In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Via CNN : Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner is stepping down from his position to “to ensure that Amtrak continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this administration,” he announced in a statement. The decision comes as Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk said he believes the US Postal Service and Amtrak need to be privatized. There's little other information on the circumstances, except that most outlets quote from Elon Musk's recent remarks : Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media & Telecom conference, Musk said it was “kind of embarrassing” that other countries, such as China, have superior passenger rail. “Amtrak is a sad situation,” Musk said, according to CNN Business, which first reported his remarks. “It’s like, if you’re coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America,” Musk said. This is actually quite true, alth0ough I'm not ...

Although Trump consistently refers to Canadian annexation in terms of making the whole country a "51st state", it seems to me that there are obstacles nobody has mentioned in swallowing Canada whole. There are major differences in national policies on hot-button issues like gun control, universal medical care, and medically assisted suicide, as well as questions over the status of the French language -- if annexing Canada would create special circumstances for French in the US, wouldn't fairness demand the same treatment for Spanish? As a practical matter, the US would also have to offer Canadians some major enticement that would overcome the reluctance or distaste of many individual Canadians to vote for annexation. One such would be to offer some form of dollar equity, equivalent to what the German Federal Republic offered the German Democratic Republic at the time of reunification : The Deutsche Mark played an important role in the reunification of...

I've continued to follow up on Justin Trudeau's March 4 remarks about Trump's "dumb" tariff threat , in large part because there's been so little long-form written analysis: Speaking to reporters at a news conference on Parliament Hill, Trudeau said Trump is trying to prompt "a total collapse of the Canadian economy" because he thinks that will "make it easier to annex us," something the U.S. president has repeatedly said he wants to do. But Trudeau said that will never happen because "when it comes to defending our great nation, there is no price we all aren't willing to pay." Trudeau said Canada will not back down from a fight in the face of "completely bogus and completely unjustified" trade action that has the potential to ruin bilateral relations and prompt job losses, economic devastation and higher inflation on both sides of the border. This stemmed from earlier exchanges between the two : ...

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...