Fires continue to destroy parts of Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. At this writing, more than 40,000 acres have burned. Twelve thousand-plus structures — mostly homes but also businesses, churches and schools — have burned to the ground. Pacific Palisades is virtually gone, as are parts of Malibu and much of Altadena. Almost 200,000 people have been forced to evacuate, and thousands of them will have no home to return to. Two dozen people have been killed. Estimates of the damage done are already at almost $150 billion — 10 times the losses of the Maui fires last year — and the California fires are nowhere near contained.
Back during the Ethiopian famine of the middle 1980s that killed between 300,000 and 1.2 million people, I heard someone say, “Mother Nature creates drought; man creates famine.” So it is here: Mother Nature may create forests, dry summers and Santa Ana winds, but human policies created the conditions for the fires devastating LA now.
Specifically, the policies of the Democrats in power.
LA Mayor Karen Bass cut more than $17 million from the LA Fire Department’s budget (and a leaked memo revealed Bass wanted $49 million more in budget cuts). The fire department itself has been the subject of criticism for its DEI hiring policies — personified by Deputy Chief Kristine Larson, caught on video defending her inability to carry a man out of a burning building, saying, “He got himself into the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”
The Santa Ynez water reservoir — which should have had 117 million gallons of water — has been empty since last February, and LA has been plagued by broken fire hydrants. Both facts were known to LA Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quinones, who managed not to fix either problem despite her $750,000/year salary. California environmental laws limit controlled burns and clearing brush. State politicians have been criticized for years for their decisions to divert millions of gallons of water into the Pacific Ocean to protect a small native fish called the Delta smelt. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom is now facing another recall effort, with critics calling his tenure “a series of catastrophic failures.”
It isn’t just the wildfires in California; many of this country’s worst problems are a direct result of policies put in place by Democrats, who — without any trace of irony — claim to care about the very populations and causes hurt worst by their own policies.
Democrats say they care about the environment. How much of the environment in California has been damaged or destroyed by their policies?
Democrats say they care about the homeless. But thousands of Californians have been left homeless by these wildfires. And that is a fraction of the number of homeless in the state — estimated at around 186,000 (almost half of whom are in LA County) — who are allowed to live, eat, sleep, take drugs, urinate and defecate in the streets, creating health hazards for themselves and for everyone else.
Democrats claim to care about the “little guy” and “small business.” But policies like California’s Proposition 47 reduced shoplifting of merchandise worth less than $950 to a misdemeanor, resulting in massive increases in retail theft. 2022 saw $112 billion in retail theft nationally, almost $9 billion of which was in California.
Democrats claim to care about women, but they argue in favor of allowing biological males into women’s sports, locker rooms and bathrooms. Just this week in Congress, Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) accused Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) — a victim of rape — of saying “trans, trans, trans” as a fundraising tactic, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) claimed that laws protecting women’s sports would result in “genital examinations.” (Has the woman never heard of a blood test?)
There’s no demographic Democrats love to tout their concern for more than “the children,” but they’re behind legislative efforts allowing physicians to stunt the development of children suffering from gender dysphoria with puberty blockers, surgically mutilate their healthy body parts and deprive them of adult sexual function (including reproduction), while leaving the real causes of their suffering and anguish (autism, mental illness, sexual exploitation) untreated.
Democrats claim to care about the vulnerable and marginalized, but their open-borders approach to immigration and soft-on-crime policies like “no cash bail” allow violent criminals to prey on the vulnerable and marginalized.
So, who exactly is benefited by Democrat policies?
Democrats are, certainly.
They run on their “intentions” — never their results — and once elected, they use their political power to stay in power — enjoying the support of a fawning (and often deceitful) press, taking money from lobbyists and other megadonors, soliciting massive donations for their “foundations,” and using the legal system to insulate themselves, their friends and their family members from their self-dealing.
How many times do we have to see this movie before the electorate — particularly those who “vote blue no matter who” — stops listening to the self-righteous speeches and starts looking at facts? How much suffering must Americans endure before they throw Democrats (and limp-wristed, complicit Republicans) out of political office, out of the media and out of academia, where their pernicious ideologies have festered and spread?
A new administration is taking over in Washington, D.C., next Monday, sent there by Americans who are sick to death of corruption and incompetence and the havoc and destruction caused by both. Now, if we could just get the same thing done in all the states.
Starting with California.
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Mayor Bass cut the LAFD budget by over 17 million but she was absent because she flew on taxpayer dollars to Ghana, Africa. Not for any important city business but to be present at the new African President’s inauguration? And even with a diminished budget, the LGBQT Fire Chief allocated millions to promoting DEI initiatives? And, oh yeah, the CEO of the LA Water Department (appointed by Bass) number one goal was also DEI and to bring more “equity and innovative solutions to the climate crises in LA”.
California is the poster state for DEI incompetence. And it’s not like California doesn’t have massive wildfires every year so maybe the French Laundry Governor should invested in basic fire management like creating “fire breaks” and removing all the dead trees and brush that are just a huge accelerant in every fire. But they stopped using basic Forestry 101 techniques years ago even though they have massive wildfires every year. Or maybe Newsom should have built the reservoirs to hold the last two years record rainfall that the state had allocated money for instead of spending 20 billion dollars in the last 4 years to zero effect on their homeless problem. But Newsom also lets them run out of water because he has proudly destroyed four of the state’s dams to return the areas to a more “natural” habitat and all that water now flows straight into the Pacific Ocean. They not only need to resign but be prosecuted for negligence.