... Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world and Alberta is
the country’s biggest producer. Some 97% of the country’s 4 million bpd
of oil exports went to the U.S. in 2023 with several European nations
and Hong Kong taking the remainder, according to Canada’s energy regulator. Alberta supplied 87% of the oil exported from Canada to the U.S. in 2023. ...
[Alberta Premier Danielle] Smith said Canada is looking at three different pipeline proposals to
its West Coast, at least one pipeline into the Northwest Territories,
one into Manitoba, one to the Hudson Bay, and one into Eastern Canada.
“Those are conversations we were not having three months ago,” [provincial energy minister Brian] Jean said of the pipelines. ...
The Senate filibuster is indeed a magical, wonderful, horrible, no good thing. It makes you collect 60 votes to end debate, but then you can vote to make yourself look good right after you betrayed your friends.
The Senate passed a six-month funding bill Friday to avert a
government shutdown hours ahead of the midnight deadline, sending it to
President Donald Trump to sign into law.
The vote was 54-46, with
two Democrats joining all but one Republican in voting yes. Earlier
Friday, the bill cleared a key procedural hurdle with the help of 10
Democrats in a 62-38 vote. Sixty votes were needed to defeat a
Democratic filibuster.
The votes came after a dramatic 48-hour period during which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., broke with most House and Senate Democrats,
announcing he would support moving forward on the bill one day after he
declared it didn’t have the votes. Schumer ultimately voted no on final
passage of the legislation.
The cloture motion roll call 62-38 is here showing the nine Democrats and one Independent vote Yea to defeat their own filibuster.
The final passage roll call 54-46 is here showing eight of the ten, all Democrats, voting their phony Nays: Cortez Masto, Durbin, Fetterman, Gillibrand and Schumer, Hassan, Peters, and Schatz.
Peters, who voted Yea and then Nay, isn't running again next year, and neither is Shaheen, who really didn't care and voted Yea both times with King the Independent.
The anger mirrors less visible Republican discontent with its supine leadership for failing to assert Congress' control over the power of the purse and letting Elon Musk run their show.
... "I know I speak for so many in our caucus when I say Schumer is
misreading this moment. The Senate Dems must show strength and grit by
voting no," said Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.).
... Some House members, in turn, have gotten an earful from constituents. "I
have also never had so many people from home personally texting
me—ANGRY," said another House Democrat. "I don't think they knew who Chuck Schumer was before today," the lawmaker said. "But they know now and they hate him." ...
President Donald Trump’s
special envoy for Ukraine and Russia was excluded from high-level talks
on ending the war after the Kremlin said it didn't want him there, a
U.S. administration official and a Russian official told NBC News.
Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg was
conspicuously absent from two recent summits in Saudi Arabia — one with
Russian officials and the other with Ukrainians — even though the talks
come under his remit.
“Together,” Trump said in announcing Kellogg’s nomination in November, “we will secure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.”
But Kellogg did not attend U.S.-Russia talks in
Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Feb. 18. Russian President Vladimir Putin
thought he was too pro-Ukraine, a senior Russian official with direct
knowledge of the Kremlin’s thinking told NBC News. ...
... “While the Polling Institute has done excellent work, it’s public
polling mission is no longer aligned with our current strategic goals,”
said Leahy. “I realize this is a significant change given the decades of
outstanding work led by Patrick Murray, the founding director of the Institute since its inception in 2005.
“Patrick’s skilled analysis and media aplomb established the Monmouth University
Poll as one of the top polls in the country for both accuracy and
transparency, including a top-five ranking from the poll analysis
website FiveThirtyEight.” ...
... Kevin’s success was also a kind of victory of democracy over snobbery.
It proved that you can write incisively about national affairs without
being in Washington, New York, or San Francisco. You can be an ordinary
person living an everyday middle-class suburban life where you don’t rub
elbows with influential journalists, academics, or financiers, yet
write journalism that those sophisticates—and plenty of other ordinary
Americans—read and respect. ...
If you're not changing the tax code, you're simply extending current policy—you are not increasing the deficit. The bottom line here is that it's a $4.3 trillion tax increase, not a $4.3 trillion deficit increase.
Most of the tax cuts passed by Republicans during President Donald
Trump’s first term, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which
raised deficits by $1.7tn, are set to expire at the end of 2025. ... Without new legislation, current law requires tax rates to return to
their pre-TCJA levels. Maintaining the current policy would cost nearly
$5tn in lost revenue over the next 10 years.
... Alsup, a San Francisco-based
appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered the Defense, Treasury,
Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments to
“immediately” offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back.
The Office of Personnel Management, the judge said, had made an
“unlawful” decision to terminate them. ... Alsup is the first federal judge to order the administration to broadly
unwind the firing spree that has roiled the federal workforce during
Trump’s first two months in office. ...
The monthly rise in core wholesale prices in January 2025 of 0.5% was revised up to 0.7% today, and the year over year increase was revised up to 3.8% from 3.6%.
Inflation in January 2025 was worse than previously reported, and probably was in February too as reported today, but we'll have to see, as long, anyway, as Ludwig doesn't manage to blow us all up in the meantime.
