The Imperial Presidency

[Dartz]

So, let me get this straight:

As the techbros might say:
The current residents of Gaza are to be collectively relocated to some form of interim collection and resettlement centre.
This ethnically-constrained assisted emigration will allow for the final sunsetting and deconstruction of the remains of now empty Gaza City.
Freshly cleared vacant sites will then be available as investment opportunities to people from the area and the world
One presumes this will result in some unregreted ethnicity-specific attrition of the former residents of Gaza still residing in these interim collection and resettlement centres.

Sounds like ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, land theft and genocide to me.

[Jinx999]

Sounds like ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, land theft and genocide to me.

People have even identified the most obvious international law it's breaking for us.

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/custom...v1/rule129

[Bob Schroeck]

Trump of course doesn't give a crap about international law -- Republicans are, of course, above all the laws of God and man and attempting to hold them to them is political persecution. The question is, does the rest of the world care enough about those laws to go up against the World's Oldest Toddler and dare say no to him?

[classicdrogn]

Sounds like ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, land theft and genocide to me.

You need to add another stack or two of thousand dollar bills over each ear, then it sounds like a happy jingle.

[Labster]

I've been drinking because of public holiday here so this idea might be a little less credible than most (Also, this whiskey is old enough to drink itself. 21 year old whsikey - my god)

But, instead of Canadian resistance, why not bring the whole teetering edifice down from the inside? You'lll have 40 million new  'natural born' US Citizens who want cheap healthcare, sensible government, and a general lack of stupidity suddenly absorbed by an entity that wants none of these.

But more than that.

You'll have the current King of Canada - also, arguably also a citizen of the Great State of Canada when it gets assimilated, and therefore eligible to run for the Presidency of the United States of American and Canadia.

Given the choice between the milk toast of the democrats, the swastika of republicanism, the third option is the Presidency of Chuck Windsor - billionaire landowner, landlord and owner of half the fucking British isles.

If American truly wants a King, now you can have one who at least knows how to arrange a murder to look like a car accident.

Truly noncredible in a good way, share on /r/NonCredibleDiplomacy please.

Trump of course doesn't give a crap about international law -- Republicans are, of course, above all the laws of God and man and attempting to hold them to them is political persecution.  The question is, does the rest of the world care enough about those laws to go up against the World's Oldest Toddler and dare say no to him?

Honestly some Republicans are mad because they're like "you promised us isolationism" (while others think "oh joy, one step closer to the Second Coming!").  

That said, building Gaz-a-Lago is yet another distraction, and yes we are at the phase where threatening genocide is a distraction.  You need to follow the money.  And that is, in fact, what Trump is doing.  I'm going to link some long articles, but then summarize them.

Elon Musk Wants to Get Operational Control of the Treasury’s Payment System. This Could Not Possibly Be More Dangerous ... and the same day follow-up, where it in fact got more dangerous, Afternoon of Day Six of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025: Changing the Treasury Payments Source Code & the Treasury’s “DOGE” gag order.

Basically, the US federal government is huge, with thousands of offices and contractors and all of that kind of stuff.  Rather than trying to reform or take over all of these offices, most filled with bureaucrats hostile to Trump's vision of America, they're targeting the one office that handles 85% of the payments.  So rather than hiring bureaucrats and replacing them everywhere, all they have to do is stop funding the things that they don't like.  Just impound the payments, and the downstream agencies will be forced to change their strategy.  As a side-effect, this allows the Doge to access mountains of personal data on most Americans and companies, bypassing previous privacy restrictions.

The followup mainly notes that Musk's longtime employee now has write access to government payment systems (and will presumably take all of the fractions of cents, no one will notice them), and can proceed to move fast and break things.  Also all Treasury Department officials are prohibited from discussing DOGE, even internally.

Next, a Vox piece with a theory: America’s constitutional crisis could come to a head in four months. How Donald Trump and Elon Musk could use a debt ceiling breach to usurp Congress’s power.

Trump's appointees have been making noises about how the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, saying that the President does not have to spend money allocated by Congress -- this law passed in 1974 because Nixon was the first person who thought he could get away with it.  If we go into a debt ceiling fight once again, which is scheduled for this spring or early summer, depending on how many accounting tricks Treasury does.

If we hit the debt limit, it gives Trump an excuse to start drastically cutting programs he dislikes.  Congress with a 5 seat majority in the House, won't pass a budget that isn't a poison pill to Democrats on Republican votes alone.  Negotiations to compromise with Democrats may hit a stumbling block, because any funds allocated to programs Democrats want will simply be impounded by Trump, so there is no reason to cooperate if Dems think their opponent will defect.  Eventually there will be no budget, and Trump will take the power of the purse to stabilize the national economy in the resulting crisis, showing that we need a strong leader to tame the petty and quarrelsome Congress.

Obviously there are lots of ways out of this scenario, but it's certainly not unthinkable.  Democrats could simply fold, Congress could get their act together.  A real, honest compromise could happen.  But it could also happen that Congress manages to make itself look less competent and less legitimate than the President, which looking at those guys is somehow possible.

[robkelk]

The Register: Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Not because they can't come up with a reason. They can come up with plenty of possible reasons.

[MilkmanConspiracy]

…and will presumably take all of the fractions of cents, no one will notice them…

I hope I am wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised for news to come out about some fresh minted Jr. Developer straight from college blatantly transferring a few grand (or more) to themselves/and or some preferred account to "Test payments in production."

[robkelk]

An intriguing suggestion has been made: Why should Canadians take part in a celebration of the culture and commercialism of a country whose leader repeatedly belittles our culture and repeatedly threatens to cripple our economy?

So, yeah... no "superb owl" events for me this year, Not even the game itself.

[Norgarth]

Honestly I had been planning to skip it even before Trump opened his mouth. I didn't watch the previous 2 Superb Owls either.

[Dartz]

An intriguing suggestion has been made: Why should Canadians take part in a celebration of the culture and commercialism of a country whose leader repeatedly belittles our culture and repeatedly threatens to cripple our economy?

So, yeah... no "superb owl" events for me this year, Not even the game itself.

They're having an NFL game over hear later this year.

That'll be a spectacular shitshow.

The last time they played a handegg game here Aer Lingus did what the US airforce couldn't -- made the entire stadium duck with the flypast. Now if only the drone with the Palestinian flag had come *before* the airliner - that would've had some heart attacks in the crowd.

One can expect a large segment of the crowd to be spectacularly hostile.

[Inquisitive Raven]

Honestly, the only reason I'm paying any attention to the game whatsoever is that the Eagles are playing and I don't want a repeat of what happened to me the last time they made it to the Super Bowl. I got trapped at Walmart after they won because the crosstown buses got blocked by celebrating fans.

[classicdrogn]

... I thought they played in January? Like right after the New Year's Day parade, or something. I was never into field sports anyway, but for my two shanix the only thing more boring than playing American footbaall and spending 3/4 of the time standing around waiting while the clock is paused, is watching someone else play, so all there is to do is listen to some poor schmuck who sounds like he's being paid by how much milk he gets out fo the giant cow blathers on about what happened in the last fifteen seconds for the rest of a minute.

[robkelk]

Trudeau caught on a "hot mike" saying that he thinks the threat to turn Canada into the 51st state is completely serious.

In remarks caught on tape by The Toronto Star, Trudeau suggested the president is keenly aware of Canada’s vast mineral resources. “I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may be even why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state,” Trudeau said.

Y'know, when most rich people want something, they negotiate to buy it, not take it by force.

[classicdrogn]

That depends on it being more cost effective to buyh it, rather than to round up some beefy guys with guns. That sowan't mean the rich guy ios good at calculating the actual military action, though (Just ask Putin) let alone indirect, second and third order effects, nor of that the cost to others will enter their calculation at all.

[nemonowan]

In related news, the graphic novel "We Stand on Guard" is flying off the shelves right now.

Just like how everyone was watching the Pandemic movie when the Covis lockdowns began.

[Jinx999]

So, he's working to expel people who were in the country legally who were refugees from Latin American communist dictatorships and supported him.

And he wants to accept White immigrants from South Africa.

He's not even trying for the faintest shred of plausible deniability, is he?

[classicdrogn]

Why should he? He got away with implausible denials for so long he started just outright admitting to and then bragging about his grifts, and didn't just get away with but got a second term in office. Only my belief in the stupidity and shortsightedness of the general public lets me believe that election wasn legtimate, but having 60% of Americans fail an IQ test is all too plausible unfortunately.

[robkelk]

An analysis that somebody in D.C. needs to read and understand:

Canada as a 51st state? Republicans would never win another general election

Quotes from the article used under a CC-BY-ND licence.

Still, let’s play out Trump’s hypothetical. Let’s say that Canada became the 51st state in the American union. What would be the electoral implications for the U.S.?

Trump and his Republican Party would certainly not like the answer: the GOP might never win a national election ever again. Indeed, the “state of Canada” would profoundly alter the electoral map of American national politics, almost entirely in the Democratic Party’s favour.

To see how, consider how the 51st state would be represented in the institutions of American government.

Let’s begin in the House of Representatives because that’s where integrating Canada would be the trickiest. In the U.S., House seats are allocated on the basis of representation-by-population, which, based on the 2020 U.S. census, means one House seat for every 761,169 people.

With its population of 41 million, Canada would be apportioned about 54 seats, becoming a bigger state than California. Combine those 54 House seats with the two senators allocated to every state, and you would have an electoral powerhouse north of the 49th parallel. None of this would be good news for Republicans.

Of course, this assumes that annexation can overcome American political fights over reapportionment and redistricting, and that Canada would accept the American constitutional and legal formula for allocating seats that would whittle 338 House of Commons seats down to 54 and its 105 senators down to two. But no matter.

We'll set aside for the moment the difference between a state government and the number of representatives that a state sends to D.C.

Let’s look now at how Canadians would alter American elections. Grafting Canada’s political culture onto U.S. party politics would be awkward, so let’s make another assumption. Presume that Conservative Party of Canada voters would vote Republican and left-of-Conservative voters would vote for Democrats.

Generally, this would include supporters of the Liberals, New Democrats, Greens and the Bloc Québécois.

Here’s where the 51st state becomes a big problem for Trump. Since Canada’s right-wing parties united in 2003, the Conservative Party of Canada has won an average of 35 per cent of the popular vote. Canada’s left-of-Conservative parties, on the other hand, have won an average of 63 per cent of the vote in that time period.

In American terms, that means about two-thirds of voters in the state of Canada would vote Democrat and one third would vote Republican, or 36-18 in the Democrats’ favour.

And that assumes Canadians who vote for the Conservative party would carry over to the GOP. Canadians don't just believe in multiculturalism, gun control, and socialized medicine, we have them as a matter of course.

Looking back over the past quarter century, that margin would have turned every Republican House majority into a Democratic majority (except for 2010). Indeed, left-of-Conservative voters in the state of Canada would make it far more difficult for Republicans to win a House majority ever again.

In the Senate, the two-thirds of Canada’s left-of-Conservative voters would likely send a pair of Democrats to the Senate. That’s not enough to alter the balance of power, but in a world of single-digit margins of victory in the Senate, it’s not trivial. After all, every senator counts, especially for things like Supreme Court and cabinet confirmations.

Now comes the big question: how would the state of Canada alter the Electoral College?

Each state has Electoral College votes that are the sum of their House representatives and senators. We also know (with some exceptions) that the winner of the popular vote in each state takes all of that state’s the Electoral College votes. Where would the state of Canada’s 54 Electoral College votes go?

Given Canada’s left-of-Conservative leanings, the state of Canada’s Electoral College votes would likely go to the Democrat presidential candidate every time. That would have swung two Republican presidential victories in the Democrats’ favour this century (2000 and 2004) and would have made Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 even smaller — so small, in fact, that American electoral math in the expanded U.S. would be fundamentally changed.

So, yeah — if His Orangeness wants to be the final Republican President ever, then go ahead and pursue this crazy scheme.

[classicdrogn]

The thing is that Cheatoman wants to be the last President ever, 'cause you don't vote for kings. He literally said at one of his 2024 campaign rallies "Vote for me and you'll never have to vote again," along with carious instances of calling himself "the MAGA King" amd so on.

I don't have any other comment to make as my thoughts are drowned out in despair. Tom Crooks, why couldn't you be the hero we needed?

[robkelk]

So much for "30 days".

Trump to announce 25% steel and aluminum tariffs in latest trade escalation

[Jinx999]

So much for "30 days".

Trump to announce 25% steel and aluminum tariffs in latest trade escalation

Which is going to make people want to build factories (which would mostly use metals) there, I'm sure.

[MilkmanConspiracy]

Amateur analysis:
It’s worth noting that according to the NASDAQ, Canada is the largest close producer of Aluminum to the United States that (was) friendly geopolitically. America isn’t even on the top ten list of producers, though I suppose that could change. As far as bauxite reserves go, according to Statista neither Canada or the United States are particularly strong producers. Refining Aluminum is highly energy intensive (And that makes the price of energy highly related to the price of aluminum), and Canada's competitive advantage in Aluminum production is the fact that they have lots of hydro power to throw at it to do it in an (comparatively) environmental friendly manner.  America can make the energy, but I think it’s unlikely to be as green - and if the energy costs are higher the bottom line won’t be as green either.

[Jinx999]

Amateur analysis:
It’s worth noting that according to the NASDAQ, Canada is the largest close producer of Aluminum to the United States that (was) friendly geopolitically. America isn’t even on the top ten list of producers, though I suppose that could change. As far as bauxite reserves go, according to Statista neither Canada or the United States are particularly strong producers. Refining Aluminum is highly energy intensive (And that makes the price of energy highly related to the price of aluminum), and Canada's competitive advantage in Aluminum production is the fact that they have lots of hydro power to throw at it to do it in an (comparatively) environmental friendly manner.  America can make the energy, but I think it’s unlikely to be as green - and if the energy costs are higher the bottom line won’t be as green either.

Look on the bright side, building a metal refining plant and getting it up and running takes years, so it would only be profitable to do if the company expects political stability and the tariffs to remain in the long term.

So, America will not see new refining plants because of this.

[robkelk]

New plants, no. Reactivating mothballed plants, maybe (depending on whether they actually exist and how deep into mothballs they were put).

[Dartz]

Unless there's been care and maintenance on a closed works, it's going to almost be harder than restarting from scratch. It'd be worth more melted down and used as feed metal

Never mind that most will be based on older processes such as the open-hearth or basic oxygen process - and were closed because they were ineffcient 50 years ago.

This industry died because it didn't adapt to new technology. Except for Nucor - which mostly runs on scrap steel rather than raw iron ore.