Free Republic

“The error is significant”: South Portland Faces $4 Million Budget Shortfall After Mistakenly Failing to Increase Property Taxes Enough Edward Tomic The City of South Portland is working to close a $4 million shortfall in their current fiscal year budget they identified earlier this month — a gap the city attributes to mistakenly not taxing residents enough to support the City Council-approved budget. According to the city, South Portland’s current mill rate is $14.14, meaning property owners must pay $14.14 out of every $1,000 of their property’s assessed value. But it should have been raised to $14.69 this past summer...

Following the embarrassment that was the 2022 election, in which Republicans managed to severely underperform despite having all the fundamentals in their favor, I asked one simple question: Are you tired of losing yet? Advertisement Ironically, some accused me of being too conservative when I predicted the GOP only getting to 235 seats in the House. Now, the Republican Party might end up with a majority far less than that. The Senate is pretty much a wasteland as well, with Mehmet Oz, despite a strong push down the stretch, not being able to overcome his unfavorables in Pennsylvania. Don Bolduc...

Tonight driving home - very thin layer of ice on I-64 (Highway 40). No traction. Traffic jammed. Slipping and sliding at 10 miles per hour. NOT A SALT TRUCK IN SIGHT. I-70 from Columbia to St. Louis was arguably the worst stretch of road in the nation, with crashes, closings, backups of many hours. Yet MO Highway 141 was deiced. County roads were deiced. Even my podunk street had large chunks of salt on it, just like in the old days. I noticed something like this before in the last couple of years. What the hell is up? Anybody know?...

(CNN) Hillary Clinton's campaign is waging a full-out war on FBI Director James Comey in the final 10 days of the election. A day after Comey made the stunning announcement that the FBI is examining newly unveiled emails that appear to be "pertinent" to the now-closed investigation into Clinton's private server, top campaign officials unleashed a blistering attack on the FBI director, accusing him of being irresponsibly "light on facts" and "heavy on innuendo." On a conference call with reporters Saturday, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta accused Comey of failing to be "forthcoming with the facts." Podesta blasted both the...

Why in the hell do we have 17 security agencies? With all of these security agencies guarding us, how in the hell did Russia (or anyone else) break in to our government servers? Are these agencies incompetent or what? And in particular, why was our state department's servers so vulnerable to hackers? Is this a sample of how a president Hillary will secure our nation's secrets?

The incompetence of the Obama administration has had its shining moments -- the Obamacare rollout, the Benghazi coverup, and Hillary Clinton's email server prominent among them. This month, a New York Times profile of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has again reminded the American people of the failures of the current president. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said such scandal is the natural result of Barack Obama's staffing choices. This "is what happens when you put van drivers and campaign flaks and failed novelists in charge of foreign policy and national security," he declared. Cotton was barely scratching the surface....

Synopsis of the story. 1) A family sued and won $215,000 from Ecorse city, retired Police Chief Jerry Copeland, and two police officials over a wrong house drug raid. The police officers had no immunity from the civil penalty. 2) Bad news is the city has to raise bonds to pay the judgment because the city is broke. 3) The couple had separately sued the SWAT team from Downriver and received a $30,000 settlement.

It is reported in today's Daily News that the chief of the National Counterterrorism Center was skiing on Christmas and stayed on the slopes for several days after the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253. It must soon be reported, certainly by tomorrow's editions, that President Obama has given Michael Leiter all the free time he likes to schuss and slalom the slopes to his heart's delight. Where Leiter belonged the moment he was notified that a terrorist had nearly executed an attack upon the United States was on his way back to Washington. Staying in touch by phone or...

Worse Than Dirty Diapers thelastcrusade.org In a prime-time speech Tuesday from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Obama is expected to announce that he is sending up to 35,000 additional troops to Afghanistan beginning next year. The figure is short of the 40,000 troops his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has requested — but remains enough to anger many congressional Democrats, who oppose any potential troop surge, arguing that the mission is too expensive and lacks a clear objective.“I think there will be some disillusionment within his base,” said Paul Kawika Martin, political director for Peace...

Clive Maund at clivemaund.com says, "Payback time for Wall St and Washington will be when foreign investors fail to turn up at the bond auctions to finance the bailout plan, whose US$800+ billion will have to be created out of thin air. So the bonds will have to be monetized, which will mean an immediate spike in inflation, which will cause the rate of corporate bankruptcies to soar as failing companies take down others in a chain reaction because the losses will be highly leveraged by credit default swaps etc. This is the underlying reason why banks won't lend to...

American businesses would rather gamble on finding talent abroad than rely on homegrown collegiates who have been through the entire public school system in the United States. Nonetheless, for its part, the higher education establishment finds more value in teaching young men and women how to meet goals and timetables under affirmative action rather than how to meet payroll in the middle of a business slump. “Students are coming out of college with huge debt, but with some of the lowest competencies I have ever seen,” Stetson University professor Peter F. Lake said at a conference recently, according to the...

The United Nations is under increasing attack by critics in the United States and other countries. At the heart of the organization's mounting problems is an almost total lack of accountability, which gives rise to suspicions of wholesale corruption. Existing evidence indicates that corruption and mismanagement go beyond the routine fraud, waste, and abuse of resources that mark all public-sector enterprises Available evidence coupled with the United Nations' unwillingness to undergo a thorough audit raise serious questions about its mission and the means used to carry it out.

Three missiles have been fired from the Jordanian port of Aqaba, missing a US Navy ship but hitting Israel. Two rockets missed the USS Ashland, an American naval ship docked in the port. A Jordanian soldier died when one of the two missiles hit the dockside. The third missile landed near Eilat airport in neighbouring Israel, causing no injuries. An internet statement, purportedly from a group which says it has links to al-Qaeda, said it was to blame. The statement, allegedly from the Abdullah al-Azzam Brigades, said the attacks were the group's first attack in Jordan and were aimed at...

Jackie Barrett met the investment adviser in Fort Lauderdale, during an event honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Fulton County sheriff had been invited to speak. Byron Rainner, who said he worked for MetLife, a national insurance and investment company, was part of the host committee, and he approached Barrett with a business proposal. That chance meeting, in February 2002, later prompted Barrett to give Rainner $7 million from county tax lien proceeds to invest. The investments — made after Rainner, his firm and a business associate donated a total of $4,000 to the sheriff's re-election campaign —...

Posted on Wed, Nov. 06, 2002 Broward vote total off in reporting glitchBy EVAN S. BENN ebenn@herald.com Broward County's election didn't end as smoothly as it began: A programming error sliced 34,000 votes from reported races on Tuesday, and 70,000 more were deducted from total turnout. By late Wednesday, election officials insisted that all the votes were accounted for. They said that the errors had no effect on the outcome of any races, though voter turnout jumped from 35 percent to 45 percent after it was corrected. And it raised questions about the vote-counting and reporting process for the county's...