ON THE SIDE OF POWER, AS USUAL: So, Where Are The Journalists?

Related: Whose side are the left and the media on?

TEXAS LURING JOBS AWAY FROM CALIFORNIA WITH PROMISES OF ELECTRICITY.

I’m so old, I can remember when the Babylon Bee was still satire, before morphing into America’s Newspaper of Record. Speaking of which, when CBS’s San Francisco affiliate is running a headline like, “Silicon Valley Businesses Consider Relocating Due To Unreliable Power System,” Gov. Abbott should adopt the “MOVE TO TEXAS. We have electricity!” billboard atop the Bee’s article as a part of an advertising campaign, in an update to Rick Perry’s earlier “come check out Texas” campaign aimed at California businesses.

(As long as he reminds them, “Don’t California my Texas.”)

BIDEN’S NEW SUPER PAC IS RUN BY A FOREIGN GOVERNMENT AGENT.

Related: AP Exclusive: Middleman helped Saudi give to Obama inaugural.

Scandal-free administration!

USA TODAY/SUFFOLK POLL: Only 36% Say House Should Impeach Trump.

BUSTED: NYC secretly exports homeless to Hawaii and other states without telling receiving pols.

BERNIE: ‘I DON’T THINK I HAVE TO’ EXPLAIN HOW TO PAY FOR SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of Vermont said in an interview published Tuesday that he doesn’t believe he needs to tell voters how it’s possible to fund his massively expensive plans for socialized medicine dubbed “Medicare for All.”

When pressed by CNBC’s John Harwood on how a Sanders administration would come up with enough revenue for the program, Sanders dismissed the concern.

“You’re asking me to come up with an exact detailed plan of how every American – how much you’re going to pay more in taxes, how much I’m going to pay. I don’t think I have to do that right now,” Sanders asserted.

Give Harwood, a loyal Democratic Party operative with a Chyron, credit for at least asking the question. In contrast, a recent New York magazine headline posited, “Elizabeth Warren Has Good Reasons to Stay Vague on Health Care.” Or as NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen Orwellianly tweeted earlier this month, “The ‘make Elizabeth warren say she would raise taxes on the middle class’ question should be a credibility killer. For the journalists who keep asking it.”

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: President Trump “doesn’t have a grasp” on what it means to be American.

While Springsteen has been a Democratic Party operative with a Shure SM58 microphone for decades, given his many songs over the decades worshipping muscle cars and his hatred of zero carbon emission nuclear power plants, in today’s lefty freakout environment of “we only have 12 years left before the climate apocalypse,” why aren’t they shunning “The Boss” for such reactionary views?

BUSTED: Virginia Democrats Use Public Library Equipment To Print ‘Paid’ 2019 Election Materials.

LAND SPEED: Watch the Bloodhound LSR Practice for its 1000-MPH Run.

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SPENGLER: It’s Time for Every American Patriot to Rally Around Trump: The American Republic Is at Stake. “For the record, I don’t care whether there was quid pro quo with Ukraine or not. If President Trump used military aid as a bargaining chip to persuade the government of Ukraine to investigate foreign subversion of our political system, he was doing his job as commander-in-chief to protect this country from its external enemies. The parade of striped-pants cookie-pushers from the State Department feeding information to closed-door Democratic Party kangaroo courts in the House of Representatives is irrelevant. Trump is fighting a mutiny by the U.S. intelligence community. If the mutineers succeed, it will be the end of the republic. If a cabal of bureaucrats nestling in the bowls of our $80 billion a year intelligence bureaucracy can bring down an elected president of the United States, the republic is finished.”

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

CHARMING: Kentucky Political Cartoon Portrays Black GOP Candidate Holding Trump’s KKK Robe.

Tolerance isn’t for you, hater.

CHANGE: The U.S. Air Force Will Invest in Low-Cost, Disposable Warplanes.

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CALIFORNIA AT THE CROSSROADS: “California power lines spark wildfires and prompt blackouts. Why not just bury them?”, asked a headline in USA Today earlier this month:

It costs about $3 million per mile to convert underground electric distribution lines from overhead, while the cost to build a mile of new overhead line is less than a third of that, at approximately $800,000 per mile, according to a section on PG&E’s website called Facts About Undergrounding Power Lines.

California has 25,526 miles of higher voltage transmission lines, and 239,557 miles of distribution lines, two-thirds of which are overhead, according to CPUC. Less than 100 miles per year are transitioned underground, meaning it would take more than 1,000 years to underground all the lines at the current rate.

Or, California could practice responsible forestry solutions to reduce the chance of fires.  But then, that would lead to this headline from back in August at the San Francisco Chronicle: “‘Radical’ tree trimming: Critics say PG&E’s rush to stop fires may hurt California forests.”

As Rich Lowry writes today at NRO, “Decades of misgovernance and misplaced priorities have left the state fighting fire with . . . blackouts:”

California governor Gavin Newsom, who has to try to evade responsibility for this debacle while presiding over it, blames “dog-eat-dog capitalism” for the state’s current crisis. It sounds like he’s referring to robber barons who have descended on the state to suck it dry of profits while burning it to the ground. But Newsom is talking about one of the most regulated industries in the state — namely California’s energy utilities, which answer to the state’s public utilities commission.

This is not exactly an Ayn Rand operation. The state could have, if it wanted, pushed the utilities to focus on the resilience and safety of its current infrastructure — implicated in some of the state’s most fearsome recent fires — as a top priority. Instead, the commission forced costly renewable-energy initiatives on the utilities. Who cares about something as mundane as properly maintained power lines if something as supposedly epically important — and politically fashionable — as saving the planet is at stake?

Meanwhile, California has had a decades-long aversion to properly clearing forests. The state’s leaders have long been in thrall to the belief that cutting down trees is somehow an offense against nature, even though thinning helps create healthier forests. Biomass has been allowed to build up, and it becomes the kindling for catastrophic fires.

As Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation points out, a report of the Western Governors’ Association warned of this effect more than a decade ago, noting that “over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires.”

In 2016, then-governor Jerry Brown actually vetoed a bill that had unanimously passed the state legislature to promote the clearing of trees dangerously close to power lines. Brown’s team says this legislation was no big deal, but one progressive watchdog called the bill “neither insignificant or small.”

On top of all this, more people live in remote areas susceptible to fires, in part because of the high cost of housing in more built-up areas.

Fortunately, as Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air, Gov. Newsom has stumbled into the perfect solution to all of his problems: “What to do with such a prickly situation? The answer is obvious. He’ll just get rid of PG&E. And the person to take care of that little chore would obviously be Warren Buffet because he could easily purchase the company that’s now in bankruptcy and facing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in fines and lawsuits:”

I’m not sure who should break this news to Governor Newsom. Perhaps one of our readers could volunteer. But the fact is that Warren Buffet is incredibly wealthy for a reason. He doesn’t pour his money down ratholes with no chance of showing a profit. It’s not his job to save California from its own folly. He’s probably already regretting the fact that his energy company is heavily invested in PG&E and taking massive hits on their shares as it is.

While Buffett has long been a lefty politically, his presumed forthcoming refusal to Newsom’s kind offer is a reminder of the late historian Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”

Thus, California’s woes continue. Or as Lowry concludes, “California’s overriding goal should have been safe, cheap, and reliable power, a public good so basic that it’s easy to take for granted. The state’s focus on ideological fantasies has instead ensured it has none of the above.”

HMM: ‘Game of Thrones’ creators back out of planned new ‘Star Wars’ movie trilogy.

“We love ‘Star Wars,’ ” Benioff and Weiss said in a statement. “When George Lucas built it, he built us, too. Getting to talk about ‘Star Wars’ with him and the current ‘Star Wars’ team was the thrill of a lifetime, and we will always be indebted to the saga that changed everything. But there are only so many hours in the day, and we felt we could not do justice to both ‘Star Wars’ and our Netflix projects. So we are regretfully stepping away.”

I doubt this would be happening if “The Last Jedi” hadn’t been a complete failure, if “Solo” had been such a dud, and if the buzz on December’s “Rise of Skywalker” weren’t so awful.

Disney, as Bill Whittle pointed out, has done the impossible: They killed the Star Wars movie franchise.

MEH, IT’S COWPOX: Lab Worker Accidentally Infects Herself With Virus Related to Smallpox.

THE OCEANS AREN’T GETTING ANY SMALLER: Navy admiral: A 355-ship Navy may not be attainable.

“Will we get to 355 ships?” Burke asked at the Military Reports and Editors conference in Arlington, Va. “I think with today’s fiscal situation, where the Navy’s top line is right now, we can keep around 305 to 310 ships whole, properly manned, properly maintained, properly equipped, and properly ready.”

He added that although the 355-ship target is appropriate, “it’s more important that we have the maximum capability to address every challenge that we might face.”

Currently, about 30 percent of the Navy’s destroyer fleet can leave port on schedule after repairs, and six of 11 aircraft carriers are under repair; one is the USS Harry S. Truman, whose electrical problems forced a cancellation of its deployment to the Middle East in September

The country has tens of millions more people than we did in the ’80s, we’re vastly richer, we’re more reliant on trade than ever, and yet we can only put to sea a fleet barely more than half the size it was under Reagan.

Readiness sucks, too: “Currently, about 30 percent of the Navy’s destroyer fleet can leave port on schedule after repairs, and six of 11 aircraft carriers are under repair; one is the USS Harry S. Truman, whose electrical problems forced a cancellation of its deployment to the Middle East in September.”

We’re failing at some very basic, vital stuff.

OUT ON A LIMB: Katie Hill is no angel.

DENNIS PRAGER: ‘Your Past Is Terrible, and Your Future Is Terrible’: What the Left Tells Young Americans.

It’s no wonder they’re falling for oppressive ideologies.

SEVEN. YEARS. OLD. Father Claims Ex-Wife Plans Genital Mutilation for 7-Year-Old ‘Transgender’ Son.

YEARS OF OBSERVATION MAKE ME THINK IT’S OFTEN THE REVERSE: There’s No Evidence Marijuana Will Treat Your Anxiety or Depression.

THE RETURN OF THE AZTECS: Over 40 skulls found at altar in den of Mexico cartel suspects.