The Imperial Presidency, Part 2

[robkelk]

renamings...

Trump signs order to rename Lake Ontario as 'Lake America'

Carney pushes back on move, says Canadians will call it Lake Ontario 'now and always'

The international border divides the lake in a way that makes the USA the minority holder, so there's some question as to whether he can do that internationally.


It's finally time to rename Ottawa's Trump Avenue, councillor says

The Central Park neighbourhood has several streets with New York City-themed names such as Staten Way and Grammercy Park.

People who actually live there get to vote on any name change. It affects them the most, after all.


As long as people are making name changes all around, I'm calling a particular famous workplace the "Oval Playpen" from now on. Nobody can stop me making the rename.

[Labster]

As New York's governor Kathy Hochul pointed out, the new mnemonic to remember the lakes is:

S uperior
H uron
A merica
M ichigan
E rie

So now when our kids are trying to learn the lakes, they can feel SHAME, too.  Okay, there's one more word in there, AHEMS.  As in, "Ahem, ahem.  Nice economy you got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it."  Since Trump doesn't have shame in his vocabulary (but there is a picture of him in the DSM under 'narcissism'), I imagine we'll be going with the second version.

Vox published a recent article about the roots of the trade war.  Essentially asking: which constituencies actually wanted the trade war with Canada.  It may surprise you to learn that the answer to that is "basically no one".  No one in the U.S.A. seems to actually want this.  There are lots of folks who want a trade war with China, in hopes of onshoring manufacturing, but against Canada, no one actually thinks it's a good idea.  So it has to come from Trump himself.

So, what's this all about, then?  Certainly, the shambolic negotiation of our administration had a little to do with it.  When the word omnishambles was coined to describe the implementation of Brexit, I don't think they truly saw the depths of shambolism that we now see in the U.S., in which every portion of the national government seems to be ineffective at everything.  But I suspect that the negotiations were set up to fail.  The pill was always going to be too bitter to swallow at the end.

Had Canada accepted the agreement, they would essentially have handed trade authority over their nation to Washington, with a clause that Trump could raise tariffs later after the agreement anyway.  Such an agreement was an unacceptable loss of sovereignty to Ottawa, and for good reason.

What we're left with is loss of sovereignty for Canada is the end goal here.  They could have taken the easy way out, and voluntarily reduced their autonomy, but barring that: begun, the trade wars have.  Trump has always been clear about one thing: if Canada joins the United States, the state of Canada will have no tariffs with the other states.  (With the rest of the world, of course there will be tariffs, but who cares about that?)  That's the way to end the trade war, and likely the only way with the current status.  If Democrats are allowed to take office next January, maybe it changes that way.  But barring that, Canada will need to submit to the U.S. in one way or another, becoming a protectorate, or a puppet, or joining as an actual state.

After all, Trump changed the map to Lake America with a Sharpie.  That's permanent. Can't be undone.  Renaming a lake isn't something you do to win a trade war, but it is something you do if want to wipe a country off the map. Allegiance or death, that's the choice.

[Labster]

I haven't talked much about the situation in American politics, largely because it's just too much, and all at once.  Flooding the zone, it's called.  And certainly, there is an element of eventual danger in speaking out, though for now this is mainly focused on the elites and media, and nobodies like me can say whatever.  It also doesn't really cause me much fear, when the prospect of being killed for my opinions is hardly worse than actually living through this benighted era.

Anyway, I wanted to pick up on a weird thread that I've been thinking about for a while, about how the latest season of Earth really has the writers going off the rails.  Or from another perspective: if the many universes interpretation of quantum theory is true, given that our world satisfies physics, there must be another universe where the story of this universe is a television program.  And gosh, does the current season seem like it's written by a total hack.

The references are all too obvious.  The main guy has a name that sounds like "trumpery", and he's taking advice from another leader with the toilet adjacent name of "Putin".

Trump is going out of his way to lose the election for his party, saying things like people who don't like data centers "want to be poor and backwards", leading to Republican congressmen saying awkward things like "I guess I'm poor and backwards then" rather than challenging the doctrine of their leader.  But under a new executive order, the US Post Office will not deliver vote-by-mail ballots to anyone who's ballot is in the same batch of ballots as someone who may be an illegal immigrant.  Of course, this will be enforced by Postmaster General David Steiner.  So the whole plan to save the election from total loss hinges on Steiner's forces coming in clutch.

The whole administration is built on con men conning each other, just like the crypto coins they sell.  And they're profiting off of human misery.  All of these people arrested by ICE have to go somewhere, which means they're mostly going to private jails.  The "food" served to prisoners is intentionally inedible, so they have to buy better food like ramen packets from the store at a huge markup.  CoreCivic is the biggest private prison operator.  While one of its board members, Thurgood Marshall Jr. raises eyebrows by being the son of the black Supreme Court member, can I also point out that the CEO's name is Patrick Swindle?  Their prisons are where we're sending the eight year olds who have overstayed their visas, of course.  Only the worst of the worst (i.e. brown people).

Not everyone is going to jail for being an immigrant.  For the Haitians living around Nashville, they've mostly chosen to put ankle monitors on everyone.  For a woman coming out of a hospital, having given birth to a baby but lost the child: ankle monitor.  We can't have dangerous people like that around.  You might say that putting shackles on the legs of black folk in the Old South is a little on the nose -- just too blatant a symbolism, and the writers are being lazy.  Incidentally, the plan is to end their Temporary Protected Status, because there's no need for them to be protected from conditions back in Haiti.  Sure, there's headlines like More than 50 kidnapped after violent gang attack in Haiti leaves 47 dead, but I mean come on, it's not as if mass kidnappings aren't happening right here in the USA these days!  They are!  The thugs doing the kidnapping are just called ICE.

And if you need any more proof that we're living in bad TV land, can I just recall that Matt Gaetz, the disgraced former Congressman, grew up in the house that was used in The Truman Show.  No, really, Truman Burbank grew up in the same house that Matt Gaetz did.  This is fact.  The guy accused of having sex with jailbait who almost became the US Attorney General had the TV land house.

And rarely do you get to see the "and then they came for me" adage play out in real time. But Laura Loomer took credit for reporting fellow pundit and ex-ally Milo Yianopolos to ICE, whereupon he was arrested pending deportation to Britain.  Just being a Trumper won't save you, because these people are evil enough to turn on each other. 

So while you hear about stuff like renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, selling $1 coins with Trump's face for $2.40 each, and a Congressional candidate dressed as a Klansman who decided not to quit -- just remember that it's far worse – and far, far stupider – because the writing this season is terrible. Hackneyed tropes and not even bothering with subtext makes it a really bad satire.  The writer is not as clever as he thinks he is.

Meanwhile, we're living in this universe.  As Dr. Timothy Snyder said, authoritarians are kind of funny, but totalitarians are not.  And as the temperature gets hotter and the ICE gets crueler, it sure feels like we're headed towards a tragic ending.  Or who knows, maybe Trump will die and Vance, Hegseth, and RFK will re-enact The Death of Stalin from the bunker under the ballroom.

[robkelk]

As Canada-U.S. relations sour, border towns of upstate New York fear damage will be permanent

"We had a brief period of time where I thought he was distracted with other problems and was going to leave the Canadians alone and we could be friends again. Obviously, that ship has sailed," Morgia [Alex Morgia, mayor of Sackets Harbor, N.Y.] said.

[Labster]

Update on last year's bingo card: Trump Moves To Let Ranchers Kill Wolves: 'You Can Shoot 'Em'

I honestly thought they'd get around to this faster.  But there is a special bonus to me for the President himself declaring open season on wolves.