Internal Combustion: General Motors, the car company that makes the gas guzzling Hummer off-roader and GMC Sierra trucks, announced yesterday that it will make only zero emission vehicles by 2035, a move that will influence the entire auto industry.

  It will be a world of vehicles with sparks and no plugs.

  This heralds big changes. The auto industry in the US now employs about one million people, but electric cars require fewer to make. 

   A switch to electric will have an impact on the oil and gas industry as well as the auto service and repair industry. Electric engines aren’t so complicated.

  “General Motors is joining governments and companies around the globe working to establish a safer, greener and better world,” Mary T. Barra, G.M.’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. “We encourage others to follow suit and make a significant impact on our industry and on the economy as a whole.”

Enemy Within: The Republican leadership in the House under fire for appointing Georgia’s freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to the education committee. It’s a development otherwise unremarkable except that Greene is a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory that child molesters run the government.

  That’s not all. Douglas has claimed in social media posts that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people died, was a “false flag” event, carried out not by a mad gunner but people who wanted to create a movement for stricter gun control.

  Greene wrote in one post that she had been “told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.” 

  Greene has also question whether a passenger jet actually crashed into the Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks. When Barack Obama was President she claimed he was a Muslim who wanted to open US borders to an invasion of Muslims.

  Greene claims the “Fake News” is coming after her because she’s “a threat to their goal of Socialism.”

  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that after the insurrection members face danger from some of their own, “to the point that they’re even concerned about members in the House of Representatives being a danger to them.”

  Asked to clarify, Pelosi said, “It means that we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.” 

Party Divided: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy swallowed both his pride and his own words of condemnation yesterday going to Florida to confer with disgraced former President Donald Trump.

  Two weeks ago McCarthy said “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” but yesterday he went to kiss Trump’s ring and a sizable portion of his anatomy.

  Following the meeting, McCarthy issued a statement saying, Trump wants to help the Republican Party win races in 2022 and “Democrats, on the other hand, have only put forward an agenda that divides us — such as impeaching a President who is now a private citizen and destroying blue-collar energy jobs. For the sake of our country, the radical Democrat agenda must be stopped.” 

Politically Correct: In a controversial decision, the San Francisco school board voted 6-1 on Tuesday to rename 44 public schools including those named after Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe. A panel of community members had identified schools named after historical figures who “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  Even the name of current Sen. Diane Feinstein will be removed.

  San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a statement that, “What I cannot understand is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.”

  It may take up to a year and more than $10,000 each to re-name the schools. How about Grateful Dead Middle School?

The Bulletin Board: At least six people died yesterday after the rupture of a liquid nitrogen line yesterday at a poultry processing plant in Gainesville, Georgia.  — A 1480 Botticelli painting called “Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel” has sold at Sotheby’s for $92 million. Bidding lasted just 4 ½ minutes. The buyers appear to be Russian. — After looking quite fashionable at the inauguration, poet Amanda Gorman and Ella Emhoff, the 21-year-old stepdaughter of Vice President Kamala Harris, both been given modeling contracts. 

The Obit Page: Cicely Tyson, an actor who played strong and dignified black women while refusing roles that demeaned people of her race, has died at age 96. She had done an interview with the CBS Morning News about her new memoir only a week ago.

  In the 1960s, Tyson appeared in Broadway plays, television episodes, and minor movie roles before winning a supporting part in the 1968 film of “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”

  Despite a slight speech impediment, she had a career lasting 70 years.

  She played the wife of an imprisoned sharecropper in the 1972 film “Sounder.” Her breakout came in 1974 playing a former slave in the CBS movie about a former slave, “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” 

Meme Millions: The picture of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders bundled up in the cold at the inauguration, his arms crossed with hands in brown and cream-colored knit mittens became an instant internet meme. The image was edited into a New York subway car, television news sets, and the Last Supper.

  The image has now been printed on items of clothing sold to raise money for charity — $1.8 million so far.

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