RIP Rob Reiner, and (hopefully) Gavin Newsom’s Political Career (posted 12/15/25)

I missed writing my Friday column due to a combination of seasonal busy-ness and a computer crash.  But I’ll try to make up for it this week.

However, just as I was finishing this column, the news came out that Rob Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death in their home, with their troubled son as the prime suspect right now.  That is such a tragic way to go, and they and their surviving family members should be in our prayers.  He was 78 and she was 68.

Although younger people might not know it now, since Reiner’s career had been quieter in recent years, he was a very talented director.  Consider this consecutive string of 7 films: Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985) (with John Cusack, one of my favorites until his hateful politics made him unwatchable for me), Stand by Me (1986), the Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally (1989), Misery (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992). 

There are directors who made more great films, but has any director had a better 8-year run than that, with no interrupting duds?

Yes, his politics were atrocious IMHO, but that amounts to nothing now.  A couple is dead, and their son is in some ways worse than dead, and I hope that no conservatives will dance on Reiner’s grave the way so many leftists danced on Charlie Kirk’s.   RIP, Rob and Michele Reiner.     

Having said that, please allow me to make an awkward transition to my previously written musings about one of my favorite lefty foils…

Gavin Newsom has long been a slick and soulless politician about whom the mockery almost writes itself, and if current polls are correct, we’re likely to have to see a lot of him over the next three years, at least. 

His flaws run the gamut from the ridiculously phony and trivial to the deadly serious.  Among the former are his ability to be transparently shameless.  Who can forget the time two years ago when – after years during which every Dem pol in California had claimed that the homeless problem was complicated, and intractable, not to mention intractably complicated – Xi Jinping was due to come to San Francisco for a meeting with Biden.  

Annnndddd…Newsom bulldozed the homeless and their smelly tents into the bay, and pressure-washed the whole place in one day.

And in a press conference, Ken Doll said the imbecilic part out loud: “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town.’  That’s true…because it’s true.”

Thanks for explaining that for us, Hair Gel!  In a sane city in a sane state, proving that you had let your city devolve into a hellscape of dirty syringes and feces, peopled by hordes of dope-sick vagrants deemed “too crazy” for the Manson family – when you could have cleaned it up anytime you wanted! – would be enough to get you run out of town on a rail.

But this was San Francisco, California.  So…keep up the good work, Cap’n!

Speaking of “Ken Doll,” you all probably saw the recent pic of Newsom being interviewed, during which his legs were very oddly crossed.  Even the MSM commented on it, referring to “what some observers called a ‘testicle-crushing’ position.”   Of all the things to criticize Newsom for, that can’t be in the top 1000!

But it’s still funny.  In his party, which can’t tell the difference between men and women, and testicles seem to be purely hypothetical, it probably wouldn’t hurt his chances.  (By the way, I saw Hypothetical Testicles open for Phish a few years back.  Killer show!) But if he wants to win a presidential election – in a country where half of the population can pretty easily define both “man” and “woman?”  

If I were his lawyer defending him and his “testicle crushing” posture, I’d cite a hoary old law school cliché: “Assumes testicles not in evidence.  I call for summary judgment.” 

In the “more serious” category of Newsom’s sins is one that he shares with the leftist elite all over America: the bedrock belief that they are entitled to as much of your money as they can get their greedy hands on, by any means necessary.

When Newsom became governor in 2019, California had a $21.4 billion budget surplus. (Actually, it was $14.8 billion, but Gav “projected” less growth in Medi-Cal health spending on the poor to inflate that number.  Spoiler alert: Nope!) After five years of spending like a meth-head with a trust fund, Newsom had produced a $45 billion DEFICIT.

So he admitted the error of his ways, and forced austerity on California’s finances.

HA! I kid because I love! 

He actually raised taxes on the most productive and rich Californians to keep the good (i.e. insolvent) times rolling.  And financially successful people immediately started to leave the state. 

So he said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake!  I have to reverse course before all the rich people are gone and the state’s finances collapse!”

HA!  I’m like Lucy with the football with these outlandishly false claims.

What Newsom actually did in late 2023 was to try to add to his “wealth tax” an “exit tax” that would hit rich Californians who tried to leave.  Anyone with a “worldwide net worth” over $50 million would have to give 1% of that to California, if they moved out.  But Newsom’s commie cronies were very thoughtful; if a wealthy guy fleeing CA had assets that weren’t easily converted into cash, he could pay in increments over many, many years.      

When many Dems in congress have attempted to push a similar national wealth tax, it has always been shut down on the grounds that such taxes are blatantly unconstitutional.  But states have their own constitutions, and several big-spending blue states have been toying with the idea of wealth taxes.

Fortunately, there were still enough sane people in California that Gavin’s first try didn’t work; his exit tax bill died on 2/1/24.  But Comrade Hair Gel was not deterred, and now that smart people have kept fleeing his state and his deficits have kept ballooning, he has proposed the “2026 Billionaires Tax Act,” which would impose a one-time 5% tax on individual wealth exceeding $1 billion. 

The painful new twist – not unlike the one that Newsom would feel if he had testicles and sat like that – is that this tax would be retroactive!  Though it mentions 2026 and uses 2026 net worth numbers, it would apply to billionaires who had foolishly lived in California at any time in 2025. 

Jonathan Turley summed it up thusly: “So you cannot hope to flee…at least with your wealth intact.  It is a penalty for those who stayed too long hoping that rational minds would prevail in California.”

It’s hard to imagine that there are many super-rich Californians who are foolish enough to still be holding out on that particular vain hope.  But if there are, I’m guessing they are the types who were either Democrats themselves, or else were hoping to be able to feed the commi-gators so that they’d be eaten last.  In which case, they deserve what they’ve got coming.

As for the rest of us, it’s pretty obvious that a retroactive law – whether about taxes or anything else – is immoral.   So I hope that Gavin’s not expecting any help from red states when it comes to collecting his exit tax.

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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