All of Hugh’s podcasts of his radio show and his off-air extended interviews can be found at InterviewWithHugh.com

Before I get to what I really want to talk about – this story amuses me endlessly.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) this week warned that California would experience an unsustainable flow of illegal immigrants once President Joe Biden reverses the Trump administration’s border policy.

“The fact is, what we’ve got right now is not working and is about to break in a post-42 world unless we take some responsibility and ownership,” the governor told ABC News Monday.

What’s funny is the man is granting “rights” to illegals left-and-right.  This is not commonsense, or practicality, or any other such high-minded reality – this is pure political posturing, trying to put some space between himself and Biden as, despite his protestations to the contrary, he prepares to run for the Democratic nomination for president.  Oh, it’s a stealth campaign, and he’ll probably never declare lest Biden gets out of the way, but this statement is entirely aimed at building a groundswell against a second Biden term amongst the Democrat faithful to open a door for himself.

Newsom abused his executive power massively during the worst of covid, but he was a piker compared to the likes of Gretchen Whitmer.  He therefore makes a nice lead-in to what I really want to talk about – the overuse and abuse of executive power.  The use of emergency powers and overuse of executive power was a theme of covid.  And following the old adage “when you’re holding a hammer everything looks like a nail” it is a trend that is and will continue.  Two examples in just the last 24 hours.:

The first:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass vowed Monday to hold nothing back in handling rampant homelessness after declaring a state of emergency on her first day in office.

Bass signed an emergency declaration at a news conference where she compared homelessness to a natural disaster, and promised to use non-traditional methods to curb it.

“The death rate and mass displacement of LA’s homelessness crisis exceeded those of our most tragic natural disasters like the Northridge earthquake and Hurricane Harvey,” Bass said. “It is long overdue that we have declared it an emergency.”

“The Emergency Operations Center and effective strategy against homelessness cannot be run like just any other city function,” she added. “We will increase the scale and speed of the city’s approach to homelessness by removing it from the traditional city hall way of doing things.”

In this case, you are looking at new graft piled on the old.  LA’s massive homeless problem is a money pit – a black hole into which billions flow only to disappear without seeming effect.  You have to know it is going into someone’s pocket, just not the pockets of the homeless on the streets.  So, if Mayor Bass is going to take the homeless problem out of the “traditional city hall way of doing things” are the billions currently flowing into that system going to be cut off?  Of course not – she is simply creating a new avenue into which new and additional billions can flow and line other pockets.

It is also worthy of note that she is with this declaration, also declaring that she cannot control the normal bureaucracy.  She cannot make the system function as it is supposed to, so she has decided to create a new system.  What makes her think it’ll go any differently?  This, like Newsom’s statement, is pure political posturing, but this time it is going to pick the pockets of Angelino’s with money and put it into the pockets of faceless bureaucrats that will somehow never quite get it to the streets.

But what is not pure political posturing is this action from the outgoing Oregon governor:

Oregon governor Kate Brown said Tuesday that the state’s 17 death-row inmates will be spared execution and will instead have their sentences downgraded to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people — even if a terrible crime placed them in prison,” the outgoing Democratic governor said in a statement.

She added: “This commutation is not based on any rehabilitative efforts by the individuals on death row. Instead, it reflects the recognition that the death penalty is immoral. It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction.”

That is a flat-out abuse of power, circumventing the duly enacted law of the state legislature (signed by prior governors) and the rulings of the judicial system of the state in pursuit of personal ideology.  This is the stuff of the Crown v Parliament battles that shaped the British constitution.  This is an act that, like Roe v Wade, unbalances the balance of power within the three branches of government.  This is how to start a civil war.

Let’s just hope it stays civil.

GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel joined me this AM. She’s got the votes to be re-elected Chair, and the rules on the 2023 debates are forthcoming in January (she gave me some clues though):

Audio:

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Transcript:

HH: The first guest in this, my third hour, is Ronna McDaniel. She is chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. Good morning, Ronna. Welcome back to the program.

RM: Good morning, Hugh. Always good to be with you.

HH: Madam Chair, have you got the votes to get reelected?

RM: I do. I have the votes. I’ve got two-thirds of the committee that support me. And obviously, I’m going to continue to talk to those members, look at things that we can do differently and better, improve on the things that we’re already doing well, and talk to every other member and hope to earn their vote as well.

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All of Hugh’s podcasts of his radio show and his off-air extended interviews can be found at InterviewWithHugh.com

Been down with the latest “germ” for the last couple of days.  I put in a couple hours at my desk yesterday, but generally felt punk enough not to work.  Today, as these things go, is symptomatically worse – more coughing, runny nose, that sort of thing – but the energy and concentration levels are much better.  And so, I face the new normal….

At least in California, I now find myself confronted with the whole new labyrinth of social mores and conventions regarding behavior in the wake of illness.  I grew up in a world where, when you had a cold or the flu, you were expected to come to work long enough to hit essential deadlines – even if you looked awful and felt worse.  Nowadays to step into public with a cough or the sniffles is to sew a scarlet letter onto your chest and to be viewed with disdain – the concern is not with your illness or need for income (or food at the grocery), but instead you are reduced to a disease vector, to be controlled and penned up.

As I contemplate this new state of affairs, I am struck by how intolerant we have become regarding discomfort.  Whatever I have, heck whatever covid was/is, it’s not the black plague that killed 30-50% of the population of Europe.  Confronted with covid, we hunkered down worse than Europe ever dreamed of in the face of the plague.  Our standards have changed significantly.  I wonder if this really marks “progress?”

Both the planet and our species are remarkably resilient.  Consider these before and after’s of the atomic weapons targets of WWII and Mt. St. Helens.  These were devastating events – actually earth shattering.  At yet these places have bounced back at a remarkably rapid rate.  We fear to the point of wanting to rewrite our global economy a rise in planetary temperature of a few degrees when such events make it obvious that we, and the planet, have the tools at our disposal to cope and compensate.  One must wonder if we really fear the catastrophic event or if we simply fear the hard work it will necessitate.

Did you know we just returned a spacecraft from a trip to the moon?  The mission was in preparation of sending man back to the moon in a couple of years.  In 1969 sending people to the moon consumed the global imagination, now it is barely a footnote.  Our psychology has changed tremendously.  We no longer embrace adventure, we fear it.  We no longer have confidence in our ability to cope with bad news, we seek to prevent it from arriving at ALL costs.

Ron Howards’s movie, “Apollo 13” is a masterwork dramatization of the third largest failure in our exploration of space.  (The Challenger explosion and the loss of the Apollo 1 crew being 1 and 2.  It should also be noted that there are rumors of far worse disasters in the Soviet space program.)   But the movie asks an important question, very directly.  Was Apollo 13 a disaster or a triumph?  Is it a story of the failure of the equipment and the failure to land men on the moon, or is it a triumph that we were able to bring the crew home alive?  Challenger and Apollo 1 were tragedies, but future success was built on lessons learned from those tragedies.

Resilience results from an embrace of problems and catastrophes – learning and overcoming.  Genuine progress entails risk and great progress involves great risk.  And yet we have become unreasonably risk adverse as a society – hiding in the face of a germ.

Here’s what I know.  History shows that our survival is not at stake – there is no such thing as an actual existential crisis – if we are determined to survive and move forward.  Cataclysm and catastrophe are possible.  But in the face of human determination and effort, we will emerge from them better.  Yes, the road will be difficult, the effort immense – it will not be comfortable.  But the story of humanity is a story of adapting and overcoming – a story of hard work to accomplish great things.

The only thing that can change that course is us.  I, for one, do not wish for such a change, nor do I choose to participate in it.

Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA) joined me Monday morning:

Audio:

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Transcript:

HH: Joined by Congressman Ro Khanna. He is back after our last conversation, which was in April. Congressman, welcome back. Good to have you.

RK: Good to be back on the program.

HH: Now I have already played for the audience your interview with Maria Bartiromo yesterday, so I’m not going to cover the same ground that you covered with her, or at least in the same detail. And I know in our April interview we covered the Hunter Biden story, and I’ve known for a long time you thought the censorship there was bad. We covered China as well. I want to dive into a couple of different aspects of that if I can and start with Twitter, and then move to China.

RK: Sure.

HH: On Twitter, do you think the stories we’ve seen thus far, the Twitter Files, is the tip of an iceberg, the beginning of an avalanche, or are they going to be one-offs, in your view?

RK: I think there is a systematic issue, obviously, at Twitter. And the issue is that they have been suspending accounts and content without transparency. Now let’s be clear. This has happened both to some accounts on the right and accounts to the left. And I think that the important thing is to have full transparency, to understand why they are making some of these decisions, and also to have a recourse for appeal in the future, which is why I’ve spoken out.

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