Free Republic

BERKELEY -- Unsure which presidential candidate's platform would be better for your household's or neighborhood's financial bottom line? Don't worry: There's an app for that. Politify.com lets a user input his or her salary, other income, age, tax status and other data, and produces an estimate of how much the user would gain or lose under President Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's respective tax and budget plans. But cofounder Nikita Bier, 23, of Berkeley, said Friday that while the site's earlier version was little more than a tax calculator, the version launched Aug. 23 also uses "a complex merger of...

A Union City police officer resigned from the force on Friday, about two weeks after being convicted of a misdemeanor count of lewd or dissolute conduct in public, authorities said. Sean Mace, 37, had been under investigation since February, when two women accused him of exposing himself in a Fremont home, said Detective Bill Veteran. Mace, also a fitness and nutrition consultant, was invited to the residence Feb. 11 to discuss fitness with the women, Veteran said. During the conversation, police said, Mace pulled down his pants and exposed his genitals.

Escalating tensions over contract negotiations for about 250 workers could disrupt, or even shut down, operations this fall at Oakland's airport and seaport, the fifth-largest container shipping facility in the country. The Port of Oakland, the agency operating the two public facilities, must rein in rapidly increasing compensation costs. While it projects revenues will increase 9 percent from 2011 to 2015, it forecasts personnel expenditures to climb 30 percent if no action is taken. Moreover, the agency's pension and retiree health care programs are underfunded by at least $269 million, a staggering sum equal to 5½ years of payroll. It's...

If there were a contest for worst mother, Rosie Murphy would qualify as a finalist. Unless all of her family members lied during their testimony in Alameda County Superior Court last week, the 63-year-old woman put her son David Mills out onto the street to sell drugs when he was 12 years old. Throughout his childhood, she cursed at him and treated him like dirt. Now that Mills, 38, is facing the death penalty for killing three people, Murphy says she bears "zero" responsibility for the fact that her son turned into a killer. No acceptance at all of the...

This is the real reason not to trust Obama.