I'm of two minds on the Kamala Harris for California governor speculation, and it seems like this speculation is really ramping up. There are multiple stories out now where they're detailing that Harris actually kind of has three options in front of her that she's considering. She's considering, on the one hand, running for governor of California in twenty twenty six, running for the presidency in twenty twenty eight, or just kind of taking a break from politics for a while.
Running for governor in twenty twenty six kind of precludes the possibility of running for president in twenty twenty eight. And there's a lot of sort of the straight media discussions of it and the left wing discussions of it. The discussions of it among left wingers are not not super grounded in reality, because I think the reality is the Kamala Harris is not a particularly adept leader in
a lot of ways. I think those of us from the right are able without as much with our without as much bias, although I guess we're biased the other way to think that she's not a very good leader, but I'd say we're correct. I don't think she's a very good leader. I don't think she's demonstrated much great
leadership capacity. But a lot of the straight reporting is whether whether you know she'd be is she up for the challenge of you know, the California is facing very serious problems, and she's wondering if she's up for the challenge, and she's she's trying to immerse herself in what the problems facing California are so that she can understand blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Now I'm sort of two minds.
My one mind is I don't think any Democrat can be successful because I don't know that any Democrat has kind of the political strength needed to tick off the kinds of essential power brokers you need on your side if you're going to be a Democratic governor of California. The powers that be in California politics want things to be the way they are for a lot of really
essential problems we face. Whether it's water shortage, whether it's wildfires, whether it's insufficient construction of new homes and therefore housing prices being too high, energy shortages, gas prices being too high, cost of living being too high. A lot of that stuff is the result of a large array of environmental and pro labor policies, especially a lot of the stuff about construction and new home construction and building new homes, building new businesses. All of that is the result of
why does it take so long? Why does it take four years in California to build an apartment complex that would take two years to build in Texas, And therefore adding enormous extra layers of costs and outlays of loans and blah blah blah blah blah blah outlays of time and worker time and construction equipment time and blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah and more environmental reviews. That happens because of California's array of environmental laws, in California's array of pro labor laws that just make construction that much more expensive. And that's the thing. Everyone knows that this is the infuriating thing about California politics. There are all these problems that everyone understands what the problems are, They know how to fix them, they just don't want to.
They don't want to because the solutions are things that would anger labor or environmentalists. That's it. We all understand why gas prices are high in California. It's because of environmental regulations, various kinds of environmental regulations. You got capentrate, and most specifically, you've got a California specific blend of gasoline that it has to be made in order to
fit California regulatory standards. This results in California being a kind of gas island where our supply chain to refine and then sell gas is a California specific supply chain. We can't use the gas that's sold in Arizona, Nevada, or Oklahoma or whatever. So that is a drastic added cost, added costs to the gas companies for those refineries and that supply chain. And now we've got two refineries that
are closing down in California. That's going to lead in twenty twenty six they're gonna be parts of California that are going to be paying over eight dollars a gallon for gas. Why. Well, because Gavin Newsom passed a stupid los saying that refineries had to maintain a certain artificially high level of gasoline at all times in order to avoid price spikes, which the gas companies told him. That's incredibly difficult for us to do. That's going to be
very expensive for us to do. You're just going to permanently keep prices high, and maybe we make the business decision that we're not going to maintain refineries in California as many of our refineries in California anymore, because it costs us a lot of money to maintain these refineries. It's like three hundred million dollars a year for maintaining them. And if we're not going to make enough money, we're
just gonna shut these refineries down. And new some sort of decided to play chicken with them and lost got run over by the truck. The refineries are moving out of California, and now our gas prices are going to go up enormously because we won't have as many refineries. Supply will be down, demand will still stay where it is, cost will go up, all right, So on the one but that's the thing, so we know exactly how to
fix the problem with gas. Just replace all of our body of environmental regulation that we have on gasoline and replace it with Oklahoma's body of regulations, replace it with Oregon's body of regulations. If you want a blue state, to make yourself feel better, like it's not hard, it's not rocket science. That's how you would lower gas prices in California, make us not a gas island anymore. But
we don't do it. We don't do it because it would anger the environmentalists and it would anger their billionaire donors. So there's a part of me that says, I don't care if Kamala Harris or Shmamala Harris runs for governor of California. Kamala Harris won't fix that problem. She won't fix that problem unless she's willing to anger all of the donors who put into office, Unless she's willing to
anger this key political constituency of the environmentalist. They don't have a lot of votes, but they have a ton of money. Unless she's willing to tick them all off early on in her time in office. And if she's going to run for governor, she's gonna have to work with these people for eight years. Unless she does that, the problem of high gas prices won't be solved. And I don't think she's got the political conviction or courage to really do that. I don't think any Democrat has
the political courage and conviction to do that. Javier Basera has pretty much said so Javierbsera, who's running for governor California, the former HHS secretary, former Attorney General of California, he has pretty much just said when he was directly asked in an interview in Los Angeles on a local TV news station down there, if you're elected governor, you know, what would you do differently from the prior to governors and specifically talking about like cost of living and stuff,
and he refused to say any specific policy he would do differently. He just said he would gather a bunch of experts together, put all their ideas on the table, and then he kept using the metaphor that he would scrub out their ideas and use whatever the best idea remaining was, scrub it out. I don't know that metaphor, I don't think makes a ton of sense. So basically what Bisarah admitted was I'm going to do what other
people tell me to do. I'm going to do what quote the experts tell me to do, and presumably environmentalists would be the experts if he's trying to figure out what he's going to do about high gas prices. So I don't think it matters. I don't think any governor of any Democrat governor of California, if they are beholden to environmentalists and they're billionaire donors, which they will be, I don't think I think any Democrat is going to
do that. So that's my on the one hand. Here's my on the other hand, though, with these same big time donors. Okay, whom do Democrat politicians fear, rank and file members of the Assembly and State Senate, the governor. Whom do they fear from the environmentalist side. They don't really fear the environmentalist groups themselves. I think whom they actually fear are the big time donors who give to
the environmentalist groups. That's what they're afraid of. And at a certain point, problems in California might just get so large that even those people will eventually say, all right, all right, you can change this. Like this is going to cause a disaster, all right, you can change it. We're seeing an example of this right now. The California State Assembly just passed AB six zero nine, a bill introduced by Buffy Wicks, who's a Democrat Assembly member from Oakland,
to basically amend SEQUA the California Environmental Quality Act. The California Environmental Quality Act was passed by Ronald Reagan, but has been maintained by generations of Democrat politicians and Democrat and liberal activists who have weaponized it to stop construction on anything they don't like, anything that might, maybe, somehow
possibly result in more emissions. The most ridiculous example of it I ever saw was that in the town of Pixley, California, a left wing nonprofit group used SEQUA to stop the construction of a green energy, zero emissions hydrogen power plant on the grounds that it would bring too much truck traffic to Pixley, which I don't know if you've ever driven through Pixley, but all it is is truck traffic.
It's a pit stop on the ninety nine. They are about the whole I don't know that there's a single part of the town that's more than a quarter mile away from a half mile away from the ninety nine. There are about one hundred million trucks driving through large portions of Pixley every single day. And the idea that oh, a few trucks will park there to drop off hydrogen for this power plant, and oh, will that'll that's what's going to really deteriorate the environment, the air quality around Pixley.
Give me a break anyway. Anyway, Buffy Wicks introduced this bill to a mend SEQUA basically to say we're going to not require SEQUA and sequa's requirements for SEQUA has all these requirements that basically, if you're starting a new construction project, you have to create a very very large, very costly, very elaborate environmental impact report, and you prepare it, you submit it, it has to get approved, and then still other people can fly in to sue you to say
that your environmental impact report is inadequate. So it's a major hindrance to construction, not only because it's very expensive and takes a really long time bunch of lawyers to make the environmental impact report, but you have this huge litigation threat that can stop your whole construction project, your whole housing development, your whole warehouse that you're building, whatever, it can stop it cold because of one Yahoo left wing nonprofit group flying in to say that this is
going to have a harmful environmental impact. So Buffy Wicks introduces this bill. Finally, a Democrat from Oakland introduces a bill to say, hey, let's not require this for urban infill housing. So an urban area, you're in the middle of a city, you have a vacant lot, You're just doing an infill of a vacant lot. You're not expanding the boundaries of the city or going out into suburbs or anything. You're putting in housing in an area that's
already surrounded by development. Which, for some reason, somehow, the research has come around to say that maybe that's not actually environmentally harmful. I don't know how that works. Maybe this is just the left rationalizing things. It just passed that bill just past the California State Assembly sixty three to nothing, with the Republicans joining in and obviously a
ton of Democrats joining it. Just to note, Democrats have sixty of the eighty seats in the California State Assembly, and I can't wait to see the Democrats all just
erupting into rocket applause over Oh this is. It's so brave of the Democrats to decide to change their position and decide to you know, think more progressively about about this issue and not not be locked into the dogmas of the past and agree to reforming SEQUA in an environmentally responsible way, and everyone's gonna pat them and Newsome's gonna sign it, and he's gonna be all of his teeth and all of his veneers, and all of his teeth on top of his veneers, on top of his teeth,
on top of his veneers, smiling for the camera. Oh see, I'm a moderate time guy should run for president. And everyone's gonna tear their rotator cuffs, patting themselves on the back for doing something that Republicans have been screaming at them to do for twenty years, Like this is not rocket science. Republicans have been saying the SEQUA is a horrible, disastrous impediment to development for forever. But oh, all of a sudden, when Democrats do it, Oh, now it's environmentally responsible.
But even then they have to put this facade on this veneer on the oh that we're doing this environmentally responsibly. Now, that's maybe the only case for why Kamala Harris or any other Democratic governor might be successful. California will eventually be confronted by these horrible, insurmountable problems, and the problems
are all a creation. So many of the problems have their roots in Democrat policies, and eventually they'll be faced with the impossibility of us carrying on with those policies.
Democrats will eventually get the okay from their brokers for some of these things, for Democrats to change course on some of those policies, but it'll only be when those groups give them permission, and to the extent that those groups give them permission, and those groups might not always give them permission or all the way give them permission. So that's why I don't really see Kamala Harris as being anything special, especially good or especially bad. Relative. I mean,
I think she's pretty bad. I think she's sort of I don't know that she's even as politically savvy or competent as Gavin Newsom is. Gavin Newsom has been a failure, not because he's an inept person necessarily, although I think he does kind of hate being governor and I think he's tired of the job. Newsom has been ineffective because he embraces all of these bad policies that are forced
on him by the powers that be. You can see Newsom straining to get away from some of those policies on certain things, he's trying to get more water delivery to southern California, which is right in the current budget. He's trying to get more water delivery to southern California. Hmm. What could that be in response to maybe the horrible wildfires where they didn't have enough water to put it
out and environmentalists are all ticked off at him for it. So, at any rate, I don't think Harris running or not matters that much because she's certainly not going to be anything impressive. She's not going to have the political courage to actually refute reject the dictates that come to her from the big time Democrat power brokers. When we return, has the Biden news kind of cooked Harris's chances of
being president? Next on the John Girardi Show, here's a question I'm wondering about the Biden, the various Biden scandals and Kamala Harris. What did she know and when did she know it? And how that could impact her kind of desire possibly to run for president in twenty twenty eight. Let's recall the three options that are before Kamala Harris right now, and all this different reporting is all affirming
the same thing. This was kind of in the news before the Jake Tapper book got released and the Biden cancer diagnosis got released, that Harris Harris is struggling. Harris is internally struggling. It sounds like she's got analysis paralysis. I don't know why it would take her this long to figure it out, but that's just me. Harris is the struggling between three options. Run for governor of California, run for president in twenty twenty eight, or take a
step back from politics altogether. With all this Biden news coming out and the left beginning to acknowledge it, and the left is still insisting on calling it a cover up, which which I hate. The phrase cover up cover up implies that no one everyone was duped, everyone was deceived, no one could have no one could have discovered it because of how expertly they hid. Oh, we were all here, we are here, we were all thinking. All of us here were thinking Biden was so sharp, and they just
deceptively lied to us. So we no sixty percent of the country thought he was too old, like a super majority of the country saw it with their own eyes, and the media was so politically blinded by their desire for Trump to lose and for Biden therefore not to
be bad, not to be in a bad way. That they just refused to acknowledge it, and they refused to investigate it when when the signs were like right there in front of them, including the her report, that the her transcript from Biden's interview with specially counsel Robert Heart, et cetera. And it makes me wonder, how does Kamala Harris fit into that if she runs for twenty twenty eight for office in twenty twenty eight, how many people on that debate stage you're gonna look at her and say, well,
where the heck were you? Why weren't you initiating if he was in such a bad way, why didn't you initiate twenty fifth Amendment proceedings? Did you know he had cancer? Did you know he was senile? Surely you interacted with him. You must have seen something that's gonna be hard for her. All right, when we return, I want to envision the hypothetical twenty twenty eight Democrat primary debate stage with Kamala Harris Gavin Newsom, and we'll have some neutral, aggressive, non
Biden person as a third party, maybe Josh Shapiro. I want to imagine what that's going to look like, and that'll be next on the show. I want to envision. I want to put the image in your in front of you. It's late in twenty twenty seven, maybe like December twenty twenty seven. It's the Democrat primary debate stage. We're hosting a Democratic Party primary. It's MSNBC or CNN or something. And we got a whole cast of characters there. We got we got Mayor Pete. We got Pete Budhagig
up there. We got Josh Shapiro up there. We've got who else? Who else do we got? Maybe we got Gretchen Whitmer up there. We'll have someone who has no business being up there. Maybe we get I don't know, Katie Porter's up there, or someone ridiculous. And then we've got the two stars of the proceedings, maybe two or three stars of the proceedings. We got Josh Shapiro. And then we get Gavin Newsome and Kamala Harris there in
the middle, all the spotlights shining on them. Now, if you're Josh Shapiro, and I have no great love for Josh Shapiro, A lot of people joke that he's kind of white Obama basically that he seems to have robbed, basically shamelessly stolen President Obama's speaking style from him, and just he's basically just trying to do an elaborate Barack Obama impression as a white guy. So and he's been
pretty successful as a governor. I think he I mean, he's he got elected as governor of Pennsylvania, a state that Trump won. He I think made a good impression for himself as governor of Pennsylvania by how he received bonded to the shooting in Butler when President Trump was almost, you know, one inch away from being assassinated. I think he responded to that very well and in a very appropriate way, and that left a kind of a good
taste in a lot of people's mouths. And I think he's I think he is well positioned to have kind of broad appeal, more so than pretty much any other Democrat. I don't think he's got kind of the negatives that like Gretchen Whitmer has or that Bodagich has, And I think he's actually might have some kind of bipartisan appeal. And he's the governor of the most important swing state
in the Union. I think Democrats are probably still scratching their heads on why Kamala Harris decided to get the governor of Minnesota, a state that was not really in question, a state that she was never at jeopardy of losing over Shapiro. And the answer a lot of people have, the conclusion a lot of people jump to is that Harris was so insecure that she didn't want a vice president who would out Shiner. And certainly Tim Walls did not out Shiner, that's for sure. Now let's go on
the let's go on here. Here we are on the debate stage, and Josh Shapiro turns to Kamala Harris, and you know, no love lost there, probably for not picking him to be a vice president. And this guy wants to be president of the United States. He's ambitious. And the critical thing is that someone like Josh Shapiro, he wasn't in the Biden administration. He wasn't in the Biden cabinet. Pete Boodagi can't make this complaint because Pete was Secretary
of Transportation. Presumably he was supposed to have met with Biden at least occasionally. Pete doesn't have this, you know, standing to do this, but Josh Shapiro does. Shapiro turns to Kamala Harris and he says, hey, Kamala, you were the vice president of the United States. Everyone now knows that Biden was senile, and we now have very serious reason to suspect he had cancer. Did you know, If you know, why didn't you say anything? If you knew,
why didn't you initiate the twenty fifth Amendment proceedings? So the twenty fifth Amendment, the vice president can uniquely herself initiate twenty fifth Amendment proceedings by convening the rest of the cabinet and to have the cabinet vote that the president is not qualified to do his job. Harris never did that. She never did that, even after Biden dropped out.
She I mean, Biden dropped out of the presidential contest purportedly on the grounds that he wasn't quite I mean, the understood reason was that he wasn't sharp enough to still run for president. But for some reason, he was still sharp enough to be president. And so now Harris has to ask answer these questions, how can you with a straight face tell us that you were the vice president and you didn't know because I mean, the cat's out of the bag now and it's now a pretty
much bipartisan position. No one needs to defend Biden anymore. That's why these books are coming out now, because Biden is not politically important anymore. Biden is a politically expendable person. At this point, Jake Tapper can all of a sudden develop the courage to talk about how what a horrible person Hunter Biden is and what a you know, how irresponsible Joe Biden was, and oh, now we've discovered how they knew. They knew all along that he was senile.
Anyone with eyes to see k who he was senile. They just refused to investigate it because they didn't want to know. But Josh Shapiro doesn't. He has no that he is in no way harmed by just totally trashing Joe Biden. And importantly, Harris is gonna be like, it's probably I guess her and Buddha jij are gonna be like the two people still up there who have to in some way defend Biden still, because if Harris is up there and says, yep, Biden was totally senile and
that's why I lost, and he hid it from me. Well, she's still gonna look like a n income poop. You were the vice president of the United States. You didn't know that the president was senile? How often were you meeting with him? We all saw it just seeing him on TV? Did you not see it? You must have seen it. You had way more in person meetings with him than we did. You saw it. Why didn't you
do anything? I don't know how Harris is gonna answer those questions on an actual, competitive, hostile debate stage, because remember she just got anointed at the Democratic Convention last year. She was anointed, she didn't have to actually debate anybody. They didn't have an open convention process where other people could have realistically thrown their hat, and she managed to just suck up all the delegates in advance until there
was no point. But that's not going to be the case in you know, in December twenty twenty seven, when she's standing on that debate stage and she's going to be looking around, and Josh Shapiro's going to be right there, going, hey, why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you do anything? Are you going to sit here and tell us that you really thought in your meetings with him in private that we didn't see. You thought he was really sharp,
and that's why you didn't initiate those proceedings. And even after the debate, when he dropped out and let you run for president, you still didn't think he was too old for his job, and you'd refuse to do any You refuse to initiate the twenty fifth Amendment then, because nobody's gonna again by the time we get to twenty twenty seven. If you've got someone who wasn't in the Biden administration running like Josh Shapiro, he's not gonna He'll have no reason to hold back. What does he care
if he offends Joe Biden. Joe Biden's out of power. Joe Biden's probably gonna be dead by twenty I don't know. Probably there's a good chance Biden's gonna be dead by twenty twenty seven. So Josh Shapiro is gonna rip her or whoever else, I mean, pick your other person. It could be Gretchen Whitmer, it could be anyone else who wasn't in the Biden administration could make this line of attack on Kamala Harris, and I don't know how she's
gonna answer it. You know, Harris had plenty of time to prepare for other kinds of similar difficult questions during the twenty twenty eight during the twenty twenty four campaign, and was not prepared. That seems to be a recurring problem with her in twenty twenty four. You know, they asked her so on on a friendly I think it was on the View. They asked, so, what would you have done differently from Biden over the last four years? And it's that nothing comes to mind. Nothing comes to mind,
that's your answer. So then the the Republicans were like, well, fantastic, we were beating Biden back when the main issues were you know, inflation and all that. And she just said, she just said on the View she wouldn't have done anything differently. They cleaned her clock. So I don't know how on a hostile Democrat debate stage she can answer
those questions well. And then the focus will turn to Gavin Newsom, both of our California The greatest flowers growing, the two greatest blossoms growing on the Willie Brown Tree of political influence, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, Gavin, if he has the temerity to speak up about anything, well, then have everyone turned to him? Maybe even Kamala will turn to him viciously and say, ooh, who the heck
are you to criticize anyone for anything? Every problem that California had when you entered as governor, And we're not talking about like partisan liberal conservative things. We're talking like objective problems. The high speed rail train isn't built, Homelessness is in a bad way. We keep having these terrible wildfires. We aren't building enough housing, cost of living is too high, energy prices are too high, Gas prices are too high.
All of those things that were problems in twenty eighteen when you ran for governor are still crippling problems for California in twenty twenty seven. On top when this hypothetical debate takes place, on top of all of that, the state's finances are actually worse than what you inherited, Gavin Newsom from Jerry Brown, Now, we're running these structural ten to twelve billion dollar deficits every single year. So why
exactly do you think you should run for president? Other than your tall and you have good hair and nice Veneers. What are you doing? You have accomplished, you have been by any objective measurement, and I am trying to be objected. Even your signature achievement of expanding health insurance for everyone in California, you had to roll it back in embarrassingly disastrous fashion in twenty twenty five because it coused way
unsustainably more than you anticipated it would. You've had to roll back your signature program of expanding medical coverage to all Californians. You did that, you improvidently expanded it, and you had to shamefacedly roll it back. So who are you to criticize anybody for anything? Who are you to promote yourself to be got? How dare you even try to run for president? Gavin Newsom and then everyone's going
to make fun of him for the podcast? Oh why don't you get another Republican white guy on your podcast to discuss it? Gavin Gavin? Oh gosh, the Democrats are just gonna rip him a new one. And that's what
I I really anticipate. I don't know that Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris are going to be the nominee for president in twenty twenty eight even if Harris decides to run in twenty and by the way, all of this scenario, this might be why Harris ultimately decides to run for governor in twenty twenty six, because she's not gonna face that if she runs for governor. No one's gonna challenge her like that if she runs for governor. She runs for governor, she's gonna have such a name recognition advantage
she can just ignore that kind of stuff. She's not gonna if she doesn't want a debate, she won't even have to debate. She'll just crush whoever's in her path. And those are the kinds of elections Harris likes. She likes just being the anointed savior who doesn't actually face a very particularly challenging election. Those are the only kinds of elections she's ever won. Frankly, when we return, is James Comy funny or relevant the curious decisions of late
night comedian hosts? Next on The John Girardi Show. I don't know how many of you have followed the particularly
stupid story about James Comy. James Comy, the former director of the FBI who deliberately tried to set up a situation to get President Trump impeached and removed on the specious grounds that he was somehow an agent of the Russians as soon as Trump took office, was trying to set up stuff in meetings to spy on him, to try to cook up a story to help him get impeached, and clearly was deceptive and has not really covered himself
in glory in retrospect in any respect. So James Comey, the former director of the FBI, he's now taken to just sort of being a social media liberal hashtag resistance anti Trump gadfly, and he posted about a week or so ago, Oh my wife was walking down the beach and saw an interesting political message and it was the numbers eighty six forty seven now to eighty six something means. It's often used in restaurants to mean get rid of it, take it off the menu, stop serving it because we
ran out of that food. Get rid of it. There's some thoughts that that could also mean, like assassinate or take out. And people are after he posted it, people were kind of like, what the heck is the former director of the FBI is the former director of the FBI like saying we should take out the forty seventh President of the United States, Donald Trump? Should we take him out? And you know Donald Trump, who has had two assassination attempts against him foil one wasn't really foiled.
The guy got a shot off and shot his ear off. Why is the former is the former director of the FBI does not understand that that's how that could be imployed. And also it just seems like complete bologny that, oh, I just happened to see this. He had like also a year or two prior, had posted a picture again at the beach of someone with a seashell that said Kamala twenty twenty four. It's like, oh, how interesting that
James Comy keeps finding out whatever beach he's at. I don't know where he is, Delaware, So it must be nice being a former FBI director. I guess you could a beach house that you see all these political messages embedded in the ocean. So all right. Stephen Colbert, the host of CBS's late night comedy show, brings on James Comy as a guest over this thing. And I guess I just got asked the question. I know Stephen Colbert is a big fat liberal. I know that he talks
a lot about politics. What about James Comy makes you think, Aha, this guy's a barrel of laughs. The guy is like a he's a wooden board. He's a stiff. He's not particularly funny. And that's what I don't get about that this huge like political turn that like Colbert has taken, is that really funny? I mean, I guess it's got him good ratings against the other late night hosts, so I guess it works. But anyway, that'll do it. John Girardi Show, See you next time. I'm Power Talk