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Air Travel: When Congress decided to let the federal government take over airport security in the wake of 9/11, critics said it would only make matters worse. Fourteen years later, it looks like the critics had it exactly right.

Woodrow Wilson. Here's Why. If you wanted to identify, with confidence, the very worst president in American history, how would you go about it? One approach would be to consult the various academic polls on presidential rankings that have been conducted from time to time since Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. pioneered this particular survey scholarship in 1948. Bad idea. Most of those surveys identify Warren G. Harding of Ohio as the worst ever. This is ridiculous. Harding presided over very robust economic times. Not only that, but he inherited a devastating economic recession when he was elected in 1920...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. economy went into reverse in the first three months of this year as a severe winter and a widening trade deficit took a harsher toll than initially estimated. The Commerce Department says the overall economy as measured by the gross domestic product contracted at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the January-March period. The revised figure, even weaker than the government's initial estimate of a 0.2 percent growth rate, reflects a bigger trade gap and slower consumer spending. It marked the first decline since a 2.1 percent contraction in the first three months of...

Jeb Bush found himself on defense after his town hall meeting in Reno, Nevada yesterday after a young voter told him, “your brother created ISIS.” Ivy Ziedrich, a 19-year-old student at University of Nevada who said she was a registered Democrat, approached Bush after the event and told the likely presidential candidate he was wrong about the origins of the terror group... Ziedrich said she is a member of the Young Democrats at her university although in an interview with ABC News yesterday she said she was not speaking as a representative of the group. She said she likes to...

In an April 4 article, Liz Sly of the Washington Post Beirut Bureau, with 15 years' experience in the Mid-East including covering the war in Iraq, discusses the origins and leadership of ISIS. The rise of the Islamic State or ISIS has caught many in the West off guard with little knowledge about the organization. We know that ISIS has been exceptionally brutal, showing no mercy or morality in how it has treated civilians as well as prisoners. The first question to be asked in understanding this enemy is "Who runs ISIS?" The simple answer is that ISIS is run...

Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church "Only after the ISIS militants began terrible mass executions of Christians the world community began speaking about this problem out loud. It happened only after the number of Christians in Iraq decreased by times and almost no Christians remained in Lybia and after the Christian community in Egypt had a hard time. The world community has at last begun speaking out against the background of general instability and uncertainty, against the background of the Arab Spring developments, against the background of what is going on now in Syria, where militants in the occupied...

Wednesday at town hall event held at the City Club of Cleveland, when asked what he would have done differently, President Barack Obama said he regretted he did not “more aggressively” warn the American public how long it was going to take for them to recover from President George W. Bush’s failures. Obama said, “I would have told myself to anticipate because the recession was so bad and so tough for so many people, that I was going to have to be more aggressive in explaining to the public how long it was going to take for the recovery to...

Did anyone see Medea Benjamin on O'Reilly tonight? She of course blamed GWB for the Jordanian pilot's execution. She said we never should have gone into Iraq in the first place. Then she said our interventionist policies in Egypt and Libya cause ISIS to act the way they do. I wanted to smack BOR for not pointing out it was OBAMA and his ARAB SPRING interventions that funded and otherwise supported the uprisings in Egypt and Libya.

Ava DuVernay, the director of the Martin Luther King historical movie "Selma", is set to again team up with the film's star David Oyelowo for a new project about Hurricane Katrina. DuVernay and Oyelowo, who were both finalists at this year's Golden Globes, will "develop a new narrative feature film chronicling a sweeping love story and complex murder mystery during the time of Hurricane Katrina," Participant Media said Monday. The project will mark the pair's third collaboration after "Middle of Nowhere" and "Selma", which has been nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Picture.

"We Blame George W. Bush" is a recurring category in James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" column at the Wall Street Journal. The meme mocks the penchant of progressives to blame the former president for everything under the sun. The phenomenon was illustrated in an ugly way on last night's Rachel Maddow Show. Dem Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut blamed the existence of the Charlie Hebdo terrorists on, yup, W. Oh, Murphy didn't call 43 out by name. He didn't have to. Instead, Murphy went out of his way to claim that the murderers weren't radicalized by ISIS [which...

The release of the already discredited Senate “torture report” has left liberals in a state of gleeful pearl clutching as they pretended to be shocked by the shocking revelation that enhanced interrogation can mean sleep deprivation and assorted mind games.Meanwhile here’s a little reminder of what real torture looks like as perpetrated by the Taliban. I was one of the Taliban’s torturers: I crucified peopleInstead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any...

Almost 13 years after the CIA established secret prisons to hold and interrogate detainees, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the CIA’s programs listing 20 key findings. Click a statement below for a summary of the findings: 1 “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence” “The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” The Committee finds, based on a review of CIA interrogation records, that the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee...

The Fed's low interest rates could bring a "scary" 50-60 percent market correction, technical analyst Abigail Doolittle told CNBC on Wednesday. "Unfortunately, I think it could come on a crash similar to what happened in 2007," the founder of Peak Theories Research said on " Squawk Box " a day after the S&P 500 closed above the 2,000 level for the first time ever. "It's tough to know what the exact catalyst will be. But that's the very nature of that kind of selloff. They start slowly and then happen very suddenly." Doolittle pointed to a 20-year chart of the...

Former Vice President Dick Cheney lashed out again at President Barack Obama on Sunday, repeatedly accusing him of projecting "weakness" abroad and "crippling" the U.S. military. The frequent Obama critic told radio show host and GOP megadonor John Catsimatidis that he traces "most" of the problems of Washington to the current administration. "They can't blame George Bush anymore," Cheney quipped on AM 970 The Answer's "The Cats Roundtable." "I think he's been a failure as a president. I think the scandals, wth respect to the Veterans Administration, with respect to the IRS, these are bad situations." Nevertheless, Cheney said there...

Before jetting off for two weeks’ vacation, President Obama laid the blame for the Iraq crisis at the doorstep of the Bush administration. At a brief press conference Saturday on the White House lawn, Obama scoffed at the notion that he might regret not having left a residual American force in Iraq. “Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to a sovereign democratic Iraqi government,” Obama said. “In order for us to leave troops in Iraq, we needed the invitation of the Iraqi government, … and the Iraqi government, based on its political considerations, in part because...

As militants with the Islamic State launched artillery rounds at Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, the U.S. military on Friday launched airstrikes using fighter jets on the USS George H. W. Bush, Pentagon officials said. It was just the latest involvement in combat for the Bush, which was commissioned in 2009. It was used extensively in 2011 to support combat operations in Afghanistan, and left Norfolk, Va., in February on its second deployment. It arrived in the Middle East in March, and entered the Persian Gulf in June, as the Islamic State took control of vast regions of northern and...

Folks.  Ross Perot was lambasted for using the term.  Now the president uses it as often as the “you can keep…” and “period” verbiage.  As always and forevermore, it is not what is said, but who says it. Folks.  As if those who went through enhanced interrogations were snatched from a Norman Rockwell scene and placed on a waterboard.  Hardly.  The president, and the attorney general, still seem bent on proving that the Bush administration engaged in “torture.”  We seem to forget the moment in history in which the procedures in question were conducted.  Did Obama and Holder see the...

While speaking out on the House floor yesterday against the House GOP lawsuit against President Obama, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said the move is a “veil for impeachment.” Jackson Lee also took the opportunity to point out that “We [Democrats] did not seek an impeachment of President Bush” when he was in office. Really? Not only did some Democrats seek an impeachment of President Bush, but Rep. Jackson Lee co-sponsored the bill? Classic!

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier. Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA...

An ongoing lawsuit has pried loose new records linked to a family of Sarasota Saudis who left home in a hurry just before 9/11. It was Halloween night, 2001. The horrors of 9/11 were still fresh on the the minds of Americans. At a time when everyone was on edge, the sight of a man disposing documents in a dumpster behind a Bradenton storage facility aroused suspicion. Summoned to the scene, Manatee County sheriff’s deputies confronted the man, who had a Tunisian passport. According to FBI records, authorities searched the dumpster and found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad,...