Free Republic

One of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County has come under public scrutiny for paying its top officials some of the highest salaries in the nation, including almost $800,000 annually for its city manager. The city of Bell pays Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo $787,637 annually, and also pays police Chief Randy Adams $457,000 a year, about 50 percent more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck or Sheriff Lee Baca make, the Los Angeles Times reported. Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia is paid $376,288 annually, which is more than most city managers are paid. Rizzo, who has run...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama called the increasingly tense environment in the Mideast "unsustainable" Wednesday and said Israel needs a "better approach" in blockaded Gaza that would satisfy security and humanitarian needs. Turning his attention to the troubled region as he welcomed Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to the White House for talks, Obama also predicted "real progress" in coming months in U.S. efforts to nudge the Israelis and Palestinians toward direct peace talks. The meeting came a little more than a week after Israel's deadly May 31 raid on a flotilla hoping to break the blockade. Nine men in the...

Fannie Mae reported a net loss $13.1 billion on Monday and forecast weakness in the housing and mortgage markets to continue throughout 2010.

The U.S. Postal Service’s business model is not sustainable, and union-backed generous employee benefits along with collective bargaining contracts are a big part of the problem, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. As mail volume has plummeted by 17 percent – or by 36 billion pieces – in the past three years, collective bargaining contracts have forced the Postal Service to keep full-time employees with full health and retirement benefits and preclude outsourcing of services. “Limitations on the workforce mix of full-time and part-time postal employees and workforce flexibility rules contained in contracts with USPS’s unions are...

Fundamental changes to the federal budget will be needed to rein in unsustainable deficits, Congress’s budget watchdog said Thursday. “U.S. fiscal policy is unsustainable, and unsustainable to an extent that it can't be solved through minor changes,” Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Elmendorf told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, plus defense programs and debt interest, will exceed the rest of the federal budget in 10 years if most of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are extended, as President Barack Obama has proposed, Elmendorf said. “It's a matter of arithmetic,”...

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care "summit," thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch...

Oh yes brother, preach it to us, America is overspending, we need more financial responsiblilty, right? Well, let’s have a brief re-cap, shall we? Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus strong-armed through congress! Obama signed a $410 Billion Omnibus Spending Bill With Bipartisan Pork Obama signed a $3.4 TRILLION budget, with NO Republican support! AND NOW, congress is preparing for passage of the Obama MASSIVE Healthcare Entitlement program.

Will Americans swallow the spin from Obama on America's debt and idolize him as a Deficit Hawk and Defender of Fiscal Restraint? Or will Americans see through Obama's audacious spin for the illusion that it is? Vote in the poll.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aJsSb4qtILhg&refer=worldwide Link only, per the rules of King Bloomberg I's news service.

USA Today reports that spending on senior entitlements has risen 24% after adjusting for inflation since 2000. Despite no increase in the population percentage receiving benefits, the actual dollars spent on senior benefits in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security rose from $600 billion to $952 billion. Senior care has now become Job 1 of the federal government: The cost of government benefits for seniors soared to a record $27,289 per senior in 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis. That's a 24% increase above the inflation rate since 2000. Medical costs are the biggest reason. Last year, for the first...

Maine Now Has Biggest Medicaid Population in Nation By IPR Nov 9, 2005, 20:42 PORTLAND -- The Maine Heritage Policy Center today cited updated 2004 data from the Kaiser Family Foundation that shows Maine now has the largest Medicaid program in the country, covering 21 percent of all non-elderly individuals, those under 65 years old, within the state. Almost all Mainers over 65 have Medicare coverage. "Maine once again is an example for the nation of an unsustainable level of Medicaid spending," said Tarren Bragdon, director of health reform initiatives for The Maine Heritage Policy Center. "Maine is number one...

In these days of liberals attacking Jesusland, and advocating moral relativism with its no right and wrong philosophy, I always hark back to the words of Barbra Streisand. Yes, for real. Actually, they were the words of Neil Simon, spoken by Barbra, in the 1970 comedy movie The Owl and The Pussycat. Streisand played a prostitute who eventually marries. In a scene with her new boyfriend, she explains how she overcame her guilt feelings about being a prostitute by visiting a psychologist. The psychologist told her that her guilt was just a leftover bourgeois emotion, a tired and outdated concept...