When Beverly Hills residents found out that many of their city’s 950 municipal and public safety employees were earning stunning salaries, 13 weeks of paid vacation, unlimited overtime and other tax-free retirement benefits, taxpayers were outraged and city officials rushed into closed-door sessions to figure out what to do.

These revelations, exposed through the efforts of the city’s hometown newspaper, The Beverly Hills Courier, unmasked an even deeper problem: many California cities, and likely other municipalities across the U.S., are being strangled by the cost of ballooning pension benefits they can no longer afford.

All this has taken place in the throes of a global recession that is clobbering federal, state and local tax revenues used to pay for public services and pensions, and against the backdrop of the nation’s private-sector workers, who are feeling the pain of reductions, or total losses of their pension funds. And, in many cases, their jobs.

“What we have now is a grab bag of incredible benefits for public employees that are totally detached from what’s been happening in the private sector, and it’s neither fair nor sustainable,” said John Mirisch, a first-term Beverly Hills council member elected in 2009. “When the city was rolling in dough, officials may have thought the salary and pension structure was sustainable, but certainly, it was not fair.”

A former statistician for the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS), the state’s pension fund, warned that by 2014, local governments could be paying 50 percent of a police officer’s salary, 40 percent of a firefighter’s salary and 25 percent of an employee’s salary for their pensions, according to a recent report by the California League of Cities, a statewide advocacy group.

 Read More at Fox News By Leah Krakinowski, Fox News

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) gave Attorney General Eric Holder a choice during the House Judiciary hearing on Fast and Furious on December 8: go before Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voluntarily or expect a subpoena within a month. The AG apparently opted for the less splashy option.

“Hostile witness” Holder will face Issa’s House Oversight Committee on February 2. This time around Issa will be in charge of the proceedings. And he won’t be limited to a few measly minutes of questioning while fending off rude interruptions by Holder-protectoress Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX).

Darrell Issa today announced that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been scheduled to testify on February 2 about the Department of Justice’s knowledge of, and response to, gunwalking that occurred in Operation Fast and Furious.

The Attorney General will be asked to address management deficiencies within the Department that occurred both during and after the conclusion of Operation Fast and Furious. This will include the Department’s steadfast refusal to disclose information following the February 4, 2011 letter to Senator Grassley, which the Department has withdrawn because it contained false information denying allegations made by whistleblowers about Operation Fast and Furious.

“The Department of Justice’s conduct in the investigation of Operation Fast and Furious has been nothing short of shameful,” said Chairman Issa. “From its initial denials that nothing improper occurred, to efforts to silence whistleblowers who wanted to tell Congress what really happened, to its continuing refusal to discuss or share documents related to this cover-up, the Justice Department has fought tooth and nail to hide the full truth about what occurred and what senior officials knew.

Read More at American Thinker By M. Catharine Evans, American Thinker

The Command Sergeant Major of the U.S. Army’s Drill Sergeant School (DSS) has been suspended from duty, and the Army is working overtime to smother the story.

An investigative report by militarycorruption.com (MCC) has uncovered the story Army brass would love to keep secret. According to MCC, which specializing in exposing stories about our military the mainstream media and official channels won’t talk about, the Command Sergeant Major of the Army’s Drill Sergeant’s School (DSS) Teresa King has been charged with a variety of violations of Army regulations.

Sergeant Major Teresa King is an African-American who will be 50 years old this year. She is divorced, has no children, and has been in the Army for 31 years. Upon taking command of the DSS on September 22, 2009, King became the first female ever to hold that position.

On paper, Sergeant Major King sounds like an ideal soldier and well qualified to be in such an important slot in the Army’s training structure. Nevertheless, once the “paper” is turned over, questions about why she was selected abound.

Reports from MCC’s on the ground correspondents say King’s suspension from duty was prompted by her heavy drinking, sexual relationship with a lower ranking enlisted soldier, and the fact that at least one of the college degree she listed on her resume is from a schools deemed to be diploma mill.

Read More at Western Journalism by Kevin “Coach” Collins

The so-called Eleventh Commandment — “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican” — which was popularized by President Ronald Reagan, has been violated numerous times in this electoral season. Now, following his somewhat unexpected success in Iowa, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum appears to have violated the unspoken Twelfth Amendment: “Thou shalt not insult Ronald Reagan.”

At a New Hampshire event on Wednesday, Santorum addressed America’s financial crisis and spoke candidly about entitlement spending. Rather than praising Reagan, who is revered by many conservatives as a stellar president and a political savior of sorts, the 2012 hopeful said that the former president contributed to the entitlement crisis by kicking the can down the road on Social Security issues. According to Santorum, Reagan should have dealt with long-term Social Security problems during a 1983 bipartisan deal.

The Daily Caller reports:

Santorum was walking the audience through what he called the “ancient days of yesteryear” in a interminable and incredibly detailed response to a questioner. He explained that in the 1983 deal Reagan brokered with Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil to fix Social Security, the retirement age was moved back to 67, but that change wasn’t slated to be enacted until the politicians responsible were out of office.

Speaking in third person, he said, “If Rick Santorum gets elected and we do what I said that we need to do, which is to deal with the entitlement programs now, not 10 to 20 years from now.” Then, he went in for the “kill” that may leave a sour taste in the mouths of Reagan-loving conservatives.

“You’ll know — unlike Ronald Reagan who maybe was a better politician than me — you’ll know that it was Rick Santorum that worked together and got the American public to gather together to fix this problem,” he said. “Why? Because it is our problem.”

 Read More at The Blaze By Billy Hallowell, The Blaze

Last night’s nail-biter in Iowa marked the beginning of election year 2012. And with Americans heading to the polls — next in New Hampshire, then South Carolina and beyond — they will hope to rely on the integrity of the election system to ensure that every legitimate vote counts and that fraud is not the deciding factor on the local, state or national level.

Unfortunately, despite all the technological advances in our modern democracy, voter fraud still occurs, and yet there is still resistance to one very simple tool that could help eradicate it — voter ID. Some, like The New York Times, say that voting fraud is a myth, that “there is almost no voting fraud in America.” But as Heritage senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky explains, voter fraud is all too common in America today:

The fraud denialists also must have missed the recent news coverage of the double voters in North Carolina and the fraudster in Tunica County, Miss. — a member of the NAACP’s local executive committee — who was sentenced in April to five years in prison for voting in the names of ten voters, including four who were deceased.

And the story of the former deputy chief of staff for Washington mayor Vincent Gray, who was forced to resign after news broke that she had voted illegally in the District of Columbia even though she was a Maryland resident. Perhaps they would like a copy of an order from a federal immigration court in Florida on a Cuban immigrant who came to the U.S. in April 2004 and promptly registered and voted in the November election.

Even former liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens agrees. Stevens wrote in a 6-3 majority opinion upholding an Indiana voter ID law: “That flagrant examples of [voter] fraud…have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists…demonstrate[s] that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

Given the incidence of voter fraud — and the simplicity of requiring voters to present a valid ID in order to be able to vote — it’s not surprising that 70 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that voters “should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to cast their ballot,” according to a recent Rasmussen poll. Meanwhile, only 22 percent of Americans are opposed to the requirement.

Despite the fraud — and the support for voter ID measures — Attorney General Eric Holder intends to examine new state voter ID laws for potential racial bias. Von Spakovsky writes that the allegations of bias are baseless, and there is evidence to prove it. In Georgia, which enacted a photo ID law before the 2008 election, the number of African American voters increased after the new law went into effect. “According to Census Bureau surveys,” von Spakovsky writes, “65 percent of the black voting-age population voted in the 2008 election, compared with only 54.4 percent in 2004, an increase of more than ten percentage points.”

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Read More at The Foundry By Mike Brownfield, The Foundry