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The U.S. Department of Defense has, once again, failed a comprehensive financial audit. The audit is the fifth comprehensive review the department has completed, and the fifth where auditors were unable to find sufficient record keeping for the DoD to pass off on a clean audit. This year’s DoD-wide audit report involved 27 smaller component audits, of which seven component audits received “unmodified opinions,” which mean that auditors determined the underlying military financial information was recorded fairly and in line with U.S. accounting standards. One component audit received a “qualified opinion,” meaning auditors found material accounting misstatements that were not...

KEALAKEKUA — Casually dressed and holding three purple orchids, Leigh Mitchell walked into the District Courtroom, Tuesday, with her husband Randy of the 36 years to get married. As they waited briefly by the courtroom door Randy and Leigh, now both 60 years old, were all smiles and laughs as they told curious onlookers the short version of their story. Two years ago, the couple learned their marriage license was never filed with the courts when they were married in California on Feb. 14, 1982. As a result, they were there that Tuesday to officially record their nuptials... Their daughter,...

The Connecticut lottery's mobile app malfunctioned over the weekend, causing some winning tickets to read as losers. Lottery officials shut down the app for an hour after identifying the error that took place from 12:25 p.m. on Saturday through 10:34 a.m. on Monday and encouraged players who checked their tickets during that time to scan them again. "If you scanned draw tickets during that time, please check your tickets again. The Mobile App 'Scan Tickets' feature is now fully operational," the lottery said. "You can also check CT Lottery tickets at a Ticket Checker available at all CT Lottery Retailers."...

Today's installment of "We're Doomed, We're Doomed!" comes via The New York Times regarding the nomination of Dr. Ben Carson to head up the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Big-city mayors and housing experts are nervous about the idea of a billionaire real estate developer in the White House. Now President-elect Donald J. Trump has picked Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon with no housing experience, as his nominee for secretary of Housing and Urban Development — and high anxiety has set in. As The Times’s Mid-Atlantic bureau chief, I have spent a lot of time in Baltimore, Cleveland and...

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is...

The United States Postal Service has spread the alarms. It has run through a $12 billion federal loan that has kept itself afloat for the past two years and it is now looking for a bailout. It cites declining revenues because of the internet, the inordinate cost of its pension program and the inability to control labor costs because of no-layoff provisions in its union contracts. It wants to cut service to 5 days a week, possibly more and it is planning to slow the delivery of first class mail. It has talked about reductions in force of 120,000, but...

The interaction of six government policies explains the timing, severity, and global impact of the financial crisis. Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself. We see how silly the Ronald Reagan slogan was that government is the problem, not the solution . . . I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas. — Economist Paul Samuelson (January 2009)The people on Wall Street still don't get it. They're still puzzled—why is it that people are mad at the...

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State by Robert Tracinski Sep 02, 2005 by Robert Tracinski It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster. If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring...

Firefighters refuse to battle blaze, but watch By JOHN GRANT EMEIGH Tribune Chronicle McKINLEY HEIGHTS - Firefighters from Niles watched a Weathersfield house burn for about 20 minutes Thursday afternoon without attempting to put it out because the fire occurred outside the city limits. Jason Radcliff said most of the items in his home at 2782 Robbins Ave. may have been saved if the Niles firefighters had acted immediately. Instead, the Niles crew waited for the Weathersfield Fire Department to come and put out the blaze. Radcliff said Niles firefighters had three firetrucks at the scene and could have easily...