Free Republic

Feb. 19 (UPI) -- A new survey of historians ranks Donald Trump the worst president in U.S. history. Trump has touted his poll numbers against President Joe Biden ahead of a potential rematch in November. However, the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, conducted by Qualtrics, has Biden significantly ahead of the former president. The survey was conducted online among more than 500 members of the American Political Science Association, an organization of professionals in the field. Respondents rated Biden at 62.66 on a scale of 100 for overall greatness, good for 14th out of 45 presidents. Abraham Lincoln scored...

ROME — Pope Francis on Tuesday imposed an Oct. 1 deadline for all Holy See offices and Vatican-linked institutions to deposit their assets with the Vatican bank. Francis’ decree follows his decision earlier this year to entrust management of all Vatican assets to one office — the patrimony office known as APSA — in a bid to end decades of mismanagement that culminated with a scandal over a 350 million-euro investment in a London property. Ten people, including former Vatican officials and external brokers, are on trial in the Vatican tribunal on finance-related charges related to the deal. The Vatican’s...

On 2 September 2018, Kansas University released a summation of a study on how gun owners affect politics.  The study will be presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in 2018, in Boston. A problem all scientists face is overcoming assumptions about reality they have already made. It is particularly true in social sciences such as political science. In such studies, it is very difficult to keep the world view of the person studying a subject from influencing the study.Most political scientists today subscribe to the Progressive political philosophy. It seems to be the case in the study...

<p>Sens. Jim Bunning, Kentucky Republican, and Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, introduced the bill before the Easter recess to force the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to implement the Federal Flight Deck Officer program the way Congress intended.</p> <p>Mr. Bunning said the legislation "will take down the barriers TSA has thrown up, and will help make our skies more secure."</p>

Jets Remain Vulnerable, Feds Block Guns in Cockpit Jeff Louderback Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2003 Two years have passed since the attacks of Sept. 11, which spurred Congress to authorize pilots to carry firearms. But as America remembers the horrific hijackings of Sept. 11, the U.S. government has impeded efforts to arm U.S. pilots, leaving civilian airlines still vulnerable to armed hijackers. Today, fewer than 150 pilots are approved to carry guns, according to Bob Lambert, president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance (APSA). Though Congress approved the firearms program for pilots, it left its implementation to the Transportation Security Administration...

In the face of new terrorist hijacker warnings, a pilots' advocacy group is calling on President Bush to expand the number of federal firearms-training facilities so more air crews can fly armed. According to the Airline Pilots' Security Alliance, a group that has advocated arming pilots, too few air crews are flying with the protection of a firearm aboard the plane, some 22 months after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings. That, APSA says, despite a new Department of Homeland Security warning that al-Qaida terrorists may be planning more suicide hijackings similar to the 9-11 attacks. "The armed-pilots program needs to...

Except for providing an endless amount of humor for late-night monologs, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is seeming more useless every day. The Air Marshal program has had major problems from its inception and the idiocy of many airport passenger screeners is almost legendary. As part of the Homeland Security bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush, TSA (1) was ordered to implement an affirmative program to arm any and all passenger airliner pilots wishing to participate in the program. There were to be no limits on participation. That is, each pilot of a passenger airliner...

Recently, I received a message from the Airline Pilots' Security Alliance (1), which is a coalition of the Allied Pilots' Association, the Coalition of Airline Pilots' Associations, the Air Line Pilots' Association, and the Independent Pilots' Association. The message concerned arming commercial airline pilots, but it provided some very good information the national media seems to have overlooked. For instance: “Most people don't know that for many decades after the dawn of commercial aviation, airline pilots carried firearms in the cockpit without incident. However, in late 1987, after a suicidal attacker broke into the cockpit of an airliner, murdered the...