Free Republic

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation and sending working parents scrambling to find care for them. Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders. Even public safety...

Congress and President Obama talk a good story when discussing the need for federal budget cuts, but Americans will know they are serious when they eliminate certain sacred cows from the federal budget.  Over the past 17 months, the Obama Administration has made token attempts at budget cutting, promising cuts tomorrow if allowed to spend today.  But, with an annual deficit of $1.2 trillion and public debt of $13,200,000,000,000.00, more stringent measures are needed.  While some officials have suggested limited cost containment, there are some programs, totaling over a trillion dollars, which neither Congress nor Obama seem to have considered...

On a July afternoon in 2006, Patrick Hale microwaved a bag of popcorn for his two young children and sat down with them to watch television. When he got up to change the channel, he heard a strange noise behind him, and turned to see his 23-month-old daughter, Allison, turning purple and unable to breathe.

...while these top earners are a small percentage of the overall congressional work force, their numbers are growing at a rapid rate under the Democratic Congress. The number of staffers earning within the upper 3 percent of House salaries — currently $163,358 or more — has increased by nearly 39 percent in the past four years....

More attacks on the Tea Party movement, this time by one of the unions. Democrats and union leaders assured everyone the TEA Party movement was pure astroturf and fake, funded by finance and insurance companies favoring Republicans. It was not true, and now Fox News reports a supposed grass-roots effort to bash the TEA Party movement is funded by unions.

Even if Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab had never boarded that Christmas flight from Amsterdam to Detroit wearing explosive underpants, a passage on page 17 of a report published in July by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security would still be eye-popping. “Not all known or reasonably suspected terrorists are prohibited from boarding an aircraft, or are subject to additional security screening prior to boarding an aircraft,” says the passage. http://www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/mgmtrpts/OIGr_09-64_Jul09.pdf More than eight years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, people boarding commercial flights in the United States—and sometimes those boarding international flights bound for the United States—are...