Free Republic

Complete title: Judicial Watch Uncovers New Documents Detailing Pelosi's Use of Air Force Aircraft for Her Family in 2010 Records Also Detail Massive Pelosi-Led Bipartisan Congressional Junket to Detroit Auto Show Washington, DC -- July 21, 2011Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained new documents from the United States Air Force (USAF) detailing then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s use of USAF aircraft in 2010. The records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which include flight manifests, expense summaries, copies of receipts and Congressional correspondence, detail a number of...

Yesterday, Miller-McCune’s Michael Scott Moore accused Southwest Airlines of helping to bury a potential Texas bullet train 15 years ago. “Southwest understood better than most high-speed rail critics just how well the trains could work,” Moore wrote. “[High-speed rail in Spain] has reduced Spanish highway traffic — even for cargo, by freeing up space on the older rail network — and it’s cut dramatically into domestic airline business.” Miller-McCune quotes a 2006 story in The Austinist: Dallas-based airline company Southwest Airlines launched a sweeping, aggressive public relations campaign throughout the state in order to discredit TGV and prevent the company...

Southwest Airlines is landing in hot water after they told a passenger that she was "too fat to fly." During a layover in Dallas on Easter Sunday, Kenlie Tiggeman was told by a Southwest employee that she and her mother were "too fat to fly" when they asked what the weight restrictions were on the flight, according to MSNBC. Tiggeman, who has lost 120 pounds in the last two years, told the news organization: "It doesn't matter how far I have come. I have a long way to go, but no one sees that. All they see is my exterior...

(Reuters) - Southwest Airlines grounded 81 aircraft from its Boeing 737 fleet for inspection after a gaping hole in the fuselage forced one of its planes to make emergency landing in Arizona on Friday, the company said on Saturday. Southwest (LUV.N) and Boeing (BA.N) engineers will inspect the aircraft to try to determine the cause, Southwest said in a statement. Passengers heard a loud noise and suddenly saw a hole about mid-cabin. Southwest Airlines is working with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration on the ground in Arizona to determine the cause of a sudden drop...

British Airways grounded two jumbo jets after a passenger complained of being badly bitten by bed bugs during two separate long-haul flights. The airline fumigated one of the planes on which it confirmed there had been an infestation and apologised to the woman for her ordeal. Businesswoman Zane Selkirk revealed her body was ‘crawling’ with bugs and ‘covered with bites’ during a ten-hour transatlantic flight from Los Angeles to London Heathrow in January. The 28-year-old believes she was also bitten on a second flight in February during a business trip from Bangalore in India to Heathrow. The revelations will certainly...

Well this is living! Marvin Gaye who sung about intercity Blues had no idea that we’d all be receiving sexual healing inside our near-the-city airports. Who among us wakes up every morning and after the morning rituals of hygiene and breakfast bolts out of the door to work where hundreds of women are lined up before you? And your job is either to scan anatomically correct female images all day or to glide your lecherous fingers up and down the nether and frontal regions of the female body? Not your job description? Well one might think it is the job...

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Friday three top Russian officials should spend New Year's Eve in the dark after failing to fulfill their promise to repair damaged power lines. "You said everything would be fine by 1800 (1500 GMT)," Russia's de facto number one said in nationally televised comments to the three. "You should not have said anything if you were not sure," he added during a meeting that included the governor of the Moscow region as well as federal energy minister and the head of the local power utility. The televised comments were followed an hour later by news...

In the wake of yet another Muslim terror plot, we can't ignore the threat profile any longer—or the solution. Asra Q. Nomani argues the case for religious and racial profiling. For all those holiday travelers negotiating the Transportation Security Administration’s new cop-a-feel strategy, there is a difficult solution we need to consider: racial and religious profiling. As an American Muslim, I’ve come to recognize, sadly, that there is one common denominator defining those who’ve got their eyes trained on U.S. targets: MANY of them are Muslim—like the Somali-born teenager arrested Friday night for a reported plot to detonate a car...

Authorities this afternoon are examining two duffel bags stored inside a Delta cargo terminal building at Boston's Logan Airport after a dog trained to sniff out explosives reacted, a Massport spokesman said. Phil Orlandella said that a K9 dog from the Transportation Security Administration "got a hit'' while routine security inspections were being performed around 12:30 p.m. today. The duffel bags carried an address in Nigeria, he said. Orlandella said the package was found inside Delta cargo building 56 and that the 25 people working there have since been evacuated. He said the suspicious package is now undergoing a more...

Just a few days before the busy holiday travel period, the Transportation Security Administration has decided to change the rules of flying - again. At the beginning of this month, the agency began enforcing its name-matching requirements for airline tickets. Passengers must now provide their full names as they appear on a government-issued ID, their date of birth and their gender when they book a flight. After a terrorism scare involving explosive devices shipped by cargo, the government banned printer cartridges from luggage. And the TSA started implementing several new screening measures, including an enhanced "pat-down" protocol for air travelers...

Dear Penthouse Forum,I know that you won't believe what happened to me, and I know that I must be a one-in-a-million guy to have this occur, but last week I was standing in line at the airport...

Our ever-friendly Transportation Safety Administration sure has smacked a hornet’s nest with their new see-through body scanners and overtly invasive body inspections that border on criminal groping if done unofficially. The anger this has raised has once again brought to the front the example of the Israeli method of clearing people through questioning rather than all the hi-tech gadgetry. Some will always criticize the Israeli method due to the fact that it is a form of profiling. This is a mute and unsubstantiated complaint as the Israelis profile not by race, religion, or other physical traits, but profile by the...

If you want to understand the spontaneous outrage that combusted this week at the introduction of new airport security procedures—an electronic undressing for those who go through the fancy X-ray machines and a groping for those who "opt out"—just look at the pictures of our fellow citizens passing through the scanners. They stand, dishearteningly, with their hands above their heads in the universal pose of defeat and surrender. Yet the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration are, frankly, annoyed at the "traveling public" for making such a fuss. A senior Homeland Security official (who would not allow...

Subject: So Dumb You Can Only Smile A DC airport ticket agency offers some examples of 'why' our country is in trouble! 1.I had a New Hampshire Congresswoman (Carol Shea-Porter) ask for an aisle seat so that her hair wouldn't get messed up by being near the window. (On an airplane!) 2.I got a call from a Kansas Congressman's (Moore) staffer (Howard Bauleke), who wanted to go to Capetown. I started to explain the length of the flight and the passport information, and then he interrupted me with, ''I'm not trying to make you look stupid, but Capetown is in...

The National Transportation Safety Board has again recommended that airlines require a separate seat for all children, regardless of age, eliminating the current practice of permitting children under the age of 2 to fly for free on the lap of a parent. Will mandating child restraint systems make air travel safer? The answer is probably yes but that's the visible. Having to purchase an extra airplane ticket, some families will opt to drive to their destination instead. Thus, mandated CRS will force some families to switch to a less safe method of travel and some highway fatalities will represent the...

...After decades as the frontman of Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson has a new second job – in middle management. The English singer has been named marketing director of Astraeus, a Gatwick-based charter airline, where he has worked as a pilot for several years. The announcement at the bottom of the Astraeus website makes it sound like just another corporate position. "With the rapid growth in the business we have increased our commercial team," the statement reads. "Bruce Dickinson as our marketing director, [and] Claire Ronson has now moved to sales and marketing to support our sales team." They don't even...

MYFOXNY.COM - A Playboy centerfold tried to bust out -- midair -- from a jet amid a bad case of high anxiety. Law enforcement officers met a JetBlue plane at its arrival gate in Newark Liberty International Airport Thursday afternoon because of a passenger who was causing a disturbance on board, the airline reported. The passenger was identified as 21-year-old Tiffany Livingston. She was aboard JetBlue Flight 522 from Florida to Newark, N.J., on Thursday when she bolted from her seat and tried to open the door of the plane. She had became agitated because of turbulence and appeared to...

One man is in custody and Miami International Airport is back open this morning after a suspicious device caused a major evacuation and shutdown Thursday night. The security scare happened just after 9 p.m., when a baggage screener spotted a suspicious item in a checked piece of luggage in the Customs area. -snip- A video of what is believed to be part of the suspicious device showed a silver canister, though police haven't confirmed what was found. Police also haven't released the identity of the man taken into custody, but airport officials said he had been on a flight from...

If you are flying out of Boston’s Logan International or Las Vegas-McCarran International airports you can expect the heavy hands of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to come down on you. The TSA has just implemented a more aggressive palms-first, slide down body search technique to properly feel up airline passengers. The new policy replaces the formerly-used almost-as-intrusive back hand patdown. It’s not enough that TSA agents get to ogle your naked bodies — and those of your kids — via the naked body scanner machines. If you refuse to subject yourself to the radiation of the backscatter naked body...

Maggots falling from an overhead bin from a spoiled container of meat forced a US Airways flight to return to the gate so the bin could be cleaned. Passenger Donna Adamo said she noticed a couple of flies on the Monday flight when she got to her seat but didn't think much of it. Then, as the plane was taxiing, she heard a passenger behind her causing a commotion and refusing to take her seat. "Then I heard the word 'maggot' and that kind of got everybody creeped out," she said. "All of a sudden, I felt somebody flick the...