Free Republic

Here’s a simple way to find more money to hire more firemen and buy more fire-fighting equipment in Orange County: Cut O.C. firemen’s extravagant pay and benefits from $175,000 a year on average to $150,000. (Some even made as much as $268,000 a year.) At $150,000, they still would be making double the average family income for a resident in Orange County. Cutting their pay $25,000 would be a reduction of 1/7th. That would mean their forces could be augmented by that amount — or a little less, if some of the saved money is used for buying new equipment....

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 — In a reversal from past election cycles, Democratic candidates for president are outpacing Republicans in donations from the health care industry, even as the leading Democrats in the field offer proposals that have caused deep anxiety in some of its sectors. Hospitals, drug makers, doctors and insurers gave candidates in both parties more than $11 million in the first nine months of this year, according to an analysis of campaign finance records done for The New York Times by the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent group that tracks campaign finance. In all, the Democratic presidential...

In the "Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator" show, men accused of having explicit online chats with people they think are underage children go to a house to meet them, where TV cameras, host Chris Hansen and police await. Louis William Conradt Jr., of Terrell, Texas, a Dallas suburb, was suspected of being one of those men, except he didn't show up at the house. That didn't stop the TV producers and police from showing up at his, though, and as officers knocked on his door and a camera crew waited in the street, Conradt shot and killed himself. His...

A split within the Episcopal Church has begun and is on its way to court -- something akin to "divorce court," it seems. More than 100 Episcopal parishes -- and some dioceses -- have either left the denomination or requested alternative oversight within the worldwide Anglican Communion. One of them is St. Stephen's Church in Heathsville, Va. "We left the Episcopal Church because we could no longer be under the leadership of people who have the attitude that they did about the authority of Scripture," said the Rev. Jeffrey Cerar, rector of St. Stephen's. "Starting several years ago, the Episcopal...