Free Republic

Furlough Program Guidelines PenFed has the following options available for members working for an affected agency who are impacted by the recent government shutdown: 1. Skip Payment 2. Furlough Loan Product 3. Direct Deposit Assistance In order to receive assistance, PenFed may ask you to provide a copy of your furlough letter as verification that you work for an affected agency. Depending on the nature of the program below, the representative will alert you if a copy of your furlough letter is required. Learn more about these options below or contact PenFed at 1-800-247-5626 to speak with a Member Service...

2013 has not been a pleasant year if you work for the federal government. You’ve been subject to pay freezes, furloughs and shutdowns. One of you got yelled at by a Tea Party Republican at the World War II memorial. And if Congress passes the budget deal announced Tuesday night by Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray – a big if – you will get a final Christmas present: You’ll have to pay more into your pension, an effective wage cut that just adds to the $114 billion, with a “B,” federal employees have already given back to the...

Gotta agree with Jonah here....fire Napolitano. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday that the thwarting of the attempt to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit airline flight Christmas Day demonstrated that "the system worked." Asked by CNN's Candy Crowley on "State of the Union" how that could be possible when the young Nigerian who has been charged with trying to set off the bomb was able to smuggle explosive liquid onto the jet, Napolitano responded: "We're asking the same questions." Napolitano added that there was "no suggestion that [the suspect] was improperly screened." The system worked? You have to be joking....

The old saying that the best job to have during a recession is in government turns out to be the truth -- as long it's the federal government. The number of federal employees earning $100,000 or more a year jumped from 14 to 19 percent of the federal payroll during the recession, according to a report in USA Today. During that same period, the private sector was shedding 7.3 million jobs. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more shot up from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009. Before the recession, the Transportation Department reported only a...

When a talk-show guy like me gets a call from a stripper complaining about guys surfing porn, you know you’ve got a problem. In this case, the stripper was Victoria - former stripper, actually - who spent 10 years dancing at New England’s finest “gentlemen’s clubs.” She was miffed after hearing about rampant on-the-clock porn surfing at the National Science Foundation. The Washington Times broke the story - so many government workers were conducting (ahem) “free-lance research on human reproduction” on taxpayer time that the Inspector General’s Office was swamped. They had to pull people from their real jobs -...

SEATTLE -- Reports of alleged abuse and fraud, and a federal investigation, have prompted a shake up at the Port of Seattle, and now port commissioners vow to change the way they operate. Public outrage was so widespread, a 2-hour meeting Tuesday lasted hours longer A state audit detailing $97 million of waste by the port is what provoked the outrage. Then came news the Department of Justice had launched a criminal investigation. "I think somebody needs to step out and hold these people accountable," said King County resident Stephanie Dotson. "I know I'm one small voice, but by God,...

A hacker from China successfully penetrated Pennsylvania's state government Web site Friday, but did not spread a virus or compromise citizen data. "We know that there was no damage done," said Mia DeVane, spokeswoman for the Governor's Office of Administration, which oversees information technology. Friday morning, four state government departments received indications of a security problem. Rather than limit the response to just those departments -- Education, Labor and Industry, Lottery and Military and Veteran's Affairs -- the state shut down its entire Web site as a precautionary measure. The Web site was down from about 9:30 a.m. to about...

How much do you suppose it costs the U.S. Mint to produce a penny? Let me tell you--with a deeply self-satisfied howl of execration--almost 2 cents. This little brown item of pocket clutter costs twice as much to make as it's worth, and it isn't worth anything. A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny. The problem is the cost of zinc, which is what a "copper" is actually made of. For the past 25 years...

Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market.Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical...

FOR years it has been a workplace truism: jobs with fat paychecks are found in the private sector, while jobs with ho-hum pay but rock-solid benefits are found with the government. But research by the Employee Benefit Research Institute suggests that the truism has not been true for some time.As of June 2005, overall compensation costs were 46 percent higher for state and local governments than for private-sector employers, according to the institute’s research analyst, Ken McDonnell. And when Mr. McDonnell separated the cost of providing current pay from the cost of providing benefits, he found that government employees were...

LONDON (Reuters) - BBC journalists and other employees have voted to go on strike to protest the publicly funded broadcaster's plans to cut about 20 percent of its workforce under Director General Mark Thompson.About 84 percent of BBC employees represented by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted for the strike, General Secretary Jeremy Dear said on Wednesday."This result is a reflection of the huge anger at the scale and impact of Mark Thompson's cuts," he said. The NUJ will meet Amicus and BECTU, two other unions representing BBC employees, on Thursday to decide when to strike.The NUJ said the...

OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) It may have been the quickest fire response ever—when Oregon City firefighters found flames coming out of their own fire station. The Clackamas County Dispatch called the fire station this morning to tell them an alarm was coming from their own station. Captain Jamie Karn says they found one of the fire engines had caught fire. They used another engine to put out the flames. But not before hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage was caused to the fire engine—and the station. Three firefighters suffered minor smoke inhalation, but they’ll be OK. Karn says the...