HE CERTAINLY TURNED HEADS AT THE VERY LEAST: Did JD Turn the Tide on Free Speech?

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

the reason they keep hammering on this offensively stupid position — that trump, in a few weeks of governance, has somehow caused these plane crashes — is they literally have nothing else. the democrats have never been this lost in any of our lives. https://t.co/7E174vDR2r

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) February 18, 2025

Democrats can’t stay this desperate and dumb forever, but right now it certainly does feel that way.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump’s Labor Secretary Pick Is a Commie Fox in the MAGA Henhouse. “Apologists say that Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination is forgivable because Teamsters head Sean O’Brien ‘helped’ Trump during the campaign last year. Did the Teamsters endorse Trump? No, they merely didn’t endorse Joe Biden. That was only because internal Teamsters polling showed huge support for Trump. That means that O’Brien’s ‘help’ in declining to endorse Biden was almost negligible. A lot of Teamsters were already going to vote for him.”

WOEING: Boeing’s Air Force One program could be delayed until 2029, or later, senior official says.

The delays are frustrating, but not much can be done to speed delivery, the official told Reuters, noting that Boeing faced problems getting components since some manufacturers had gone out of business. Some requirements for the aircraft had also changed, given evolving potential threats, the official said.

Boeing had no immediate comment on the program, known as VC-25B. The first aircraft was slated for delivery in December 2024, but Boeing has pushed its delivery off until at least 2027 or 2028 – towards the end of Trump’s second term in office.

Breaking Defense in December reported that the presidential aircraft program faced new delays that could push delivery of the first jet to 2029 or later.

Asked about the report, the administration official acknowledged the fresh delays and the delay could stretch “years beyond” 2029. U.S. President Donald Trump has been deeply engaged with the program since his 2016 presidential campaign, extracting a promise from then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg to cap the program’s cost at $4 billion. Those fixed-price contract terms, questioned by analysts at the time and finalized in 2018, have cost Boeing over $2 billion so far.

The company seems to be snakebit.

FUN, BUT THE REAL FUN WON’T HAPPEN UNLESS ADAMS SWITCHES PARTIES: Apoplectic Dems Dogpile NYC Mayor Adams.

ASSUME THAT ALL SOFTWARE AND SERVICES FROM COMMUNIST CHINA ARE SPYWARE AND YOU WON’T OFTEN BE WRONG: DeepSeek ‘shared user data’ with TikTok owner ByteDance.

South Korea has accused Chinese AI startup DeepSeek of sharing user data with the owner of TikTok in China.

“We confirmed DeepSeek communicating with ByteDance,” the South Korean data protection regulator told Yonhap News Agency.

The country had already removed DeepSeek from app stores over the weekend over data protection concerns.

The Chinese app caused shockwaves in the AI world in January, wiping billions off global stock markets over claims its new model was trained at a much lower cost than US rivals such as ChatGPT.

Since then, multiple countries have warned that user data may not be properly protected, and in February a US cybersecurity company alleged potential data sharing between DeepSeek and ByteDance.

DeepSeek’s apparent overnight impact saw it shoot to the top of App Store charts in the UK, US and many other countries around the world – although it now sits far below ChatGPT in UK rankings.

In South Korea, it had been downloaded over a million times before being pulled from Apple and Google’s App Stores on Saturday evening.

If you downloaded DeepSeek (or TikTok, for that matter), you might want to delete it.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Won’t Get Fooled Again: GOP Moves to Impeach Judges Trying to Stop Trump Agenda.

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: “Dave” and Our Situational Politics.

Viewed from our current turbulent times, the [1993 movie, “Dave”] movie is something of a time capsule. It gives us a glimpse into a more egalitarian, less angry Hollywood, back in the days before the movie business went rabid… when the overriding impulse of the theatrical movie model was to tell stories that appealed to the widest possible swath of Americans… because that, as everyone in the world understood, was how you made real money.

The movie is certainly political, in ways we will get into, but its politics are subtle… it is subtext rather than text. If you were not a hyper-partisan, as most normal Americans were not in those pre-social media days, the politics were so subtle that they amounted to little more than background noise.

“Dave” (1993), and then later on “The American President” (1995) and “The West Wing” (1999) created a gauzy Federal fantasy land where Progressive Government was always and everywhere a force for good. Where all Americans aspired to a life beneath an all-powerful benevolent Government which did everything for us from birth to earth. In these movies, government never arrests you for speaking out at your local school board meeting. They don’t deny you disaster aid based on your political yard signs. And they never, ever, kick down your door and murder your pet squirrel. These movies built a world where the heroes were always coded Liberal, where they always did the right thing, and where screenplays written by prominent Hollywood Progressives ensured that Conservative-coded villains would always be frustrated by the ability of their opponents to tie them in rhetorical knots.

Most importantly, with the movies and TV shows of this era, Progressive Hollywood was telling us “this is how it ought to be… this is how Government should work.” But to watch “Dave” here in the post-Biden era… the era of Trump 2.0… is to realize that what Hollywood really did in the late-90’s, was to set a bunch of traps for itself and then gamely walk right into them thirty years later.

Read the whole thing.

AMERICANS: “Do you think Democrats learned anything from last November’s historic election loss?”

Democrats: Black queer woman to play Jesus Christ in Jesus Christ Superstar musical at Hollywood Bowl.

IT’S HARD TO COMPLAIN AFTER SO MANY GREAT PICKS, BUT… SHE’S AWFUL: Trump‘s Shockingly Awful Pick for Labor Secretary.

CHANGE: NYSE Chicago Moving To Dallas. “Chalk up another case of another company in a failing high tax, high regulation, blue-run locale getting the hell out why the getting is good and moving to Texas.”

THEY CHOSE IT BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT THEY COULD GET AWAY WITH IT:

I want to note that this didn't have to happen. The destruction of trust in institutions and authority that came out of Covid was a choice made by people in power.

They were warned repeatedly and they chose this collapse. https://t.co/kXq1VRNj39

— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) February 18, 2025

If my sons ever start to drift leftward — unlikely as that seems — I’ll remind them of the year the government stole from their childhoods.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Critics Prove Vance’s Point on the Threat of the Anti-Free Speech Movement.

Brennan could not have picked a better country to utterly destroy the point that she was trying to make in favor of limits on free speech.

Germany continued to censor and criminalize speech after World War II, targeting the neo-Nazi movement and other prohibited viewpoints.

Authorities charged citizens for everything from wine labels to ringtones with banned content. The government has sought to force figures like X owner Elon Musk to censor Americans and others to combat anything that it deems “fake news” or “disinformation.”

Of course, Germany’s massive censorship effort has done little to deter the thriving neo-Nazi movement. What it has done is chill the speech of ordinary citizens. One poll of German citizens found that only 18% of Germans feel free to express their opinions in public. Only 17% felt free to express themselves on the internet.

Other nations joined in the harrumphs with equally disingenuous statements, including the United Kingdom. British diplomats expressed shock despite their systemic suppression of free speech, including arresting citizens for simply praying to themselves near abortion clinics.

The British have doubled down on censorship with sweeping new laws. Hundreds have been arrested recently for speech crimes like spreading “fake news” or disinformation that could lead to “non-trivial psychological or physical harm.”

Previously, British citizens were arrested for criticizing religious groups or opposing homosexuality or immigration. In one case, Nicholas Brock, 52, was convicted of a thought crime.

This doesn’t look much like the Western Europe that brave men stood watch at the Fulda Gap to defend.

HMM: The Murder of a Border Agent on Inauguration Day Keeps Getting Weirder and Weirder.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED HE WAS THE FUTURE OF THE PARTY: Some Dems already turning on Hogg two weeks into DNC vice chair gig.

Hogg has already ruffled some feathers within the DNC for using the committee’s contact list to solicit donations for his own political action committee (PAC), Leaders We Deserve, according to a report from the New York Post.

“David Hogg here: I was just elected DNC Vice Chair! This is a huge win for our movement to make the Democratic Party more reflective of our base: youthful, energetic, and ready to win,” reads one of eight texts, which include solicitation links to “Leaders We Deserve,” sent out to a DNC database of phone numbers, according to the report.

The texts aren’t sitting well with some DNC insiders, who believe the committee’s vast database of numbers and donors should be used to help the future of the party, not a member’s individual PAC.

“David Hogg – talk about living up to your name. A trough of DNC dollars all for him and he doesn’t seem to give an oink,” one top Democrat told the Post.

When you’re too much of a grifter for top Democrats…

TDS IS REAL AND IT IS SPECTACULARLY FUNNY: Disney Fan Site Tries to Tie Changes at Epcot to Donald Trump and Fails Spectacularly.

AMERICANS: “Do you think Democrats learned anything from their historic losses last November?”

Democrats: Washington State Dems Want To Remove George Washington’s Image From State Flag.

Granted, it is an ugly flag and a redesign — by sane people with taste — might be worth looking into. But removing Washington from the state named after him? It’s really because he’s one of those dead white guys, isn’t it?

THAT’S PRETTY FUNNY, COMING FROM A GUY WHO JUST GOT BOYCOTTED BY HIS FORMER EMPLOYERS AT CNN:

NEW: Former CNN host Jim Acosta is calling on the media to come together and boycott the Trump administration.

The call comes in response to the White House's decision to ban the Associated Press.

"News outlets then must rally to the cause, by offering supportive statements to… pic.twitter.com/uRr11xuO86

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 17, 2025

Sorry, that isn’t pretty funny — it’s hysterically funny.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: How to Kill NATO With This 1 Weird Trick (and it Isn’t Trump’s).

CRUEL, BUT FAIR:

All it took for Pete Buttigieg to finally take an interest in transportation was for him to no longer be the Secretary of Transportation.

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) February 18, 2025

Previously:

'Pete Buttigieg is so bad at his job people actually know who the Secretary of Transportation is.'

(can't remember who said it.) https://t.co/eXSQw3sqXo

— John Ringo SF Author (@Jringo1508) February 17, 2025

The only reason I remember the name of the current Transportation Secretary — Sean Duffy, right? — is the last one left him such a mess to clean up.

HMM: The Coming Democratic Baby Bust.

A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told me.

That isn’t to say 38,000 couples took one look at President Trump and decided, Nope, no baby for us! But the correlation that Dahl’s team found was clear and strong. The researchers also hypothesized that George W. Bush’s win in 2000, another close election, would have had a noticeable effect on fertility rates. And they found that after that election, too, the partisan fertility gap widened, although less dramatically than after the 2016 election. According to experts I spoke with, as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility. In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.

The future belongs to those who show up.

CATHERINE SALGADO: Remembering Rush Limbaugh, America’s Anchorman.

WORTH FOLLOWING, BUT…: DOGE sets up IRS, SEC accounts on X.

…despite the headline, this report from The Hill is just a hit-piece on Musk and DOGE, and contains no links to the new X accounts.

So here’s a link to DOGE IRS and another to DOGE SEC.

Meanwhile, this is kind of a big deal:

The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process).

In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost…

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) February 17, 2025

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Is So Powerful That He’s Now In Charge of Every Plane in the Sky. “Once more, with feeling: NBC News is the most corrupt and biased of all the corrupt and biased American news organizations. It’s a part of the media behemoth that’s writing paychecks to Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid.”

THEY’RE FLAILING:

NBC’s Tom Costello ties Donald Trump, @ElonMusk, and @DOGE to the Delta Airlines crash in Toronto, Canada: “[T]his is going yet again raised a concern about FAA staffing — air traffic control staffing. Now, this is a Canadian air traffic control tower and this is under Canadian… pic.twitter.com/KOecnP1A0n

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 17, 2025

Is there anything Trump can’t do? Aside from land a plane in Toronto, that is.