Matt

@SRuhle @xJonNYC Would have rising fuel prices brought down a combined JB/Spirit airline? Who knows. What other airlines are going bankrupt due to fuel prices? Maybe it’s more than the price of fuel.

2 things can be true. - the Biden Administration blocked a JetBlue/Spirit merger out of market consolidation concerns & now here we are with one company gone. - the final blow that caused Spirit to fall was skyrocketing jet fuel prices caused by the war in Iran.

@SenWarren You danced on the merger’s grave when it went down and celebrated the decision. All when Jet Blue and Spirit compromised less than 10% of the total market share.

Spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline. FWIW, JetBlue merger failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal. Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher costs hitting families.

Why would have SWA been axed soon after? Not sure I follow the logic. Would it not be capitalism to allow JB to purchase Spirit? And if SWA failed shortly thereafter, then wouldn’t it have been the bottom of the barrel? I’m not really sure I understand your position when saying “great decision”. Didn’t the government put their thumb on the scale by denying the merger and thus affect the final outcome? I’m neither pro/anti JB-Spirit merger. I can see arguments for both cases. I was most definitely against the government rescuing Spirit btw.

@Heed_AV8B @ewarren If this merger went through, Southwest probably would've been axed very soon thereafter. Great decision. Get rid of bottom of the barrel airlines like Spirit.

The Big Four airlines (American, Delta, Southwest, United) control 75% of the U.S. market. Fewer choices = higher prices for you.

@timtationgg @ewarren You won’t find me 💩ing on Spirit. I’m just commenting on the utter hypocrisy of said Senator complaining about competition after she helped further its demise and celebrated the blocking the merger. She’s the arsonist and now claims to be the firefighter.

@Heed_AV8B @ewarren I love how you retards shit on Spirit for being too cheap and unsafe for YEARS, but now you're crying because nothing of value was lost.

Now that Spirit is going away, which lucky airline gets the passengers? Waffle House Air?

Sadly, I fear that won’t come either. We lived through an era I thought was impossible in America. But it happened and those who perpetrated that evil don’t want to admit what they did. The media isn’t gonna shine a light on it (they were the propaganda bullhorn) and the politicians won’t either - they were just as caught up in it. It’s gonna get brushed under the rug. I hope I’m wrong, but fear I’m not.

@Heed_AV8B Then we deserve a detailed explanation for why it won’t.

Respectfully, the wrong will never be righted until accountability is brought to the officer corps who promulgated, enforced and failed to refuse this unlawful order on their own behalf and on behalf of their people. It has been well over a year, and there hasn’t been so much as a punitive letter of reprimand given to these officers. The only lesson these officers have learned is that they can give and enforce unlawful orders with impunity and retaliate against those who refuse so long as they have political top cover, and when they don’t, they can wait out the next administration. I retired a couple of months before the vax mandate, and I never took the shot. So, why do I care? Because I love our service, and over the last several decades, it has embraced a culture of retaliation against whistleblowers who refuse unlawful orders and insist the command pin is not a “do whatever I want and get away with it” badge. None of our individual whistleblower stories will get any traction to change that incestuously corrupt culture, but COVID? THERE is a scandal of epic proportions where the culture of retaliation I am describing was perpetrated in the open by the vast majority of the officer corps and affected so many people that, if we - and I mean you - do not squander this opportunity for widespread accountability, we MIGHT have a chance to restore honor to the culture of the officer corps. In a hundred years, I want Commanders whispering with pale faces about what happened to the officers who forced this unlawful order on their people and retaliated against the ones who refused. I want this to make the Tailhook investigation look like a friendly game of Clue on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Most of all, I want the culture of unlawful orders and retaliation eviscerated to restore trust in the chain of command and our leadership. And I want that to happen before any of the brave service members who refused this unlawful order are “reinstated” under the leaders who were promoted for retaliating against them.

@russellcrowe Gladiator is my favorite movie of yours. Followed by Master & Commander. Wish there could have been a sequel to M&C. Recently re-watched Robin Hood - that should be on that list.

Nice article that I missed when it came out. One writer, Luke Buckmaster’s opinion, but, he does give some solid reasoning. As I get older, I am humbled that someone would even think to write an article like this. Russell Crowe’s 20 best roles – sorted! theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/…

@RSE_VB That’s almost SOP behind an LHD. And for a Harrier, it’s almost always a “trick or treat” recovery so it’s gets colorful.

Been there!

@RandPaul @Mimosalovin While agree with your sentiments, I’ll bet you big $$ Fauci is NEVER convicted. Heck, I’d almost be willing to bet he’s never indicted.

I've said it from the beginning: lying to Congress is a felony. Destroying federal records is a felony. Advising others to destroy federal records is a felony. Fauci did all three. His adviser was just indicted. Fauci is next. The deadline to prosecute Fauci is May 11. The DOJ must act now. nypost.com/2026/04/28/us-…

@B_DiNucci6 Hmmm. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Don’t worry, your tax money is being well spent.

Can somebody tell me why registering / renewing your car in Colorado is so expensive ???? Texas was $20 a year.. Colorado is >$400

Hello @Avis - I have followed and DM’d you - no response. My wife called an Avis location this morning and is getting the run around. We booked a full size and are being charged for a a full size and she got a small electric car. Rental agreement says the car was rented with a full 8/8 charge, but as the picture shows above it wasn’t even half charged.

@grey4626 Savage. But certainly rings true.

No British government ever imagined an American president might finally tell the truth about the “special relationship.” Until now. Spare me the pearl-clutching obituary from The Economist, that decaying salon of transatlantic nostalgia where the ghost of Churchill is still being pimped out like a rent-boy for Davos subscriptions. Your precious bunting of flags in the bin isn’t some tragic metaphor for Trump’s “betrayal.” It’s the autopsy photo of a one-way parasitic bargain that America has carried on its back like a drunk uncle for eighty goddamn years. And the drunk finally woke up, looked around, and said: Fuck this. This isn’t “turning his back.” This is a sovereign nation refusing to keep subsidizing a continent of strategic eunuchs who have spent decades castrating their own militaries, hollowing out their industrial bases, and importing the very pathologies that make them security liabilities rather than allies. You want the special relationship? Earn it. Reciprocate it. Stop treating the United States like an ATM with nuclear weapons. Geopolitically and militarily, the numbers don’t lie and they never have. The United States still shoulders roughly sixty percent of total NATO defense spending...$845 billion out of a collective $1.4 trillion last year. Most of your European “partners” couldn’t hit the 2% GDP target even after Russia parked tanks on Ukraine’s border and started lobbing missiles at civilian infrastructure. Britain under Starmer talks a big game about “global Britain” while quietly slashing capability, courting CCP-linked cash, and letting its own streets burn under the weight of demographic transformation and speech codes that make the old East German Stasi look libertarian. You lecture us about values while your own government criminalizes tweets and turns Rotherham into a cautionary tale the media still refuses to fully autopsy. Historically, the ledger is even more damning. We bled for you in 1917 and 1941 when your empires were on the ropes. We bankrolled your reconstruction, anchored your defense for the entire Cold War, and let you punch above your weight on the world stage because sentimental Anglosphere nostalgia still meant something. In return? Suez 1956, where you expected us to back imperial nostalgia while we were trying to contain Soviet expansion. Vietnam, where you sat it out. Iraq, where you half-assed it and then spent the next twenty years sneering at us in your broadsheets. And every single time an American president dared put America First, your commentariat wailed like Victorian widows about the death of the alliance...as if the alliance was ever meant to be a suicide pact. You’ve internalized a victimhood narrative so profound it borders on the clinical...projecting your own national decline, your own loss of agency, your own self-inflicted castration onto the one country that still possesses the will to act like a great power. Trump doesn’t “deprioritize” the relationship; he simply refuses to indulge the delusion any longer. He sees what you refuse to admit: the United Kingdom of 2026 is no longer the reliable offshore balancer of 1945. It’s a mid-tier European power wrestling with internal entropy, elite disconnect, and a demographic trajectory that makes long-term strategic partnership… let’s just say, complicated. We are sick of it. Sick of the free ride. Sick of the lectures from people whose capitals are turning into no-go zones while their defense ministers beg Washington for more F-35s and more carrier groups to patrol waters they can no longer secure themselves. Sick of the pomp, the pageantry, the royal visits, and the hand-wringing editorials that treat American self-interest as some kind of moral failing. The special relationship isn’t dead. It’s being stress-tested by reality. And reality, Mr. Economist, is a vicious bitch with a ledger in one hand and a mirror in the other. Look into it. 💀⚖️🗡️

@AvisTmhub1 I followed your account and also sent a DM with the reservation number.

@BarackObama We have his manifesto now. He quoted numerous Democrats who have also called Trump a “rapist” and “pedophile”. Disagree with his politics, policy and behavior. Those are normal human disagreements. Maybe layoff calling him a Nazi, rapist, pedophile and/or the end of democracy.

Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.

@Avis absolutely terrible service today. Rented a full size car for my wife at MCI. After a 12 hr day traveling, they gave her an electric car without notifying her and to add insult to injury the car doesn’t even have half a charge. She has no way to charge this car and it’s a massive inconvenience to say the least. Huge fail.

@ChrisMurphyCT Rooting for Iran. Got it. TDS in full bloom. One can dislike Trump and his policies and be quite critical of his actions. That’s what a reasonable politician would do. The TDS infected politician roots for Iran success and American failure. You’re a 🤡.

awesome

@Supersonic_Red Solid post. Spent my last tour as the manager of our fleet and preparing to sundown the platform - what you say spot on.

The A-10 Isn’t the Problem. The Strategy Is. Extending the A-10 Thunderbolt II to 2030 is being sold as a decisive move. It’s not. It’s another short-term patch on a long-term problem the Pentagon refuses to solve. Let’s be clear. This is not a four-year decision. It’s barely three and a half. In defense planning terms, that is nothing. You cannot stabilize a force, sustain an industrial base, or build a transition strategy on timelines this short. And yet, here we are. Again. The A-10 keeps surviving because reality keeps winning. When conditions degrade, when troops are in contact, when precision and presence matter more than theory, the Warthog shows up and does exactly what it was built to do. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is how we manage it. This cycle of incremental extensions is not strategy. It is institutional indecision. Every time leadership pushes the timeline out a few years, it sends a ripple through the entire system. Maintenance units cannot plan. Suppliers hesitate to invest. Training pipelines stall. Pilots and maintainers start looking for stability somewhere else. That is how you hollow out capability without ever formally retiring it. The cost is not just financial. It is operational. Sustaining a platform like the A-10 requires consistency. Parts production, depot maintenance, training throughput, and operational doctrine all depend on a clear and credible timeline. When that timeline keeps shifting in small increments, efficiency collapses. You spend more money to get less readiness, all while pretending you are buying flexibility. You are not. You are buying uncertainty. If the Department of Defense believes the A-10 still fills a critical role, then commit to it properly. Set a horizon that actually means something. 2040 is a reasonable anchor. It gives the force room to breathe, allows industry to stabilize, and creates space to develop a real replacement instead of a theoretical one. And if something better arrives sooner, then retire the A-10 on your terms, not in reaction to the next crisis. That is what strategy looks like. Right now, we are asking a combat-proven platform to carry ongoing operational demand while denying it the structural support required to do so efficiently. That is not modernization. That is drift. The A-10 is not the problem. It has never been the problem. The problem is a system that cannot decide whether it wants to replace it, sustain it, or simply keep kicking the decision down the road. Extending to 2030 does not resolve that tension. It prolongs it. At some point, leadership has to stop managing this aircraft in election cycles and start managing it as a capability. Because the battlefield is not waiting for us to make up our minds.

@grok @SpaceX @grok how many landings has the falcon booster had in the last 12 months?

@Heed_AV8B @SpaceX The 600 Falcon booster landings span from the first successful one on December 21, 2015, to the 600th today (April 19, 2026). That's a bit over 10 years and 4 months of rapid reuse progress.

Falcon lands for the 600th time!