Something to Know - 25 March

Quote of the Day: "A crook is a crook, and there's something healthy about his frankness in the matter. But any guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician."

- Al Capone

Song of the Day:  "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall", Joan Baez

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdEmGATyFPI&list=RDpdEmGATyFPI&start_radio=1

Another day of Trump's lies and grifts.   Makes you ill when you see him going around and destroying the beauty and panorama of our nation's capital.   DC is his playpen and as he plays GI Joe.   He and his cronies enrich themselves with the insider trading information that Trump creates.  He tells them something that will spike a rise in certain stocks, so they buy it low, and them dump them when the news he creates lowers their value.   If Trump does nothing else, what he says does influence the markets; this is known as "insider trading"; it's illegal and he does it with impunity.   Trump is a sack of manure, and he spreads his chracteristics all over the nation.  This is like a very bad movie.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>  Unsubscribe	Mar 24, 2026, 10:04 PM (11 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more March 24, 2026 Heather Cox Richardson Mar 25   READ IN APP   This morning, economist Paul Krugman came right out and said it: "People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets." Another word for that, he said, is "treason." The evidence for such a claim is the sudden and isolated jump in trading volume in S&P 500 and oil futures about 15 minutes before Trump suddenly announced that the U.S. and Iran were in negotiations to end the war—an announcement that turned out to be false. The oil futures trade alone was worth about $580 million, the Financial Times estimated. As Krugman notes, exploiting confidential information for financial gain, otherwise known as "insider trading," is illegal. But exploiting confidential information about national security for private financial gain is something else again. It puts profit-making above Americans' safety. "I'd very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning," Krugman wrote. "Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?" There certainly are signs that Trump considers the government his to do with as he wishes to keep himself in wealth and power. In the Washington Post Monday, architecture critic Philip Kennicott examined how Trump is smashing the historic lines and architecture of the national capital. Trump's plan for a gargantuan 90,000-square-foot ballroom will dominate the original White House and cut into the lines of the driveway designed a century ago by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. His proposed 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery would be the largest triumphal arch in the world, overshadowing the nearby Lincoln Memorial. His proposed "National Garden of American Heroes" between the Lincoln Memorial and the Tidal Basin would take the park near monuments dedicated to Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and fill it with hastily made statues to "showbiz stars, folk heroes, and sports celebrities." By stuffing oversight panels with his own cronies, Trump has destroyed the process of design review intended to preserve Washington as a city whose layout and design reflects the simplicity, dignity, and majesty of the American people. Yesterday the White House began the process of ripping the beige Tennessee flagstone pavers out of the West Colonnade that connects the Oval Office and West Wing to the Executive Residence. Trump wants to replace them with black granite, which will contrast more effectively with the gold doodads and the gold-framed portraits in the "Presidential Walk of Fame" Trump has installed along the walk. Trump's vision of the U.S. is one tied to fossil fuels, leading the administration to declare war on renewable energy. On Monday it announced it will pay $928 million in taxpayer money to the large French energy company TotalEnergies to buy back leases it acquired under the Biden administration to build two wind farms, one off New York and the other off North Carolina. TotalEnergies will then invest that money in U.S. oil and gas projects, including one in Texas that will export liquefied natural gas. "The era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable and unsecure energy is officially over, and the era of affordable, reliable and secure energy is here to stay," said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. North Carolina governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, told Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer of the New York Times: "Our state has the offshore wind potential to power millions of homes with renewable American-made energy. It's ludicrous and wasteful that the Trump Administration is spending $1 billion in taxpayer money to pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need." Meanwhile, as airport lines grow because of the ongoing shutdown that means Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents aren't getting paid, Trump yesterday sent in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to fourteen airports in eleven cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Phoenix, Cleveland, Fort Myers, New Orleans, and New York City. While CNN's Brian Stelter speculated that Trump got the idea for putting ICE agents in the airports from "Linda from Arizona," who called in to "The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show" last Friday, Trump ally Steve Bannon suggested on his podcast War Room yesterday that "[w]e can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE's involvement in the 2026 midterms." Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted that Trump's deployment of ICE agents to airports showed both that he sees them as his own personal law enforcement agents and that he is willing to deploy them in situations that are not related to their actual job description. Democratic senators have tried repeatedly to get Senate Republicans to agree to fund all of the Department of Homeland Security except ICE, the agency responsible for the violence in Minnesota that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. For those, Democrats have demanded reforms. But Trump has kept pressure on Republican senators not to pass such a measure, instead demanding that Senate majority leader John Thune kill the filibuster to pass legislation without the votes of Democrats. On Sunday, Trump posted that he would not agree to any funding proposal unless Democrats also agreed to support the so-called SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show not just ID but also proof of citizenship, would end mail-in voting, and would attack the rights of transgender Americans. After the Senate confirmed former senator Markwayne Mullin late yesterday as secretary of homeland security, replacing former secretary Kristi Noem, Republicans offered to Democrats a measure that funded DHS without funding ICE, but made no reforms to the agency. To fund ICE—and perhaps to pass pieces of the SAVE America Act—they plan to use the process of budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered and thus can be used to pass measures without any Democratic support. Democrats rejected the Republicans' offer, noting that Republicans have blocked eight different Democratic attempts to fund everything in the Department of Homeland Security other than ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. The Democrats will make another offer. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), who as vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee is central to the talks, said Trump's demands have made negotiations difficult and added: "We've been very clear that if we're talking about funding any part of ICE and CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in. The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that. Reforms must make it into law." The SAVE America Act Trump wants is pretty openly a voter suppression measure: voting by undocumented immigrants is already virtually nonexistent, and it is already illegal. And the Brookings Institution reported in 2025 that only about four cases of mail fraud occur per 10 million mail-in ballots, or 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast. But Republicans are using the idea of voter fraud to argue for measures that could toss more than 21 million Americans off the voter rolls. There is an especial irony in Trump attacking mail-in voting as fraudulent: Bill Barrow of the Associated Press reported today that Trump voted by mail in Tuesday's elections in Florida. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales explained Trump's position, saying that "the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel—but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it's highly susceptible to fraud." In today's special legislative elections in Florida, Democrat Emily Gregory flipped the house district in which the Trump Organization's Mar-a-Lago sits. The district went for Trump by 11% in 2024. Gregory, a business owner and a military spouse, defeated a Republican who received Trump's "Complete and Total Endorsement" in January. At an election night party, Gregory told her supporters: "When we started this, nobody thought it was possible. They thought we were crazy. I knew my community. I knew we deserved better. We deserve a leader who will fight for us." Gregory told CNN's Erin Burnett that she did not focus on Trump, but focused on her Republican opponent and the "issues that matter most to Florida families." "Everyone is feeling that affordability crisis, and the last thing that Florida families needed when they're struggling is $4 gas," she explained. Trump's niece, psychologist Mary Trump, posted: "The Democrats just flipped a state house seat in the district where Donald committed voter fraud by casting his ballot illegally by mail." Tonight, Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the Pentagon has ordered to the Middle East about 2,000 military personnel from the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, trained to deploy anywhere in the world within eighteen hours. About 2,500 Marines from the 31st Expeditionary Unit will arrive in the region later this week. — Notes: Paul Krugman Treason in the Futures Markets Source: Yahoo Finance… Read more

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Juan Matute

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C.C.R.C.

Thank You, Delta

The airline Lynne and I retired from made a great decision today.   If other airlines don't follow their lead, shame on them.

Delta has suspended all perks and privileges for members of Congress regarding assistance and escorting to and from their flights.    I know how this works, and why it is done.   I used to do a lot of PR work in my career.   It was part of my job.  Nothing educates them more than to have to endure the hassles and bureaucratic maze of security that we all have to go through.   

Politics

Congress loses a flying perk as DHS shutdown continues

March 24, 20261:37 PM ET

By 

Barbara Sprunt

Delta Airlines has announced it is temporarily suspending a specialty services program for members of Congress as the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security continues.

SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images/AFP

Members of Congress are now facing a personal consequence from the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security: losing one special flight perk.

Delta Airlines is pausing special services that make flights more convenient and efficient for members of Congress, as first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"Due to the impact on resources from the longstanding government shutdown, Delta will temporarily suspend specialty services to members of Congress flying Delta," the airline said in a statement to NPR. "Next to safety, Delta's no. 1 priority is taking care of our people and customers, which has become increasingly difficult in the current environment."

Specialty services include airport escorts and other red coat services. Delta said lawmakers will be treated like any other passenger based on their SkyMiles status.

This comes a week after Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC he's "outraged" by the ongoing shutdown, which has led to TSA officers working without pay.

"It's inexcusable that our security agents, our frontline agents, that are essential to what we do, are not being paid, and it's ridiculous to see them being used as political chips," he said.

The Department of Homeland Security, which includes TSA, has been in a partial shutdown since mid-February.

The shutdown means TSA officers are working without pay, and has led to widespread staff shortages and long wait times for travelers.

Other major airlines did not respond to NPR about imminent changes to their specialty services. A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines told NPR the airline "continues to engage with our federal partners and joins the airline industry in urging Congress to fund the TSA and CBP without further delay."

DHS ongoing shutdown

In the wake of the killing of two U.S. citizens by immigration enforcement officers in Minneapolis, Congressional Democrats said they wouldn't vote to fund DHS until changes — specifically for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — were put into place.

Senate Democrats and the White House have been trading proposals back and forth for weeks, with little progress.

Democrats have pushed to fund DHS with carveouts to not fund ICE and CBP to alleviate the TSA pain points as negotiations continue

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Saturday that Democrats are having "productive conversations" on ICE reforms but that it's an ongoing process "that should not get in the way of funding our TSA workers."

"Let's keep negotiating the outstanding issues with ICE while sending paychecks to TSA workers now," Schumer said. "Let us end those long lines at the airport now. This is the logical, expedient, correct thing to do."

Republicans thus far have objected to votes on those proposals, pressing to fund the entire department.

Last week, a bill from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to prohibit preferential screening at airports for members of Congress cleared the Senate. It has not yet been taken up by the House of Representatives.

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Juan Matute

R.B.R.

C.C.R.C.

Something to Know - 24 March

Quote of the Day : "When I testified before Congress after the Hudson River landing, Congressman James Oberstar of Minnesota said, 'Safety begins in the boardroom.' That's as true in medicine as it is in aviation. It always boils down to leadership."

- Chesley Sullenberger

Song of the Day:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jV-E09efRE&list=RD5jV-E09efRE&start_radio=1  Which is a classic example of the intellectual level of understanding things that fly around.

On any given moment on any given day, the sky is full of aircraft flying around in an orderly manner, thanks to the aviation pioneers who engineered heavier than air machines to carry people and cargo swiftly from one place to another.    Over the years, the sky has not changed, but the amount of aircraft going every which way has changed.   Technology has tried to keep up with the methods of keeping planes functioning in an orderly manner.    Technology has its limits.  More planes mean better technology is needed.   Technology is very expensive to create and update as more pressure is applied to create more traffic lanes.   The creation and implementation of technology becomes a federal problem; funds to research, develop, and implement new and better systems.   However, whatever updated systems are implemented, a human being must oversee the operation.   One person, in the form of one traffic controller can do only so much.  When operational stresses affect normal operations, things can go very wrong.   Planes can run into unplanned objects, computer systems in ATC can fail, and in the case of the recent incident at La Guardia, people can die.   An air/ground traffic controller was guiding a landing aircraft on to the exact runway, and guiding it to its proper gate destination on ground.   At that same moment, his attention was diverted to an incident on the ground that a United Airlines plane at the airport had an emergency and required Emergency Fire Truck response.   The fire truck had to cross on active runways to get to the United plane, and its route from the firehouse to the United gate intersected with the landing Air Canada plane.   We all know what happened.  The controller who was working to land an airplane and at the same time attendind to another emergency admitted that he failed in his job.   But did he really fail?  Ask yourself that, while we will find out more about how severely short-staffed our air traffic controllers seem to be.   Hopefully Trump will not play wack-a-mole and staff ATC with untrained ICE agents.

The Atlantic Daily

American Aviation Is Near Collapse

Fatal crashes, overstressed controllers, and endless security lines reveal a system teetering on the brink of failure.

By David A. Graham

Spencer Platt / Getty

March 23, 2026, 11:37 AM ET

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The American commercial-aviation system is a modern marvel. On any day of the week, a passenger can get to and from nearly any two cities of decent size and to destinations on five other continents, for a relatively affordable price and with exceptional safety.

Or at least all of that was true until recently. Today, the system seems near collapse.

Travelers around the country are facing long security lines: two to three hours at New York airports, three in Atlanta, two in Houston. Checkpoints are staffed by the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS has not been paying TSA workers since Valentine's Day because of a partial government shutdown.

Meanwhile, at New York's LaGuardia Airport, one of the nation's busiest, all flights are paused until at least this afternoon after an Air Canada jet collided with an airport fire truck on a runway, killing two pilots and injuring dozens of other people. Nearly 1,000 flights leave from or arrive at LGA every day, and hundreds have been canceled.

A closure at LaGuardia puts pressure on other airports in the area, and they might not be prepared to handle any redirects. This morning, reports of smoke in the air-traffic-control tower at Newark Liberty International Airport, just across the Hudson River from New York City, caused a brief ground stop. Officials determined the problem was a burning smell in an elevator and reopened the tower, but this is only the latest sign of how broken Newark airport is. Last week, an Alaska Airlines plane nearly crashed into a FedEx plane on a runway at Newark, missing by just 300 to 325 feet, after pilots were instructed to avoid a collision. And earlier this month, a Singapore Airlines plane clipped the wing of a Spirit Airlines jet while pushing back from a gate. Last spring, air-traffic controllers lost the ability to track planes at Newark for two brief intervals, causing such stress that some of them took leave.

Each of these situations had its own specific causes, but what unites them is years of disinvestment capped by political dysfunction. Modern air travel was a classic postwar American triumph: a big, complicated system built with lots of money and careful tracking. Deregulation of the airlines in the 1970s made flying cheaper and more widely available. A careful, iterative process of safety regulation culminated in a 16-year period, from 2009 to 2025, when no U.S. airline had a fatal crash.

Yet the system was quietly eroding from within. For many passengers, the most visible sign was the deterioration of airports themselves. In 2014, then–Vice President Biden said that LaGuardia resembled "some third-world country." Although LGA has since been renovated, other, more essential parts of the system have continued to get worse.

The federal government has been trying to run air traffic control on the cheap for decades, which has resulted in staffing shortages and badly outdated equipment. Many towers are operating below recommended capacity. After the outages last spring, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy panned the infrastructure used to keep flyers safe. "We use floppy disks. We use copper wires," Duffy said. "The system that we're using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today." Yet despite warnings from airlines and regulators, successive congressional sessions and presidential administrations have failed to fix the problem. The FAA has also seen what's known as "regulatory capture": Cozy relationships with Boeing, for example, helped problems with the 737 Max escape notice until a pair of fatal crashes abroad in 2018 and 2019.

More recently, the FAA abruptly closed the El Paso, Texas, airport in a standoff with the Defense Department over laser weaponry. The FAA appears to have made the move as a desperate step after its safety worries weren't taken seriously. The ploy worked: The FAA drew attention to its concerns and the airport reopened, but in any functional administration, this would have been resolved behind closed doors much earlier.

When an Army helicopter and an American Airlines jet collided near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last January, President Trump immediately jumped to blame DEI, a claim as nonsensical as it was repellent. Following multiple investigations, the FAA has changed some rules to prevent a similar incident, but Congress couldn't agree on an air-safety bill that offered broader fixes.

A different sort of political dysfunction has snarled passenger experiences. TSA is charged with keeping travelers safe not from aviation failures but from threats of violence. While its approach has often been more security theater than essential, as Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported in 2008, some screening is necessary. But DHS is unable to pay agents for this work because of the partial shutdown. Following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have demanded reforms in exchange for funding the department, and neither they nor Trump have been willing to budge. TSA agents, who are not well paid in the first place, have not received paychecks since February, and the situation seems to have hit a breaking point in the past few days. (Some airports have begged people to donate gift cards or food for TSA agents.)

Over the weekend, Trump said that he would "move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia." (DHS has moved funds so that ICE agents, unlike TSA, are being paid.) Administration "border czar" Tom Homan has since said that ICE won't be doing screening but will take on other, unspecified roles. The administration has insisted that border security is an emergency, so pulling agents off their jobs to do something else seems odd. More broadly, the administration is deploying ICE agents outside of their training in a dubious attempt to ease a political crisis created by ICE agents who had been deployed outside of their standard role in Minnesota. (Trump said today that he would deploy the National Guard to assist if ICE agents could not alleviate wait times.)

The ICE deployment is a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed "kludgeocracy," in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. "'Clumsy but temporarily effective,'" Teles has written, "also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response." The U.S. aviation system has been held together by such patches for years, but the kludges may finally be failing.

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Juan Matute

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Andy Borowitz

The Borowitz Report <borowitzreport@substack.com>  Unsubscribe	4:08 AM (4 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more TSA Arrests ICE Agents After Guns Set Off Metal Detectors Andy Borowitz Mar 24   READ IN APP   Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (The Borowitz Report)—TSA officers arrested hundreds of ICE agents on Monday after the untrained individuals inadvertently set off airport metal detectors with their guns. In airports across the nation, ICE agents walked through the detectors despite signs warning that firearms were not permitted. "This is so unfair," said one ICE agent as he was being handcuffed. "When I took this job I was promised it wouldn't involve reading."

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Juan Matute

R.B.R.

C.C.R.C.