In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Trump's latest move in the simmering autopen scandal raises a big set of unanswered questions. As he put it, President Trump dropping bombs on Sunday night... pic.twitter.com/YEfeHnWTv4 — Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) March 17, 2025 His premise is that some group of people put some pardoning documents together without Biden's knowledge, and they signed them with the autopen. So, who were these people? For now, the media is being cagey : One Biden White House source told The Post they suspect that a key aide to the then-president may have made unilateral determinations on what to auto-sign. The Post is not publishing that staffer’s name due to the lack of concrete evidence and refutations by other colleagues. The Biden aide, who did not respond to requests for comment, would frequently make mention of what “the boss” wanted, the source said, but compatriots would have “no idea” if it was true because the internal culture was to not ask questions. “I feared no ...

Here's something nobody's mentioned: in less than a year, for most of which he was out of office, Trump has defeated his main first-term adversaries. He beat Joe Biden so badly in the 2024 campaign that Biden had to withdraw before he was even nominated. But it was Nancy Pelosi, nominally out of leadership but clearly still in effective control, who pushed Biden out. Yet in doing this and endorsing Kamala Harris as his replacement, she left Biden and his allies embittered and damaged her own reputation when that whole new 2024 strategy proved a loser. Now, by backing Jeffries and the failed House strategy over the continuing resolution and the shutdown threat, she's badly damaged Chuck Schumer's position as Senate Democrat leader, split the party, and put herself on the losing side of another issue with the battle cry, "Listen to the Women!" When the commentariat tsk-tsks over how the Democrats don't have a leader, they're talking about Pelosi....

Thers's been little commentary anywhere on Trump's remarkable victories in both the House and Senate over the past week, culminating in Schumer's abject reversal on the continuing resolution, with nine Democrats and an Independent voting in favor of cloture and one Democrat and one Independent even voting in favor of the underlying CR. But Real Clear Politics had nothing on the story this morning , notwithstanding Schumer's reversal on the bill and cloture took place Thursday, which made the eventual outcome clear. RCP's lead story, unbelievably, was Byron York on A reminder that Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate from two days earlier. And I noted yesterday that Politico had characterized the White House strategy for the CR as "over-confidence bordering on arrogance". Nobody saw this coming, and it looks as though almost nobody, despite two days notice, had begun to draft any sort of reaction. It isn't just legacy media that's lazy and c...

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 ...