In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

President Trump: Canada can keep their national anthem when they become the 51st state pic.twitter.com/85aVHsRQ9v — Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) March 13, 2025 I tend to stay away from Victor Davis Hanson; I find his views just a little too pre-digested and several days behind what's actually going on, but the YouTube post below gives me a basis on which to make a different point: At 4:29. he says, We don't want Canada as a 51st state, and Trump knows that, and The Art of the Deal , trolling style, he knows that. Canada is a very left-wing country, socialized medicine, state-run industries. Its GDP is not as great as similar-size California, which also has 40 million people, but its per capita income average is about like Mississippi. I don't think it's as large as Mississippi's per capita income. But more importantly, if it was a state, if the whole country was a state, it would get two left-wing Senators and probably 50 left-wing House of Representa...

For much of the past week, I've been looking at a business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style as it's manifested in both his business and political careers, looking mainly at the issue of Canadian tariffs. But all of a sudden, we're getting a new case study, the House's passage of a continuing resolution, which needed only a simple majority, but now it's moved to the Senate, which needs a 60-vote supermajority to pass a procedural vote. Trump had a bare majority of Republicans in the House, which he was able to control for the vote. But while he has 53 Republicans in the Senate, he doesn't have the 60-vote supermajority he needs . Following Tuesday night’s vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced the lower chamber of Congress would recess until March 24, leaving Schumer with the option of accepting the House bill and keeping the federal lights on over the objection of progressive activists, or rejecting it and putting th...

I want to look at a secondary example of Trump's role as a disrupter, which he clearly relishes. Most of the attention in recent news cycles has gone to Ukraine and DOGE, but it's important to remember what is almost a side project, Canada. As of late November last year, a few weeks after the election and almost two months before his inauguration, he singlehandedly caused a crisis in the Canadian government , not just the US: The US president-elect said he would sign an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada, after being inaugurated on 20 January 2025. . . . Last year, more than 80% of Mexico's exports went to the US, while around 75% of Canada's went to its southern neighbour. By early January, the threat alone, with Prime Minister Trudeau's flaccid response, forced Trudeau to announce his resignation : Trudeau, 53, had faced growing calls to quit from inside his Liberal Party, which ramped up in Decembe...

Yesterday I linked to a comment by Michael McFaul, a Stanford Political Science professor, Obama advisor, and US Ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014. Wikipedia calls him "the architect of the so-called 'Russian reset policy'". He has been both a prestigious supporter and an architect of the Biden Ukraine policy. At Wikipedia , Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, McFaul and Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andrii Yermak headed an expert group called the Yermak-McFaul Expert Group on Russian Sanctions, which developed an individual sanctions roadmap with plans to tighten sanctions against Russia. McFaul debated the Russian invasion with John Mearsheimer in May 2022. McFaul has taken a position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine identifying Putin as a culprit in conducting the invasion of Ukraine against the position of Mearsheimer that Putin is pursuing a realist geopolitical plan to secure Russian national interests in the presence ...

Trump talked about who has the cards again on Friday : Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump urged Ukraine to "get on the ball and get a job done" as he expressed frustration over Kyiv's position over peace talks, saying he found it "more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine." . . . "As you know, we're meeting in Saudi Arabia on, sometime next week, early, and we're talking - what I find that in terms of getting a final settlement, it may be easier dealing with Russia, which is surprising because they have all the cards," Trump said. When asked whether he believes Putin when the Russian leader says he wants peace, Trump responded, "Yeah... I believe him." "I think he wants to get it stopped and settled and I think he's hitting them harder than he's been hitting them and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now," Trump said. He referred again to Ukraine, saying ...

Via NBC News : Trump has discussed with aides the possibility of calibrating America’s NATO engagement in a way that favors members of the alliance that spend a set percentage of their gross domestic product on defense, the officials said. As part of the potential policy shift, the U.S. might not defend a fellow NATO member that is attacked if the country doesn’t meet the defense spending threshold, the officials said. If Trump does make that change, it would mark a significant shift from a core tenet of the alliance known as Article 5, which says that an attack on any NATO country is an attack on all of them. This comes as the administration increasingly distances itself from involvement in any Ukraine peacekeeping force, especially any attempt by NATO countries to draw the US into a wider Ukraine role : Stating that the U.S. does not believe NATO membership for Ukraine would be a "realistic" outcome of any negotiated peace settlement with Russia, Defense Sec...

There've beern several stories over the past week about Hunter Biden being broke, for instance : According to court filings in California, Hunter's attorneys claim he "has suffered a significant downturn in his income and has significant debt in the millions of dollars range." Imagine that; when daddy's no longer pulling the strings from the Oval Office, the money well runs dry faster than Hunter can say "Where's my crack pipe?" Like most of these stories, this one misses a much bigger point: Remember Hunter's illustrious "art career"? You know, the one where anonymous buyers totally weren't paying for access to the White House? Those sales have crashed harder than Hunter after a bender. From selling 27 pieces at an average of $54,481.48 each, he's now managed to sell just one piece for a measly $36,000. The art career comes very late in the saga. Hunter's connections with his then-senator father almost certai...