Mayor Pete failed for four years to address the air traffic controller shortage and upgrade our outdated, World War II-era air traffic control system. In less than four weeks, we have already begun the process and are engaging the smartest minds in the entire world.

Here’s the truth: the FAA alone has a staggering 45,000 employees. Less than 400 were let go, and they were all probationary, meaning they had been hired less than a year ago. Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go.

Mayor Pete chose to use this amazing department—that is so critical to America’s success—as a slush fund for the green new scam and environmental justice nonsense. Not to mention that over 90% of the workforce under his leadership were working from home - including him. The building was empty!

When we finally get a full accounting of his mismanagement, I look forward to hearing from him.In the meantime, I will not rest until I return the Department of Transportation and its incredible employees to its mission of efficiency and safety. //

jri500
8 hours ago
For 2 years during the Idiot Biden administration, the FAA DID NOT HAVE one single training classes for new Air Traffic Controllers (ATC). In the meantime, Biden's FAA refused to hire 1,000 newly qualified ATC graduates because they were WHITE.

When training finally resumed, FAA couldn't fill training classes because they couldn't find enough woke, minority, physically or psychologically challenged (WTF???) candidates to fill them. ANYTHING BUT WHITE. FAA is currently short about four (4) thousand ATCs. Add to that, the mandatory retirement age is 54!

The tower in DC called for a full staff of 30 ATCs. They had about half that. And the night the crash happened, 1 controller was doing the job of 2. Every airport in the country is short staffed. And democRATS are trying to blame Trump? He's been in office less than a month.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
I’ve had a top secret clearance for many years and have clearances that themselves are classified.

That said, FAR too much information is made “classified”. If something is easily found online or patently obvious, it should NOT be classified. This impedes effective communication within the government.

TONY™ @TONYxTWO
This moment from the USAID House Hearing is 🔥🔥🔥!!!

“@elonmusk does have a security clearance, he has a top secret security clearance, by God he makes the rockets for NASA! But the suggestion that he somehow can’t be trusted to dig in to how we’re spending our money is nothing…
Embedded video
6:10 AM · Feb 14, 2025. //

1. FOIA Exemption 1 (5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1)) – This exemption protects information that is classified under Executive Order 13526 (or its successors) for national security reasons. Security clearance information often falls under this exemption because it involves classified material.

band (2ghz-b | 2ghz-b/g | 2ghz-b/g/n | 2ghz-onlyg | 2ghz-onlyn | 5ghz-a | 5ghz-a/n | 5ghz-onlyn | 5ghz-a/n/ac | 5ghz-onlyac | 5ghz-n/ac; Default: ) Defines set of used data rates, channel frequencies and widths.

channel-width (20/40/80/160mhz-Ceeeeeee | 20/40/80/160mhz-XXXXXXXX | 20/40/80/160mhz-eCeeeeee | 20/40/80/160mhz-eeCeeeee | 20/40/80/160mhz-eeeCeeee | 20/40/80/160mhz-eeeeCeee | 20/40/80/160mhz-eeeeeCee | 20/40/80/160mhz-eeeeeeCe | 20/40/80/160mhz-eeeeeeeC | 20/40/80mhz-Ceee | 20/40/80mhz-eCee | 20/40/80mhz-eeCe | 20/40/80mhz-eeeC | 20/40/80mhz-XXXX | 20/40mhz-Ce | 20/40mhz-eC | 20/40mhz-XX | 40mhz-turbo | 20mhz | 10mhz | 5mhz; Default: 20mhz) Use of extension channels (e.g. Ce, eC etc) allows additional 20MHz extension channels and if it should be located below or above the control (main) channel. Extension channel allows 802.11n devices to use up to 40MHz (802.11ac up to 160MHz) of spectrum in total thus increasing max throughput. Channel widths with XX and XXXX extensions automatically scan for a less crowded control channel frequency based on the number of concurrent devices running in every frequency and chooses the “C” - Control channel frequency automatically.

Greg Price
@greg_price11
·
Follow
JD Vance went to the Munich Security Conference and roasted the entire continent of Europe for being petty tyrants and criminalizing freedom of speech, including a British man arrested for praying at an abortion clinic.

2:02 PM · Feb 14, 2025

It's a concerning thing that you have those kinds of actions, and he was right to call them out. If we are supposed to be standing with them because of "common values," those aren't common values and they need to understand that. //

JD Vance
@JDVance
·
Follow
This is a crazy exchange.

Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech?
Michael Brendan Dougherty
@michaelbd
This is the first time I’ve heard the theory that the Holocaust wasn’t conducted with gas chambers but with free speech zones.
Embedded video
8:14 PM · Feb 16, 2025 //

The Nazis had no free speech. They locked up and killed many people who bravely spoke out against their evil actions. How does someone with that kind of a position in media not fully understand that? //

JD Vance
@JDVance
·
Follow
Insulting someone is not a crime, and criminalizing speech is going to put real strain on European-US relationships.

This is Orwellian, and everyone in Europe and the US must reject this lunacy.
End Wokeness
@EndWokeness
CBS: "Is posting an insult a crime?"
German prosectors: "Yes"
CBS: "Is it a crime to repost a lie?"
German prosecutors: "Yes"
Embedded video
12:40 PM · Feb 17, 2025

Note that the spy balloon transited Alaska, flying just north of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, possibly over Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, then proceeded to fly over the missile silo complexes in the Dakotas and over several military bases in the central and southern United States before being shot down off the South Carolina coast. While a balloon is at the mercy of the winds, prevailing winds very conveniently will take such a balloon on this route if it is launched in the right place.

The inclusion of American technology not only demonstrates a considerable degree of planning and forethought, but it also shows that China is easily capable of obtaining superior American technology — and using it against us. This was a serious intelligence-gathering exercise by a country that is growing increasingly bellicose towards the United States — and our allies. //

Hank Reardon
7 hours ago
Quoting Professor Victor Davis Hanson from a recent opinion piece published in The Epoch TImes:

“(China’s) entire 20th-century ascendance was based on stealing U.S. technology, dumping its products on the U.S. market below the cost of production to capture market share, and forcing American corporations to relocate, offshore, and outsource—leaving our industrial hinterland a “rust belt.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/are-trumps-tariffs-really-tariffs-5808723. //

bk
7 hours ago
By coincidence, I just read the old Buzz Patterson book Dereliction of Duty about what a disaster Clinton was for our country re China. This episode with the balloon seems reminiscent of how Clinton allowed his bog donors at Loral and Hughes to provide all sorts of satellite and nuclear technology to China. No doubt Clinton - oops I mean the charitable Clinton Global Foundation - made some big bundles of cash.

Hank Reardon bk
7 hours ago
If you want another reason to despise Slick and his abuse of our technology, read Never Mind We’ll Do It Ourselves. The book that details how Slick demanded a new method for finding UBL for his handoff to Al Gore in advance of election day, 2020. And once the nascent Predator program did just that, by September, 2020, Slick refused to take the shot.

Thomas Hern @ThomasMHern
·
CNN interviewed eleven Arizonans who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024.

All eleven said they support the job President Trump has done in his first month in office.

"He got transgenders out of women's sports, that's number one!"

Dana Bash did not seem very pleased.

5:42 PM · Feb 17, 2025 //

Jason Cohen @JasonJournoDC
·
🚨NEW: @FrankLuntz says former Biden, Clinton voters who flipped to Trump in 2024 "love" how fast he's moving 🚨
"They love the pace of change. They were very fed up over the last four years. They wanted action, they wanted results. They looked at prices, they looked at affordability, they looked at immigration. And they didn't see anything happening."

"They wanted to see a reduction in wasteful Washington spending and they're seeing that...For the first time they have confidence in the future, which is why you now see some significant shifts in the polling for the direction in the coming years."

9:00 PM · Feb 17, 2025. //

InteractivePolls @IAPolls2022
·
📊 President Trump Job Approval

🟢 Approve: 55% (+12)
🔴 Disapprove: 43%

Was net: +6 (51-45) on Feb. 6
——
• @NapolitanNews | RMG Research
• #63 (2.3/3.0) | 3,000 RV | 2/10-14 | ±1.8
11:40 PM · Feb 15, 2025. //

Weminuche45
7 hours ago edited
They focus on change itself, and the pace of change, while mostly ignoring the direction of change, the goals, the policies, the results.

Their conclusion will almost certainly be that they should double down on their existing religion of toxic ideology and policies by driving their garbage faster and harder, with more screeching, wailing, fear, outrage and deconstructing of traditional American values.

The harder and faster they drive unwanted unpopular change, the more they will self-destruct. Changing what to change would require loosening their external TDS riddled tunnel vision and spending some difficult time looking in the mirror at what they see there. I dont see much sign of that, yet anyway.

reported earlier on Tuesday how they discovered that there was a missing code in regard to $4.7 trillion in payments, that would link a treasury payment to a line item, that the code was optional and was often left blank, making tracing the payments almost impossible. Yikes. I'm sure no one has taken advantage of that (/sarcasm). //

Even MSNBC is now recognizing there's a problem, in a bit of a stunning report. They acknowledge that there had been $71.8 billion in improper Social Security payments over eight years, which had been discovered by the inspector general in 2024. That's billion, not million. //

Even for anchor Jose Diaz Balart, that sounds crazy. He isn't buying it: "72 billion! And that's without a comprehensive search!"

What could they find with a comprehensive search? And if there is that much of a problem resulting in such massive overpayments, then yes, this is more evidence of a systemic problem that DOGE needs to help resolve. We already saw the concerning issue of the active Social Security numbers for millions of people over 120 years old that could be used for all kinds of nefarious things, yet hasn't been addressed. //

DOGE is supposed to end in 2026, but we need to have something in place to continuously review all this stuff, so these issues cannot come back after they are resolved. Otherwise, there can be backsliding unless the whole system is changed to one of responsibility and accountability. Obviously, what has been in play hasn't been enough to stop these crazy things.

stickdude90
9 hours ago
Remind me again why we spend so much blood and treasure to protect these blowhards...

jri500 anon-fv7m
6 hours ago
Bill Clinton and his buddy, Bernard Schwartz (LORAL Space) GAVE China our ballistic missile gyroscope guidance technology. Just gave it to them because liberals couldn't stand the fact that the US was the world's lone super power at the time. China's missiles couldn't reach orbit. Clinton moved the gyro technology from Defense to the Commerce department, and put a CIA satellite on a Chinese rocket. And when that rocket crashed, the Chi Coms sifted the wreckage and reverse engineered our gyros. When Clinton took office, China had zero (0) nuclear missiles capable of hitting the US mainland. When he left office, they had 20. //

Dieter Schultz stickdude90
6 hours ago edited
Remind me again why we spend so much blood and treasure to protect these blowhards...
I think you might be looking at the US being forward deployed and allied with nations around the world... through the wrong lens.

Yes we're spending money stationing forces around the world and, yes, some... maybe a lot of these countries... don't appreciate or deserve our protection but... look at it from the point of view of avoided costs.

But, we can't understand avoided costs unless we consider what isolationism might really cost us in the bigger scheme of things.

We were, mostly, isolationists between 1910 and 1940... not spending money with alliances and forward deploying our forces. Because of that the bad guys in the world didn't believe we'd respond as they gobbled up other countries. What they did believe, and what Churchill said so elegantly in some of his writing, was that if the US allowed its natural allies to fall, the position that the US would be in, strategically, would be difficult in the extreme.

So we stayed out of the areas but, when we were finally forced to act the costs in treasure and lives of our youth was great... far, far greater than they would have been if the Germans and Japanese really believed we would fight to stop them.

Since the end of WWII we've made a lot of mistakes and many of those mistakes have cost us 10s of thousands of our youth and untold treasures but, even with Russia's aggressive moves in the world, we haven't had a repeat of the carnage, loss of life, and expenditures of the country's treasures.

But, we should ask ourselves, even if we've helped protect people that didn't seem to appreciate and value our sacrifice, if, like happened to us leading up to WWI and WWII, would we have likely gotten sucked into another one of the continent's or world's battles and cost ourselves 10 or 100 times the loss of carnage, loss of life, and expenditures of our treasure anyway?

I see the discussions about forward deploying our forces around the world much like the Chesterton's Fence and we should ask ourselves, why that fence was needed in the first place?

Many in this country just want to tear down that fence but, as Chesterton might see it: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

KAROLINE LEAVITT: If you just watched that video, but shut your eyes and listen to the words from those Democrat politicians, you would think you are listening to President Trump, Elon Musk and our entire administration, who are saying the exact same things that Democrat politicians promised the American people they would do for decades. President Trump is just the first president in our lifetimes to actually do it. And now you see the Democrat Party and the mainstream media spiraling out of control about a very simple promise: rooting out waste, fraud and abuse from our federal bureaucracy. This is a promise President Trump campaigned on. He is now delivering on it.

I've been fighting fake news reporters all day long here in the Washington, D.C. swamp who are trying to fearmonger the American people into believing that this administration is going after their hard-earned tax dollars and their hard-earned Social Security checks. So I want to set the record straight on your show tonight, Sean, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to do so. President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the Doge team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration. They haven't dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments and so their goal in going into the Social Security Administration is to identify three things: Number one, to identify duplicate payments and to end them, Number two, to identify payments that are going to deceased people who are no longer living and should no longer be receiving that money and number three, to protect the integrity of the system for hardworking Americans who have been paying into it their entire lives.

The head of the criminal division of the US Attorney's office in DC has resigned rather than investigate a Biden-sponsored New Green Deal grant network for possible criminal behavior. Denise Cheung announced her departure to staff with an email saying, “This office is a special place. I took an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, and I have executed this duty faithfully.” //

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was to funnel about $26 billion to the United Climate Fund and Climate Justice Alliance. This grant was funded in August 2024 to the tune of $20.3 billion, again in October for $4.3 billion, with the final tranche of $2 billion landing in December 2024/January 2025; see the details here. These were all part of the Biden "throwing gold bars off the Titanic" (see EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds the $20 Billion 'Gold Bars' the Biden Administration Tried to Jettison – RedState) plan where immense amounts of grant funding would be "parked" in leftist 501(c)3 corporations that were supposed to continue to run beneath the radar even after Trump had taken office.

The crux of the case brought before Chutkan is that Musk's participation in government is illegal as the US Senate has not confirmed him as a "principal officer" as required by Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 or the Constitution and Congress does not have oversight of DOGE because it exists within the Executive Office of the President. This sounds rather bizarre to me as the President has clear authority, in my view, to set up an ad hoc task force to carry out a time-limited mission and to appoint anyone he wishes to lead it. But I'm not a judge on the DC Circuit.

In these circumstances, it must be indisputable that this court acts within the bounds of its authority. Accordingly, it cannot issue a TRO, especially one as wide-ranging as Plaintiffs request, without clear evidence of imminent, irreparable harm to these Plaintiffs. The current record does not meet that standard. //

NavyVet
32 minutes ago
I am sick and tired of this "unelected official" BS. It is "unelected officials" that have been malfeasant allowing massive fraud waste and abuse. That's the way it works.

So the entire "unelected official" mantra is a smokescreen for the ignorant and stupid. That means it works on democrats and their media bootlickers, but has no credibility with the rest of us.

In fact, all it shows us is that the democrats are corrupt and stupid.

Karoline Leavitt @PressSec
·
More fake news from the @AP

1. DOGE doesn’t even have a Facebook page

2. No air traffic controllers nor any professionals who perform safety critical functions were terminated

Tara Copp @TaraCopp
.@FAANews: FAA staff fired over the weekend included personnel that worked radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, among others. Hundreds were fired, just weeks after a fatal mid-air collision in DC killed 67. One employee said they were harassed on Facebook by @DOGE…
10:21 PM · Feb 17, 2025. //

Chuck Todd @chucktodd
·
Replying to @PressSec @GNHarben and @AP
The report never says DOGE had a facebook page nor does the report say there were air traffic controllers fired. So you are denying facts or accusations that were not reported or made.

Sister Toldjah 💙 @sistertoldjah
·
Classic "our sources told us" trick. But the report never noted that DOGE doesn't have a Facebook group, which is kinda critical information to put in a story where a source is alleging DOGE's Facebook group (which doesn't exist) targeted him. #Journalism
11:43 PM · Feb 17, 2025