Free Republic

Oh if it were only true. Joel Fox pens this over at Fox & Hounds: Applying the same criteria in which Major League Baseball (MLB) stepped in to take over the operation of the Los Angeles Dodgers, . . .

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Postal Service said Friday it lost $8.5 billion last year despite deep cuts of more than 100,000 jobs and other reductions in recent years. The post office had estimated it would lose $6 billion to $7 billion, but a sharp decline in mail took a toll. Increased use of the Internet and the recession, which cut advertising and other business mail, meant less money for the agency. For the year ending Sept. 30, the post office had income of $67.1 billion, down $1 billion from the previous fiscal year. Expenses totaled $70 billion, a decline of...

On July 21, when President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, he promised: “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.” How long will this Obama promise last? Well, The New York Times reports today that “the Obama administration on Wednesday pumped $3 billion into programs intended to stop the unemployed from losing their homes,” including a program announced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that “will draw on $1 billion authorized by the new financial overhaul law.” That’s right. The Dodd-Frank “no more taxpayer-funded bailouts forever” bill is not even a month old, and already...

When her church's pantry received a donation of 16,000 pounds of food in May from a postal food drive, pastor Angela Hood saw it as a blessing. But when she checked the supply earlier this week, it was as if she had been cursed. "Almost all of our crates and our boxes were completely empty,'' said Hood, near tears. "I just kept thinking where is the food, what happened? I cried. I was so angry.'' Every Tuesday and Thursday, the volunteers at the pantry at New Life Worship Center Ministries handed out canned food, cereal and vegetables to as many...

WASHINGTON, June 10, 2010 – The top two officials in charge of Arlington National Cemetery here were disciplined after an Army investigation found the cemetery’s management to be “dysfunctional,” Army Secretary John M. McHugh announced today at the Pentagon. Secretary of the Army John M. McHugh announces at a June 10, 2010, Pentagon press conference that in light of findings of inappropriate practices and mismanagement at Arlington National Cemetery, he is relieving the cemetery’s current superintendent and deputy superintendent of their duties and placing Kathryn Condon (right) in the newly created role of Executive Director of the Army National Cemeteries...

Passing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would result in millions in additional political funds for organized labor over the next 10 years, a business group opposed to the legislation will argue in a report to be released Tuesday. Unions would stand to gain an additional $320 million more to spend on political activities in year ten alone with a ten year total of $1.75 billion, according to a report put together by the anti-EFCA Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI). EFCA’s passage into law could generate billions of additional dollars for unions to spend on political activity to advance their agenda,"...

In "Uncle Shariah" in the Washington Times, December 16, Frank Gaffney details why AIG's nationalization is so worrisome: The insurance giant AIG has lately become the poster child for corporate risk-taking, mismanagement and greed. Its unimaginably large losses, rooted in insurance it extended to financial companies engaged in subprime mortgage-backed transactions, have destroyed both AIG's corporate reputation and balance sheet. Indeed, but for the fact that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - who during his days running Goldman Sachs had extensive ties to AIG - deemed the insurance firm "too large to fail," the company would surely have gone under by...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12, 2008 – The Defense Department Inspector General reports that the America Supports You program was being managed in a “questionable and irregular manner,” the department’s top public affairs official said today. Robert T. Hastings, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, spoke with reporters in advance of the release of the inspector general’s audit. Dorrance Smith, then-assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, requested the IG audit in May 2007. Still, Hastings said, America Supports You is a “tremendous initiative” for U.S. servicemembers and their families. As originally conceived, the program aimed to inform servicemembers...

Despite lining up at the “federal trough” for large helpings of taxpayers’ dollars, ailing businesses like AIG, and Citibank say they have no plans to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in sports team sponsorships. “Putting your company’s name on a stadium built with tax-financing is the kind of ‘in-your-face’ image that says you’re the top dog in the hump,” bragged Citibank CEO Robert Baron. “I can’t tell you how many doors it’s opened at city hall, the state house or congress.” Baron dismissed criticism that his firm ought to concentrate on putting out a better product or make better...

On May 23, 2006, as a jury in Houston deliberated the case against top Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, a little-known regulatory agency in Washington, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), released a study with the dryly bureaucratic title “Report of the Special Examination of Fannie Mae.” The document received far less attention than the news from Enron, but its conclusions were stunning. In meticulous detail, it outlined a culture of corruption at the Federal National Mortgage Association — better known as Fannie Mae — that rivals the most serious corporate scandals in recent years. In...

Tax credits time bomb threatens to explode The nation will face a bill for £2.8 billion Jon Ungoed-Thomas ON February 26 last year, a manila envelope crammed full of documents arrived at a house on the Isle of Wight. Inside was a dossier that amounted to a detailed indictment of the tax credit fiasco that will cost the country as much as £2.8 billion. The documents - and tapes of telephone conversations that arrived some weeks later - were obtained under data protection laws and detailed the tax credit claim of Simon Blackmore, 38. He was being pursued for £6,057...

SAN ANTONIO -- It's official. Texas Department Of Transportation really does need to be more accountable, responsive and transparent. We could all guess what the Sunset Commission finally recognized: TxDOT is out of control and needs to take radical measures to restore trust. Of course, TxDOT promises to do better, but we'll believe it when we see it. They may be so far gone that the only way to fix TxDOT's mess is to disband them altogether and start over. With a Trans-Texas Corridor and toll roads in play, as well as grossly miscalculated budgets, TxDOT needs more oversight now...

As waves of talk hosts, producers, disc jockeys and news personnel are sent packing in the wake of Citadel- ABC Radio's financial collapse, shell-shocked radio insiders are wondering if anything can be done to save their highly- successful talk format. Yesterday, now known as "Black Friday", has career professionals in a state of outright panic, with even more job cuts expected on Monday. When it is over, even the highest- rated major- market outlets will be expected to somehow function with few remaining staffers. And even deep cuts aren't likely to provide more than a drop in the bucket for...

Squandered oil bonanza may bring down Iranian President Bronwen Maddox, World Briefing Oil at nearly $100 a barrel cannot keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad safe in the presidency of Iran for ever. Finally, it seems as if his breathtaking economic mismanagement, squandering an unprecedented bonanza, may prise him from office. His critics have been predicting from his election in June 2005 that his wilful ignorance of economics would lead to his downfall. They have been wrong so far because of oil prices even higher than expected; a still-deep hunger among the very poor for Ahmadinejad's message; and his fortuitously successful handling of...

NEW YORK - In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators." "The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press. Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The tally for Hurricane Katrina waste could top $2 billion next year because half of the lucrative government contracts valued at $500,000 or greater for cleanup work are being awarded with little competition. Federal investigators have already determined the Bush administration squandered $1 billion on fraudulent disaster aid to individuals after the 2005 storm. Now they are shifting their attention to the multimillion dollar contracts to politically connected firms that critics have long said are a prime area for abuse. In January, investigators will release the first of several audits examining more than $12 billion in Katrina...

Corruption in Venezuela Hits Record Levels Under Hugo Chavez Says Cato Institute To: National Desk Contact: Gustavo Coronel, coronel.gustavo@gmail.com or Ian Vasquez of the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, ivasquez@cato.org or Nicole Kurokawa, nkurokawa@cato.org or 202-218-4613, or Evans Pierre, epierre@cato.org or 202-789-5204, both of the Cato Institute WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Higher oil revenues have enabled mismanagement and abuse of power in Venezuela, leading to record levels of corruption, argues a new policy analysis by the Cato Institute. In the study released today, "Corruption, Mismanagement, and Abuse of Power in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela," author Gustavo Coronel, member...

WASHINGTON - Federal officials are investigating how National Archives documents of interest to Indians suing the Interior Department were found discarded in a trash bin and a wastebasket. The discovery came to light on Sept. 1, when Archives staff noticed federal records in one of the trash bins behind the National Archives Building near the Capitol. They notified the Archives' inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, whose staff recovered the documents. They found at least a portion of the documents were Bureau of Indian Affairs records dating to the 1950s, according to Jason Baron of the Archives' Office of General Counsel, in...

A home under construction overlooks a mobile dwelling in Harbison Canyon. County officials say three years is long enough to rebuild or at least get started, but those with eviction notices are angry. After issuing multiple extensions, San Diego County officials recently told people they had 30 days to move out of the trailers they've lived in since losing their homes to the Cedar and Paradise fires three years ago. The final notice left residents like David Baker without a home, again. A general contractor from Ramona who lost his house in the October 2003 wildfires, Baker said he...

DETROIT (Reuters) - U.S automakers face a widening gap in profitability per vehicle compared to their major Japanese rivals because of missed design opportunities, heavy discounting and high labor costs, a study released on Monday said. The study by the automotive consultant Harbour Felax Group marked an attempt to quantify the costs that have sapped earnings-per-vehicle for Detroit-based car makers relative to their major competitors in the American market. The study found that General Motors Corp lost an average of $1,271 for every car and truck it sold in North America last year. By contrast, Toyota Motor Corp <7203.T>, which...