State Workers and N.Y.'s Fiscal Crisis  —  At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees' pensions than it did just a decade ago.

Mitt Romney's prescription for ‘Obamacare’: Repeal it  —  BARTLETT, N.H.—Mitt Romney repeatedly called for the repeal of “Obamacare” in a Saturday night speech to New Hampshire Republicans, even as the former Massachusetts governor admitted his own state's health care program “wasn't perfect.”

Tea Partiers Clean-Up Mess Left By Union Protesters in Wisconsin  —  Tea party supporters in Wisconsin have created a Facebook group designed to organize an event called “It's Time to Take Out the Trash!”.  They will be in Madison tomorrow to clean-up the disaster left by the anti-union protesters over the past two weeks.

A Liberal Is a Villager Who's Been Screwed By a Mortgage Servicer  —  Dana “the mark” Milbank of the Washington Post  —  The past week has seen a pronounced evolution in the writing of Dana Milbank.  Earlier in the week he severely criticized the incestuous relationship between the political …

Former French President Chirac to stand trial  —  PARIS - After years of claiming presidential immunity to avoid legal proceedings, Jacques Chirac is finally facing a court.  —  The former president, a bugaboo for George W. Bush during his rush to war in Iraq, on Monday becomes France's …

Sarah Palin gets snippy when O'Reilly tries to press her on aid cutbacks to Alaska's poor  —  It's hard to say why it happened, but all of a sudden Bill O'Reilly decided last night to stop tossing Sarah Palin the usual softball questions and Hannity Jobs she's become accustomed to during her tenure at Fox News.

Republicans in solid shape to take control of Senate next year  —  An early spate of Democratic Senate retirements has put Republicans in solid shape to retake the majority in the upper chamber next year.  —  The first edition of The Hill's 2012 race ratings puts five Democratic-held seats in the toss-up column.

MERS?  It May Have Swallowed Your Loan  —  FOR more than a decade, the American real estate market resembled an overstuffed novel, which is to say, it was an engrossing piece of fiction.  —  Mortgage brokers hip deep in profits handed out no-doc mortgages to people with fictional incomes.

It's Time to Face the Fiscal Illusion  —  FISCAL policy debates often focus on technocratic questions about how much money the government should spend and when, yet the actual course of events depends not on the experts but on politics.  The more that our government runs up unfunded obligations and debt …

Obama's 2012 reelection team gets moving  —  As Republicans dither, debating who is and who isn't in the 2012 race for the White House, President Obama and his team are moving swiftly to dive into the business of winning reelection.  —  No office space has yet been rented.  No committee has been formed.

Saudis mobilise thousands of troops to quell growing revolt  —  Saudi Arabia was yesterday drafting up to 10,000 security personnel into its north-eastern Shia Muslim provinces, clogging the highways into Dammam and other cities with busloads of troops in fear of next week's “day of rage” by what is now called the “Hunayn Revolution”.