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Kadner: Union tells retirees to repay pension Phil Kadner October 30, 2013 Imagine a retired man going to his mailbox one morning and finding a letter informing him that a mistake has been made in his pension payments and he owes more than $100,000. No joke. And it’s not some scam. “I darn near had a heart attack,” recalled Ron Kosinski, 79, a former sheet metal worker who was notified that he owes $105,500. His union, Sheet Metal Workers Local 73, miscalculated his pension payments when he retired 17 years ago. In fact, dating to 1974, the union’s pension fund...

As teachers throughout the country introduced the new Common Core curriculum—the federal standards for mathematics and English Language Arts—in their classrooms this fall, most parents had no idea this radical change in their children’s education was coming. Some might have noticed over the past month that there were dramatic changes in the textbooks and tests that their children were bringing home. Others may have noticed that in language arts, their children are now being introduced to some very different kinds of books—texts with more emphasis on technical or informational material, and less emphasis on classical literature. It would be...

As Columbus Day weekend approaches and New England fall foliage reaches its peak, the U.S. Forest Service has decreed that 22 privately run campgrounds in New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest will have to close because of the government shutdown. According to the Union Leader, while the campsites are situated on federally owned land, they are entirely run by a private company, which has a contract to operate the sites and which pays the federal government a cut of the fees it collects. That means the closure will not only prevent thousands of campers from using the facilities, it will...

When U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Col.) got the word that he could opt out of Obamacare or keep his current health-care plan — which you might be surprised to learn is a private plan — he took a road some might say is less traveled…and then hit a big pileup:(Credit: Twitter via Twitchy) He breaks it down a bit more:(Credit: Twitter via Twitchy) Instead of heading down a woe-is-me path, Gardner harnessed his unfortunate news to get a conversation going about what’s happening to people’s health-care plans in the wake of

While the world was glued to the developments in the Mediterranean in the past week, Poland took a page straight out of Rahm Emanuel's playbook and in order to not let a crisis go to waste, announced quietly that it would transfer to the state - i.e., confiscate - the bulk of assets owned by the country's private pension funds (many of them owned by such foreign firms as PIMCO parent Allianz, AXA, Generali, ING and Aviva), without offering any compensation. In effect, the state just nationalized roughly half of the private sector pension fund assets, although it had a...

In Pocono Township, police officers are searching for a new way to make sure they are ready for any situation amid budget constraints.Two officers approached Pocono Township Police Department Chief Phil Riley several months ago, questioning whether they could use their own privately owned firearms as patrol rifles on the job. Riley said the township is now considering an ordinance to cover the liability as it has not yet purchased enough rifles for every officer in the department. Riley said the department has about five or six rifles for the 18-person force, which creates several safety problems.These days, Riley said,...

As the number of street crimes committed in Baltimore City escalates, so does the level of fear. This has caused communities to look beyond the police for protection. In Baltimore City there are four special tax districts where residents pay more to make their neighborhoods safer. Charles Village is one of them and has the lowest surtax of the four. It was formed in the mid-1990s as a way for the community to provide supplemental security and sanitation services to what the city was already providing. The surtax charged to homeowners has never been altered. Baltimore’s Little Italy community is...

For more than two years, there's been speculation about who is lining up for the Gulfstream G650, the new private jet that has quickly become one of the most impressive aircraft in the skies today. In 2011, the New York Post reported Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffet, and Ralph Lauren were all lining up to drop $65 million on the jet. But for those who are just looking to get on the list now, the next available plane won't be delivered until 2017 — and there's no way to jump the line, Gulfstream says. "You are not allowed to sell your...

You’re not running a domestic terrorism group (well, there are those new DHS criteria…). You’re not even sending around emails about what a dismal failure President Obama’s administration is (THIS hour, anyway). You just want to be able to chat with friends, conduct your financial business, and argue with your spouse without Big Daddy Gummint all up in your biz. Believe it or not, that’s your right. Harry “Who Cares” Reid may blow it off and say the government’s been “doing that stuff for years,”but we’ve got a news flash for Harry: just because you’ve been doing it a while...

Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday.

Common Core is an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration, which is scheduled to be mostly implemented this year in the 45 states that have adopted it. Common Core eliminates local control over K-12 curriculum in math and English, instead imposing a one-size-fits-all, top-down curriculum that will also apply to private schools and homeschoolers. Common Core was has been promoted in a manner that sounds good and commendable – “States working together to create national standards for education… standards that are designed to be robust and relevant in the real world.” Common Core describes itself...

Private religious schools perform better than public schools, and public charter schools performed no better than regular public schools, according to a new study by William Jeynes, professor of education at California State University at Long Beach and senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton. Jeynes spoke Monday with The Christian Post about the study. He found that religious, mostly Christian, school students were a full year ahead of students who attend public and charter schools. The results of his research were recently published in vol. 87, issue 3 of the Peabody Journal of Education in an article titled,...

It seems freedom of association and religious doctrine, and the juxtaposition thereof, are concepts destined to elude liberals’ grasp. That’s the inescapable takeaway from The New York Times’ report on trouble at Boston College, where the Jesuit school’s administrators have decided to crack down on an unofficial student group dedicated to free condom distribution: “While we understand that you may not be intentionally violating university policy, we do need to advise you that, should we receive any reports that you are, in fact, distributing condoms on campus, the matter would be referred to the student conduct office for disciplinary action...

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called "the best way to settle the Jewish question." Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman)...

Vice President Joe Biden, in remarks today before a meeting on guns, suggested the Obama administration is seriously considering outlawing unregulated "private" gun sales:"And so the kinds of things that there´s an emerging set of recommendations, not coming from me but coming from the groups we´ve met with," said Biden today, before a closed door meeting on gun control. "And I´m going to focus on the ones that relate primarily to gun ownership and the type of weapons can be owned. And one is,

Some interesting news has broken in the wake of the latest push for gun control by President Obama and Senate Democrats: Obama sends his kids to a school where armed guards are used as a matter of fact. The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak. If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards -- they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point. The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period....

Just when you thought yesterday’s dismal jobs numbers couldn’t get any worse -- they did. According to CNSNews.com, nearly seventy-five percent of all civilian jobs created since the beginning of last summer are in the public sector: Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In June, a total of 142,415,000 people were employed in the U.S, according to the BLS, including 19,938,000 who were employed by federal, state and local governments. By November, according to data...

Hey, I’ve got a neat idea — why don’t we just keep growing the government, until we all can have government jobs? That can work, right? Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. … In the same five-month period since June, the number of people employed by government increased by 621,000 to 20,559,000. These 621,000 new government jobs created in the last five months equal 73.3 percent of the 847,000 new jobs created overall.

Avi Roeh, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, has told employees that police are likely to open an investigation against him in the near future, regarding a sewage treatment plant built in the town of Ofra, north of Jerusalem. Roeh is accused of violating a Civil Administration stop-work order in order to complete the plant despite a complaint by a far-left group that it was built on private Arab land. In an interview with Arutz Sheva, Roeh admitted to the accusations against him, but argued that his decision had been the moral thing to do. “There are people living...

NEW DELHI: Notwithstanding the sagging economic situation, family businesses in India are thriving, as 74 per cent of firms have witnessed growth in sales in the last fiscal, says a survey by consultancy firm PwC. PwC calls the family business as a "resilient model" for the 21st century as the structure offers significant advantages and benefits - particularly with regards to their agility/flexibility, continuity and the longer-term perspective. Moreover, family businesses also have a stronger set of values than other businesses, it says. According to the Family Business Survey (FBS) 2012 conducted by PwC, 74 per cent of family businesses...