Why Katie Porter & Other Democrats Are Bad at Interviews

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I don't know if anyone wants to win the California governorship.
And Katie Porter yesterday had two different videos leaked showing
her being just wildly unpleasant. Now it's been no secret
that Katie Porter, former member of the House of Representatives

(00:21):
who represented Orange County, it's been no secret that she's
not the nicest person in the world. She got kind
of some degree of viral attention during her relatively short
stint as a member of the House of Representatives. Among

(00:42):
Elizabeth Warren loves her to death, helped her with fundraising.
But for this kind of girl boss attitude. I think
it was during I forget what it was. Maybe it
was during a Trump State of the Union or something.
She was reading this book, this book that's entitled The
Subtle Art of Not Giving a f There are all

(01:03):
these like self help books that have curse words in
the title, and it's just slop produced for I don't know,
bored millennial women or something. Anyway, she had a couple
of stunts like that that got her some degree of
attention and favor from the sorts of people who use
Blue Sky nowadays as their preferred social media app. Super

(01:27):
hardcore left wing resistance types who somehow found her shtick enduring,
But it then came out that she's kind of a
monster to people who work for She yells, she screams
at her staff, some story about her throwing a bowl
of mashed potatoes at a staff.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Member, and.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
She had yesterday two different videos of her leaked of
her just being a total jerk on camera, refusing.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
To do an interview with a sack, a very.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Non confrontational interview that she turned confrontational with a local
I believe it was a local CBS affiliate in Sacramento.
And then what appeared to be some kind of like
DNC like pre recorded video thing about electric vehicles, where
in this particular video production she has a staffer who

(02:23):
you can see it's clearly designed, it was something that
was filmed during at the height of COVID. It's in
her house. You can briefly see her staffer's head in
the background. The staffer then comes back in to tell her, Hey, no, no,
you got this stat wrong that you're saying, and she
screams at this woman, get out of my effin shot,

(02:45):
like screaming at her, which it seems to be like
why is this.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Stuff being leaked.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
I think it's being leaked because there's staff hates her,
and there's all.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
These different stories sort of flying around about.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
How unpleasant she and it's just remarkable to me how
the job is just ripe for the picking, Like it's
the governorship of the most populous state in the Union,
and nobody prominent wants it.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
The most prominent person.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Who is running for it, I guess, is Javier Bessera,
who was the former Health and Human Services Secretary and
had been Attorney General of California. He's not doing that
well though. I mean, as soon as he announced, he
had this disaster interview where they asked him, hey, what
would you do that's different from Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown?
And his response was, I'll ask a bunch of experts,

(03:45):
And he had absolutely no opinions of his own about
what he would actually do as governor of California. Sort
of showed how totally wooden he was, and I wonder
if that sort.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Of dried up support for him.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
But now with this little mishap, I don't know how
Katie Porter's gonna survive much longer.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
I mean, she's just so wildly unlikable.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Jeff Blahar, writing for National Review, has a piece about
it that's funny. He talks about how Katie Porter jumped
into the field early, announcing her candidacy this past March
for governor of California, which, by the way, the reason
why Katie Porter is running for governor is because she
can't really run for her House seat again. Her House

(04:30):
seat was very much a swing seat. It's now, I believe,
held by a Republican. It's this Orange County seat, so
Orange County like trending more liberal, but still has a decent.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Number of Republicans in it.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
And it's basically, I think it's a thing basically of
she has a better chance if she winds up being
the Democrat. Her chance of winning the governorship is actually
going to be easier than winning back her House seat. Anyway,
she jumped in March twenty twenty five. That early start
payd off for Porter, who currently leads a divided primary

(05:02):
field also populated by former HHS Secretary Hobvier, but Sarah
Lieutenant Governor Elenni Kunelakis, former Los Angeles mayor Tony vie Rigoso,
Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, a Republican and six other
guys you've never heard of. Her lead is not commanding, however,
and is due primarily to name recognition as a former
congresswoman from the populous Los Angeles suburbs Orange County. Porter's

(05:25):
name recognition is about to spike even higher with California voters,
but for reasons she would desperately not prefer. Near the
end of September, Porter sat down with CBS News's California
based correspondent Julie Watts for a candidate interview, part of
a series of them CBS was conducting with all the contenders,
and the video aired only last night. Now California voters
know a lot more about Porter because she melted down

(05:46):
in spectacular fashion on camera and terminated the interview abruptly.
Settle in readers, this one will take some time to
properly appreciate. The interview began with Watts querrying Porter about
the recent move by Gavin Newsom and state Democrats legislators
to redistrict Republican congressmen out of their seats in retaliation
for the redrawing of other red state legislative maps.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
So this is Prop fifty.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
Watts fatefully misspoke on her very first question, ensuring there
would not be a second, what do you say to
the forty percent of California voters who you'll need in
order to win who voted for Trump? Needless to say,
it is tautologically false that you need the support of
the losing Parti's voters to win, But candidates aren't supposed
to say things like, ha, we live in a one

(06:30):
party state, so it doesn't matter what Trump voters think.
Watts was actually attempting to pose a simple challenge to
the would be governor, As she later made clear many times,
what do you say to the forty percent of Californians
you are seeking to federally disenfranchise? Can you reassure non
Democratic voters that you will govern them with understanding and sympathy.
Any competent candidate has an answer for a question like this,

(06:52):
because it's so frequently asked a variant on we may
not share the same party, but we share the same
basic human needs, and I will work for you on
the most important level, on that most important of levels.
But Katie Porter is not a competent candidate and apparently
has never sat through a remotely adversarial interview In her life.
This is this is, this is dead on. When porter

(07:16):
got asked this, what do you think about the forty
percent of Republican of Republicans in the state whose votes
you might need? She got super angry and glared at
this interview and said, how would I need them in
order to win?

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Ma'am? Then she turns to mug for the camera with
that can you believe this idiot? Shrug? Now she spends
the next.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
Several minutes just submarining the interview, getting angry at everything.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
The reporter says, and this is the thing.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
She's a she's a bad candidate. And I think a
lot of California politicians are actually pretty darn bad. Why
this is my theory about California politicians. How do you
win statewide office in California? You don't win it on
the strength of being a good debater or a good interviewer.

(08:20):
You typically win it on the basis of campaign ads.
If you have more money, because and especially someone from
southern California, to get your name out there, to get votes,
to get voter recognition, name recognition, you have to get

(08:42):
television ad buys. And to get a television ad buy
in the LATV media market is hugely expensive, so that
winds up being your chief mode of messaging. So as
a result, I think a lot of California politicians just

(09:03):
are not good at thinking on their feet and doing
interviews well. Like Javier Basserra was a train wreck in
an interview a couple months ago when he announced his candidacy.
Porter is a train wreck during this interview, and it
wasn't a very hostile interview like it was.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
It was whatever.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
The interviewer asked a couple of bonehead questions, but a
normal human being could have dealt with it. She's not
a normal human being because they're so used to just
having television ads do the heavy lifting for them. I
think a lot of smaller states they're politicians still. And

(09:44):
by smaller states, I don't mean like Wyoming. I mean
like even like a state like Ohio or Wisconsin or something.
I think you still need to do more like debates
and public appearances and interviews with local news like that
stuff matters more. Californ His population, though, is so huge,
so widespread, that it turns into just who can pay

(10:06):
for the most television ads, especially for LA based politicians
like Porter or in her case, Orange County. So I
think they're just bad at talking, or they don't get
the reps. I mean the greatest example of this is
Kamala Harris, who made it all the way to the
vice presidency while being incapable of talking, like like she

(10:28):
just did. Harris just did a sit down interview with
Rachel Maddow. Who of all people, I mean, of all people,
Kamala Harris doing a sit down interview with Rachel Maddow,
that's not going to be an adversarial interview.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
Mattow asks her one kind of tough question.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
Hey, in your book, you said you didn't pick Pete
Boudageest to be your vice presidential running mate because he's gay.
That's kind of hard for me as a gay woman.
Rachel Maddow is a lesbian. Kind of hard for me
to hear that. And Harris couldn't really answer it, like
she's tripping and falling all over herself. Like, Harris managed
to become a US Senator, the Attorney General of California,

(11:12):
US senator representing California, and was incapable of talking, incapable
of sitting down for an interview, gaffed her way through
her short.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Presidential campaign.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
I think a lot of these California politicians are just bad.
They're just not that good at sitting down and talking
and interviewing. Newsom's maybe the one exception. I mean, Newsom
is glib and fly and savvy, but a lot of
these California politicians just stink. It's like that they are

(11:52):
bad at sitting down and talking to people and interacting
like human beings. So as bad as this Katie Porter
interview is, I don't know what's gonna result. It's it
sounds like she's at around twenty three percent. When you

(12:15):
have all the candidates laid out, She's got about twenty
three percent of the vote. Most of the other candidates
have about five percent of the vote. I don't know
what's gonna happen. I mean, these two video clips getting
released on the same day, which seems like her staff
exacting their revenge for years of her yelling at.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
Them and being a total you know what.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
That's not gonna help. Maybe that sinks her chances. And
it's really funny because she has this statement she released saying,
you know, I have a very high standard for myself
and my staff, which is like the exact kind of
thing A jerk would say, like, as if you yelling
and throwing curse words at your staff equals a high standard.

(13:00):
This ain't the Marine Corps, Like, no one needs to
do that in an office environment, Like get real, Yelling
and screaming at people and tossing f words at them
isn't a manda, isn't required for a high standard. And
she said, I have made a conscious effort to be

(13:20):
more grateful and appreciative to my staff or their many contributions.
Blah blah, blah, blah blah, which was the exact same
canned response she gave two years ago for a similar
story breaking about how she was mean and awful and
terrible to her staff. So it's kind of hilarious to
me how she now has it not a great look
that she has a canned response that's ready for any

(13:44):
time a news story emerges about what a monster she
is to work for.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
And I guess I'll.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Conclude with it before we get to more thoughts on
whose actually is someone actually going to take this California
governorship race by the throat? Oh, the mashed potatoes thing
was she put? She dumped scalding hot mashed potatoes on
her husband's head.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
They are now divorced.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Yeah, what is this personality type that Democrats are Like, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
Mean.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
Middle aged and older women where you've got people like
Katie Porter, Amy Klobashar, the Senator from Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren.
Where it's this weird thing where there's a certain segment
of Democrat voters who think that that kind of attitude,

(14:49):
these kind of women politicians who've got an edge that
they think is like fun and cool and cutting and
not taking note crap from knowing, and they sort of
think that this is like an appealing personality, when for
any male voter, this is so far from being an

(15:13):
appealing personality, Like this is the kind of person that
when they approach you, like for a lot of male voters,
they're basically ready to jump off a cliff at the
very sight of them, like it's so great. And if
you want to say this is men being sexist, all right,
you can you can continue to lose elections, going down

(15:37):
with the ship saying we're.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
All the saying cake because you're a sexist, Like this
is not an appealing personality.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
It turns off huge numbers of male voters, and it's
not every woman politician.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Lots of female politicians, including like.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
Liberal female politicians, don't have this precise personality type this
Elizabeth Warren, Katie Porter, Amy.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Klobashar sort of girl body.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
Like It's it's not every single liberal politician even who's
like this. And there's almost this thought that you're a
jerk for being for pointing out when Katie Porter is
a monster to her staff members, because well, male bosses

(16:28):
yell at their staff members and people don't have the
same expectation or the same thing with regard to them. Well, one,
I'm not sure that that's true. Two, it doesn't make
what she's doing good or somehow Okay, that's what we

(16:48):
call the two quoque logical fallacy. Will you do the
same thing okay, yeah, but that doesn't justify that you're
doing this thing, or it doesn't make you're doing this
same thing good. Jeff Blahart in National Review Rights. Porter
was politically mentored by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, which is
fitting both carry themselves like Dolores Umbridge, as well as

(17:12):
deeply ironic given that Warren is well liked by her
staff and Porter was famously loathed by hers. So Warren
isn't quite that way. I guess, I don't know, but
there's this sort of like, yes, this embrace of the left,
of these sort of shrieking older harpies of strident liberalism.

(17:38):
And it's also this like, you know, the expectation from
Democrat politicians that the press will never ask them a
tough question, like oh, like Porter is like genuinely offended
that a reporter would ask her something slightly difficult.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
I guess that's the other personality trait here, all right.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
When we returned, the California governor's race is just dying
for someone actually to win it.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
Next on the Johnewardy Show.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
The California Governor's race is just dying for someone to
actually win it, like like for someone to actually want
to win it. Every Democrat who's entered the race is
either a nobody that someone that nobody's heard of, or
feels like a total has been or is actively, like

(18:26):
sub actively sabotaging their own campaign. Porter gets in and
actively sabotaging it by being a jerk for a CBS
interview video coming, and has been such a jerk to
her staff over the years that all of a sudden,
all these videos get leaked of her being a huge

(18:46):
jerk to people. You've got Javier Bessera, who jumped into
the race and immediately looked like the biggest stiff who's
ever walked the face of the earth, like repeatedly asked
by this reporter from LA like, what would you do
differently from the prior to governors? You know we've had

(19:09):
Democrat governors for fifteen years, whatever, what would you do differently?
You know we have all these continuing problems in California
with home, with housing and homelessness. What would you do differently?
And but Sarah just refuses to answer the question. He says,
I would just get a bunch of experts together and
listen to their ideas, which is like, okay, why don't

(19:30):
we elect one of the experts.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
What are you doing? You don't have a single idea
in your head for what to do.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
And he's sitting there like with just slogan after slogan
after slogan after slogan, absolutely not answering the question. He
seems like just a complete cardboard box. So he's not
getting anyone excited. Porter had the lead. I think just

(19:58):
based on name recognition, I'm I'm not sure how that's
gonna work out after these videos have come out.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Now you've got.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
I mean, you have Antonio Viaregosa in the race, who's
kind of a has been. He keeps trying to run
for governor of California. Everyone kind of keeps telling him, No,
I don't know what he did to tick off Democrat donors,
but no, I feel like the Democrat donor class is
sort of not sure what they're gonna do. And just

(20:27):
you know, long and short, Democrats win this state. They
win statewide elections because they are anointed as the winners
by the Democrat donor class. In order to win, you
need name recognition. For name recognition, you need television ad buys,
and television ad buys, particularly in the Los Angeles market,

(20:47):
are crazy expensive. So if you've got all of the
big Democrat money lined up behind you, you will win.
And a lot of that Democrat money is based in
San Francisco, and I think that's part of why a
lot of our governors and statewide folks have been from
the Bay Area. I mean, if you look at it,

(21:08):
it's Harris, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, it's all these people
connected to Northern California. Politic it's not as much Southern
California politics. And there's just nobody kind of like that
right now in the governor's race. You know, Elenni Kunelakis
is not that person. She has like no name recognition

(21:30):
as the lieutenant governor. Katie Porter has some name recognition,
but she's sort of this Orange County person. She's not
from that particular circle of Democrat money. She's submarining herself.
Xavier Bessera seems like he should be that person, but
maybe his personality is so wooden and his name recognition

(21:50):
is relatively poor for relatively poor for a guy who
had a very prominent position in the Biden administration HHS
secretary and he was a former attorney general, so he's
one statewide office before.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
But for some reason he's just not catching on.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
He's gotten less name recognition than Katie Porter, bizarrely, even
though she was just a congresswoman from one part of
the state. The whole thing feels like it's desperate for
someone to step in and actually take this thing by
the throat and win it. And I do wonder if
the rumors about Alex Padilla are true. So Alex Padilla

(22:29):
is currently the US Senator representing California. There's some speculation
he might jump into the governor's race. Maybe that's what
it's gonna be. I mean, he has been in a
lot of these anti these pro prop fifty ads. I
sort of wonder if that's the play. I think if
he jumps in, I think the donors like him. He

(22:51):
was Gavin Newsom's pick to fill the vacancy in the
US Senate that was created when Kamala Harris became Vice president.
So I don't know, maybe that's maybe that's what's gonna happen. Also,
then Padilla could if he wins the governorship, his Senate
seat will be vacated. He could appoint Gavin Newsom to it.

(23:12):
There's some thought that could happen. I don't know how
interested Newsom is in that. But in short, nobody is
taking this governor's race by the throat. Katie Porter could have,
but she's not a good politician, and I'm wondering if
the big time Democrat money is really gonna get behind

(23:34):
her if she's that lam Maybe I don't know, and
I don't know, maybe they're the Democrat powers that be
or running out of options. I mean, but Sarah is
totally wooden. Porter is totally unpleasant. I'm not sure what
it's gonna be, but I feel like there's there is.
This is a vac nature abhorrors a vacuum, and I

(23:57):
think this is a big time vacuum in the California
governor's race that's desperate for someone of greater significance than
the current field to jump in. When we return the
failure of plastic bag policies in Washington State and also California.
Next on the John Girardi Show, this is a great

(24:19):
little story about the plastic bag ban that took place
in Washington State, which I think is from my assessment
of it is identical to the plastic bag ban that
happened in California. Now, allow me to express, particularly as
a father of five kids, a married household of seven

(24:41):
people with an eighth on the way, we do a
lot of grocery shopping. Got to do a lot of grocery.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
Shopping to feed all these hungry mouths.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
And it's sort of when I moved back to California,
have my sort of before college and after college law school,
first two years worked not in California life, so I
have this kind of like California of my childhood and
then California of my adulthood. Way, I have this sort

(25:11):
of nine year gap where I wasn't in California all
the time. So and so the nine years being from
two thousand and six when I was a freshman to
twenty fifteen, when I finally moved back to California after
again college, law school, two years working in Massachusetts, so

(25:31):
twenty six to twenty fifteen. A lot of stuff changed
in California over the course of those nine years. One
of the things that changed pretty much right when I
came back or shortly after I came back, was this
shift by grocery stores, mandated by state law, from paper
and plastic to thicker plastic bags. Why what was the idea, Well,

(25:59):
the idea was that the thin plastic bags are bad
for the environment, which is weird because I don't know
why people didn't like paper bags. I always liked paper bags,
but I guess a lot of people don't because they
rip more easily, blah blah blah. So and I always
felt like grocery stores were pushing plastic more, even though

(26:19):
paper is actually totally recyclable and whatever. So paper versus plastic,
and the old thinner plastic bags have been almost entirely
replaced by the new current thicker plastic bags, which you
get charged for. And this was pushed by environmentalists. Basically,

(26:40):
the idea was, well, the thin plastic bags are really
bad for the environment. They don't really biodegrade, you can't
really recycle them, so let's get these thicker plastic bags
so that people will reuse them. And the thing is
people don't reuse them. It's hard to remember to reuse them.
It's hard to go to a grow. She's start, Okay,
I need to shop with the whole family. How many

(27:02):
bags do I bring? Five, six, seven, like like? And
then I have to basically rebag my own groceries when
I get there. It's hard to remember to do. And
also you can't really recycle them. It's very hard to
recycle them. You can't just put the If you could
just put grocery store plastic bags, the thicker plastic bags
that we currently.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Have, if you could just put them in your blue.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
Garbage can at your house, it would be great. I
would do it all the time, as I did for
years and years and years with paper bags and my
wife is This is a feature of my wife, whom
I love very dearly.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
She is a rule follower. She's a rule.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
Follower to a t, and she gets very worried about
the idea of what will happen if we don't follow
the rules, Like this is like.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
Our usage of the library is a great example.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
We've got five kids who all like reading books or
having books read to them.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
We check out.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
We our family might be like a top one percent
user of the county library system out of if you
survey all county residents, our family might be a top
one percent user of the library just because of how
many books our little homeschool readers are checking out, just constantly, constantly, constantly,
Holly checks out tons of stuff, especially for ebooks and

(28:29):
things like that.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
We're constantly checking out books.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
I think we might have checked out something like six
hundred books over the course of a year. And if
we lose one of them, my wife is like going insane,
Like she gets so and she's like, oh, but it's.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
Gonna oh, they're.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
Gonna do this, and it says here that'll impact your
credit scores. I'm like, I'm not gonna do anything to
our credit score.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
What the heck are you talking.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
Okay, we're gonna if we check out this many, we're
gonna lose a certain percentage of them.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
The library knows that. The library knows that out.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Of every x number of books that people check out
from the library, people lose a certain percentage of them.
And it's not because people are bad or it's just
gonna happen. It's okay, we're doing our best if we
can't find it after looking like, it's all right. My
wife is a real rule follower, so when these plastic

(29:24):
bags started emerging, she was like saving all of them
to finally go at some point to go to the
recycling place to recycle them, which we don't exactly know
what grocery stores will recycle them, where you have to
actually take them to recycle. So we have this just
enormous collection of plastic bags just building up, taking up
more and more space in our house. And eventually I

(29:45):
was like, honey, just throw them away, like forget it,
Like who knows that it's even getting really recycled anyway.
And that's what most people wind up doing because it's
very hard to recycle these things. It's hard to remember
to take them to the grocery store. It's hard to
plan your whole grocery trip around the idea of the
bags you're going to use.

Speaker 2 (30:05):
No one is reusing them, and as a result, what's happened.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
Here's a piece in National Review about it by a
guy named Jason Rantz. The humiliating failure of Washington State's
plastic bag ban. Washington State lawmakers promise that banning single
use plastic bags would reduce waste, conserve resources, and protect wildlife. Instead,
their virtue signaling law has produced a humiliating series of
unintended consequences that make the problem worse while sticking retailers

(30:32):
and customers with the bill. The state's own report admits
as much, and Washington State's law is pretty much exactly
the same as California's. According to the Washington State University
research team tasked with evaluating the law, the number of
plastic bags distributed in Washington fell by fifty percent between
twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two. However, during the
same time, totally plastic use by weight increased by seventeen percent.

(30:54):
Why according to the September twenty Why According to the
September twenty twenty five study findings. Because the new reusable
bags mandated by Olympia the capital of Washington, are four
times thicker and far heavier than the old ones. It's
precisely why the report recommends removing the thickness requirement on
carryout bags and allowing retailers to provide single use point
five mili milgram plastic bags for a pass through feet.

(31:20):
This is a staggering indictment of environmental activism. The state
banned thin plastic bags to fight waste, litter and marine pollution,
but instead created a system where more plastic, not less,
is now in circulation. As the report bluntly states, for
the single use plastic bag band to be effective in
reducing plastic use by weight, the number of plastic bags
distributed to customers on an annual basis would have to

(31:42):
fall by seventy eight percent. Instead, total plastic use by
weight has increased by an estimated seventeen percent from twenty
twenty one to twenty twenty two. So the idea from
liberals was, Okay, let's make the plastic bags thicker and
people will get fewer bags.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
And that'll reduce the amount of plastic waste.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
The problem is that the bags are so stink and
thick that even if you cut plastic bag usage in half,
you still have more plastic waste, and it costs too much.
Retailers are being crushed by costs too. The law forces
stores to charge eight cents per bag, but the eight

(32:21):
cents doesn't even cover the expense. A twenty twenty four
survey by the Northwest Grocery Retailers Association found paper bags
have an average cost of sixteen cents per bag to retailers,
and reusable plastic film bags have an average cost of
ten cents to thirty nine cents per bag. With the
mandated fee capped at eight cents, retailers are spending more

(32:42):
acquiring their bags from distributors than they can make back.
In other words, lawmakers handed grocery stores and small shops
a hidden tax they can't recover, and consumers aren't reusing
these heavier bags enough to justify their higher environmental costs.
The report site studies showing consumers typically do not reuse
their bags enough to compensate for the higher external costs

(33:02):
for production and distribution. The phenomenon is similar to that
being observed by New Jersey's bag band crusade, as detailed
by National Reviews. Noah Rothman, this is also going on
in California. Okay, this is exactly This is California's law.
I think we invented.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
This terrible idea.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
The transportation and emissions trade offs are equally embarrassing. Before
a palate can carry seventy two thousand single use bags,
now just two four hundred of the thicker ones. That
means more trucks on the road, more emissions, more inefficiency.
The report states clearly, transporting two point twenty five mil
reusable plastic bags is also less efficient, with fewer bags

(33:42):
fitting on each palate twenty four hundred usable bags perpellte
versus seventy two thousand single bags propellt yielding yielding.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Fewer bags per truckload.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
For the single use plastic bag band to be effective
in reducing plastic bag transportation costs and emissions, plastic bag
use has to fall by sixty relative to plastic bag
use pre ban.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Even this, recycling benefits are questionable.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
Washington's Department of Ecology survey found that while seventy one
percent of respondents report offering curbside recycling for paper bags,
only three percent offer curbside recycling opportunities for plastic carryout packs.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Thank you. This is the thing.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
If you want people to recycle, you've got to make
it somehow, somehow accessible for them.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
To do so.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
If I have to drive a big, long distance to
some place I'm not familiar with just just to drop
off things to recycle, that's another chore I have to do.
That's another errant. If I could just put it in
my blue garbage can, that's great, but no, can't do that.
Most of the thicker bags, as a result, end up

(34:52):
in the garbage or worse in the environment, where they
take longer to break down. Lawmakers built this house of
cards on political posturing rather than data the Commerce Department itself,
he concedes, the study was hamstrung. The contracted research team
was unable to obtain sufficient data on the quantities of
bags distributed, retail prices, or reuse rates within Washington to
effectively evaluate the laws impact. The report states, in other words,

(35:13):
they didn't know what they were doing, and they still don't.
This is the story of progressive governance in the Pacific Northwest.
And I will add in California, slogans over science, mandates
over markets and the inevitable, inevitable boomerang of unintended consequences.
Washington's bag band didn't save the planet. It just made
life harder, costlier, and dirtier. And of course Washington State

(35:35):
Commerce and ecology don't recommend reversing course.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
That's the other thing.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
These liberal environmentalists, they're wrong, They're loud wrong, And basically
their answer is, well, this would work if people would
just do what we tell them. Well, people like, what
are you going to do? How are you going to
force people to do this? People have lives to live
where the you know, environmental impact of a plastic bag is.
It's just not the most important thing in their lives.

(36:03):
They got a lot of other crap going on. When
we return the incredibly non interesting point of the military
takes an oath to the Constitution, not Donald Trump. Next
on the John Girardi Show, So a bunch of people
are very mad at President Trump for moving National Guard
troops from one state into another state.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
And it's an invasion of Illinois.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
That Texas National Guard are being put there, or invasion
of californ Oregon the California National Guard are being pulled there.
I don't think it's an invasion of any sort. These
people are being brought in for law enforcement purposes. The
president is the commander in chief of the military.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
Now. I don't know the specific details about legal.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Stuff regarding National Guard deployment, but for the most part,
the president has very broad latitude to deploy the military
for protecting federal assets. Now, this thing keeps getting said,
like Tom Nichols says this piece in The Atlantic all
about this, and people make this point as if it's significant.

Speaker 3 (37:10):
The military is the only thing outside of Donald Trump's grip.
The military. They don't take their oath to a president.
They take their oath to the Constitution. Now, first of all,
the military is not outside of Donald Trump's grip.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
He's the commander in chief. The Constitution itself says Trump's
the president's in charge, whoever that is, and right now
it happens to be Donald Trump. So no, it's not
outside of his grip. He can fire.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
People, he can.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, he's in charge of the military. Second, the fact
that they take their oath to the Constitution, not the president,
is true but not very meaningful. Yeah, they take their
oath to the Constitution, which sets up the president as
the guy in charge of the military, so they have

(37:57):
to follow what Donald Trump tells them. I guess unless
it's like a plainly unlawful order, they're supposed to do
what he says. That's what military obedience means.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
The people keep saying this as if it's some like
big significant thing, and it's it's just not like they
have to obey Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Sorry, that'll do it. John diorlready show see you next
time on Power Talk