Garrett Ballengee

I've waited five years to read this headline in West Virginia ... surreal. #Hope #schoolchoice

"You know what happens when people can't have babies in the place they live? They move away." West Virginia has seen three labor and delivery closures in the last 21 months. Listen to Chief of Staff @jldobrinsky on WAJR discuss rural L&D closures and how Certificate of Need is impacting communities across the Mountain State. ⬇️

When Montana repealed CON in 2021, the total number of businesses providing home health, outpatient surgery, and inpatient rehabilitation services surged by 12.5%. @FrontierMontana

Great stuff here from @RobertEnlow

🏥 Boone Memorial Hospital wants to bring podiatry, behavioral health, and a retail pharmacy to Chapmanville, a small Logan County town. A hospital twenty minutes away has filed to block it.

Three things. One sentence. All true. This is the kind of institutional knowledge that gets lost when policy debates stay focused on intentions rather than track records.

VINTAGE WV: Republican presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan arrived at Kanawha Airport shortly after noon and was surrounded by news media. Reagan arrived in Charleston following an overnight stop in Wheeling and a short morning stopover in Parkersburg. Gerald Ford won the Republican nomination in the 1976 primary race, but then fell to Jimmy Carter in the general election. Republican candidate for governor Cecil Underwood can be seen in the background behind Reagan. 👉 Find more vintage WV photos at wvgazettemail.com. DATE: May 4, 1976 PHOTOGRAPHER: Earl Benton

Utterly extraordinary. Arsonist and firefighter.

Joe Biden killed Spirit Airlines. And anti-business, anti-market politicians like Elizabeth Warren celebrated as he did so. Spirit has been in financial distress for years. Its ultra low-cost operating model simply no longer works. Back in 2022, though, JetBlue offered Spirit a lifeline. JetBlue bid to acquire the struggling airline for $3.8B, and Spirit’s shareholders accepted the deal. The Spirit brand would have been retired, and the interior of the jets would have been somewhat reconfigured (more premium seats, more legroom, no more inserting a quarter to use the lavatory, etc.). The core of what made Spirit “Spirit”—good, bad, and ugly alike—would have changed. But the majority of flight routes would have been preserved, and most Spirit employees would have kept their jobs. Given the sizable challenges to Spirit’s business model—as well as the company’s weak balance sheet—it was the best outcome any of its stakeholders could have hoped for. But that wasn’t good enough for the Biden administration, nor for politicians like Senator Warren (who has never seen a dollar of shareholder value she didn’t wish to tax, regulate, or otherwise strangle out of existence). In 2023, the Biden DOJ sued to block the deal. In January 2024, a judge ruled in the DOJ’s favor, and the deal was dead by March. By November 2024, Spirit was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy; after emerging with a restructured balance sheet in early 2025, it would file for Chapter 11 again—a rare “double dip” bankruptcy process—less than a year later, in August 2025. And now, possibly as early as this weekend, Spirit will enter liquidation. Its planes will be parceled out to the highest bidders, where they will likely fly completely different routes across the US. Its pilots will land safely on their feet (though they, too, may have to relocate their families to new home bases), as will some flight attendants. Most mechanics and other ground crew are probably out of luck—and jobs. The Biden administration’s lawsuit against JetBlue all but guaranteed this. And the worst part is, anyone could have predicted it (in fact, countless people across the aviation and finance worlds did just that). When the DOJ or FTC sues to block an M&A deal, it typically does so by arguing the post-transaction market will be too concentrated (you’ll hear something called the Herfindahl-Hirschman index referenced to argue this; and don’t worry, the rest of us can’t pronounce it either). But this was not the argument the Biden DOJ made. The DOJ instead argued that Spirit, as an independent company, charged so little that it created a disproportionate downward pricing effect that affected the rest of the airline industry. In other words, Spirit was so cheap that it couldn’t be allowed to be acquired by a competitor, lest the entire airline industry be able to raise prices. It’s analogous to saying the dirty Arby’s in my town can’t shut down, or else the steak house across the city might be able to charge more. But here’s the thing: Those disproportionately downward prices meant Spirit wasn’t viable as a business. Unlike legacy carriers such as United—which now generate a large share of profit from premium seats—Spirit does not offer premium seats with which it can subsidize its lower-cost fares. ALL of Spirit’s fares are ultra low-cost tickets, with ultra low margins for the company. And now, the company is about to die. So way to go, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Lina Khan and all the rest of you who—despite barely having held private-sector jobs, let alone built companies or been responsible for payroll—know what a business should do better than its shareholders, board of directors, executives, employees, investment bankers, and lawyers. Job well done. I hope you’re proud.

Thank you Elizabeth Warren for killing Spirit Airlines, a budget airline for low income consumers

Spirit Airlines died tonight at the hands of the socialist crusader, Elizabeth Warren She must be so proud to add another casket to her achievements. Tonight at 3am, Spirit turns off the lights. 14,000 jobs gone. 30+ smaller airports lose service. JetBlue offered $3.8 BILLION in cash to buy Spirit in 2022. Shareholders, flight attendants union, literally everyone voted yes. The combined company would have held 9% of the US market against a Big 4 that already owned 80%. For anyone who understands numbers: 9% isn’t a monopoly against 80%. Warren said no. She wrote letters. She pressured Buttigieg. Biden’s DOJ sued. A federal judge killed the deal in January 2024. Her argument: the merger would cost consumers $1 billion a year. Now look at her collateral damage she dusts under the rug. 510 pilots gone in the months after. 1,800 flight attendants furloughed in December. 14,000 jobs in 2023. 7,500 last week. Zero tonight. And that’s just the people in Spirit uniforms. Catering goes. Fuel guys go. Baggage crews, gate agents, airport coffee shops, hotels and rental cars in 70 cities Spirit flew to. Every airline job carries 3 more on its back. 40,000 people out of work because of one woman’s moronic crusade against the market. And the math ain’t mathing. Spirit abandoned 90 routes during the death spiral. Fares on those routes are up 14% on average. Oakland to Newark: $135 to $288. Fort Myers to San Juan: $92 to $219. Kansas City to Newark up 66%. That’s reality. Not some BS number from a “study.” So @SenWarren tell me how this saves the consumer money? Cheap carriers in a market drop fares 21% across the board. Southwest did this in the 90s and saved Americans $68 BILLION over 20 years. Warren killed it. That’s what moronic politicians led by socialism do. Then with her own blind arrogance, she tweeted Spirit’s collapse is “a Biden win for flyers.” A win. 14,000 people are reading termination letters tonight. And she’s taking credit. This is socialism in 2026. A senator who’s never made payroll thinks she knows how to run a market better than the people who own and work in the company. She saved you a billion on imaginary paper. She cost you ten times that in real life. She didn’t protect consumers from anything. 14,000+ will go from working to welfare. She will make sure to blame billionaires, hardworking tax payers, AI, capitalism and whatever monster they will make up tomorrow hiding under your bed. Higher taxes. Fewer jobs. More expensive everything. She called it a win. I hope you enjoy winning.

Spirit airlines is now planning to shut down after a failed rescue for the company As reminder, JetBlue offered to buy the company for almost $4B a few years ago The DoJ blocked the M&A deal, claiming that it would take out the low cost airline operator from the market and hurt consumers Incredible work from our own regulators. They destroyed value for shareholders, and now the low cost operator will be leaving the market anyway

This is a colossal failure on the part of the Biden admin (and antitrust hawks generally). The government stopped Spirit from merging with JetBlue over concerns about ticket prices. So instead the low-price company will just shut down instead. A total faceplant.

We're cutting the education pizza the same way we did 30 years ago, even though the table looks completely different. The pizza doesn't need to be bigger. It needs to be sliced smarter. 🍕

West Virginia is the center of the universe

Do CON laws actually help patients, or do they mainly protect incumbents? Jessica Dobrinsky (@jldobrinsky) joins CMH's Reinier Schuur to unpack the politics and economics behind these "permission slips" in healthcare. New episode of The Pursuit of Health: youtube.com/watch?v=qwzUDX…

Tomorrow, Stonewall Jackson Memorial Hospital closes its labor and delivery unit. It is Vandalia Health's second obstetrics closure in six days.

The free market doesn't promise perfection. It promises accountability. That's the foundation of everything we do at Cardinal, making the case that systems which reward results serve West Virginians better than those that protect the status quo.

📢 West Virginia! Patients over systems.

Work is the foundation of lasting stability—and dignity. Imagine a system where workforce programs and safety net services come together under one roof, with a single, coordinated plan focused on helping people thrive through employment. Less red tape. More collaboration. Real results. That’s the power of the One Door model—opening new pathways to opportunity for every West Virginian.