I’ll Pass, Thanks

You probably think that quote, as succinct and spot on as it is, must’ve come from someone like Snoop Dogg or Rosie O’Donnell. Nope. Gavin Newsom said that. The man currently at the helm of Cali’s sinking ship, shouting orders for more sail while the seawater pours over the scuppers and seeps into his Gucci loafers. Newsom has managed to pass, without question, the dumbest laws in the history of laws, but hey, he’s got nice hair.

One of those is the one that requires all new cars sold in California to be totally electric by 2035, despite the fact the state’s power grid is already sweating like a fat guy on a treadmill trying to keep the lights on as it is, with only about ten percent electric vehicles at present. Reminds me of the two Aggies who bought a truck and started buying watermelons for a dollar apiece, hauling them, and selling them for a dollar apiece. They were trying to figure out why they were going in the hole, and one of them said, ‘Maybe we need a bigger truck.’

Newsom is, of course, one of the biggest threats to guns in Cali since rust, and he may have figured out a way to attack the 2A even more effectively than he has in the past. He said, ‘A mistake that a lot of us have made, related to those who advocate for gun safety legislation, is that we try to process it through our legislative bodies, and that’s where the NRA’s strength lies.’ Bear in mind that when a leftist like Newsom says ‘gun safety legislation’ he means ‘gun control,’ which has almost nothing to do with guns and everything to do with control.

But what Newsom was actually saying there, if you’ll allow me to translate his statement from politese into English, is that the reason the left hasn’t been able to pass even more restrictive gun laws than they already have is that they’ve been trying to do it legally. Because the only way to pass legislation is through legislative bodies. What he means is that he wants to do it some other way, and I know from Mrs. Talent’s civics class (1976-77) that the only other way to pass a law, besides doing it legally, is to have nice hair.

Of course, Newsom also once said, ‘Government can do best by simply getting out of the way.’ Which, so far, he hasn’t. But he also said, ‘If, in this country, a simple majority of people can start stripping away the rights of a protected class in the minority, that’s a pretty alarming thing.’ Which, in English, means ‘Democracy is a horrible way to run a country, which is why America was founded as a Constitutional Republic.’ I agree with him completely on that one, and I’m quite positive that, if he had any idea what he’d said, he would disagree completely with himself.

To be fair, Gavin Newsom doesn’t have a monopoly on stupid. Another Californian, a fellow named Trevor Daniel Jacob, seems to be trying to give his governor a run for his money. Jacob has a YouTube channel where he posts videos of his adventures and exploits, and evidently makes money doing that. But at the moment he’s staring down the barrel of a 20-year prison sentence.

In late 2021 Jacob took off in his little airplane, and then faked engine trouble, or something. He jumped out of the plane (with a parachute) and let it crash. He put a video of the whole misadventure on YouTube which, surprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration has access to. Evidently it’s illegal to crash a plane but not a state. Who knew?

It turns out Jacob was paid pretty well for crashing the plane by a company that sells wallets. Seems kind of odd. I could understand if it was a company that sold parachutes, helmets, or EPIRBs, or underwear that washes out really easily, but wallets? I got nothing. Anyway, Jacob is now in Big Trouble for crashing his plane and trying to cover up the truth from the FAA, which is a whole nuther crime. I’m not sure of all the details, but it looks like he’ll end up spending a pretty good stretch in the graybar hotel. Because he’s bald as an egg. He’d probably get away with it if he had nice hair . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor columnist and minister who doesn’t have nice hair. Write to him at [email protected]