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The child who was taken to Sick Kids is in good condition.   Apparently there’s one person left in critical condition but I haven’t seen a recent update.  Juan Browne of the Blancolirio YouTube channel is up with his first take.  He didn’t see anything obviously bad about the approach.  He’s got the latest video which was shot from the cockpit of another aircraft waiting to take off.  Everything we’ve seen so far points to a problem with the plane or the flight crew, not Toronto Pearson airport, and the plane and crew are US (Endeavor flying as Delta Express) so this crash is squarely on the shoulders of Endeavor, Delta and the FAA.

(The flight attendants and the firefighters here did a great job.  Don’t take your luggage with you when you evacuate, and wear some decent shoes.)

This is a huge political opportunity with two prongs:

First, Musk’s cuts to the FAA, which are making it less safe.  The original Rolling Stone piece is paywalled, but Democratic Underground has some excerpts:

-snip-

Rolling Stone spoke with a fired FAA employee who was among a handful of employees working on an obstacle impact team at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City. The team evaluates many tens of thousands of potential new hazards — such as new buildings, windmills, and especially cranes — to inform flight procedures each year.

The obstacle impact team was already understaffed before it was gutted. “There are currently four people remaining over there to do the work of 15 people,” they say, adding: “The danger to the national airspace can’t be understated. This is a very real threat to the American flying public.”

-snip-

Though Musk and the White House claim their job cuts relate in no way to anyone involved with airline safety, Rolling Stone separately spoke with a second terminated FAA employee whose job was ensuring that pilots are medically able and certified to fly. It’s a vital role, especially given the ongoing airline pilot shortage.

“We were already behind,” says the terminated FAA employee. “The pilots already complained that there’s a shortage in getting their medical certification [approved]. It’s just going to be put further behind now.”

-snip-

Second, the nonsensical idea that SpaceX is going to somehow “fix” the Air Traffic Control system.

A team from Elon Musk’s SpaceX is visiting the Air Traffic Control Command Center in Virginia Monday to help overhaul [ed. note: vomit] the system in the wake of last month’s deadly air disaster in Washington, DC, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced. The news comes after CNN reported that the Federal Aviation Administration fired hundreds of probationary employees who maintain critical air traffic control infrastructure.

The exact number of workers losing their jobs is unknown, but the union representing them said it was in the “hundreds.” The Trump administration is in the process of trying to eliminate thousands of federal employees as it works with Congressional Republicans on a massive tax cutting bill that is said to favor mostly corporations and the wealthy.

If I’m in SpaceX management and King Elon calls up to have me send some people to “fix” the air traffic control system, I’m sending the most annoying, incompetent assholes that I can find, so let’s start there.  Continue with the fact that the FAA has gone through a 20 year cycle with a lack of radar system replacement (according to their own document).  This means that the systems are old, and the people who repair them have years of experience on how to maintain old radars.  ATC radar and whatever radar SpaceX uses to track launches are completely different animals.

The FAA is understaffed, removing more staff will just lessen safety, and a lot of people are nervous flyers.  I think the natural inclination of the responsible party is to not scare people unnecessarily.  I’m telling you that I’m scared of flying, and scaring people right now is necessary.

Quick Post on the Toronto CrashPost + Comments (85)

Thanks to everyone who sent protest pics from yesterday.  I’m going to post your reports and pics soon.  But, sheesh, seems like everybody’s quitting, and it isn’t quiet quitting,  so I wanted to cover that first.

Let’s start in New York City.  Yesterday, four deputy mayors resigned their posts.  There are eight in total.  The city comptroller, Brian Lander,  sent a letter to Adams asking him to provide a contingency plan by the end of the week, otherwise Lander might convene an “Inability Committee” meeting, which is the way under the Section 10 of the City Charter to remove the mayor if the governor doesn’t act.  Kathy Hochul, who needs a lot of weathermen to see which way the wind is blowing, issued a statement that seemed like she’s actually considering using her power to remove Adams.  She’s going to meet with key members of the downstate machine as well as Lander today:

CBS News New York’s Marcia Kramer has learned the meetings Hochul will have will be one on one with New York political leaders, including City Comptroller Brad Lander, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Queens Congressman Gregory Meeks.

Kramer has also learned everything is on the table, including the mayor deciding to resign or deciding not to run for reelection, and even the governor using her powers to remove the mayor from the power, something that has never happened in New York state history.

While it’s true that the mayor has never been removed, FDR started the process and had court rulings saying he could do so back when he was governor (the mayor resigned instead), and Pataki removed the Bronx DA from a case and won court rulings on that.

The state of play on the dismissal of Adams’ charges is that Young Voldemort Bove apparently put all the remaining public integrity prosecutors in a room and said nobody’s leaving until someone files a dismissal on Adam’s charges. The dismissal was filed by two attorneys, Antoinette Bacon and Edward Sullivan.   I’m not an expert, but reading that filing, it’s all “The Acting Attorney General determined…” — that’s Bove.  So, I think they filed the dismissal but basically hope to keep their careers and bar cards by simply reporting what Bove told them to do.  The federal judge handling the case, Dale E. Ho, has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow.

The DOGErs got another one:

The top official at the Social Security Administration stepped down after a clash with DOGE employees over access to sensitive personal records, two sources told ABC News.

Michelle King, a career official who served at the agency for more than 30 years, was serving as acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration but left the agency after she was replaced with Leland Dudek this weekend.

Sources said that DOGE employees were seeking access to an internal data system which includes sensitive, personal information of Americans.

Presumably King’s replacement will be more open to letting Elon have every American’s data so he can enroll us all in his new payment system on X.

Edit: Sorry, missed another one:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The top federal prosecutor who supervised criminal cases at the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office resigned on Tuesday, citing what she described as an improper demand by officials appointed by President Donald Trump’s administration to launch a criminal probe and pursue an asset freeze.

In a letter to the interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin reviewed by Reuters, the office’s criminal chief Denise Cheung wrote that the Trump administration had ordered her to investigate a government contract awarded during Joe Biden’s administration and pursue a freeze of the recipient’s assets.

She said that neither request was supported by the evidence, which she said she was provided with by the Deputy Attorney General’s office.

Cheung is a 24-year career prosecutor at DoJ.  I’m sure her replacement, someone who graduated from Liberty University and just passed the bar on their third try, will be up to the task.

Everybody’s QuittingPost + Comments (102)

Emergency crews at Toronto Pearson Airport are responding to the crash of Delta CRJ-900 arriving from Minneapolis/St.Paul.  According to the latest from the airport, all passengers and crew are accounted for.  That link is to the CBC which I’m sure will have updates. (The latest is 8 passengers are being treated by paramedics.)

I’m a bit of an aviation geek, but not a nervous flyer.  But, for the first time in my life, I’m debating whether to take a plane to a family event in a couple of months.  Elon Musk has willy-nilly fired hundreds of FAA employees at a time when there have been shortages of air traffic controllers for years.  On the night that the CRJ-700 had a mid-air collision with a Blackhawk helicopter near DCA, there were supposed to be separate controllers for helicopters and for fixed-wing planes.  They were short-staffed and only one controller was working both positions.   The NTSB is going to report the cause(s) of the crash in a year or two, but it’s not alarmist or silly to say that Republicans are making us less safe by not addressing the crisis of ATC short-staffing, where 90% of US airport towers are understaffed.

So, yes, Republicans are trying to kill you and your family.  Pictures like the one above will become more commonplace because an unelected billionaire decided that he wanted a bigger tax break.

My view is that the real problem isn’t exploiting the tragedies that will undoubtedly occur on Trump’s watch, it’s making sure that whatever caused the tragedy is fixed.  Firing FAA employees will cause more tragedies.  The fix is to boot Musk, re-hire everyone fired, and hire more ATC.  We can call for that today without hurting anyone but Republicans.

Editfrom the CBC: “Ornge Air Ambulance, Ontario’s air ambulance service, says a child was taken to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children with critical injuries, while a man in his 60s and a woman in her 40s were also taken to Toronto hospitals with critical injuries.”

Hope the world-class team at Sick Kids can save the child’s life. At least Canada funds its healthcare, unlike what Trump and Musk would like to see.  Sick Kids is a University of Toronto Hospital.  The research grant cuts that Musk has put into place will rob our great University hospitals of the funding they need.  This means worse care for badly injured kids.

Breaking: Another Crash, Let’s Politicize It!Post + Comments (91)

I was at the gym this morning and Fox News was going at Democrats hammer and tongs.  Hakeem Jeffries had an interview during the segment, and in the portion I saw, he said the usual (good) stuff about how Democrats are going to push back, protect Medicare/Medicaid, etc.  He also used the standard line that a lot of Democrats use about “extreme right-wing” in an effort to make a distinction between Republicans who are hard-core Trumpers and the imaginary others who might possibly vote for a Democrat.  The Fox hosts followed that segment with the comments about Democrats in general being too woke, how we’re staggering after the huge defeat we just had, etc.

It’s just unilateral disarmament to manufacture some imagined distinction between far-right and reasonable Republicans when you appear on Fox (or anywhere else).  I’ve long been inspired by Steve M’s take on Fox News trying to “other” Democrats, no matter how “moderate” or “centrist” we are.  We are the fucking enemy to them, we’re bad people, and in their ideal world, we’d be exterminated.  This is not hyperbole.  Tom Homan has already called for a DoJ investigation of AOC because she informed people of their rights on her social media.

The Harris campaign made a huge deal about having Liz Cheney on our side.  On everything but democracy, she’s as right wing as they get.  The reaction of the Republican Party — as a bloc — was to disavow her and there were many threats of violence that came her way.  Anyone paying attention knows that there’s no such thing as a “moderate” Republican:  Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted for RFK Jr, for fuck’s sake.

If we are going to communicate the extent of the threat that the Republican Party presents to the US, we need to have some frank talk.  An unelected billionaire and Trump’s cabinet of clowns are endangering lives daily. Elon Musk is going to kill people by cutting staff at the FAA.  RFK Jr’s nutty anti-vaxx nonsense comes at a time when we might be facing a pandemic of bird flu and an outbreak of measles among kids in Texas.  Trans people are being scapegoated.  The list goes on and on.  They’re all extremists.  Call them that.

Extreme Right Wing = RepublicansPost + Comments (81)

Reader J sent this pic from the Minneapolis anti-Tesla protest, complete with IncelCamino.

Protesters at the Tesla service center just outside of Minneapolis. Signs reading “Unplug Mad King Musk”, “This car runs on facsism”, “Who buys cars from a nazi?”, “Say no to doge”, “Don’t buy swasticars, BAD DOGE!”.

Keep the pics coming to [email protected].

I posted this on BlueSky yesterday but in case you didn’t see it, it’s a perspective that I hadn’t seen before:

“It seems to me, with Canadian farms, we are well protected against the worst effects of avian influenza,” he said. He says U.S. “agribusiness” has “no resemblance” to Canada’s egg farms, which have an average of 25,000 laying hens per farm.

In the U.S., farms run by mega-producers like Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms can have several million laying hens.

If a wild bird infected with avian flu lands on a farm and infects a hen, the whole flock has to be euthanized because the disease spreads so quickly. Avian flu has a 90 to 100 per cent mortality rate in chickens, and they usually die within 48 hours, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s an incredibly communicable disease. So it has become a really, really significant and problematic issue,” Muirhead said.

On a farm with six million birds, he says, killing them would eliminate about four million eggs per day from the market.

Needless to say “small family farms” don’t have millions of laying hens on them.

Here is the ad the Washington Post refused to run about Elon Musk this weekend.

And here is the ad the Post was happy to run by a rightwing group funded by Musk that smeared me in October.

I started Democracy Docket to be fiercely independent and prodemocracy. Check it out. www.democracydocket.com

[image or embed]

— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 7:49 AM

Legacy media, and most social media with an “algorithm” (all but BlueSky) are all-in on Trump 2.0. The woman who posted that great TikTok (franchesca_leigh) that I embedded on Saturday got that video demonetized for some pretext, and Hope Walz got a strike for gentle pushback against a right wing commenter. No links because it’s a pain to do with TikTok.

In a bit of a rush this morning, open thread and hope you’ll get time to attend a protest today, and if you’re in the Phoenix area check out WaterGirl’s post below.

Various TopicsPost + Comments (61)