A Canadian envisions world domination

The morning after our idiot President did his best to murder the international and domestic economy, it would be easy to rave. But I think sometimes it is better to laugh.

When not trying, in a very different world, to ape late 19th century economic foolishness, Trump also claims to want to repeat President William McKinley's experiment in American imperialism (think the Philippines, Cuba) by demanding that Canada be made the 51st state. Canadians aren't having it.

John Manley was Deputy Canadian Prime Minister and Minister of Finance in Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government in 2002-3. He's written a letter to Donald Trump which I reproduce here in full:

• • •

Dear Donald Trump,

My mentor and former boss, prime minister Jean Chrétien, has dismissed your suggestion that Canada and the U.S. merge.

Do not despair. My point of view differs somewhat from his (sorry, Boss). I think we may be able to make this work if Canadians fully understand your proposal. 

Imagine what the “United States of Canada” could be. We would marry American ingenuity and entrepreneurship to Canada’s natural resources, underdog toughness and culture of self-effacing politeness to create a powerful, world-dominating country.

Pointers for starters...

☆ We would be the largest land mass in the world.
☆ We would be self-reliant in every respect (food, energy, minerals, water).
☆ We would attract the world’s most talented people.
☆ We would truly be “the best country in the world,” to use Mr. Chrétien’s words.
☆ We would dominate international hockey competitions.

Your idea is truly brilliant.

As you know from your corporate experience, for any successful merger, the devil is in the details, but I have some suggestions.

(1). Canada could never simply be the 51st state. You see Canada consists of 10 states (we call them “provinces”) and three territories.

Each of our provinces exists for historical reasons and citizens feel a deep loyalty to their province. So we would need to be the 51st to 60th states. With two senators for each state, of course. 

Therefore, our 20 senators will no doubt bring fresh ideas to the institution that will help make the United States of Canada truly great!

(2). Some issues that cause division and frustration in your country are considered settled by political parties of all stripes in Canada, so I suggest adopting Canadian consensus in the interest of making this deal work.

☆ For example, there is no argument in Canada over women’s reproductive rights. There! That hot-button issue is resolved for you! (You can thank me later.)

☆ All Canadian politicians support our single-payer health care system because no one is refused treatment for their inability to pay and no one goes broke because they suffer a catastrophic illness. In effect, all of our citizens have lifetime critical illness insurance provided by the government. And while it’s expensive, our system costs considerably less than yours, with 100 per cent of the population covered! Your citizens will love it, I promise.

☆ I would also observe that Canadians have long preferred to live with many fewer firearms than are tolerated in the United States. The result is a drastically lower rate of deaths and injuries caused by gun violence in Canada. Our gun laws would make the country safer than it is, and safer is definitely greater!

☆ We have some other innovations that you may wish to consider. Our Canada Pension Plan, equivalent to your Social Security, is fully funded and actuarially sound. This requires higher contributions but it pays off with solvency. I believe your Social Security runs out of money in the near future. (That’s not great, is it?)

☆ Lower personal income taxes paid in the U.S. are a great attraction.

☆ But our programs to support both seniors and young families to reduce the worst cases of poverty among them help make society more cohesive and fair. That’s one of the reasons our taxes have been higher.

☆ Oh, and we must consider how we fund government expenses. We’re struggling to bring our deficit back down, but it wasn’t that long ago (2015) that our budget was effectively balanced. In fact, for more than a decade prior to the global financial crisis, Canada ran surplus budgets. In addition to spending discipline, our national value-added tax, the GST, was key. You definitely want to adopt that! In fact, you will love it! (Canadians don’t love it, but their governments do. And it beats borrowing money from the Chinese.) There are many smaller details that I am sure we can work out.

☆ You will enjoy the simplicity of the metric system for weights and measures, for example. Oh, but we’re not crazy, you can keep yards for football! And you will love that sport even more when you play it on a bigger field with only three downs.

I am so excited about this, Mr. Trump. You are truly a visionary leader to have come up with this idea.

I can already see the 60 little maple leaves on the flag with 13 stripes!

I am ready to throw myself into this great project of making the United States of Canada great again! (Oh, that’s too long. Let’s just call our new country “Canada.”)

Respectfully, as I dislodge my tongue from my cheek,

John Manley

Once again, what's wrong with these people?

This morning we begin to get reports of the shitshow MAGA and RFK Jr are making of the American health complex. It's bad. It will be a few days before the newsmedia suss out the full catastrophe.

But this morning we get The Bulwark's new healthcare writer Jonathan Cohn taking up what those of us who live in the reality-based universe frequently find ourselves reverting to these day: why are these lunatics tearing down the country we have known? What motivates them? I found this summary helpful:

THE WRECKAGE FROM TUESDAY’S CUTS ONCE MORE raised the question of why, instead of undertaking a more carefully calibrated set of staff reductions, the Trump administration cut so crudely and destructively.

Most likely, multiple motives are at work, coming from different parts of the Trump coalition. For ideologues like Russ Vought, the Project 2025 participant who now leads the Office of Management and Budget, this is a chance to cut the federal government down to their preferred size—and to wipe out all the supposedly left-wing activists they believe have burrowed into the bureaucracy.

For Elon Musk and the DOGE team, quite possibly, there’s an element of techno-arrogance at work. And for Trump himself, the cuts would seem to fit in neatly with his agenda of attacking the “deep state” he believes thwarted him during his first term.

That leaves Kennedy, the secretary, who if so inclined could have pushed back on these reductions or at least demanded they proceed in a more deliberate way. There are no signs that happened. Instead, the one hallmark of Kennedy’s tenure so far has been a disregard—some would say disdain—for the department’s veterans and the way they do things.

You can see it in the expertise that the Trump administration cavalierly dispatched on Tuesday. You can see it, also, in how RFK Jr. is dealing with real-world challenges the department currently faces.

Right now the United States is confronting two serious threats that fall under HHS jurisdiction: the measles outbreak that started in Texas and has now spread to three other states, and the strands of avian flu decimating poultry flocks. ...

Photo from 2009. Will these Unitarian Universalists have to come back to the fray?

Jonathan Cohn is long time student of our health care morass who was one of my go-tos during the Obamacare passage wars.  Definitely someone worth following as MAGA tries to unravel decades of health accomplishments.

No capitulation to MAGA here

So I'm stuck in the Harvey Milk Terminal of the San Francisco airport for a long day (boring story of weather near destination colliding with airline schedules) so I got a chance to try to get in my walking miles in the corridors. You'll be glad to know that SFO is paying no attention to Trump's commands to erase women, POC Americans, queers and history. 

 

Northern California was a center of WWII war production, so there is a lot to display.

 

Women had a job to do to defeat fascism. War mobilization broke a lot of barriers. Even knowing what we know now of the underbelly of US empire, it's possible to admire their spunk.

 

 

They weren't all eager pink-cheeked white girls either. 

The Harvey Milk terminal at SFO is a monument to all MAGA hates. Nice place to involuntarily spend a day.

Trans Day of Visibility 2025

As I walked up to the Teslatakedown protest on Saturday, I was greeted by this guy.

The Trans Day of Visibility weekend had begun. 

This is not an observance I know much about, so I looked up what the media advocacy outfit GLADD had to share about it.

International TDOV was created in 2010 by trans advocate Rachel Crandall. Crandall, the head of Transgender Michigan, created TDOV in response to the overwhelming majority of media stories about transgender people being focused on violence. She hoped to create a day where people could celebrate the lives of transgender people, while simultaneously acknowledging that due to discrimination, not every trans person can or wants to be visible.

Given that only a minority of Americans say they personally know someone who’s transgender, the vast majority of the public learns about trans people from the media, including TV, film, and news. This is a problem because, as shown in the Netflix documentary Disclosure, the media has misrepresented, mischaracterized, and stereotyped trans people since the invention of film. These false depictions have indisputably shaped the cultural understanding of who trans people are and have modeled, often for the worse, how the average person should react to and treat trans people in their own lives.

Evident in 2025 is intensifying vitriol and attacks against trans people led by a vocal but loud minority. ... That’s why it’s still necessary for trans people to be seen through authentic, diverse, and accurate stories which reflect the actual lived experiences of trans people; both for themselves and for the people who believe they’ve never met a trans person.

Trans people care about the coup against our country as much as anyone. Maybe more, in fact, being involuntary targets on the front lines...

• • •

For the Trans Day of Visibility, Aaron Scott, Episcopal Church Staff Officer for Gender Justice, preached a sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. I'm including short excerpts here which I hope retain its power for a broad audience; there's much more. Read it in full here.

... We are, in the end, a small community, very much under the boot of repression. And yet we continue to lead.

We speak for ourselves.

We set forth our own vision for what justice means for our people—trans and nonbinary people. 

... It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

It’s a beautiful day to exist, in flagrant defiance of executive orders. January 20th came and went and I still haven’t been whisked away to Oz—like the rapture, but for trans people only. I briefly wondered, “Am I not transgendering hard enough, if two whole months have gone by and I’m still stuck here in America?!”

And then I remembered myself, and I remembered: this is a sham. Because we have always been here and we are not going anywhere, ever.

We determine what justice means for us in our bodies, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in our workplaces, in our country. And while we need everyone here to join with us in that struggle, we are the ones responsible for setting the vision. We are the experts on when we are free. Only we get to say when we are truly safe, truly honored, truly afforded our God-given dignity and rights. So thank you to every trans and nonbinary person here for the visions you put forward into the world. Thank you for standing in your power and your leadership.

... We will only get what we are organized to take. No powers and principalities are going to hand trans people our joy and our thriving ... out of their benevolence. That’s not how change happens. Change comes because we demand it, and we labor for it. So today we celebrate our joy—and tomorrow we get back to work organizing to defend our joy. Organizing to defend our young people. Organizing to defend our dignity. Organizing to draw in more and more people to stand with us, move with us.

And we can’t do all that on an empty tank, so today: We sing. We shout. We strut. We swagger. We rejoice in our trans-ness so that the memory of this joy can continue to carry us forward even in the hard times.

... Trans joy is not about marketing a false, palatable version of ourselves. It is about enjoying being alive and not dead.

... We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.

... The more that trans people stand in our joy and our full messy humanity without apology, the more powerful we become. That is why this day is important. The less afraid we are to live—even when there is so much to fear—the stronger we get.

#Teslatakedown – San Francisco – Saturday, March 29

The crowd outside the dealership on Van Ness Avenue just gets larger each week.

Perhaps 500 people yesterday? Each Saturday there are more protesting Elon's car company while he works to destroy American democracy. Next week this crew will take a week off to join the Hands Off protest at Civic Center -- but the following week (April 12) they'll be back.

That seems a good idea.

 

A simple and patriotic message here.

This does seem on the right track for a nice spring day.

 

 In our various ways, The Defiance needs to show staying power.

See no evil: the toll of the Trump team's Signal chat lapse(s?)

Wouldn't they have loved to get the intel on D-Day?

The people whose lives might be at risk as a result of the Trump team's frat boy approach to national security are not amused.

Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
Men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States expressed bewilderment after the leak of attack plans. “You’re going to kill somebody,” one pilot said.

Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and use of her right arm when the combat helicopter she piloted in the Iraq war was shot down, had a very direct response

Duckworth: ‘Pete Hegseth is a ‘f‑‑‑ing liar’ “...This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” Duckworth said in a statement. 

The Washington Post's judicious columnist Philip Bump unpacks what accountability for the security breach might look like and why we won't get it from the Trump clown show.

The point of accountability is to reinforce that bad things are bad. ...

... Trump — and by extension his party — have proved increasingly likely to rise to the defense of anyone seen as under fire from any perceived opponent. (“Deny, deny, deny,” Trump once reportedly advised an ally.) In any previous administration, Hegseth wouldn’t be the secretary of defense in the first place. Deeply unqualified (beyond his closeness to Trump) and mired in multiple scandals, he was nonetheless confirmed by a Republican-led Senate unwilling to face the ire of Trump. Since the Signal scandal broke, Hill Republicans — a group ostensibly empowered to enforce accountability from the executive branch — have not indicated any newfound appetite for challenging the White House. No one thinks the Justice Department, helmed by some of the more energetic Trump sycophants in America, will launch any serious investigation.

Without accountability, the damage here would not simply be that the U.S. government will continue to be led by people who don’t know or don’t care why communications about military operations occur over secure channels. It is also that there will be no public signal that the actions of these officials were bad. No signal to others in government. No signal to Trump’s base of support. No signal to America’s overseas allies that this government holds such mistakes to account.

This is precisely what (the deeply insecure) Trump wants to avoid, of course. He will happily malign people who used to serve under his direction — but always as he introduces some imaginary distance from them. It would be very hard for him to do so with Hegseth in particular: He picked and advocated Hegseth despite concerns about his readiness; if the criticisms of Hegseth were accurate, then so were the criticisms of Trump.

What results is a weird (and for the right, ironic) moral relativism, one centered on the whims and actions of Donald Trump. We know that religious conservatives revamped their moral boundaries once Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. What we’ve seen since is an entire party willing to shift black-and-white moral and ethical issues into a muddy, gray area in which Trump alone remains untainted.

Republican politicians have replaced both common sense and elementary ethical calculation with "Anything for Mr Trump." They've become servile as well as ignorant.

Friday cat blogging

Two cats, one bed. Despite the size discrepancy, Janeway holds her own when Mio approaches. They work it out, often by both abandoning the choice window spot.

An abomination, not a mere embarrassment

Last night, I had terrible dreams of encroaching deaths and horrors. I am not the only one living with bad dreams

This morning I opened Facebook to this, from the Rev. Br. Richard Edward Helmer, Rector of the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in Mill Valley, California.

Beyond American Vulgarity
It is arguably very late to say something, but the glorified visage of the Secretary of Homeland Security standing in front of half-naked, deported, incarcerated prisoners who had no recourse to due process — incarcerated, I should add, in an overseas prison with no access to legal representation and completely voided of their rights — a prison bought and paid for with U.S. tax dollars…

…crossed the line for me from the all-too-familiar vulgarity of this administration into outright obscenity.

No cynical veneer of deterring illegal immigration or criminality holds when those in power glorify the treatment of basic human life and freedoms with no greater notice than did the “owners” of those caught in chattel slavery or, for that matter, the overseers of concentration camps.

This is a criminal administration for its utter contempt for human dignity and rights, for its corrupt anti-constitutional assumption and conflation of the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury, and for its sheer bloody-mindedness when confronted with simple appeals for the truth. We are witnessing an abomination, not a mere embarrassment. All the more so because so many in this cabal lay claim to Christian faith as justification for their actions. There is nothing Christian about this. To say otherwise is blasphemy.

The bone-chilling truth is that this line, departing from all valued constitutional process that this government was sworn to uphold, puts all of us — citizen and immigrant alike — in danger. From abroad, reprisal and encouragement to every enemy of human dignity and freedom. And from within: If the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers may be treated with such open and gleeful contempt by this presidency, so may the rights of our citizens. Some would say that may in fact may be the point. In which case I say we are already tumbling over the precipice.

Our work ahead could not be clearer. Wherever we are, whoever we are, we must be doubly-prepared to stand up, speak up, and take action to preserve dignity, rights, and freedoms while we still can. If we do, our children will thank us.

If we do not, they will never forgive us.

The crime is in plain sight

Somebody on social media created this all-too-appropriate image.

 

Our rulers are running national security like a marginally competent, clubby family business. They don't trust the apparatus of government, so they have been going "off the books" to try to do their stuff. Since they are mostly ignorant light-weights, they are making a dangerous mess.

People keep suggesting that the Trumpies are so much more competent this time around. Not so. They've just found new, less orderly, and more vicious ways to impose themselves on the American state and people.

Paul Waldman explains how it is all about grievance.

No Republican alive has felt the kind of intoxicating surge of power they are experiencing right now, not because of the size of their 2024 electoral victory but because they have collectively decided that with sufficient aggression and creativity, they can go after just about every individual or institution that ever pissed them off. Even as they set about destroying the federal government, they are expanding its power to harass and intimidate their enemies wherever they may be found.

Incompetently of course, but no less malicious for that. 

Trump amplifies the stupid

Maybe this wasn't the smartest move?

Most people watching around the world recognizes foolish pride mixed with incompetence when they see it. 

And any woman who has competed with a particular sort of oblivious man for a job knows the special stupidity unqualified guys bring to tasks in which they are pretending to expertise they don't possess. (Few women get to try that dodge.) Here's journalist Jill Filipovic:

I cannot emphasize enough that these people do not know what they are doing. They were hired not in spite of that fact, but because of it. Hegseth, Gabbard, and the rest of mostly-men who make up the Trump administration clown show would simply never have otherwise ascended to the positions in which they currently find themselves. No other president would have appointed them, because other presidents at least try to appoint for competence. 

Trump knows that people who have no career prospects without him will do whatever they need to do to stay in his good graces. And that matters more to him than actually getting anything done, or keeping America safe and prosperous.

When your only route to power runs through one man, you are loyal to that one man.

This group chat debacle is not an aberration; it is a predictable result of what happens when you put a bunch of people in power who don’t know what they’re doing, and when you fire everyone who does know something. 

Trump’s paranoia about the Deep State being out to get him is amplified in his second term; he feels that last time around, his ambitions were thwarted by career civil servants and those who had careers before him and ambitions after him. So this time, the confidence man has gotten rid of the competent men.

... Incompetent people behave incompetently. That’s all part of the plan.

What more are these fools broadcasting to a listening world?

Oh Canada! as so often, DJT is shaming us

What if they don't want to get married? 

Historian Marc-William Palen knows a lot more about Canada, and also about the real world consequences of tariffs, than Donald Trump. Trump's attempt to make Canada the 51st state by economic coercion is a re-run of a plan tried by the late 19th century McKinley administration, also to reverse effect.

While Trump’s protectionism and imperial designs are a sharp break with the recent past, they aren’t new. In fact, they’re part of a very old GOP playbook that dates to a period Trump regularly lionizes: the late 19th century. He sees it as a golden era in American history. Yet, the history of the 1890s actually exposes the dangers of the U.S. trying to force Canada into American hands.

Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.

To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs. 

Secretary of State James G. Blaine saw annexation as a way to eliminate continued and contentious competition over fish and timber. Blaine, who co-authored the McKinley Tariff, publicly stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.” Blaine declared himself “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag. . . and enjoying the actual remuneration of American markets.” Privately, he admitted to President Benjamin Harrison that by denying reciprocity, Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”

Things didn't work out that way. The McKinley tariff inspired Canadian resistance. 

Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister John Macdonald wanted to react forcefully to send a message to the U.S. He proposed retaliating with high tariffs on American goods, as well as increased trade with Britain. He also recognized a political weapon when he was handed one. He adroitly turned the 1891 Canadian elections into a broader referendum concerning Canadian-American relations. He portrayed the Liberal opposition as being in bed with the Republican annexationists. According to him, they were involved in “a deliberate conspiracy, by force, by fraud, or by both, to force Canada into the American union.”

It looks as if Canada's current prime minister Mark Carney is going to pull out an unexpected victory for the country's updated ruling Liberal Party thanks to the unpopularity of today's Conservative leader Pierre Polievre apeing Trump.

by way of Paul Krugman

Thanks Donald!

Wedding graphic by way of Adam Tooze.

 • • •

I grew up much more aware of and fond of Canada than most residents of the USofA. Canada was just across the Niagara River, shores to sail my little Sailfish to if I was being adventurous. Nobody worried much about the border when I was a kid. Canadians didn't mind US visitors to their side of Niagara Falls and we didn't mind Canadians coming to shop in Buffalo malls when for a moment the value of the currency made this a good deal. My father added a booster antenna to our house so we could watch hockey and other interesting broadcasts on Canadian TV. 

Interestingly, the US Secretary of State James G. Blaine mentioned here also figured in my early life because I went to high school with a descendant of that Republican luminary. Like me, she was interested in what we called "current events." 

Trump's assault on Canada makes me feel ill.

To "improve the world"

Did you know that Washington, DC -- the 68 square mile federal district and city -- is not truly self-governing? Because the city government exists on the sufferance of the national Congress, when Republicans control both Houses -- and DC's budget! -- they can dictate to the city.

And so the GOP Congress demanded that the Black Lives Matter Plaza be erased -- and it was. The mayor needed her budget approved. Talk about "no taxation without representation!" in the slogan of the American Revolution.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar often strikes me as the last judicious rationalist standing, determined to be a thoughtful reasonable man, come what may. And not only that, he seeks to find something affirmative in the worst of times. It can be a very difficult posture to maintain. But this piece of racist Republican vandalism in DC got to him. In every edition of his substack, he reflects on something that grabbed his attention. He wrote:

QUOTE OF THE DAY

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. -- Anne Frank (1929-1945), died at 16 in a Nazi concentration camp

Through her diaries written while hiding from Nazis for two years, Anne Frank has become an international symbol of hope and optimism, despite her tragic death at sixteen in a Nazi concentration camp. Her quote here is an inspirational call to action that most people can embrace.

However, what does it mean to “improve the world”? That question is where sunny optimistic slogans meet the harsh reality of the real world. The Nazis thought they were improving the world: They were ridding the world of inferior people. Lynch mobs thought the same thing: They were imposing social justice on uppity Blacks, thereby restoring natural order. Billionaire industrialists convince themselves, and others, that because they employ many people, whatever they do improves the world. Politicians, judges, and others in power justify their corrupt behaviors with the soothing mantra that they, too, are improving the world.

Musk and his cohorts refer to anyone who disagrees with them as NPCs, a gaming acronym for non-player character. They convince themselves that they are improving the world because those whose lives they are destroying aren’t real people, just stick figures to be manipulated. Their self-delusion is so complete that they are beyond reason.

It’s a game of fake virtue that anyone can play.

The dismantling of the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. hit me hard. Republicans threatened to withhold crucial funds for the city in order to bully the mayor into ripping up the pavement that featured the words Black Lives Matter. Why spend the money to do that except to insult, not just Black people, but the up to 26 million Americans who marched in support of BLM in 2020? This is a gauntlet thrown to the ground by Trump’s GOP that dissent will not be tolerated. How did this action improve the world? (FYI: It cost $610,000 to destroy.)

It would be easy to say that it’s all just a matter of point of view: One person’s ceiling is another person’s floor. It’s all just a friendly disagreement between two equally valid sides. But it rarely is. Evidence and logic usually favor one side more than the other. Yet so many people ditch evidence and logic in favor of a knee-jerk reaction that favors their biases. Examining evidence and employing logic requires rigorous research and thought. The process makes one feel overwhelmed and anxious, while just shouting a thoughtless opinion feels smart and virtuous, even though it is the opposite. But, as the saying goes, it is better to feel good than be good. Of course, we should strive to feel good by doing good.

There are so many ways—large and small—to improve the world. I often ask myself, “What can I do today to make someone’s day better?” Chat with a neighbor. Sign an autograph. Lend a beloved book to a friend. Those are the small ways.

But I don’t think doing those small actions alleviates my responsibility to do the larger things that improve the world. To do whatever it takes to promote the American ideal that all people are created equal and deserving of equal opportunities. And fighting those who are marginalizing people and punishing dissenters, while enriching themselves at the cost of the U.S. Constitution.

I don’t need to wait a single moment to do that.

Kareem's musing are available here.