Tag: Canada

…meanwhile…

FRIDAY 3/24/23

(The Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the ninth consecutive time since the beginning of last year. Chairman Jerome Powell, pictured, called the U.S. banking system “sound and resilient,” while signaling this could be the final increase in its efforts to reduce the inflation rate back to 2%, according to NPR.)

Border Deal to the North – President Biden announced a new rule that will allow Canada to turn back migrants who cross from the U.S. at unofficial, but popular, border crossings – and who cross them from Canada into the U.S. – NPR reports. Biden announced the rule, which takes effect Saturday and will be published in the Federal Register, to Canada’s parliament on Friday, the second day of his visit with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

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Defense Was Down During Attack in Syria – The main air defense system was “not fully operational” at a coalition military base in northeast Syria attacked by a suspected Iranian drone Thursday, two U.S. officials told The New York Times Friday. An American contractor was killed and six other Americans were injured in the attack.

According to the report, it is unclear why the defense system failed, and whether the attackers had detected the vulnerability. U.S. forces have been on high alert since January 2021. There have been 78 such attacks by Iranian-backed militias since then, according to the NYT.

--TL

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THURSDAY 3/23/23

Oh, Canada – President Biden travels to Ottawa Thursday to discuss the war in Ukraine and the crisis in Haiti, with Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau (NPR).

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TikTok Testimony – Chew Shou Zi, CEO of the popular Chinese-owned social media site, testifies before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce beginning 10 a.m. Eastern Thursday. Ahead of his appearance, Chew promised to wall off U.S. users’ data and make further safety and security improvements, Semafor reports.

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Trump Lawyers Must Turn Over Documents – A three-judge panel for the D.C. Court of Appeals rejected attempts by Donald J. Trump’s legal team challenging a court ruling last Friday that orders the former president’s own lawyers to turn over documents related to the Mar-a-Lago classified documents probe, according to The Hill. Last Friday’s ruling removes attorney-client privilege between Trump and Evan Corcoran as the former president is believed to have lied to his legal team over whether he returned all the documents from Mar-a-Lago.

Meanwhile: As we await potential Manhattan grand jury charges in another of the former president’s cases, the one involving a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, Trump has raised $1.5 million, MSNBC reports, for his 2024 presidential campaign after he said on his own social media site last Sunday that he would be arrested Tuesday.

As Trump’s GOP Lead Grows: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appears to be facing a backlash against his veiled criticism of the former president. In Morning Consult’s latest poll on the 2024 GOP race, 54% of Republicans polled said they preferred Trump for president, versus 26% for DeSantis. Ex-Veep Mike Pence came in third at 7%, with Nikki Haley edging out former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), 4% to 3%. 

A raft of other undeclared candidates all polled at 1% or less, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Woke, Inc.author Vivek Ramaswamy. 

--TL

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WEDNESDAY 3/22/23

UPDATE: Fed Raises Interest Rate 0.25% -- Citing “modest growth in spending and production,” increasing job gains in recent months and inflation remaining elevated, the Federal Reserve raised its interest rate by 25 basis points Wednesday to a range of 4.75% to 5%. 

Prior to the 2 p.m. (Eastern) announcement some economists had expected the Fed to stop raising interest rates for the first time since the beginning of 2022 after failures this month of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. But the Fed said in its statement following the increase “The U.S. banking system is sound and resilient.

“Recent developments are likely to result in lighter credit conditions for households and businesses and to weigh on economic activity, hiring and inflation. The extent of these effects is uncertain. The (Fed) Committee remains highly attentive to inflation risks.”

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Will They or Won’t They? – There’s nervous anticipation and angst among economists waiting to find out whether the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates Wednesday afternoon by a quarter-point, half of what was expected to fight inflation before banks began collapsing or whether it will wave off any increase for now. It began with the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank nearly two weeks ago and continued when America’s banking giants had to bail out First Republic Bank with more than $30 billion in emergency funds.

Cuffs for Trump? – Donald J. Trump has told his advisors he “wants to be handcuffed” for an expected court appearance before a Manhattan grand jury, according to The Guardian. The former president is willing to play political martyr for his small, vociferous group of hardcore MAGAtarians who remain sufficiently significant to maintain Trump’s status as the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination for president.

Trump reasons that if he needs to surrender himself to a Manhattan courthouse for fingerprints and mug shots anyway, he might as well turn everything into a “spectacle.”

Uh, yeah, it could become a spectacle.

No Attorney-Client Privilege?: A district court judge has written that “compelling preliminary evidence” uncovered by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office – you know, the one investigating Mar-a-Lagogate – proves Donald J. Trump “knowingly and deliberately misled” his own lawyers about whether he returned all classified material uncovered at his Florida compound, thus removing attorney-client privilege, ABC News reports. U.S. Judge Beryl Howell wrote last Friday, March 17, before stepping down as D.C. district court judge that prosecutors in the special counsel’s office have made a “prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations,” and orders attorney Evan Corcoran to comply with a grand jury subpoena to testify on six separate lines of inquiry for which he had previously asserted attorney-client privilege. 

The report cites “sources who described” the judge’s order to ABC News.

--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

EV Incentives and Requirements

Pundit-on-the-left Ken Zino makes his case in the column on the other side (full commentary in The Gray Area) for Canada’s effective public-private partnership intending to foster a quick move from gas- and diesel-powered vehicles to electric cars and trucks. Zino compares Canada’s initiative with the Inflation Reduction Act recently signed by President Biden, and argues that congressional Republicans will oppose it at any cost.  

This comes as the California Air Resources Board releases the state's plan to ban sales of gas- and diesel-powered cars and trucks by 2035. Sixteen other states, mostly on the East and West Coasts, are expected to comply with the latest incarnation of the California Waiver to EPA rules, which would result in electric vehicle market share of roughly 40% in 13 years.

Agree or disagree. Right or left. Here’s your chance to voice your opinion. Hit the Comment box in this column below or email us at editors@thehustings.news.

We are also following the Justice Department’s affidavit for the FBI’s search of former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on August 8 (48th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation). A federal magistrate has ordered the Justice Department to release its heavily redacted affidavit on Friday, same day another judge has ordered Trump’s attorneys to explain his request for a “special master” to oversee the official explanation of the search.

--TL

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Same as the Old Boss — Obama

By Andrew Boyd

President Biden’s slew of executive orders and proclamations are less practical and effective than they are an apparent attempt to enhance the Democratic Party’s image. Biden is particularly bent on reversing former President Trump’s immigration policy without proposing the sort of permanent policy that has evaded both parties for decades. 

Counting non-citizens in U.S. Census is a nakedly political effort to disenfranchise American citizens through reapportionment leveraged against illegals (sorry, non-citizens) by executive fiat. DACA part deux. Halftime show brought to you by SCOTUS and their denial of Trump’s authority to overturn part one. Farcical. 

There is one executive order I can support, to stop building The Wall. I’ve always been dubious on the efficacy of The Wall. On that basis, I’m good. As to walls being immoral, which was the rallying cry like 20 minutes ago, I’d call that complete trash thinking. Look no further than Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony. I await some reasoned argument from anyone on how to effectively manage and monitor inflows and outflows of peeps as do all other sovereign nations. See beloved progressive Canada.

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My take on the other major executive orders …

•Masking challenge and creation of a directorate for global health security and biodefense. What the hell is a directorate? Sound like something we can neither afford nor effectively contain. Watch to see the swell of SJW agenda items that get smuggled in through this baby. A ministry of funny walks would be more to my liking. It’s at least good for a laugh. [Note: SWJ is “social justice warrior” –Ed.]

•Rejoin the World Health Organization. The WHO proved itself utterly unreliable as an honest broker of information in this pandemic, which is putting it kindly. Lapdogs of the Chinese communist party is more on the nose. You can pretend this is a nod to the primacy of science and the critical importance of global coordination, but I suspect it’s more about the Dems unrelenting desire to be loved by their EU counterparts, which is most easily achieved by kneeling to a global bureaucratic hegemony that has anything but the best interests of the American people in mind.

•Extend eviction and foreclosure moratoriums. It’s easy to be humane when you’re doing it with other people’s money. It’s also, inconveniently, immoral. In principle, no different than “stimulus” via the accumulation of public debt, a.k.a. stealing from the future, only this one is on a shorter time frame and more directly tied to a specific group of people in the present, a.k.a. property holders. It’s all theft.

•Pause student loan payments through Sept 30. Why are we so focused on the particular slice of consumer debt that applies to college? It’s regressive in many respects, and again, stealing. Then, of course, there’s the moral hazard behind the notion that the government should have the power to step in and abrogate a legally constructed agreement between two private parties. But that’s just a matter of principle, so whatever.

•Rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. An agreement without teeth, and mostly another means of smuggling in global economic wealth transfers. Among first world nations, who reduced their total CO2 emissions the most, on an absolute basis, in 2019?. That would be the U.S., courtesy of technological innovation driven by the big, bad free market. Meanwhile, 80% of increases in global CO2 emissions in the same time period came from China, Asia and India, and future forecasts see the U.S. remaining relative stable while China, India and other developing economies will fuel their growth with ongoing increases in greenhouse gas emissions.  

•End Keystone XL Pipeline. The environmental impacts of a pipeline are minimal and, to my mind, substantially outweighed by the economic and national security benefits of America’s energy independence. I know, I hate polar bears and seals and life in general. Shame on me. Oh, and Canada is not so pleased either.

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Of Time, Bells & Meaning

By Stephen Macaulay

In 1787 Paul Revere opened a bell foundry in Boston. In addition to things like copper spikes and bolts that were used for shipbuilding, Revere cast his first bell in 1792. One of them was produced for the USS Constitution. During the War of 1812, the bell was put out of commission by a British ship, HMS Guerriere.

(For those of you who have forgotten their American history classes, the War of 1812 pitted the U.S. against the United Kingdom, which would seem unthinkable today as the U.K. is now one of our closest allies—well, given the way the current administration has treated our closest allies, maybe it isn’t so unthinkable. Anyway, during this war the U.K. and Native Americans were on the same side; the U.S. tried to get chunks of Canada; the Brits burned the White House. Again, much of this seems bizarre, but things were different 208 years ago. Hang on to that thought.)

While Revere’s bell foundry is somewhat obscure, it is worth noting that in 1787 the U.S. Constitution was signed.

According to the official White House website, “The founders also specified a process by which the Constitution may be amended, and since its ratification, the Constitution has been amended 27 times.”

Which is germane because it is clear from this that the founders didn’t think that what they had created was carved in stone tablets.

Even the White House understands that. Things change. Even words.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett has described herself as a “constitutional originalist” and that she takes a textualist approach to the law.

During the hearings for her appointment to the Supreme Court, Lindsay Graham, a former JAG lawyer (there is no evidence that he, like Harmon Rabb, suffers from night blindness, although he seems to be vexed by a tendency to behave as a presidential lickspittle), asked Judge Barrett what all that means in a way that could be understood.

She replied, "So in English, that means that I interpret the Constitution as a law, that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it."

She added, "So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it."

“The meaning doesn’t change over time.”

Really? 

So the words as written in 1787 have the same meaning as they do today? Back when Paul Revere was casting bells?

Let’s look at Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, which is important vis-à-vis the recent decision regarding the U.S. census as this is where taking the census every 10 years came from:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.”

Note how there seems to be a randomized capitalization of words. Presumably were one to write that way on one a paper submitted to Judge Barrett when she was teaching they would have been in a World of Hurt because We don’t capitalize Nouns Nowadays. 

What’s more, there is the word “Persons” not “citizens” (or Citizens). There are Persons counted as fractions (or Fractions).

And meaning doesn’t change over time? 

Macaulay is a cultural commentator based in Detroit.

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