Keystone

Over 40,000 voters are registered in both Virginia and Maryland

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.
But George said his group will expand their search for duplicate voters in the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Georgia.

IRS employees with tax and conduct issues still got awards, watchdog report finds

IRS employees who had been disciplined for tax and conduct issues were nonetheless rewarded with monetary awards or time off, according to a watchdog report released Tuesday.
The report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that while for the most part the reward program for IRS workers complied with federal regulations, employees who had themselves failed to pay their federal taxes and had discipline problems were also rewarded. 
"While not prohibited, providing awards to employees who have been disciplined for failing to pay federal taxes appears to create a conflict with the IRS’s charge of ensuring the integrity of the system of tax administration,” Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George said.
The watchdog found that in the period from October 1, 2010 to December 31, 2012 over 2,800 employees who had been disciplined for conduct problems, including issues with federal tax compliance, had received over $2.8 million in monetary awards and over 27,000 hours in time-off awards. 
The watchdog found that the more than 1,100 employees who had issues with tax compliance received more than $1 million in monetary awards and more than 10,000 hours in time-off awards.
The IRS said in a statement it has already developed a new policy linking conduct and performance bonuses for executives and senior level employees.
"Even without a formal policy in place over the past four years, the IRS has not issued awards to any executives that were subject to a disciplinary action," the IRS said in a statement. "We are also considering a similar policy for the entire IRS workforce, which would be subject to negotiations with the National Treasury Employees Union."
The IRS had about 100,000 workers during the period under review.
In the 2011 budget year, more than 70,000 IRS workers got cash bonuses totaling $92 million, the report said. In the 2012 budget year, nearly 68,000 workers got cash bonuses totaling $86 million.
The report said the IRS considers prior conduct before awarding permanent pay increases. "However, IRS officials stated that the IRS generally does not consider conduct issues when administering other types of awards," the report said.
There are no government-wide policies on providing bonuses to employees with conduct issues, the report said. However, a 1998 law calls for removing IRS employees who are found to have intentionally committed certain acts of misconduct, including willful failure to pay federal taxes.
Tax compliance at the IRS is generally better than at other federal agencies.
In 2011, 3.2 percent of federal workers owed back taxes, according to IRS statistics. The Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, had the lowest delinquency rate, at 1.1 percent.
The delinquency rate for the general public was 8.2 percent.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Md. gov candidate suggests Iraq War vet opponent not up for 'real job'

A Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland is defending comments he made Monday in which he suggested his opponent, an Iraq war veteran, was not up to the task of a “real job.”
Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler drew ire from a veterans’ group after he made the comments about his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, at an event held by the Tech Council of Maryland.
During the event, Gansler was asked what the state had learned from the rollout of ObamaCare. Maryland’s state-run exchange has been particularly troubled, and earlier this month the exchange’s board of directors voted to replace technology in the system with one used in in Connecticut's exchange instead of fixing its current system or partnering with the federal government.
Gansler said the website’s woes prove Maryland needs someone who has leadership experience and worked with budgets, someone, he claimed, unlike Brown.
“I’m running against somebody who has never managed anybody, never run anything, his ads are about how he’s a lawyer in Iraq, and that’s all fine and good but this is a real job,” Gansler said.
Gansler was referencing a recent campaign ad by Brown, in which he talks about serving in the Army ROTC, the Army Reserves and being deployed to Iraq.
Gansler’s comments were slammed by a veterans’ group VoteVets.org, whose chairman told the Baltimore Sun his comments were “slime ball politics.”
“Doug Gansler needs to stop smearing those of us who served in Iraq as not having had a ‘real job,’ "Jon Soltz, whose group has endorsed Brown, said. “It’s a horrible insult to all those men and women who put their lives on the line, and especially those who died, in service to this country."
Gansler said in a statement to FoxNews.com his comments simply needed to be clarified.
“I have the utmost respect for his military service and for veterans,” Gansler said. “The point I was trying to make is that Anthony Brown's only attempt to lead as Lieutenant Governor was the unmitigated debacle of the health exchange website that denied Marylanders access to health care and cost taxpayers nearly $200 million.”
Brown and the state’s current Gov. Martin O’Malley have blamed the website’s vendors for the problems with Maryland’s state exchange. He and Gansler face off in the primary June 24.

Feds draw criticism for selling Wyoming horses for slaughter

(Bailey) Where is Reid and his smart mouth on this issue?

The Bureau of Land Management rounded up a horse herd that had roamed for decades on federal land in northwest Wyoming and handed the horses over to Wyoming officials.
They, in turn, sold the herd to the highest bidder, a Canadian slaughterhouse.
Wild horse advocates are incensed, saying they should have had a chance to intercede in the March roundup and auction. But the BLM says that the horses were abandoned, not wild, and that it publicized the sale beforehand.
"It would take very little to do this in a more effective way so that horses are not just sent off to slaughter indiscriminately," said Paula Todd King, of The Cloud Foundation, a Colorado-based advocacy group.
According to the BLM, the Wyoming horses weren't officially wild and protected by the Wild-Free Roaming Horses and Burro Act, the federal law for maintaining many of the horse herds, some of which have roamed free in the West since the days of Spanish explorers more than 300 years ago.

"It would take very little to do this in a more effective way so that horses are not just sent off to slaughter indiscriminately."- Paula Todd King, of The Cloud Foundation

The BLM bans wild horses from being sold for slaughter. Anybody who adopts a wild horse from the BLM must agree to provide it a home.
The horses in the Bighorn Basin's sagebrush hills descended from stray rodeo horses owned by Andy Gifford, a rancher and rodeo livestock contractor, in the 1970s, BLM spokeswoman Sarah Beckwith said.
Gifford had claimed the horses as his but never rounded them up before he died in 2009. That, plus the fact that the horses never interbred with wild horses, officially classified them as strays.
"Nobody had a permit to have these horses grazing on public lands," Beckwith said.
King questions that policy. "How long does a horse have to live wild and free before it's considered wild?" she said.
Area ranchers and farmers had long complained that  the herd grazed down pastures and damaged cattle rangeland.
On March 18 and March 19, a BLM contractor rounded up the 41 horses and handed them over to Wyoming officials. Within hours, the horses were sold for $1,640 to Bouvry Exports, a slaughterhouse based in Calgary, Alberta.
The BLM follows state laws for handling stray livestock, Beckwith said, and it had no option but to hand over the horses to the Wyoming Livestock Board. The state took three bids for the horses, state Brand Commissioner Lee Romsa said.
Bouvry Exports shipped the horses out of state, Romsa said. Phone messages for Bouvry Exports weren't immediately returned.
BLM officials had printed notices about the upcoming roundup in local newspapers and posted notices in local post offices.
The roundup wasn't unprecedented. Last summer, a federal judge allowed an American Indian tribe to sell 149 mustangs over the objection of critics, who claimed that the unbranded animals were federally protected wild horses.
The mustangs were among more than 400 on U.S. Forest Service land along the Nevada-Oregon line that the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe claimed belonged to them.
In the end, King said, more than 160 were sold to people who planned to take them to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico, but local residents and rescue groups raised money to buy 150 of the horses to spare them.
The BLM rounds up stray livestock perhaps three or four times a year in the West. Usually they are cattle or sheep. Impoundments of large numbers of stray horses are far less frequent, said Robert Bolton, a senior rangeland management specialist for the BLM.
"That's a pretty sizable number, and they have been out there a long time," Bolton said of the Wyoming herd. "Normally, most of our impounds have been in the low numbers."

Easter

ABC News

Why did a news outlet cancel this church's Easter ad?

A New York City news organization has apologized after it canceled a church’s advertising campaign promoting its Easter Sunday services – just three days before Good Friday.
The Journey Church, a Christian evangelical congregation, paid $1,400 to run a series of ads on the Capital New York website. Capital New York is a sister publication of Politico. And for the sake full disclosure, I attend The Journey Church.
The advertisement read: “You’re invited to discover #HOPE at The Journey Church this Sunday April 20. Click here to discover how you can find hope when you feel like giving up.”
Pastor Kerrick Thomas tells me the advertisement ran on Capital New York’s website earlier in the week – but on Wednesday the church received an email notifying them that the ad was being pulled.
“Capital is implementing a new policy company-wide that we won’t be running any religious-affiliated campaigns moving forward,” the email read.
It certainly seemed rather convenient that the company’s new policy was implemented just days before the holiest of holidays for Christians. Heaven forbid Capital New York soil their fine reputation by taking money from Christians.
“It stings a little when someone says they won’t work with you because you are religious or Christian or a church,” Thomas said. “But we are going to love everyone and keep moving forward to have an impact for Christ in New York.”
The news organization’s decision put the church in a jam.
“As a church we have limited resources – so we have to be strategic when we invest in outreach,” Thomas said. “We thought working with them could be a cool way to bless New Yorkers. The fact that it was canceled the week of Easter made it impossible for us to use our resources to try something new in such a short amount of time. We really felt like it wasted our time and a great opportunity at Easter.”
But fortunately, this Easter story has a happy ending.
About an hour after I started sniffing around and asking questions, Capital New York suddenly had a change of heart – a come-to-Jesus moment.
The company reversed course and apologized.
“The Capital New York brand is very young and there was some confusion around the advertising policy,” read a statement the news outlet sent me. “In this case, the Journey Church ad should not have been pulled.”
Pastor Thomas confirmed that he received an email as well – offering to run the church’s ad without charge.
So, let’s review. A wrong has been righted. Apologies offered. Forgiveness granted. And all’s well that ends well. Happy Easter, America.
Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. Sign up for his American Dispatch newsletter, be sure to join his Facebook page, and follow him on Twitter. His latest book is "God Less America”.