$1 Million Bounty to Be Offered for ‘Smoking Gun’ in IRS Targeting Scandal

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Photo Credit: Voter’s TrustA nonprofit group hopes to award a $1 million bounty to anyone who can provide “smoking gun” evidence to implicate IRS leadership or members of the Obama administration who purposefully targeted conservative and tea party-affiliated groups, TheBlaze has learned.

Gregg Phillips, the managing director for The Voters Trust, a political nonprofit 501 (c)(4) which was established to identify and mobilize Americans, told TheBlaze on Wednesday “that this is the people’s bounty to seek the truth.”

Catherine Engelbrecht, president of the nonprofit group True the Vote, will be officially announcing the bounty Wednesday night on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show, “The Kelly File” at 9 p.m. ET.

To qualify for the bounty, the person needs to provide “relevant evidence including emails, eye-witness accounts, or testimony of political targeting of Americans by the IRS or the Obama administration that has not previously been reported,” according to an official press release from the group obtained by TheBlaze.

Phillips said the evidence must lead directly to the arrest and conviction those responsible and the information provided will remain anonymous and confidential.

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Pope Francis Against Gay Adoption: ‘Every Person Needs a Male Father and a Female Mother’

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Photo Credit: APAlthough Pope Francis was praised for his “who am I to judge?” comment about gay individuals and was named Person of the Year by the homosexual magazine The Advocate in 2013, the Pope has rejected the idea of same-sex marriage as an “anthropological regression” and stressed that when it comes to adoption, “every person needs a male father and a female mother.”

Pope Francis explained his views on these hot-button issues in his book, On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century, which he co-wrote with Rabbi Abraham Skorka in 2010 and which was republished after the then-Argentine cardinal was elected to the papacy in March 2013.

The book is a dialogue between Skorka and the future Pope and includes a chapter on same-sex marriage, which is where the pontiff also talks about adoption.

Skorka first explains that Judaism “prohibits sexual relations between two men” and then expresses worry about how a proposed gay-marriage law in Argentina could change “the core values of our society.”

Pope Francis (then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio) says, “I have the exact same opinion; in order to define it I would use the expression ‘anthropologic regression,’ a weakening of the [marriage] institution that is thousands of years old and that was forged according to nature and anthropology.”

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Girl Kidnapped from Santa Ana Park in 2004 Found Alive

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Photo Credit: Santa Ana Police DepartmentOn a summer night a decade ago, a 15-year-old girl who had just arrived in Santa Ana from Mexico disappeared from a park near her mother’s apartment.

Police launched a missing-persons investigation. But the case went cold — until this week, when she contacted authorities with a harrowing story of being abducted by her mother’s boyfriend, repeatedly assaulted for years and forced to move around Southern California to avoid being found.

Police say Isidro Garcia, 42, drugged and kidnapped the girl, beat her when she tried to escape and later forced her to marry him.

For years, authorities allege, he used violence and threats to keep her under his control, forcing her to work beside him and telling her she would be deported if she left.

Two years ago she had his child, according to police.

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Drone Wars: Memo Justifying Strikes on Americans to be Revealed

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Photo Credit: REUTERSThe Obama administration has signaled it will publicly reveal a memo explaining its legal justification for using drones to kill American citizens overseas, a U.S. government official confirmed to Fox News Tuesday.

The official said the Justice Department has decided not to appeal a Court of Appeals ruling requiring disclosure of a redacted version of the memo under the Freedom of Information Act.

The decision to release the documents comes as the Senate is to vote Wednesday on advancing President Obama’s nomination of the memo’s author, Harvard professor and former Justice Department official David Barron, to sit on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., had vowed to fight Barron’s confirmation, and some Democratic senators had called for the memo’s public release before a final vote.

The key Democratic holdout against Barron’s nomination, Sen. Mark Udall D-Colo., announced Tuesday night he will now support Barron because the memo is being released.

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Kerry: If We’re Wrong on Climate Change, ‘What’s the Worst That Can Happen?’

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Photo Credit: Cliff / Creative CommonsSecretary of State John Kerry did not shy away from pejorative language when addressing “climate change” in his commencement speech at Boston College on Monday. Kerry referred to those skeptical of the Obama administration’s climate claims as “members of the Flat Earth Society” who are “risking nothing less than the future of the entire planet” by resisting implementation of the administration’s policies. At the very least, Kerry argued, what have we got to lose by taking the steps he and the president are advocating? [emphasis added]:

If we make the necessary efforts to address this challenge – and supposing I’m wrong or scientists are wrong, 97 percent of them all wrong – supposing they are, what’s the worst that can happen? We put millions of people to work transitioning our energy, creating new and renewable and alternative; we make life healthier because we have less particulates in the air and cleaner air and more health; we give ourselves greater security through greater energy independence – that’s the downside. This is not a matter of politics or partisanship; it’s a matter of science and stewardship. And it’s not a matter of capacity; it’s a matter of willpower.

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Did the President Take a Pay Cut Like He Promised? White House Won’t Say

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Photo Credit: APThe White House is refusing to confirm whether President Barack Obama followed up on his pledge to take a five percent pay cut due to sequestration last year.

Obama promised last April to take a 5 percent pay cut in “solidarity” with federal employees who were furloughed as a result of the automatic budget cuts, known as the sequester. The cut was meant to equate to the level of spending cuts imposed on nondefense federal agencies.

“The president has decided that to share in the sacrifice being made by public servants across the federal government that are affected by the sequester, he will contribute a portion of his salary back to the Treasury,” a White House official said at the time.

According to his tax returns, Obama is still receiving the presidential salary of $400,000 per year. Last year, he earned $394,796 in wages from the Defense Financing and Accounting Service (DFAS-CIVPAY), which handles the salaries for civilian members of the Defense Department.

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And Then There Were Nine: Albuquerque VA Accused of Wait List Manipulation, Destroying Evidence

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Photo Credit: WNDObama Briefed on VA Problems as Far Back as 2005

By Aaron Klein.

Documentation and testimony reviewed by WND reveals that as far back as 2005, Barack Obama, as a U.S. senator, was briefed on dangerously long wait times for returning veterans to receive health treatment.

Obama was a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. On numerous occasions he publicly chastised President George W. Bush about the wait times, treatment shortages and lack of funding to the Veterans Administration’s medical programs.

On June 28, 2005, for example, Obama complained at a hearing on the VA medical care budget that “somehow it seems that we’re willing to trot in front of flags and take photographs with soldiers, but when it comes to the appropriations process, we’re not there.”

Obama said he heard from veterans of a problem with receiving treatment.

“One final question that I’ve got, specific to some of the issues that I’m hearing back in Illinois,” he told the Senate. “I’ve heard some constituents complaining that veterans’ clinics have been reducing hours. Is there any association – if that’s the case, is that one strategy to handle the shortfall? Are we reducing hours as a way of handling the shortfall?”

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Photo Credit: TownHall Number Nine: Albuquerque VA Accused of Wait List Manipulation, Destroying Evidence

By Guy Benson.

These “isolated cases” (Sec. Shinseki) that may or may not be indicative of a larger problem (Jay Carney) certainly are piling up. The latest is out of New Mexico, via The Daily Beast:

Add Albuquerque, New Mexico’s to the growing list of VA hospitals accused of keeping secret waiting lists to hide delays for veterans seeking medical care. And it may already be too late to get to the truth and find out what harm, if any, was done to veterans there—VA officials are already destroying records to cover their tracks, a whistleblower inside the hospital tells The Daily Beast…“The ‘secret wait list’ for patient appointments is being either moved or was destroyed after what happened in Phoenix,” according to a doctor who works at the Albuquerque VA hospital and spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast. “Right now,” the doctor said, “there is an eight-month waiting list for patients to get ultrasounds of their hearts. Some patients have died before they got their studies. It is unknown why they died, some for cardiac reasons, some for other reasons.” There’s no proof yet that veterans died while waiting for treatment, like what allegedly happened in Phoenix. But the doctor says it’s quite possible that some veterans would still be alive if they hadn’t been pushed through a record-keeping trap door that buried their requests for medical care.

Can you imagine how shocked the president must have been when someone forwarded him the link to this story? This quote makes it sound as if the VA’s book-cooking scheme was a relatively open secret:

When another of the doctor’s colleagues, a physician in a managerial position at the Albuquerque VA, saw the initial story about secret wait lists break he heard him say, “I always knew that Phoenix was better than us at playing the numbers game.”

Read more from this story HERE.

CNN President Jeff Zucker: ‘We’re Not Going To Be Shamed’ Into Covering Benghazi

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller CNN President Jeff Zucker declared his network would “not going to be shamed” into covering Benghazi and other stories without “real news value” at an awards dinner Monday.

Capital New York reports that Zucker explained CNN’s post-plane plans during an interview at the Deadline Club’s annual dinner on Monday night.

“I don’t think there’s any question about our commitment to breaking news, as evidenced by all the questions about the plane,” Zucker told The New York Times’ Bill Carter.

“So we’re still there whenever that happens,” he continued, “but we’re going to supplement that with some different kind of storytelling.”

What kind of stories? “Climate change is one of those stories that deserves more attention, that we all talk about,” he explained — though he lamented the fact that “when we do do those stories, there does tend to be a tremendous amount of lack of interest on the audience’s part.”

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Spending on Healthcare.gov to Break $1 Billion Mark

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Photo Credit: APFederal spending on the Obamacare website healthcare.gov, a source of tremendous frustration for the public and embarrassment for the White House, will soon cross the $1 billion mark as the administration continues to fix glitches and make it an IT gem, according to congressional testimony.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, nominated to replace outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, said in answers to questions from Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., that spending has already reached $834 million and another $200 million has been budgeted for fiscal 2015.

Asked by Alexander, the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, to tally the costs of the Obamacare marketplace website where policies are purchased, Burwell said in written answers…

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Scientist On PBS: Lock Up Politicians Who Question Climate Change (+video)

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Canadian geneticist David Suzuki urged Western governments to lock up politicians who question man-made climate change, telling PBS’ Bill Moyers “our politicians should be thrown in the slammer for willful blindness!”

Suzuki appeared on “Moyers and Company” earlier this month to express his abject frustration over politicians, in both Canada and the United States, who refuse to accept the “settled science” on man-made global warming.

“Our politicians should be thrown in the slammer for willful blindness!” he asserted. “If we are in a position of being able to act, and we see something going on and we refuse to acknowledge the threat or act on it, we can be taken to court for willful blindness.”

“I think that we are being willfully blind to the consequences to our children and grandchildren,” Suzuki continued. “It’s an intergenerational crime.”

Moyers, a well-known climate alarmist, didn’t push back a bit — instead gently tabling the idea as impractical.

Read more from this story HERE.