Free Republic

Another Democrat Success Story— The 23,500 pensioners in Detroit are going to have to adjust their budgets. The city plans on cutting pensions by 84 percent. Doug Ross and Reuters reported: On Friday, city financial consultant Kenneth Buckfire said he did not have to recommend to Orr that pensions for the city’s retirees be cut as a way to help Detroit navigate through debts and liabilities that total $18.5 billion. Buckfire said it was clear that the city did not have the funds to pay the unsecured pension payouts without cutting them. “It was a function of the mathematics,” said...

Another concern of the ADA is female toplessness downtown, something not currently against the law, but which Council members have noted in meetings recently is a source of complaint from some downtown business owners. State Rep. Tim Moffitt introduced a bill to ban female toplessness (specifically nipples) in public, and Asheville City Council had earlier called for a change in state law to allow them to stop the annual topless rally. But the bill never advanced during this year's legislative session, and the so-called "nipple ban" became the target of some mockery.

A group of Milwaukee pastors and their supporters gathered Monday morning at a local coffee shop to implore city officials to sponsor a gun buyback program, which they say could remove weapons from the city's streets and reduce violence in their neighborhoods. "We are here today because we are fed up," said the Rev. John McVicker Sr., pastor at Christ the King Baptist Church. "There have been far too many senseless shootings in our city, many resulting in homicide." The pastors have asked the city to allot $50,000 in its 2014 budget to initiate a one-time, anonymous gun buyback, where...

<p>Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sentenced Thursday to 28 years in prison for corruption, the apparent last step after a series of scandals destroyed his political career and helped steer a crisis-laden city even deeper into trouble.</p> <p>Kilpatrick, who served as mayor from 2002 until fall 2008, fattened his bank account by tens of thousands of dollars, traveled the country in private planes and even strong-armed his campaign fundraiser for stacks of cash hidden in her bra, according to evidence at trial.</p>

Detroiter Sleeps In Liquor Store With Shotgun To Prevent Robberies October 4, 2013 9:43 AM Steve Bahoura said he's been forced to sleep inside his east side Detroit liquor store with his shotgun to make sure he doesn't get robbed. (Credit: Mike Campbell/WWJ Newsradio 950) DETROIT (WWJ) - One Detroit business owner is taking matters into his own hands to make sure thieves leave his liquor store alone. Steve Bahoura, who has owned the Van Dyke Liquor Market since the 90s, said he deals with several break-ins each year and he’s tired of it. Most recently, Bahoura said someone broke...

The city insists the water is safe, but people can't get over the colorResidents on Manhattan's East Side are staying far away from their tap water after it started flowing with an unusual color, despite the city's insistence the water is safe. On Thursday, residents and businesses began noticing brown water from their sinks and taps. Nearly a dozen hydrants in the area were also unlocked and gushing discolored water. The city's Department of Environmental Protection said the discoloration happened when construction of new water mains forced them to reverse flow, stirring up sediment. The DEP said the brown in...

An ambulance was summoned to the Summit Medical Center abortion clinic in Detroit, Michigan, yesterday, and rushed an African-American woman to the hospital. This is the second such incident at this abortion clinic since March. Pro-life activist Emmanuel Lugermo ignored orders by the clinic security guards not to photograph the incident. His pictures show a woman on a gurney in obvious distress. Witnesses on the scene said she was trembling or shaking. Reginald Sharpe, an abortionist with a long and sordid history, was on duty at the time of the emergency. Sharpe was known to have killed a patient in...

<p>Reduce the obesity rate in New York City? Fat chance!</p> <p>More New Yorkers than ever are living large, despite Nanny Bloomberg’s war on sugary drinks and fast foods, statistics obtained by The Post reveal.</p> <p>The city’s obesity rate among adults has skyrocketed 25 percent since Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, city Health Department figures show.</p>

In some cash-strapped Chicago schools, no resource can be taken for granted -- not even toilet paper. Nicholas Sposato, alderman of Chicago’s 36th ward, recently held a toilet paper drive for the schools in his community.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel condemned a Thursday night shooting on Chicago’s South Side that wounded 13 people, including a three-year-old boy. “Senseless and brazen acts of violence have no place in Chicago and betray all that we stand for,” said Obama’s former chief of staff in the first of a series of tweets Friday morning. “The perpetrators of this crime will be brought to justice and prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” Emanuel added. Witnesses said several gunmen fired at least 20 shots at a group on basketball courts, according to NBC News’s Chicago affiliate. The station said...

IN THE 1983 movie Dr. Detroit, the flamboyant lead character goes on a rampage warning of trouble to come. “I am talking about scorched earth, no survival, wholesale destruction…body-bags and fire!” he yells. That’s pretty much what has happened to Detroit over the last three decades. Its population has shrunk by half to below 700,000. The wait for police response is five times the national average, and only 8 percent of crimes are solved. Roughly a third of the city’s 140 square miles is either unoccupied or dilapidated. About 40 percent of its tax revenue is directed to retirement or...

Even the most dangerous cities in America can have relatively safe neighborhoods, as there is more variation in crime within most cities than between cities. But using exclusive data developed by NeighborhoodScout, and based on FBI data from all 17,000 local law enforcement agencies in America, we here report those specific neighborhoods in America that have the highest predicted rates of violent crime per 1,000 neighborhood residents of all. Violent crimes include murder, forcible rape, armed robbery, and aggravated assault. These neighborhoods are the epicenters of violence in America, where social issues are likely to ignite into violence and spread.

Using Census data, we've figured out that half of the United States population is clustered in just the 146 biggest counties out of over 3000. Here's the map, with said counties shaded in. Below the map is the list of all the counties, so you can see if you live in one of them. See link for list of names.

Los Angeles’ new mayor has vowed to help stanch the flow of film and TV production jobs out of Hollywood, starting with the appointment of a film czar at City Hall. But to make a real difference, Eric Garcetti needs to convince skeptical state pols to combat the lure of rich tax incentives from outside California. Two days after this year’s Oscars, Hollywood’s councilman Eric Garcetti, then running for mayor of Los Angeles, staged a media event at Sunset Gower Studios. Only a smattering of reporters and photographers showed up, perhaps because the gathering was to address “runaway production,” a...

Marijuana is now legal in Washington, and the Seattle police have been remarkably mellow about the whole thing. In fact, the city's Police Department plans to be at Hempfest, what has become the largest pot rally in the world. And they're taking bags of Doritos in case anyone, you know, gets a little hungry.

Travel mag Conde Nast Traveler asked its readers to name (and shame) the friendliest and unfriendliest cities in the US and across the world. The "unfriendliest" winner in both categories was deemed to be Newark, New Jersey, which one reader say they would not recommend for anything except as "a cheaper/less busy airport to fly into while visiting other cities." Other winners and losers: -- The next four unfriendliest cities in the US? Oakland, New Haven, Detroit, and Atlantic City, which one voter calls a "pale shadow of Las Vegas." -- Globally, Islamabad, Pakistan; Luanda, Angola; Kuwait City, Kuwait; Lome,...

EXCLUSIVE Cory Booker pocketed “confidential” annual payouts from his former law firm while serving as Newark mayor. Booker, the front-runner in New Jersey’s Senate race, received five checks from the Trenk DiPasquale law firm from 2007 until 2011. During that time, the firm raked in more than $2 million in fees from local agencies over which Booker has influence. “This was a settlement buyout for my interest in the firm,” the mayor told The Post at a campaign stop in Jersey City yesterday. “I had an equity stake, and we had a negotiated settlement.” Booker worked at the West Orange...

L.A. Unified and seven other California school districts on Tuesday won relief from some strict and costly provisions of federal education law. Besides Los Angeles, the school districts are Long Beach, Santa Ana, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Sanger.

Young Tatiana Kirby cried until she couldn't cry anymore last Monday night after an angry man attending a party next door pumped several bullets into the body of her father, Pastor Tim Kirby, 46, after he asked them to turn down the music. "It was devastating. I cried for a minute, and then it was like I couldn't cry no more," the young girl told WDIV 4 of her father's untimely death in Detroit, Mich. "He was a good father. He was always a caring person. Every Sunday we were always in church. He always made sure we had clothes,...

Detroit, you're not alone. Across the nation, cities and states are watching Detroit's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy filing with fear. Years of underfunded retirement promises to public sector workers, which helped lay Detroit low, could plunge them into a similar financial hole. A CNBC.com analysis of more than 120 of the nation's largest state and local pension plans finds they face a wide range of financial burdens as aging work forces near retirement. Thanks to a patchwork of accounting practices and rosy investment assumptions, it's not even clear just how big a financial hole many states and cities have dug for...