Founded back in 1970, this event was created to foster support for environmental protection. (Coincidentally, it's also the day communists celebrate the birthday of Vladimir Lenin.) Chances are you saw some news reports on the joys of recycling and other such fluff. Personally, I find such Earth Day nonsense quite tiresome as the environmental movement went from wanting to stop pollution to full-tilt insane in a few decades. One of the Earth Day consequences that we have is the EPA, which liberals and eco-nuts will gleefully remind us was signed into...

New figures by the Congressional Budget Office released on Monday reveal that over the next 10 years the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio will double to 78%. Over the last four decades America's average debt-to-GDP ratio was 39%. At the end of 2007, federal debt was just 35% of GDP. The CBO report says gross federal debt will soar from $17.7 trillion to $27 trillion over the next ten years. CBO warned of the dire consequences the nation's debt will have if gone unchecked. "Such high and rising debt would have serious negative consequences," says the report. "Federal spending on interest payments...

Reid and his oldest son, Rory, are both involved in an effort by a Chinese energy giant, ENN Energy Group, to build a $5 billion solar farm and panel manufacturing plant in the southern Nevada desert. Reid has been one of the project's most prominent advocates, helping recruit the company during a 2011 trip to China and applying his political muscle on behalf of the project in Nevada. His son, a lawyer with a prominent Las Vegas firm that is representing ENN, helped it locate a 9,000-acre (3,600-hectare) desert site that it is buying well below appraised value from Clark...

When Eric Holder became attorney general in 2009, he declared that when it comes to discussing race, we have become “a nation of cowards.” Now there’s plenty of discussion of race, some of it swirling around Holder himself. In recent days, conservative critics have accused Holder of playing the race card to deflect criticism—while his liberal allies believe some of that criticism is racially motivated. It reflects a classic cultural divide in this country and in the media establishment. Just days ago, I was questioning whether New York Magazine went too far in proclaiming that everything about the Obama presidency...

As a family in Clark County, Nev. continues to face an onslaught of heavily armed federal agents determined to kick them off of their ranch, reports have surfaced that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might be behind the entire ordeal. The ranch, which has been in Cliven Bundy’s family for more than a century, is ground zero for a growing showdown between federal authorities and individual rights activists. Despite attempting to silence protesters by limiting them to so-called “First Amendment areas,” law enforcement personnel, legislators, and militia members are heading to the site in droves to express their outrage over...

The Bureau of Land Management, whose Director was Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) former senior adviser, has purged documents from its web site stating that the agency wants Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle off of the land his family has worked for over 140 years in order to make way for solar panel power stations. Corrupt Democratic Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) working with the Chinese gov’t to take land from hard-working Americans. Deleted from BLM.gov but reposted for posterity by the Free Republic, the BLM document entitled “Cattle Trespass Impacts” directly states that Bundy’s cattle “impacts” solar development, more specifically the construction of...

April 9, 2014 Elijah Cummings owed IRS $30,000 in back taxes Jeff Quinton In light of the most recent revelations about Elijah Cummings and the IRS, I thought it would be interesting to discuss Cummings and his past history with the IRS.In 1999, David Folkenflik of The Baltimore Sun wrote an article on Cummings and his financial problems.From that 1999 article (emphasis added): Among his most serious troubles:In the mid-1990s, the Internal Revenue Service filed court papers declaring that Cummings was legally obliged to pay more than $30,000 in unpaid federal taxes. He finished paying those taxes earlier this year.Cummings...

"I have been proud to stand along side of you in supporting efforts to advance the cause of justice that has always been at the center of this , this administrations work I am pleased to note that the last five years have been defined by significant strides and lasting reforms, even in the face, even in the face, of unprecedented, unwarranted ugly adversity. And if you don't believe that, you look at the way ...forget about me... forget about me , you look at the way the Attorney General of the Untied States was treated yesterday by a House...

The U.S. House Oversight Committee today released emails between the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Democrat Minority Leader Elijah Cummings of the same committee detailing joint attempts to collect non-public information from True the Vote. According to the release obtained by Breitbart Texas, House Oversight offered glimpses into coordinated fishing attempts for information: Five days after Cummings contacted True the Vote seeking “copies of all training materials used for volunteers, affiliates, or other entities,” the IRS sent True the Vote a letter requesting True the Vote provide “a copy of [True the Vote’s] volunteer registration form,” “…the process you use...