DL Open Thread: Friday, October 31, 2025
Air Traffic Controllers Could STILL Be The Key To Ending Government Shutdown:
Air traffic controller absences delayed or temporarily halted operations at airports on Thursday, as the Trump administration warned of worsening disruptions while workers go without pay.
The worst of the staffing interruptions was at Orlando International Airport, where the Federal Aviation Administration warned in an advisory Thursday evening that for a period of time, “no arrivals will be able to land as there will be no certified traffic controllers available.” By Thursday night, the airport was reporting average delays of about 2 hours and 40 minutes, with some flights delayed for nearly 12 hours, and several canceled.
The delays and their ripple effects along the East Coast followed a warning that Vice President JD Vance and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had issued hours before of impending “disaster” if the government shutdown continued into November. The holiday travel season and the worsening winter weather, they argued, would increase the demands on air traffic controllers just as working without pay could become untenable.
Controllers, whose first payday without pay was Tuesday, were already overtaxed before the shutdown, as many worked overtime shifts to compensate for the around 3,000 vacant jobs in a 14,000-position work force. That preexisting staffing crunch meant that many air traffic facilities did not have enough staffing to accommodate surprise absences, whether or not they were caused by the shutdown.
Mr. Duffy has argued that the air travel delays are evidence that it is still safe to fly, explaining that it shows the F.A.A. is responding to so-called “staffing triggers” by managing air traffic to ensure no facility takes on a greater workload than its controllers can handle.
Well, it may be safe to fly. Just not feasible to fly if the planes don’t, um, fly.
Trump Has Caribbean Boaters Cowering In Fear. I might have missed it, but has anyone provided one scintilla of proof that the boats Trump is destroying actually ARE involved in the drug trade?:
As U.S. forces launch lethal attacks on boats the Trump administration alleges are carrying illegal drugs to the United States, and the Pentagon masses fighter jets, warships and troops off the coast of Venezuela, the waters on which Trinidadians have long relied for their food, livelihoods, and leisure no longer feel safe.
The U.S. attacks are sending waves across the Caribbean, exposing divisions between leaders on narcotrafficking and raising alarms in a region where a long history of U.S. interventionism casts a shadow — even as officials acknowledge there’s little they can do to stop them.
“We are facing … an extremely dangerous and untenable situation in the southern Caribbean,” Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said Saturday. “Peace is critical to all that we do in this region, and now, that peace is being threatened.”
The U.S. military has blown up more than a dozen boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific since early September, killing at least 61 people. Administration officials have alleged, without producing evidence, that the boats are crewed by “narcoterrorists” who are “poisoning” Americans with lethal drugs such as fentanyl.
Legal analysts say the strikes violate U.S. law and international law.
At least half of the attacks have occurred in the waters between Venezuela and Trinidad, a route used to traffic cannabis and cocaine to West Africa and Europe — not, as President Donald Trump has claimed, fentanyl to the United States.
In early 2023, Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, gave the state and the nation a demonstration of the stunning and overlooked power of his office.
The previous year, the court — then majority Democrat — had outlawed partisan gerrymandering in the swing state. Over Newby’s vehement dissent, it had ordered independent outsiders to redraw electoral maps that the GOP-controlled legislature had crafted to conservatives’ advantage.
The traditional ways to undo such a decision would have been for the legislature to pass a new law that made gerrymandering legal or for Republicans to file a lawsuit. But that would’ve taken months or years.
Newby cleared a way to get there sooner, well before the crucial 2024 election.
In January — once two newly elected Republican justices were sworn in, giving the party a 5-2 majority — GOP lawmakers quickly filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to rehear the gerrymandering case. Such do-overs are rare. Since 1993, the court had granted only two out of 214 petitions for rehearings, both to redress narrow errors, not differences in interpreting North Carolina’s constitution. The lawyers who’d won the gerrymandering case were incredulous.
“We were like, they can’t possibly do this,” said Jeff Loperfido, the chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “Can they revisit their opinions when the ink is barely dry?”
Under Newby’s leadership, they did.
Behind the closed doors of the courthouse, he set aside decades of institutional precedent by not gathering the court’s seven justices to debate the legislature’s request in person, as chief justices had historically done for important matters.
Instead, in early February, Justice Phil Berger Jr., Newby’s right-hand man and presumed heir on the court, circulated a draft of a special order agreeing to the rehearing, sources familiar with the matter said. Berger’s accompanying message made clear there would be no debate; rather, he instructed his colleagues to vote by email, giving them just over 24 hours to respond.
The court’s conservatives approved the order within about an hour. Its two liberal justices, consigned to irrelevance, worked through the night with their clerks to complete a dissent by the deadline.
The pair were allowed little additional input when the justices met about a month and a half later in their elegant wood-paneled conference room to reach a decision on the case. After what a court staffer present that day called a “notably short conference,” Newby and his allies emerged victorious.
Newby then wrote a majority opinion declaring that partisan gerrymandering was legal and that the Democrat-led court had unconstitutionally infringed on the legislature’s prerogative to create electoral maps.
The decision freed GOP lawmakers to toss out electoral maps that had produced an evenly split North Carolina congressional delegation in 2022, reflecting the state’s balanced electorate.
That’s the ‘what’. The ‘how’ he got there is what makes this award-worthy piece fascinating.
The John Kowalko Obituary. This provides all the information on the arrangements.
Court Of Chancery Rejects Challenge By Landlords:
Delaware’s Court of Chancery upholds property tax rates created in New Council County to address post-reassessment concerns.
Vice Chancellor Lori Will rejected all arguments made by a coalition of landlords and property associations.That coalition argued the authority state lawmakers gave New Castle school districts to set split rates for residential and non-residential properties resulted in a misplaced tax burden.
In her decision, Will said state lawmakers have the power to classify property for rate-setting purposes once a uniform assessment methodology is in place – and their action was neither unreasonable nor arbitrary.
Will also notes any errors in the process were not “systemic or pervasive, but correctable,” adding the error rate of 0.66% suggests administrative difficulties.
She also ruled the state and county are providing remedies that are constitutionally sufficient for any correction of property tax classifications.
What do you want to talk about?
I read this morning about the passing of Pierre Robert. I think he was a part time Rehoboth resident, he mentioned Rehoboth on air many times. Always a positive voice. A very sad day. Bon Jovis post is worth a read.