Today I‘ve got two stories to kick off your weekend. I started drafting them last week, but between the pain meds and the PT and the necessity to write about the passing of creepy Paul Ehrlch, I‘ve been slow to post on these two tales. I hope they don’t seem like old news now.
The common theme in these two stories is that they both illustrate the seemingly intractable wrong-headedness of the left as embodied by the governors of the two biggest blue states, NY and CA.
First, NY governor Kathy “I’ll get you and your little dog too” Hochul’s latest move doesn’t just say the quiet part out loud. It screams the quiet part through a bullhorn.
In 2022, in the first year of her malevolent governership, she displayed the kind of supremely confident ignorance that one only achieves by living in a leftist bubble for her entre life. Fully caught up in the TDS that has swept through her party like STDs through a party thrown by Slick Willy and Hunter Biden, she was full of urine and vinegar as she threw down the gauntlet to any non-leftists who lived in her blue state domain.
To wit: “We’re fighting to bring government back to the people and out of the hands of dictators. And we’re here to say that the era of Trump… is over. Just jump on a bus and head down to Florda where you belong okay? Get out of town! Get out of town!”
And the applause of a dim-witted crowd filled the air.
Then, as the Sponge Bob meme would have it… Four… Years…Lay-tare…
The Margaret Hamilton (look her up) of the Empire State is reaping what she sowed. And it is hilarious.
A couple of weeks ago she gave an interview in which she came crawling back with her broom tucked between her legs and pleaded with the rich New Yorkers she had scorned way back in ‘22.
Sorry, “tail.” I meant with her tail tucked between her legs.
Or did I?
When discussing the giant pile of money she wants to spend on useless and counter-productive social programs — Because: New York liberal – here’s what she had to say:
“I’m being conscious of the fact that I need people who are high net worth to support the generous soical programs we want to have in our state. There are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Okay, cut me the checks, if you want to be supportive… but maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who you can bring back home. Because our tax base has been eroded.”
“I have to look at the fact that we are in competition with other states who have less of a burden on their corporations and individuals. Remote work changed everything. There were people who could only work in an office in Manhattan and in NY state, and they were captives to our state, and they were going to stay. We saw that that’s not the case on Wall Street, businesses looking at Texas, they’re not going there because they have a nicer governor, that’s for sure. They’re going there for the tax rate. We have to be smart about this.”
Let’s savor the key details, shall we?
Her definition of “patriotic” is being willing to allow greedy politicians who hate you to confiscate more and more of your earnings so that they can be “generous” (aka “wasteful”) with those earnings.
She apparently thinks that financially successful people who were smart enough to follow her snotty commands to “jump a bus out of town” are dumb enough to succumb to the equivalent of an obnoxious solicitor at your front door, entreating you to leave the Free State and go back to New York so that you can once agan be treated like a pimp treats his hookers.
The strangest part is that she actually gets the most important parts right. She correctly realizes that NY State’s tax base has eroded. (Unexpectedly!) She correctly points out that NY is in a competition with other states, and that high taxes are a burden.
She even admits that New York prefers to treat rich people like their slaves. (She uses the term “captives.” But you say “potato,” I say “Gulag Archipelago.”)
She comes to the right conclusion – “They’re going there for the tax rate” – and even clearly states the logical next step: “We have to be smart about this.”
Annnddd… then she falls at the last hurdle. Because if leftists could accept reality, follow logic, and be smart, they’d be conservatives.
Meanwhile her co-religionist commie Mamdani is stepping on the same reality rakes as Hochul. He’s been in office for 20 minutes, and already the combination of his extravagant promises and NYC’s existing ocean of red ink are pummeling him with the groin kicks of financial reality.
Consider: last year NYC spent $81,000 per homeless person, and they’re due to cross into six figures per vagrant this year. And the result?
More hobos than you can shake a crack pipe at. If you could shake a crack pipe. Which you can’t. Because one of the expensive schizophrenic junkies has already pushed you into the path of a subway train, squashing you as flat as the line on Joe Biden’s latest brain scan.
So suck it, Nepo Baby Jihadi and Wicked Witch of Botaxia!
Speaking of spending tons of taxpayer money on eye-wateringly stupid boondoggles, how about that West Coast, featureless, plastic-crotched Ken Doll, Gavin Newsom?
Sure, for pure wastefulness he can’t top the multibillion-dollar high-speed railroad to nowhere, or the gusher of red ink devoted to phony hospice care centers tucked away in every strip mall, P.O. box and mop closet in the greater Los Angeles area. But his latest brainstorm might take the Tinfoil Medal – because there’s no gold left in the Golden State to make medals anymore – for the staggering stupidity of its conception and execution.
I‘m talking about the now-infamous “Wildlife Crossing” (i.e. highway overpass) that is supposed to allow cougars and butterflies to safely transit over the 10 lanes of the 101 in southern Cal.
I know. When I woke up one day last week thinking about this story, I suspected that it was the product of last night’s Oxycodone-created dream. But no. This thing is real. And it’s spectacular.
Let’s start with the details. Haircut launched the project with great fanfare in 2022, saying that the taxpayers had already committed $52 million for the project, and that another $10 million would complete it in 2025. It had the grand name of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC).
Why does a highway overpass require a fancy name and an acronym, you might ask?
Because you’d have to be an absolute moron to pay $62 million for a freaking overpass! Fortunately for Gav, absolute morons are thick on the ground in deep blue California.
Annnndddd… so far the state has spent $114 million of the original $62 million budget, and the overpass is still not finished.
If you’ve got a calendar handy you can confirm that it is 2026. And if you’ve got a calculator handy, you can confirm that 2026 comes after 2025. And also that $114 million is almost twice as much as $62 million.
If you’ve never seen lefty government at work, and if you’ve never read my columns before, you might think that this is some kind of elaborate joke. But you probably have done both, and thus you know that it is no joke.
Let’s consider how many layers of graft and insanity it takes to explain this story.
First, we’ve all seen thousands of overpasses in our lives, and none of them are an engineering feat to compare wth the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or AOC’s juicy booty (her words not mine). (I had to throw a gratuitous reference to AOC in here, because I haven’t taken a shot at her in too long.) It’s a slab with a ramp at both ends, some concrete and some rebar and maybe a railing on both sides if you want to get fancy.
So what’s so special about this overpass? Does it have a climate-controlled bubble over it, made of space-age materials and featuring elaborate lighting and sound systems calculated to attract and relax cougars and butterflies? Are the railings coated in gold and encrusted in diamonds?
Nope. It’s just an overpass. The only thing that sets it apart from every other overpass in Christendom is that it’s got some dirt and a few plants dumped onto the concrete slab of the overpass. Because everyone knows how cougars and butterflies hate to burn their sensitive feet walking on concrete.
And before you can ask, yes, butterflies can fly. It’s right there in their freaking name! So why on earth would they tramp across an overpass when they’ve been given the gift of flight and could easily flutter safely above the cars and U-hauls streaming along the 101 on their way out of the failed state of California, bound for a sane red state?
Obviously they wouldn’t, and they don’t. And CA Dems are idiots for saying such a thing. But this isn’t the first time they have made such an imbecilic claim. If you look back to one of my very first columns – archived on this site in late 2016 or early 2017 – you’ll find me reporting on one of the Democrats’ absurd objections to Trump’s proposed border wall. They said that it would interfere with the migration of hundreds of species…including many bird species.
As I mentioned at the time, the Dems were actually asking us to believe that long lines of birds – who could easily fly right over the wall – would instead clomp across the scorching desert before bonking into the wall, falling over, and starving to death. All because of the Orange Man’s Satanic hatred of all creatures avian.
If Eric Swallwell were here, this is when he’d say, “What about cougars? I’m pretty sure they don’t have wings. And if they don’t, that means they can’t fly over the highway safely! Why do you want to kill cougars?!”
And I’d say, “Very good, Eric. Now can you go away while the grown-ups are talking?” And I‘d look around to find the closest Asian cutie in the area and point to her and say, “Ooh, look at her! I‘ve heard that she has a crush on you despite her being a 9 and you being a 3, and that her turn-ons are low IQs and flatulence, and that she has no ties at all to the CCP. Go get her boy!”
Where was I?
Oh yeah. Cougars.
It turns out that a study of local fauna – because you can’t build an overpass without paying a fauna-ologist six figures for a comprehensive local fauna study – suggested that there were around a dozen endangered cougars in the area around the overpass.
Whch means that you could much more easily build a top-notch cougar brothel, capture the local cougars, teach the females to wear French maid outfits and lap dance, then put them together and let nature take its course. Or – hear me out – you could just dose their food with cougar viagra, and in a year or four you’d have enough new cougars to release the original dozen back into the wild, and trust them to look both ways before crossing the road, while knowing that the species was safe.
(Full disclosure: I flunked my class in cougar mating, gestation and litter size – my majoring in English and minoring in chasing girls and playing sports really cut into my time spent on cougar fertility studies — so that’s only a rough guess. And I’m not sure whether male cougars technically have laps. So that lap-dancing cougar brothel might need to be Plan B.)
One other hilarious detail which I am not making up is that one side of the overpass where the cougars are is a wilderness area. Not far from the other side of the overpass is a bunch of subdivisions. Right now the people living in those subdivisions only have to worry about their neighborhoods being plagued by illegal gangbangers, mounds of trash and syringes, and recidivist criminals and junkies who keep getting re-released there. Oh, and earthquakes and preventable fires that will definitely not be prevented.
So look at the bright side, blue voters. Once that wildlife crossing is completed, you and your children will likely be mauled or eaten by cougars long before God’s wrath or the lesbian DEI-hire Fire Chief can kill you by earthquake or fire, respectively.
And that’s why the story I read about this was headlined, “The Most Gavin Newsom Story Ever.”
Yes, the whole thing is absurd, and Californians who keep voting Dem deserve to have leftist politicians confiscate their money, pile it up in giant mounds, and then set it on fire. This ridiculous uncompleted overpass has been under construction for 4 and a half years, and will likely cost $200 million, assumng it is ever finished.
By comparison, there was another overpass in CA that took 4.5 years to complete, and for only $35 million. Of course, that was in 1930s dollars. But then again, it wasn’t just an ugly, squat overpass. It was a full-sized bridge, and it was quite attractive compared to the ugly AWAC.
It’s called The Golden Gate Bridge.
Great job, California!
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Martin Simpson 