RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/reagan-national-airport-crash-faa-air-traffic-control

We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace.

Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.

The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/05/hed/

Americans have been largely pleased with President Donald Trump’s deluge of executive orders. But not all of them. Public support is weak for his order to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate treaty. This is curious. One is clearly a political organization, the other a useless and wasteful effort. The failure by a significant swath of our countrymen to recognize this is worrisome.

This is actually the second time Trump pulled the U.S. from the WHO. The first departure was in 2020. It pleased us then that no longer would this country “take part in its kleptocratic incompetence and its cozying up to dictators and tyrants, including its biggest influencer, China.” The WHO’s reckoning, we said at the time, “is long overdue.” 

Of course Joe Biden put the country back under the WHO’s thumb on his first day in office in 2021, even though it was clear that leaving had hurt no none. Despite this, our I&I/TIPP poll found that only 38% of Americans agree, either strongly (22%) or somewhat (16%) with quitting the WHO.

Critics point out that at one time, when it followed its original mission, the WHO had value.

“Unfortunately, the WHO has expanded its mission over the years to areas that only tangentially relate to public health, such as issuing alcohol consumption and dietary guidelines,” says Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey A. Singer. “Such issues are more aptly defined as private health, i.e., matters that don’t cause harm to others.”

https://www.jns.org/you-cant-make-america-great-again-by-making-it-retreat-again/

In a recent interview on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” the eponymous host asked typically leading questions of his interviewee—in this case, Curt Mills. The purpose of the one-on-one between the two conservative pundits and supporters of newly instated President Donald Trump was to reiterate their shared aversion to the Republican Party’s “war-mongering neocons.”

Carlson highlighted what he sees as the persistence of neoconservative figures in shaping foreign policy, expressing surprise that “over 20 years after the Iraq War, its architects and supporters are still not fully in control of America’s foreign policy, but certainly influential in it.”

David Wurmser, a renowned Middle East policy expert and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, is not mentioned by name in the above exchange. But he has been a target of false accusations regarding his ostensibly pernicious undue sway over U.S. foreign policy. In the following Q&A with JNS, Wurmser sets the record straight.

Q: Before addressing the internecine clash between what I’ll call the “Tucker” camp of the Republican Party/MAGA movement and other conservatives, can you define the term “neocon” and what it has come to mean?

A: Neoconservatives were a group of American liberal intellectuals who began in the 1970s to see a fundamental problem with left-leaning positions. Mining classic philosophy, they essentially had a discovery of civilizational values and foundational ideas that define what made the West—not only in the previous 20 years, but in the previous 2,000—and realized that defending Western civilization was on the table. As a result, they drifted into the camp that was defending it. These figures included Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer. For me, the epic neoconservative, who emerged during what came to be called the “[Ronald] Reagan revolution,” was Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Originally on the left, affiliated with the Young Socialists—even giving the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention—she ended up becoming the symbol of Reaganism.

What defined her and the entire age of Reaganism was a revival of the faith in America’s being a good and proud nation that needed to issue no apologies. It was a reaction to the defensiveness of the post-Vietnam War era, which had descended into constant self-excoriation during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, always explaining the global hatred of the United States through “blame America first.”

In any case, I don’t believe there’s such a thing anymore as a neoconservative, and I never was one. Because how could I have been a “new” conservative when I reached the age of political awareness after the movement rightward had already happened? I was born and raised on conservative principles. My mother had been a Czech dissident who fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 with the KGB on her tail. She wound up in Germany in a DP camp, then went to Switzerland and finally arrived in America, where most Czech dissidents headed. Later, I found out that she’d been the leader of the Moravian underground against Stalin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democrats-still-in-denial/

Like the Japanese soldiers found hiding in the jungle after World War II, unaware that their Emperor had surrendered, the Democrats don’t seem to grasp that their side was nuked and decisively defeated last November.

Witness the recent pathetic spectacle of the Democratic National Committee’s annual winter meeting last week, carried live on MSNBC and held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley told Fox News Digital, “It’s an important opportunity for us to not only refocus the party and what we present to voters, but also an opportunity for us to look at how we internally govern ourselves.”

But even The New York Times admitted about the DNC meeting that the “Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided” and “have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.” “We have no coherent message,” complained Rep. Jasmine Crockett to The Times.

And that’s at the heart of the Democrats’ problem: they believe that ineffective messaging and not the substance of their vision is the reason they lost to Trump. A few Dem leaders, like Amy Klobuchar, at least suspect (correctly) that Biden administration economy-wrecking played a role in voter dissatisfaction, but for the most part, the Party is still in denial about, and clinging to, a vision that the American people roundly rejected last fall.

The forum focused, for example, heavily and unsurprisingly on race and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs – exactly the sort of divisive, social justice madness that Americans brought Trump in to dismantle.

The DNC meeting included a debate among eight candidates for a new DNC chair: former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, DNC Vice Chair Ken Martin, Wisconsin Democrat party Chair Ben Wikler, former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, failed candidate for Arkansas state Representative Quintessa Hathaway, former DHS official Nate Snyder, and Newton, Massachusetts Democratic City Committee executive member Jason Paul. As Fox News Digital put it,

With no clear leader in the party, the next DNC chair is in a position to become the de facto face of Democrats from coast to coast and will make major decisions on messaging, strategy, infrastructure and where to spend millions in political contributions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/04/trump-should-unleash-musk-to-fix-our-dangerously-decrepit-air-traffic-control-system/

Do What Canada Did 20 Years Ago

After the mid-air collision at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump cast blame on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration. But the problem goes much, much deeper than that.

Decades of gross mismanagement and chronic waste have left the FAA’s air traffic control (ATC) system dangerously ill-prepared to safely do its job. And the only fix is a complete overhaul – something Canada and most other industrial nations did years ago.

“I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first,” Trump said, suggesting they hired people based on membership in “protected classes” rather than merit.

Naturally, the press sprang into action to attack that claim. But it’s possible that DEI contributed to the calamity, if indirectly.

In 2012, for example, the FAA temporarily halted new hires “so it could replace race-blind hiring rules with a ‘Biographical Assessment’ stratagem designed to hire more minorities,” according to the Washington Times. Congress forced the FAA to drop this “assessment” in 2018, but the FAA now faces a class action lawsuit from more than 2,000 qualified air traffic control applicants who say they were sidelined to make room for “diversity” candidates.

In June 2023, the Transportation Department’s inspector general reported that the “FAA continues to face staffing challenges and lacks a plan to address them,” prompting lawmakers to attack then-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for being “focused on advancing racist and divisive DEI agenda” instead of filling this alarming gap.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/02/opinion/trumps-win-was-a-call-for-law-and-order-after-the-dems-constant-demonization-of-the-police/

“Maybe this will end in another week,” sighed the cashier at a CVS store on the Upper East Side, seven days after President Trump’s inauguration. A young male, clutching a black plastic garbage bag, had just darted out the door.”Maybe this will end in another week,” sighed the cashier at a CVS store on the Upper East Side, seven days after President Trump’s inauguration. A young male, clutching a black plastic garbage bag, had just darted out the door.

The thief had wandered the premises unchallenged, despite being a member of the predominant shoplifting demographic and openly carrying a receptacle for his heist. After his rushed escape, no one called the police. The employees knew the precinct’s officers weren’t likely to come — and nothing would happen if they did.

I, meanwhile, had had to summon a clerk to gain access to the store’s calcium pills, locked behind plexiglass shields.

So much for the invidious racial profiling that former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden routinely accused the country of engaging in.

The cashier nodded wearily toward a rack of batteries in the front of the store — a target of this latest heist — oddly not behind lock and key.

The clerk’s long gray corkscrew curls, beard and heavy Puerto Rican accent did not mark him as a stereotypical Donald Trump voter. Yet here he was, assuming that his reference to “another week” was clear and that I would share his hope for a political sea change.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/02/opinion/trump-is-sending-the-deep-state-to-the-outhouse-as-he-cleans-house-at-the-fbi-and-doj/

It’s galling to hear sleazy Democrats like Rep. Jamie Raskin and self-serving government bureaucrats whine about “due process” as Donald Trump sets about cleaning house in the out-of-control administrative state.

Last time Trump was president, he and his appointees were sabotaged and obstructed by Machiavellian Deep-Staters who perverted concepts such as “due process” into protective shields around wrongdoers and turned them into weapons against their adversaries — that is, anyone trying to carry out the wishes of the democratically elected president.

That won’t be happening again. It’s called democracy.

The FBI raided Trump’s home and rummaged through his wife’s underwear drawer. They tried to lock him up and bankrupt him. They rounded up his supporters and advisers and threw them in jail.

He was forced to spend 60% of his time and tens of millions of dollars fighting the lawfare waged against him.

So don’t talk about “due process” to Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/03/the-problems-with-dei-that-frighten-the-public/

The diversity, equity, and inclusion project, often seen as a major element of the so-called “woke” creed along with green fanaticism, keeps popping up as a possible subtext in a variety of recent tragedies.

In the case of the Los Angeles fires, Mayor Karen Bass, who cut the fire department budget, was warned of the mounting fire dangers of the Santa Anna winds and parched brush on surrounding hillsides. No matter—she junketed in Uganda. When furor followed, on cue, her defenders decried a racialist attack on “a black woman.”

Her possible stand-in deputy mayor for “security” was under suspension for allegations that he called in a bomb threat to the Los Angeles city council—a factor mysteriously forgotten.

The fire chief previously was on record mostly for highlighting her DEI agendas rather than emphasizing traditional fire department criteria like response time or keeping fire vehicles running and out of the shop.

One of her deputies had boasted that in emergencies, citizens appreciated most of all that arriving first responders looked like them. (But most people in need worry only whether the first responders seem to know what they are doing.) She further snarked that if women allegedly were not physically able to carry out a man in times of danger, then it was the man’s fault for being in the wrong place.

The Los Angeles water and power czar—culpable for a needlessly dry reservoir that could have provided 117 million gallons to help save Pacific Palisades—was once touted primarily as the first Latina to run such a vital agency. But did that fact matter much to the 18 million people whose very survival depended on deliverable water in the otherwise desert tinderbox of greater Los Angeles?

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/03/trumps-executive-orders-have-solid-voter-backing-ii-tipp-poll/

President Trump entered the White House for the second time with a bold agenda, which included a spate of executive orders on a wide range of issues. Even the media had trouble keeping up with the changes. But how was Trump’s flurry of orders received by average Americans? They liked it, with the exception of Democrats, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The online I&I/TIPP Poll queried 1,478 adults across the nation on their view of 12 key Trump executive orders, intended to kick-start his second term in office and set a new direction for U.S. policy. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

The question posed was “Do you support or oppose the following executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in his first week in office?” Each question was followed by a description of Trump’s action, with those answering having a choice among the following responses: “Support strongly,” “Support somewhat,” “Oppose somewhat,” “Oppose strongly,” and

Even amid Democrats’ strong doubts, four of the 12 issues managed to receive solid majorities in support.

They included: “Deploy the U.S. military to secure the southern border,” receiving 57% “support,” 33% “oppose; “Ban federal funding for gender identity programs and recognize only biological sex,” 53% support, 36% oppose; “Require federal workers to return to the office full-time,” 56% support, 30% oppose; and “Speed up deportation of illegal immigrants,” 54% support, 35% oppose.

A handful of other Trump moves garnered pluralities, but not absolute majorities.

This group included “End birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens,” 49% support, 41% oppose; “Declare a national energy emergency to boost oil and gas production, while excluding wind and solar energy,” 46% support, 39% oppose; “Eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government,” 45% support, 42% oppose; “Make it easier to fire federal workers by removing job protections,” 44% support, 42% oppose; and “Pause for 75 days on a law banning TikTok,” 44% support, 31% oppose.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/02/pete_hegseth_makes_an_example_of_mark_milley_for_his_arrogant_defiance_of_the_president.html

If President Trump had known in 2016 how arrogant a man Mark Milley was, he might never have appointed him to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Milley’s treasonous behavior, spectacular incompetence, and rebelliousness against the president justify the punishment he is being ordered.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate the ‘conduct’ of retired Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley — who at times clashed with President Trump during his first term — and determine whether it’s appropriate he should be reduced in rank from his current four stars.

Hegseth also revoked Milley’s security detail and suspended his security clearance.

Even though Milley is retired, he had an ongoing security detail through the Army as a result of Iranian threats in the wake of the 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian [Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qasem] Soleimani. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton recently lost their security details on orders from Trump, who clashed with them as well.

When Trump first appointed Milley, he seemed like a reasonable choice; however, Milley seemed to have an exaggerated understanding of the power he wielded, and when Trump “defied,” him, he was apparently insulted.

He frequently disagreed with Trump’s decisions, and proceeded to undermine him.

Milley opposed Trump’s interest in using military force to suppress protests following George Floyd’s death and later found himself at the center of controversy in 2021 for independently contacting his Chinese counterpart. Trump denounced the calls as treason, while Milley defended them as routine and within his duties as Joint Chiefs Chairman.