Free Republic

Social Security problems start sooner than you think Alan Greenspan puts the date to really start worrying at 2008. That's because he's looking at real cash flow, not fancy government accounting that puts the problems with Social Security decades away. By Scott Burns In two days of grilling about Social Security, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan put an important new date on our calendars: 2008. That's when he believes problems may begin with Social Security. **SNIP** The high-cost estimate has a smaller cash surplus. It also disappears much faster. The high-cost estimate has Social Security and Medicare down to a...

ITHACA NY—Newly elected Democratic National Commitee Chair Howard Dean, speaking at a Cornell University rally Wednesday (February 23), admitted that social security faced “problems” if not reformed, contradicting the claims of many in his own party.According to the Cornell Daily Sun, which covered the event locally, “Dean pointed out that…if Social Security were left alone for 30 years, its benefits would be reduced to 80 percent of what it is now. He acknowledged that… there were indeed problems with the program.”The article also indicates that Dean also attacked the notion of many that social security was a “pension” for the...

KIEV, Feb 18 (AFP) - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko slapped down a threat by his fiery prime minister to review the privatization of 3,000 firms, insisting in an interview with AFP that only a "few dozen" companies are affected. In what analysts warned showed a troubling split within the ex-Soviet republic's new Western-leaning government, Yushchenko flatly contradicted Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. "There will not be a review of 3,000 privatizations. I go by the principle that -- in all likelihood -- there will only be a few dozen companies concerned and the list, once established, will be definitive," he said....

SACRAMENTO (AP) - A defunct state agency that distributed federal crime grants was so plagued with accounting problems that it was impossible to audit and tens of millions of dollars in future funds could be in jeopardy, state auditors said Wednesday. Auditors looking into the Office of Criminal Justice Planning found incomplete and inaccurate paperwork a year after the agency was abolished because of leadership problems and poor business practices. "In my 30 years experience, this is the worst thing I've ever seen," said Samuel Hull, chief of state audits. "When we got into there and started looking at things...

Installed SP2, I cannot access start menu, cannot even run a disc defrag. Computer is running fine, otherwise. I tried uninstall on SP2, still had the problem. Tried to run the XP disc for repair, it tells Me that the OS is more advanced. Do I need to wipe the whole thing clean, and start over?

DOes anyone else have problems when clicking on the subject lines to a new thread?? So many times, i have to "copy the shortcut" then paste it in the address line to get to the thread. Am I the only one who clicks away on a new thread and get's nothing??

Democrats need not--and should not--adopt the agenda of social conservatives, but we need to do a better job of speaking to the moral and spiritual yearnings that have always characterized the American experience. Since Election Day, many Democrats have griped about the fact that, in supporting Bush, so many middle-class voters failed to vote in their economic self-interest. That is entirely true--and completely beside the point. Americans do not enter the voting booth in the manner of accountants calculating take-home income. They have historically voted on hopes and resentments--slavery and civil rights, freemasonry and free love--that have nothing to do...

Those who believe the Nov. 2 election was fraught with fraud or conspiracy that kept Democrat John Kerry from winning the White House should talk to Lana Morgan, supervisor of elections in Florida's Lafayette County. That county, along with about two dozen others in the state, has been the subject of intense speculation on the Internet because while 83 percent of residents are registered Democrats, Republican President Bush won 74 percent of the vote. But that's the way it always has been, Morgan said. "We're in the Bible Belt. There's still enough people that have got enough Christian in them...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union (news - web sites) urged re-elected President Bush (news - web sites) on Friday to make a fresh start in transatlantic cooperation, but internal EU differences over ties with Washington refused to die down. "The EU and its member states look forward to working very closely with President Bush and his new administration to combine efforts, including in multilateral institutions, to promote the rule of law and create a just, democratic and secure world," the 25 EU leaders said in a joint statement. But the future of relations with the United States prompted a...

On election eve, voting officials from Florida to Oregon were already dealing with problems that could slow down voting and lead to court challenges if results are close. Four years after the Florida debacle in which thousands of votes may not have counted, CBS News/New York Times poll conducted Thursday through Saturday found that most voters — 70 percent — were not concerned or not very concerned about whether their vote will be counted this year. But Republicans and Democrats have traded charges for weeks over alleged voter fraud or plans to intimidate people trying to exercise their franchise. Nowhere...

Why can't I access some posts today? I get the message "document not found on this server".

Hydrogen holds fantastic promise as a plentiful, clean-burning fuel and an eventual replacement for gasoline. Environmentalists like it because it might trim the amount of greenhouse gas spewed by the nation's automobiles. (The combustion of hydrogen produces only water.) Engineers like it because it's new technology that will need fueling with lots of ideas and design work. One futuristic idea places wind turbines in the windiest part of the country electrolyzing water and pumping it into a national grid. And cynics like the idea of a hydrogen economy because it lets them snicker while pointing out the hurtles that must...

Is anyone else having problems displaying threads on FR? I use Firefox, and it displays extremely long blank posts on every thread. I tried Internet Explorer and it seems to be having trouble with formatting tables and only shows the article with no other posts. Anyone else experiencing this? Yes, I'm logged on.

Provisional ballots could pose Election Day problems COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Provisional ballots could be the hanging chads of the 2004 presidential election, say critics of Ohio's guidelines for handling those votes. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell recently issued a directive to county election officials saying they are allowed to count provisional ballots only from voters who go to the correct polling location for their home address. Blackwell has ordered that if residents go to the wrong precinct, poll workers must find their correct precinct and tell them where to go, Blackwell's spokesman Carlo LoParo said. They also may cast provisional...

Darcy Jorgensen, Berkeley A compelling agenda and a message other than "Vote for me because I'm not Bush." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tony Rodriguez, San Francisco A candidate with sound ideas on how the government can help the world move forward. Kerry only offers rehashed socialist ideas from the failed Johnson-era Great Society. He refuses to recognize the wealth and freedom the Reagan/Thatcher revolution created. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jo-Anna Pippen, Albany It's missing media coverage. Kerry is talking about the issues, but the media spends its time fighting the Vietnam War all over again. Iraq is falling apart, but it's more sensational to argue over...

On Aug. 10, the Schwarzenegger administration reached an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union to settle its lawsuit demanding better education for California's neediest students. The good news is the lawsuit focused enormous attention on how decrepit and dysfunctional our public schools have become, especially those serving our most disadvantaged families. The bad news is it will do nothing to improve our public schools. After the suit was launched by the ACLU in 2000, the Davis administration fought it with the $320-per-hour O'Melveny and Myers law firm and $14.5 million in legal fees. Their hardball lawyers deposed kids as...

Many Germans will find it hard to say goodbye to the slice of American pie they've had for 50 years when US army bases close, writes Alex Duval SmithIt was probably a German road planners' joke. The road sweeping through the beautiful, pine-wooded valleys of southern Germany towards Baumholder - the largest US army base outside the United States - is called the B52. Last week President George Bush threw the lives of the town's 4,000 German residents into disarray when he announced a major restructuring exercise that will see 70,000 US troops sent home from Europe and Asia -...

The Law of the Conservation of Problems We have all used a number of laws describing the nature of the Universe, the nature of Man, and the nature of Society to make sense out of what we experience in everyday life. The Law of Unintended Consequences describes how any given decision can create results that were not in the original plans, even if the decision produced the desired results. The Law of Diminishing Returns describes how actions can produce lessened returns over time. The model I am proposing can explain a lot about the complexity and stress of modern life....

Over the last several days I've been having technical problems with FR and I'm curious if anyone else has been having similar problems. What has been happening is that on some threads and for a while there when view new posts at the root level of the forums the page would load to a certain extent and then stop only reload. When viewing the list of new posts it would vary from moment to moment what I would see as people would post. But invariably I would only be able to see so far down the page or hardly any...

The jaw-dropping moment came right at the beginning of a hearing in a room tucked away near the top of the state Capitol building. Lawmakers wondered: Was anybody managing spending at the state's adult prisons, which had blown their budget by a half-billion dollars this year? The one-word answer they got from a Finance Department official at the March hearing: No. More than two decades after California started toughening its sentencing laws and building new prisons to deal with rising crime rates, the mammoth penal system it created is embroiled in financial and management turmoil. The adult corrections system has...