THE HANGOVER FROM 2009 CONTINUES: Washington Post admits that, no: electric cars were NOT worth it.

Unexpectedly.

DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A BYLINE SAYS WHAT? Cruz, Rubio Charged with Race Treason by Univision’s Jorge Ramos.

Add this to his hilarious meltdown in August over Donald Trump, and it’s almost as if there’s no Republican that meets Ramos’ impossible standards.

Not to mention that Ramos’ daughter is a Hillary Clinton staffer.

KRISTEN SOLTIS ANDERSON: A depressing campaign, and an election we need.

To put this in context, during the entire slog of the 2012 election, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney sustained a brand as unfavorable as Clinton or Trump. John McCain, John Kerry and George W. Bush all enjoyed “favorables” of over 50 percent during their presidential campaigns, even though two out of the three were ultimately never elected president.

Today, only one out of four Americans think the country is on the right track. Americans continue to express deep economic anxiety, and the president’s job approval remains low, with particular disapproval for handling of foreign policy.

Given this complete rejection of the status quo, it is astonishing that there’s a chance that voters will be presented with this depressing choice: Hillary Clinton, — symbolic of dynastic elite, entrenched interests, corporate America and politics-as-usual — or someone radical like Trump, whose vision of forward progress is distinctly backward looking, as if to reclaim a bygone era by hitting rewind.

But taking America back to a different time isn’t possible, even if we wanted it to be.

Republicans may pine for the Reagan 1980s, while Democrats pine for the New Deal 1930s. But the makeup of America and the evolution of our economy means that neither is in the cards for us, nor should they be. The pace of demographic and technological change reshaping America means it is impossible to recreate the halcyon days of our own preferred ideological movements.

This sounds like a nice way of saying that we’re screwed.

TRUMP GOING BIRTHER ON CRUZ MAY BACKFIRE:

Was Trump hinting that he might mount a legal challenge to Cruz’s eligibility to serve as president? No doubt Trump considers it an option. If Cruz continues to surge in the polls and then pulls off a few early primary victories, Trump might attempt it — if only to corner media coverage for a few days to slow the Texas senator’s momentum.

But the gambit could backfire on Trump. Republicans across the board would resent Trump bringing a damaging issue like this to the fore of the campaign. Even raising it now, if only to speculate on what a court challenge could mean to the Cruz campaign, is not likely to win him many additional friends in the Republican Party.

And it was just Trump going birther — Rand Paul and even former GOP presidential nominee John McCain (who should know better) are also playing that gambit against Cruz this week, as the primaries loom larger. On the other hand, as John Nolte has been writing on his Twitter feed, getting the birther stuff out of the way somewhat mutes the media using this as a wedge — or worse, the typical DNC-MSM late-October drive-by massacre — if Cruz winds winning the nomination. He can yawn and declare the issue old hat, in much the same way that Obama was able to shake off the birther talk as November of 2008 approached. Cruz won’t have a supine media to help him as Obama did of course, but he can also have fun with a Reagan-esque “well, there you go again” if Hillary herself raises the issue, and point out that this isn’t the first time her presidential campaign helped birth a birther attack.

CALIFORNIA DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY FOLLOWING GAS LEAK THAT HAS BEEN SPEWING NOXIOUS METHANE FUMES INTO THE AIR FOR MORE THAN TWO MONTHS.

The leak has been dubbed “the biggest environmental catastrophe since the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010; and for now, there is no way to stop it.”

But Jerry Brown has a (D) after his name, which is why the network nightly news programs haven’t been running this story in a continuous loop.

JOEL KOTKIN: Where American Families Are Moving.

Much is made, and rightfully so, about the future trends of America’s demographics, notably the rise of racial minorities and singles as a growing part of our population. Yet far less attention is paid to a factor that will also shape future decades: where families are most likely to settle.

However hip and cool San Francisco, Manhattan, Boston or coastal California may seem, they are not where families are moving.

In a new study by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, we found that the best cities for middle-class families tend to be located outside the largest metropolitan areas. This was based on such factors as housing affordability, migration, income growth, commute times, and middle-income jobs. Many of our best-rated cities tend to mid-sized. The three most highly rated were Des Moines, Iowa, Madison, Wis., and Albany, N.Y., all with populations of less than 1 million. Among our top 10 metropolitan areas for families, five are larger than this, but only two—the Washington, D.C. area and Minneapolis-St. Paul—are among the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas.

Our bottom 10 includes the media’s favorite two cities, New York and Los Angeles, also the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Three other large metropolitan areas rank in the bottom 10: Miami, Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., and Las Vegas. The hipster cities, in other words, are not so amenable to the new generation of young families.

Hipsterville ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s expensive as hell. And that’s by design:

America has always had its fancy neighborhoods, often associated also with racial or ethnic exclusion. But increasingly large parts of the country, and this is true in certain cities and suburbs, are evolving into what Dartmouth University’s William Fischel has called “exclusionary regions”—too expensive for middle-class families to access.

Fischel traces much of this development to regulatory policies that restrict housing supply. In 1970, for example, housing affordability in coastal California metropolitan areas was similar to the rest of the country, as measured by the median multiple (the median house price divided by the median household income). Today, due in part to a generation of strict growth controls, home prices in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles are now three or more times higher than in some other metropolitan areas.

This has enriched the rich, at the expense of working families. Democrats supported it. Why don’t Republicans make an issue of it?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Sanders: Clinton Lacks Courage To Stand Up To Wall Street.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t stood up to Wall Street, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) contended on Wednesday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning joe.”

“Do I think Hillary Clinton or many other senators have shown the courage that is necessary to stand up the Wall Street power? The answer is no,” Sanders in a response to a question about whether Clinton had provided cover for Wall Street.

“We need a president who now has the courage to stand up to the billionaire class and Wall Street,” he said during the appearance.

When co-host Joe Scarborough interjected a question about whether Clinton has the courage to stand up to the billionaire class, Sanders responded, “Well I’m running for president because I think not.”

Well, her son-in-law runs a hedge fund.

KATHY GRIFFIN’S NEW YEAR’S EVE CO-STAR TO INTERVIEW JERRY SEINFELD’S COMEDIANS IN CARS GETTING COFFEE CO-STAR TONIGHT: “On Thursday, CNN will host a town hall with President Obama as part of his ‘final-year push to make gun control part of his legacy.’ In addition to sitting down with liberal anchor Anderson Cooper, the network says Obama will ‘take questions from the audience,’” Michelle Malkin writes. “Uh-oh. Get out your best pruning shears and trowels. In an age of micromanaged partisan stagecraft and left-wing media enablers, there is no such thing as a spontaneous question. CNN has a long history of allowing political plants to flourish in its public forums.”

Related: CNN Hosts Shocked, SHOCKED, That Anyone Might Believe Obama Wants to Take Guns.

Gee, wait ’til they discover that Piers Morgan fella who used to work for CNN.

2015, THE YEAR THE PC CHICKENS CAME HOME TO ROOST: “The big new development in 2015 is that the left’s culture war came back to attack the very institutions that hatched it,” Robert Tracinski writes at the Federalist. “There are two centuries of chickens coming home to roost, because that’s how long ago academic intellectuals began toying with the idea that ideas don’t matter and everything is just a raw power struggle.”

A struggle that eventually always devours its own. “And that brings us back to a question I started the year with, Tracinski adds. “Have we reached Peak Leftism?”

We’ll, we’ll have one answer to that in November.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: I hate to break it to feminists, but ‘white male privilege’ is a myth.

How’s this for dark irony: throughout 2015, ‘white male privilege’ was the buzzphrase on every rad tweeter and liberal hack’s lips, as they fumed against the easy, pampered lives allegedly enjoyed by human beings who had the fortune to be born with a penis and pale skin. Railing against ‘white men’ and their cushy existences has become the stock-in-trade of many feminists.

Yet towards the end of 2015 it was revealed that there’s a social group in Britain more derided and less successful than pretty much every other social group. Guess who? Yep, young white men. Especially young working-class white men. A large sector of the group that the new identity-politics mob loves to ridicule for sailing through life unmolested and unchallenged is actually having a rough time.

Consider this: 18-year-old women are 35 percent more likely to attend university than 18-year-old men; and where 37 percent of black school-leavers go to university, only 28 percent of white school-leavers do. These stats were unveiled by UCAS in December, leading its chief executive to wonder if it isn’t time to initiate ‘outreach’ projects designed to get more white blokes into college.

Also in December, a YouGov analysis of 48 surveys of public attitudes found that young white men are viewed as ‘the worst ethnic, gender [and] age group’. They are ‘the most derided ethnic group in Britain’. YouGov’s number-crunchers confessed to being surprised by ‘the lousy reputation of young white men’, who are seen as drunken, promiscuous, prone to drug-taking, work-shy and impolite (even as other surveys reveal that today’s yoof actually drink less and do fewer drugs than earlier generations did).

What’s more, young women now earn more than young men: £1,111 a year more, to be precise. Between the ages of 22 and 29, women in general — covering all races — out-earn guys; by the time women hit their thirties, however, their pay falls below men’s. Those young, opinionated new media feminists who get handsome advances to write books spluttering about ‘white male privilege’ are far more privileged than many of the white males they splutter about — especially the ones who empty their bins or sweep their roads. It’s almost Orwellian in its topsy-turviness — the most well-connected, middle-class women denouncing the alleged privileges of some of the most derided people in society.

Indeed.

AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD SOUNDS AS UNBELIEVABLE AS THE NYT: North Korea Successfully Harvests Wheat In Show Of Growing Strength.  (Yes, it is the Onion.  Though at this point, what difference does it make?)

THE FLIGHT FROM REASON: Dilbert’s Creator on Trump’s Black Magic.

I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT: Will the FBI Revolt over Indicting Hillary?

RECALL HOW CARTER GOT HIS NOBEL PRIZE: You can thank Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for North Korea’s nukes.

THEY WERE AGAINST SPECIAL INTEREST MONEY BEFORE THEY WERE FOR IT: The oddest inversion at the New York Times.

AND HE WEARS AYN RAND T-SHIRTS: So, there’s that.  From Marine Corps to ‘Star Wars’: ‘Force Awakens’ actor Adam Driver savors success.

IT WORKED FOR ME: They got bored, and wrote, and learned to do stuff like cook and play the piano and build stuff. (Though mostly I was writing or reading, not watching TV, but that’s a mater of personal style.)  I am a lazy parent and proud of it.

THEY CAN’T HAVE THEIR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO: Bill Cosby has changed the rules of the game the Clintons used to play, and Trump knows it.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Congress Passes Obamacare Repeal and Planned Parenthood Defunding: Finally!

IT LOOKS LIKE SOME PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR A BACK DOOR:  We may need to get off the rock.

SHUT UP OR ELSE, THEY THREATENED: Death threats made against HS student who criticized college race protests.

WITHOUT DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Facebook’s anti-Israel double standard on hate speech.

MR. PRESIDENT, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF US: Presidents aren’t supposed to just “act” anytime Congress doesn’t agree with their desires.

A PHRASE BOOK FOR TOURISTS IN HELL: Common SJW Phrases Translated into English.

ROGER SIMON: Hillary’s Watergate Looms.