Trump says Russia can invade Canada!

Donald Trump says he will ignore the article 5 commitment to any NATO country that does not meet its defense spending 2.0% GDP obligations. In fact he encourages Putin to invade such countries with impunity. Canada is America’s largest trading partner, ahead of even Mexico and China. Approximately 17% ($355 billion in 2022) of total US exports go to Canada. Canada spends 1.3% of its GDP on defense and has not come close to a 2.0% level for over 30 years. How comfortable are you now, with another Trump Presidency? Or with another Trudeau led government! Canada’s prime-minister is a joke and basically irrelevant on the world stage. But Donald Trump is no laughing matter. This man poses such an existential threat to freedom and democracy, yet the entire world it seems, persists in treating his pronouncements as simply outlandish buffoonery. We fear Vladimir Putin and his expansionist genocide in Ukraine, but Donald Trump poses every bit as serious a threat. We are sleep walking our way to disaster. 

Read Full Post »

Diversity, equity, inclusivity…..is this grade school?

I love the ‘Letters’ section of ‘The Economist’ magazine. This letter writer hit the nail bang on the head, wouldn’t you agree? 

Read Full Post »

Some disturbing snippets

From January 6th Economist.

In 2022 more than 200,000 people (in the USA) died from alcohol, drugs or suicide, equivalent to a Boeing 747 falling out of the sky every day with no survivors.

This is an age where, if you’re ruthless and reckless, nobody gets in your way.

Read Full Post »

Trump’s “presidential immunity” argument is dangerous and ludicrous.

HuffPost (url link below) published an excellent essay on Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy and the American constitution. If you think he is a rational choice to be President again, you need to read this essay. Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the United States and to the free world. This is a man every bit as dangerous as Vladimir Putin. Norm Eisen, a White House lawyer during the Obama administration who worked on the House of Representatives’ legal team during the first Trump impeachment, said Trump’s immunity theory would undo the founders’ goal of avoiding an unaccountable monarchy.

“Trump’s argument actually turns the American idea on its head,” Eisen said. “Election to the presidency would become an authorization to go on a non-stop crime spree as long as a president could claim that his actions, however tangentially, were related to his official duties. This can’t be right.” Read the full article in the Huffpost link below. It intelligently lays out how ludicrous and dangerous Trump’s “legal” position is. Should the Supreme Court eventually decide the case in his favour, then all hope for democracy is lost. Dictatorships like Russia and China will over run the world. 2024 is a turning point in world history.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-trump-presidential-immunity_n_65943b0fe4b0f27b6e356793

Read Full Post »

One sentence that explains Trumpism

A century ago, the world witnessed fascist leaders who sought to fuse their identities with their followers while sowing distrust in all other institutions, so that followers lost their capacities for independent thought and accepted whatever the leaders said as truth. (I can’t take credit, author unknown)

Read Full Post »

Build them and they will sell

This chart illustrating new single family housing construction vs sales is quite striking. For the past 23 years it would appear that construction of housing and sales go in lock step, quite literally sales following construction. All new houses built are sold. Remember that famous line from ‘Field of Dreams’, where Kevin Costner is told ‘build it and they will come’? Could the solution to America’s homelessness crisis be as simplistic as ‘build them and they will sell’?

Read Full Post »

George Santos – this is not a normal person

“This is not a normal person.” And indeed it’s hard not to suspect that there might be something wrong with the man, aside from the moral turpitude – a delusional tendency or break with reality that precipitated all these fictions. But it would be a mistake to think that George Santos’s pathologies are his alone. His lies are the product of a political system that incentivizes dishonesty, punishes sincerity and is rife with opportunities for petty crooks. In that sense, Santos is the politician that we deserve. (Moira Donegan)

Read Full Post »

Speaker of House vote should be a private vote!

It’s high time the United States Congress changed its procedures relating to choosing a Speaker of the House. We are now into the 9th vote!! This is yet another example of the way American politics can degenerate into the most polarized bipartisan system. Why are votes conducted via show of hands, voice vote? Surely if you want an unbiased objective House Speaker, make the vote a private vote by ballot. No Dem or Rep will vote against the party in the present polarized system. The vote must be made a private vote. You would get a reasonable Speaker, one who does not play party politics. The voting process as presently conducted further encourages partisanship. And deal making bordering on extortion. So until the entire voting procedure is changed, this silly and embarrassing charade will continue.

Read Full Post »

America has no problem with speech. It has a problem with listening.

Some excerpts from my favorite publication “The Economist”.

Newspapers continue to tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile the politics of their staff with covering a fractious democracy. They tend to default to framing their purpose in terms of protecting the right to speak – as though a publication is meant to serve its interview subjects and op-ed writers – rather than of protecting readers’ opportunity to understand the world…….all Americans can now relax in homogeneous spaces where they hear plenty of speech but nothing that might confound them. Whatever objectionable ideas or information they do encounter will arrive safely filtered through the congenial viewpoint of their chosen cable-news channel, social-media group, newspaper or Substack writer. They can duck the work of hearing alien arguments and sharpening their own ideas of even adjusting them – the kind of work that turns diversity in a pluralistic democracy into a source of resilience rather than a fatally fissiparous weakness.

Read Full Post »

MAGA

Read Full Post »