Mike Huckabee

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that sales of gas-powered cars will be banned in the state by 2035. Why didn’t he cut out the middleman and just order the climate to stop changing?

Put aside the fact that by 2035, Newsom will have been out of office for at least eight and hopefully 12 years. For those of us who are so old we remember when Jimmy Kimmel was funny, this grandiose order elicits an amusing sense of déjà vu.

For decades now, California’s liberal politicians have been belching out laws and policies, orders and incentives, all to try to force all the state’s residents into electric cars. Their utter cluelessness about how markets work have doomed all these efforts to humiliating failure. They’ve mandated that a certain percentage of cars sold had to be electric by a certain time, and forgot that first, consumers had to want to buy them. They’ve mandated that a certain number of EVs had to be on every car lot, which forced makers and dealers to waste space with cars that gathered dust as consumers purchased SUVs. They’ve offered rebates, carpool lanes and other incentives to try to bribe people to buy them.

They previously used their imagined godlike powers to declare that there would be 5 million EVs on the road in California by the end of the last decade. They reached 11% of that goal.

The fact is, Californians didn’t want electric cars. They do a LOT of driving, and they get stuck in loooooong traffic jams on overcrowded freeways (another reason to thank their liberal politicians), and they don’t want to be in a car that might die if they turn on the A/C and then have to find an outlet to charge it for hours just to get home.

As technology improved, electric cars became a bit more popular among a certain small subset of the market (in some circles, “EV” stands for “Electric Virtue-Signaler”), but they’re still impractical for the majority of drivers.

Newsom claims that by 2035, EVs will be superior to gas-powered cars. Maybe, maybe not. But will California’s politicians be superior to today’s, who can’t even provide enough juice to keep people from having to swelter in their homes with no lights or air conditioning? If not, what are they going to plug all those electric cars into?

James Taylor, president of the Heartland Foundation, called Newsom’s order a “classic example of politicians seeking short-term political gain by imposing impossible requirements on future residents and politicians.” He said they’d actually create an ecological catastrophe: to generate enough “green power” (which the state’s leftist leaders also are mandating), thousands of square miles of land would have to be clear-cut to install windmills and solar panels. Taylor added, “On the other hand, it will leave fewer forests for Newsom to mismanage and turn into overgrown fire hazards.”

Personally, my theory is that this is a plot by California liberals to stick every resident with an electric car and no electricity to charge it with, making it impossible for them to flee to Texas.

Mike Huckabee

There’s an inside term in political journalism that everyone needs to learn: “Put a lid on the day.”

No, that doesn’t refer to thinking “Oh, put a lid on it” every time Nancy Pelosi opens her mouth. It’s what a campaign team tells the media to let them know that there will be no more comments, appearances or events involving the candidate for the rest of the day. And the media are hearing it a lot these days from the Biden campaign, and very early in the day, which worries them since they are the unofficial PR arm of the campaign.

For instance, Tuesday morning before 9 a.m., Biden’s aides told the media they were “putting a lid on the day.” So 42 days away from the election, while President Trump is jetting around the country, giving 90-minute campaign speeches and addressing the UN in between dealing with major policy issues, Biden is declaring the day over before most people even get to work.

In the linked article from David Marcus of the Federalist, he goes to some lengths to say he has tried hard not to accept rumors or assumptions about Biden’s mental or physical health. I’ve also tried not to get into that kind of personal speculation. Maybe it is some brilliant "lay-low strategy" they're following. But when the candidate not only seems incapable of remaining coherent even with a Teleprompter in front of him, and his campaign day ends at 9 a.m., you have to start wondering if Biden is capable of handling the most demanding job in the world.

It’s obvious that his supporters in the media are starting to panic. I hate giving the leftist magazine the Nation any clicks, but just to prove I’m not making this up, one of their writers just published a screed insisting that there’s nothing to be learned from presidential debates so we should cancel them all, “permanently.”

Translation: I’m saying “permanently” because I don’t want to admit that I’m scared out of my wits about this particular candidate in these particular debates, but I’ll write another screed arguing the opposite in four years.

If Biden is capable of being President, then he should at least be capable of working past the end of the “Today” show. If he’s not, and the Democrats know it, then they are attempting to pull a shameful scam on the American people, and one that’s cruelly unfair to Biden as well. As for all the claims that there should be no debates because Joe Biden is just too honest and pure to lower himself to debate Trump, my response to that is “Put a lid on it.”

Mike Huckabee

Proving once again that you can’t cure “stupid,” the Seattle City Council voted 7-2 to override Mayor Jenny Durkan’s veto of their plan to defund the local police department by about $3 million (they claim this is a “down payment” on their plan to cut police funding by 50% by next year.) Think about it: they're actually worse at their jobs than the Mayor of Seattle!

In a city torn by radical rioting and lawlessness, Council President Lorena Gonzalez declared that it’s vital to cut the police budget and spend the money on social programs instead because “Everyone deserves to feel safe…” Safe from the police, she means. Because that's the big worry in Seattle: being assaulted, robbed and set on fire by the police.

I’m sure that just like the poor people suffering under the brain dead city council of Minneapolis, they’ll end up feeling very safe from having the police intrude on the criminals who are going to be targeting them daily. Seattle voters who start asking, as people in Minneapolis now are, “Where are the police?!” should mark it down now so they can remember it: the police are gone because you voted leftist morons into power. And believe me, I don’t use that term as a pejorative but because it’s the most accurate term I can think of, based on the evidence.