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Created
Thu, 09/01/2025 - 00:00

“Trump threatens ‘economic force’ to make Canada ‘51st State’ after PM resignation.” — The Independent

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America, you know Canada as your hat. We’d like to keep it that way.

As you may be aware, Donald Trump has been flirting with illegal expansionist fantasies again. They include possibly invading Panama, taking over Greenland in some kind of rent-to-own scheme, and, of course, making Canada the fifty-first state.

We are flattered to be asked, but think maybe this whole thing is moving a little too fast. We’re super busy with work, and there’s that thing with our mom, who is now our dad. It’s complicated.

Canada has been right here, hanging out with America’s frosty bits, for 157 years. It’s been great, mostly. You seem to like us when you remember us. Everyone needs a friend who can explain the rules of curling. And we love you too. Or, at least, we love certain aspects of you.

Created
Wed, 08/01/2025 - 13:59
Today (November 27, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest – Monthly Consumer Price Index Indicator – for November 2024, which showed that the annual underlying inflation rate, which excludes volatile items continues to fall – from 3.5 per cent to 3.2 per cent. The overall CPI rate (including the volatile items)…
Created
Wed, 08/01/2025 - 12:22
Smart CEOs Suck Up To Trump

So, a very partial list of donors to Trump’s second inauguration includes:

  • Apple’s Tim Cook.
  • Ken Griffon of Citadel.
  • Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
  • Sam Altman of OpenAI.
  • Zuckerberg of Meta/Facebook.
  • Dara Koroshawi of Uber.
  • General Motors, Ford and Toyota.

Trump imposed a lot of sanctions on China in his first term but somehow Apple avoided most of them. Not coincidentally Tim Cook supposedly talked to Trump every week. I’m sure he spent that time being Trump’s good friend and toady.

I don’t blame him for it, it was his job. Apple sold a ton of phones in China and made most of their gear in China. Trump could have (and can) tear the heart of out of Apple.

The FTC is planning to take Meta to court over anti-trust violations this year. Want to bet they change their minds?

Amazon is nothing but a giant sucking anti-trust violation.

Created
Wed, 08/01/2025 - 11:00
Trump is fighting tooth and nail to keep Jack Smith’s report from being released to the public and you have to wonder why. He beat them all. He’s not going to be prosecuted. But as Bill Kristol points out, there is a good reason for him to want to keep it out of the public record: Trump knows how crucial his rewriting of the history of January 6th was to his victory in November. If most Republicans had held to their original judgment of January 6th as a day of shame—if they had continued to believe that it was what Trump the very next day called a “heinous attack” that “defiled the seat of American democracy”—Trump would not have been the 2024 GOP nominee. If most Americans had thought January 6th not just an unfortunate event but a disqualifying disgrace, Trump wouldn’t have won the general election. The whitewashing of January 6th was key to Trump’s political comeback. And Trump has the sense—and I think he’s right about this—that he must make sure that January 6th stays whitewashed for the sake of his political success going forward.