Thursday, December 19, 2024

Today's News: Weakness all around


The government shutdown talk in the United States shows Trump for what he really is -- 
a weak clown
 Oliver Willis / Daily Kos 
Billionaires lead GOP revolt against critical spending bill 
...Led by billionaires who have been appointed by Donald Trump to wield massive influence over his incoming administration, Republican members of Congress are rejecting a last-ditch spending bill just days before a possible government shutdown. 
 House Speaker Mike Johnson has had to reach across the aisle for Democratic assistance to pass the continuing resolution legislation ahead of Friday, the last day before funding dries up. But hard-line Republicans in his own party have voiced their opposition to the bill, which contains economic aid for those hit by recent hurricanes and some relief for farmers. 
 It looks like they’re taking their cues from the likes of failed presidential candidate and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump appointed to lead the advisory (and completely unofficial) Department of Government Efficiency alongside multibillionaire Elon Musk. The obscenely wealthy duo wants the bill killed. 
Canada is giving Trump lots of coverage this week as he has tweeted about Freeland resigning and Canada becoming a US state. In Canada, Trudeau seems to be going from bad to worse. Grenier gives an excellent summary of the slide in Liberal fortunes since July 2023:
Ɖric Grenier / The Writ 
Weekly Writ 12/18: After a tough 18 months, will this week end Trudeau? 
How the cycle of bad polling and unforced errors has brought the Liberals where they are today. 
...[Trudeau]seems to have three options available to him, none of them good: he can try to hold on, call an election or resign. The least-bad option for him and his party would seem to be a resignation. A competitive leadership race that names a new prime minister early next year would give the Liberals a fighting (if still long-shot) chance in the next election. By comparison, sacrificing himself on the electoral altar in a snap vote would do little good for the Liberal Party and trying to hold on as prime minister for as long as possible would likely do even more harm. 
Whether or not an election now is the right call for the country as a whole is another matter entirely. Depending on how one views what the Conservatives would do once in office, one could debate that Trudeau giving a successor a chance in the next election later is better than handing over the reins of power to Pierre Poilievre now, but it is increasingly untenable for Trudeau to believe that staying on in his weakened state is the better option for Canada, especially in the context of the looming tariff threat south of the border. 
 Of course, this week’s bombshell didn’t occur in isolation. It’s the culmination of a cycle of series of decisions and events spanning Trudeau’s time in office since 2015 that has been accelerated by the Liberals’ more recent slide in the polls. Attempts to halt that slide resulted in unforced errors, further driving the cycle of bad polls, unforced errors and caucus (and, now, cabinet) unrest.
While the catalyst for the slide might not have explicitly been the cabinet shuffle of July 26, 2023, it certainly seems to have been an inflection point for the government. It was presented as a reset for the Liberals but seemed to many voters to have simply been more of the same. 

Refers to pretty much everyone right now in #cdnpoli.

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— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) December 17, 2024 at 9:50 AM
This sums it up: 
Dale Smith / Routine Proceedings
Roundup: Can you “reflect” without a sense of self-awareness?
...There are MPs and former party operatives who think that Freeland should be the leader, because she is an intellectual heavyweight, and while I don’t disagree that she has the brains, she has proven to be a charisma black hole, and lacks the retail politics instinct that leadership requires. (And for the record, I don’t think that Mark Carney possesses the retail politics qualities either, or the patience to lead the party through the wilderness of opposition years and rebuilding).
And it wasn’t just Trudeau and the Liberals who are without any self-awareness. Poilievre held a press conference in Mississauga, and gave the line “if you hire clowns, you get a circus.” I mean, has he looked at, or listened to himself or his caucus? Ever? We are so screwed as a country.
Canada seems to be tired of Trudeau, but we will be so much worse off with Poilievre - if Poilievre gets a majority in 2025, the buyer's remorse will be epic. He will rip down everything Trudeau has done in the last nine years, but be unable to replace it with anything that will improve Canada.
Max Fawcett / Canada's National Observer
Pierre Poilievre is setting himself up to fail
... there’s another piece of Khan’s wisdom that Poilievre may be about to learn. "Conquering the world on horseback is easy,” he said. “It is dismounting and governing that is hard." That’s especially true when you’ve spent the last two years, as Poilievre has, raising the expectations of your closest supporters. 
It’s one thing to promise that you’ll axe the tax, fix the budget, build the homes and stop the crime. It’s quite another to actually do it. Poilievre’s first act as prime minister will likely be, as he’s promised thousands of times by now, to “axe the tax.” But eliminating the carbon tax and rebate won’t magically make people’s groceries cheaper, if only because it didn’t cause them to go up in the first place....
...the bigger drivers of rising food prices in 2025 are expected to be climate change (hello, olive oil prices!) and the prospect of a trade war between Canada and the United States. In a particularly cruel irony, the households most negatively impacted by rising food prices will also lose the most from the elimination of the carbon tax and rebate. This is the risk in pretending, as Poilievre has for years now, that the carbon tax is the root cause of all Canada’s problems. When those problems persist or even worsen after the carbon tax has been eliminated, people will naturally go looking for a different cause — and perhaps start considering Poilievre for the role of whipping boy.
The same holds true for Poilievre’s pledge to “build the homes,” a promise that has helped him attract more support from younger voters than any Conservative in his lifetime.
Poilievre correctly identified the role that so-called “gatekeepers” at the local level were playing in obstructing the development of new housing supply, and the impact that was having on rents and home prices. What he has missed — or, at least, declines to talk about — is the disproportionate role conservative-leaning politicians are playing in that....
And then there’s the oil and gas industry, where Poilievre is p romising to unleash a flood of new investment in pipelines, LNG terminals, and other energy infrastructure. He’ll repeal Bill C-69, which clarified (and strengthened) the environmental review process for major projects, and Bill-48, which banned tankers off the north coast of British Columbia. And then he and his allies in Alberta will have to watch as they lose their single greatest asset in their crusade to crush climate policy: the ability to blame Justin Trudeau.
....For almost a decade now, they’ve pretended that global trends that drove down investment in the U.S. oil and gas industry, to almost the same extent as in Canada, are entirely the doing of the Liberal government. Now, they’ll be forced to contend with reality. Demand for oil and gas will peak within the next decade while the cost of renewable energy and electric vehicles will keep getting cheaper. And while blaming Trudeau will still be a popular sport in Alberta long after Poilievre leaves office — some pundits here still can’t let Pierre go, after all — it won’t work nearly as well outside the province.
On top of all that, Poilievre will also have to contend with an American president who’s openly hostile to Canada’s economic interests...
None of this will change the outcome of the next federal election, or the inevitability of a Conservative majority government. But the seeds of future discontent with it are already being sown by Poilievre himself, and they will almost certainly take root in his own political fields.
I expect Poilievre has other worries now too:
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