Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

January 12, 2025

BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Newsom Continues to Flail, Sends Out Cringe Email Slamming People Who ‘Laugh About Gay Firefighters.’

Newsom earlier Saturday claimed on social media: “I’m not interested in politicizing a natural disaster.” In this email, however, he proceeded to do exactly that:

Now, if you’ll allow me, let me add a few words about Donald Trump, as his allies lie about water policy and laugh about gay firefighters – while people are literally fleeing as homes, churches and schools burn down. It sickens me to my core.

You have probably heard the saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” – well, that is especially true right now. We will combat these politically motivated lies. But our focus today isn’t on meme wars, it’s on firefighting. And showing up for Californians who have lost everything.

What exactly did Trump lie about? Notice there are no specifics. Are you saying there were no problems with the water supply, Governor? Tell that to the firefighters in the Palisades, who sometimes had to resort to desperate measures to attack the flames.

Nobody’s “laughing about gay firefighters,” but we are pointing out their self-admitted weaknesses, to borrow from another L.A. institution’s motto, when it comes to protecting and serving L.A.’s citizens:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 12th, 2025

APOCALYPSE NOW, IN LA:

As fires continue to destroy Los Angeles, the incompetence of that city’s leadership, along with that of the State of California, is coming into focus. It is almost incredible that anyone could do as bad a job as Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom have done. Many instances of their incompetence have come to light, but Michael Shellenberger takes the broad view, explaining how progressive politics inevitably led to the current disaster. Please do read the whole thing:

But don’t worry — the dancing TikTok nurses Mayor Bass’s crack team have things totally under control:

Posted at 7:15 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 12th, 2025

January 11, 2025

UP IN SMOKE: Palisades Fire Incinerates Future Career of Mayor Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom’s Presidential Aspirations.

There are many other significant problems created by Bass, Newsom, as well as other progressive politicians in this state. However, blog space is short.

In conclusion: Bass’ future in politics and Newsom’s presidential aspirations can be added to the list of items destroyed in the Palisades fire.

California literally turned into a red state overnight.

The political careers of Bass and Newsom are quite possibly finished as a result of their combination of incompetence and obsession with leftist eco-shibboleths and DEI (and likely, particularly in Newsom’s case, a huge dose of “Magical Sorkinism” as well.) But I’d hold off on declaring California a red state just yet. This 2015 City Journal piece by VDH titled “The Scorching of California” is a reminder that wealthy Californians seem to have little desire to fix their state’s myriad woes.

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

WE WERE RIGHT ABOUT IMMIGRATION:

One unique point I do think I made in my 1992 National Review cover story: there is no economic justification for these modern massive immigrant inflows. It may increase gross domestic product, but virtually all of that is captured by the immigrants themselves. American workers don’t benefit—in fact, they are disadvantaged, because immigrant wage competition shifts income within the native-born community from labor to capital. I discussed this in Chronicles’ June 2009 issue, in an article titled “The Economic Impact of Immigration.”

There are more than 30 years of economic studies to back my point up. But I have to say that despite all the evidence of immigration’s harmful effect on the economy, I have made absolutely no impression. Both Canada’s Liberals and Britain’s Conservatives, as well as both Democrats and Republicans in America, have rationalized allowing their recent immigration surges on the grounds that it would stimulate economic growth.

Of course, these surges were not really motivated by economics. All these governments simply hate their underlying nations.

The Biden administration, needless to say, has not even bothered to offer any economic rationale at all for its enabling an unprecedented immigration surge.

True, but it’s there around the periphery: “The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly.”

—Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, January 2nd, 2025.

But it wasn’t a “moment” — it was a series of crises by design:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

And:

 

Is MSNBC getting into Bulwark territory with their sudden interest in illegal immigration?

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

OUT ON A LIMB: Adolf Hitler, Communist.

Of course, AfD is invariably described as “far right,” which is Eurospeak for opposed to mass third-world immigration. Beyond that, the other German parties denounce AfD as “neo-Nazi,” notwithstanding the fact that its platform is the polar opposite of Hitler’s national socialist ideology. This is the portion of today’s interview that I want to focus on:

Adolf Hitler was a communist and the “greatest success” of the postwar years was to rebrand him as far-right, a leading figure in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has said.
***
Asked by Musk about the frequent claims in Germany that the AfD is “Nazi-lite”, Weidel responded: “The National Socialists were socialists … Adolf Hitler was a communist. He considered himself a socialist … The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Hitler as [far] right and conservative.”

She added that the AfD was the “opposite” of the Nazis in its attitude towards the size and power of government: “We would like to free the people from the state.”

That is correct. Hitler always described himself as a man of the Left. He and his cohorts took over the German Workers’ Party, which was uniformly and correctly regarded as left-wing. They renamed it the National Socialist Party. Still left-wing, even more so. The Nazi regime vastly expanded the power of government–to put it mildly–raised taxes, essentially took over private industry from the top down, and, throughout World War II, assured Germans that they would have “real socialism” once the war was over.

Of course the Nazis battled the Communists in the streets in the 1930s; that was like the Crips and the Bloods fighting over turf. Bitter enemies who are in all respects relevant to outsiders, the same. And they soon became allies.

The great public relations coup of the Western Left was its success in branding both the Nazis and Italy’s Fascists as “right-wing.” In fact, they were big government–make that huge government–socialists: the opposite of Western conservatism. Hitler would have been astonished by the claim that he was somehow a free-market, limited government conservative. By any sane definition–including his own–he was a left-winger.

Well, they were socialists who were both nationalistic, and had some very international expansionist plans.

Related: Former European Commissioner and Wannabe Tyrant Thierry Breton Says EU May Cancel German Elections if Right-Wing AfD Wins.

Hey, you know who else tried to form a union of European nations after first cancelling German elections…?

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

WILDFIRES AND THE HOARY HOAX OF A BURNING PLANET:

As it happens, the same story is true with respect to wildfires like the current LA inferno. This has been the third category of natural disaster that the Climate Howlers have glommed onto. But in this case it’s the aforementioned bad forestry management, not man-made global warming, which has turned much of California into a dry wood fuel dump.

And don’t take our word for it. This quotation below comes from the George Soros-funded Pro Publica, which is not exactly a right-wing tin foil hat outfit. It points out that environmentalists have so shackled Federal and state forest management agencies that today’s tiny “controlled burns” are but an infinitesimal fraction of what Mother Nature herself accomplished before the helping hand of today’s purportedly enlightened political authorities arrived on the scene:

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. 

We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

In short, if you don’t clear and burn out the deadwood, you build up nature-defying tinderboxes that then require only a lightning strike, a spark from an unrepaired power line, or human carelessness to ignite into a raging inferno. As one 40-year conservationist and expert summarized,

 …There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”

The failure to do just such controlled burns is exactly what is behind the LA wildfire today. That is, a dramatically larger human footprint in the fire-prone shrublands and chaparral (dwarf trees) areas along the coasts has increased the risk residents will start fires, accidentally or otherwise. California’s population doubled from 1970 to 2020, from about 20 million people to nearly 40 million people, and nearly all of the gain was in the coastal areas.

Under those conditions, California’s strong, naturally-occurring winds, which crest periodically, as is occurring at the moment, are the main culprit which fuels and spreads the human-set blazes in the shrublands. The Diablo winds in the north of the state and the Santa Ana winds in the south can actually reach hurricane force, as has also been the case this week. As the winds move West over California mountains and down toward the coast, they compress, warm, and intensify.

These winds, in turn, blow flames and carry embers, spreading the fires quickly before they can be contained. And on top of that, the Santa Ana winds also function as Mother Nature’s blow dryer. As they come down the mountains toward the sea, the hot winds dry the surface vegetation and deadwood rapidly and powerfully, paving the way for the blowing embers to fuel the spread of wildfires down the slopes.

Among other proofs that industrialization and fossil fuels aren’t the culprit is the fact that researchers have shown that when California was occupied by indigenous communities, wildfires would burn up some 4.5 million acres a year. That’s nearly 6X the level experienced during the 2010-2019 period, when wildfires burned an average of just 775,000 acres annually in California.

Beyond the untoward clash of all of these natural forces of climate and ecology with misguided government forest and shrubland husbandry policies, there is actually an even more dispositive smoking gun, as it were.

To wit, the Climate Howlers have at least not yet embraced the patent absurdity that the planet’s purportedly rising temperatures have targeted the Blue State of California for special punishment. Yet when we look at the data for forest fires we find, alas, that unlike California and Oregon, the US as a whole experienced the weakest fire years in 2020 since 2010.

That’s right. As of August 24 each year, the 10-year average burn had been 5.114 million acres across the US, but in 2020 it was 28% lower at 3.714 million acres.

Related: Adam Carolla: California’s Government Started These Fires, and Has an Evil Surprise Coming for Those Who Lost Their Homes: They Won’t Let You Rebuild the Homes They Burned Down, Either.

Trainer/host of The Biggest Loser Gillian Michaels confirmed that, saying that when her home was burned down by another regularly-scheduled disastrous wildfire years ago, it took her a full year just to get the permit to…

Bulldoze the wreckage of her destroyed home.

Not to rebuild the home. That would take another gauntlet of permit approvals.

But just to secure the right to bulldoze away the ruins of her home, she had to wait a year for the blessing of California’s oppressive government.

You think they’re going to just let people rebuild their homes or — the horrors! — even rebuild their homes with a somewhat different blueprint this time?

Oh no. Oh dear no.

Never let a crisis go to waste, to coin a phrase.

Posted at 1:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

MATT MARGOLIS: As Wildfires Rage, Chaos Erupts in Los Angeles Leadership.

A source initially told DailyMail.com on Friday afternoon that the fire chief was fired, but the Mayor’s office told ABC7 Crowley still had her job. The office’s official statement to the outlet said the pair ‘met’, without any reference to whether Crowley remained in her position.

‘The Mayor and Chief met. The priority remains fighting these fires and protecting Angelenos,’ the statement said.

But ABC7 reporter Josh Haskell added on social media site X that the Mayor’s office had officially denied the claims that Crowley had been fired.

When Crowley returned from the meeting, she told her office staff that she was ‘not fired yet’, the source said on Friday evening.

‘She was going into the meeting, telling everybody goodbye, because she was told the whole purpose of the meeting was to fire her,’ a source close to Crowley’s office said.

‘When she was summoned into the meeting, it was with the direct purpose to fire her.

‘Whatever happened in that meeting, minds got changed.

“Either Bass realized it would be suicide to fire her, and came to her senses, or Crowley talked her out of it,” the source told the Daily Mail. “She came back in the office briefly, told her staff, ‘I’m not fired yet’ and went into a meeting with all her chiefs.”

Related: Great moments in California water management:

In 1974, a fictionalized version of William Mulholland bringing water to Los Angeles was the baddy in Robert Towne and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. 50 years later, as VDH notes, “what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19th-century pastoral condition. They are decivilizing the state, and deindustrializing the state, and defarming the state, but they’re not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19th century when you had no protection from fire, you didn’t have enough water in California, you didn’t have enough power, you didn’t pump oil.”

But hey, look on the upside!

 

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN DEI: “Residents of Richmond, Virginia have been left without water for days while DEI advocate April Bingham sits at the helm of the utilities department.”

Flashback: “Richmond Police Chief William Smith, center, takes a knee with protesters as he attempts to address a crowd in front of city hall Tuesday.”

—“Richmond mayor joins protesters, apologizes after city police gassed a peaceful demonstration,” the Washington Post, June 2nd, 2020.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

BIDEN: ‘I Would Have Beaten Trump,’ ‘Kamala Would Have Beaten Trump.’

Biden made the remarks during an evening press conference at the White House, one of the rare moments that he has answered questions from reporters.

“Do you regret your decision to run for re-election?” a reporter asked Biden. “Do you think that that made it easier for your predecessor to now become your successor?”

Biden responded: “I don’t think so. I think I would have beaten Trump, could have beaten Trump, and I think that Kamala could have beaten Trump and would have beaten Trump.”

Video of Biden’s latest attack of Trunalimunumaprzure here:

UPDATE: Three Big Ways Biden Is Harming Democrats on His Way Out.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

I’LL TAKE TWEETS FROM 2021, ALEX:

Larry Elder would like a word here — and a word with the L.A. Times, who called the potential first black governor of California “the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned,” and compared Elder to David Duke and the KKK when he dared run against Newsom.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

KAROL MARKOWICZ: In LA fire horror, California elites face the consequences of blue misrule.

It was mostly the lower and middle classes, walloped by notoriously high taxes, mismanagement at every level of government and crumbling infrastructure, who made a run for the door.

The affluent have been largely protected from all that.

They could easily absorb the heavy tax burden and the high costs of housing or gas.

Like Gov. Gavin Newsom, they could avoid their state’s failing public schools and send their kids to private schools instead.

But no water in a fire hydrant is a great equalizer.

Comedian Billy Crystal lost his home — all but its tennis court — in Pacific Palisades.

The homes of actors Anthony Hopkins, Miles Teller and John Goodman were wiped out there, too.

Heiress Paris Hilton said she saw her luxe Malibu vacation house “burn to the ground on live TV.”

It’s unpleasant to talk about the politics that led to the loss of entire neighborhoods, but it’s necessary to examine the terrible policies that led to this preventable disaster.

After over a decade of one-party rule, California has become the testing ground for the left’s most extreme ideas — and we are seeing the results in real time now.

Whether it was cutting the budget of fire departments, not refilling the reservoirs, ignoring deforesting guidelines under pressure from environmentalists or simply deflecting blame, California’s leaders are agonizingly inept — and it shows.

Exit quote: “Breaking with the left is a difficult thing to do in a sea of deep blue. Yet the Californians who woke up with this current crisis can’t go back to sleep now.”

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that’s exactly what many of them will do.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: LA’s $750k-a-year water chief Janisse Quiñones ‘knew about empty reservoir and broken hydrants’ months before fires.

The $750,000-a-year LA water czar is responsible for a raft of failures that contributed to the devastating Palisades Fire, fire department insiders told DailyMail.com.

On Mayor Karen Bass’s orders, the city maxed out its budget to ‘attract private-sector talent’, hiring Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones on a $750,000 salary in May – almost double that of her predecessor.

Now, Quiñones is being blamed by LA Fire Department (LAFD) insiders for leaving a nearby reservoir disconnected and fire hydrants broken for months, DailyMail.com can reveal, leading to firefighters running out of water as they battled the devastating Palisades Fire this week.

And, Daily Mail.com has learned, Quiñones past employer is also linked to fire scandals. She was previously a top executive at electricity company PG&E, which went bankrupt over liability for several massive wildfires in California.

She served as senior vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) from 2021 to 2023.
The utility company’s power lines sparked the second-largest wildfire in California history, Dixie, in 2021. Its involvement in the 2018 Camp Fire cost PG&E a $13.5billion legal settlement.
The firm’s liability for allegedly causing fires was estimated at $30billion when it filed for bankruptcy in 2018. It exited bankruptcy in 2020.

But her LinkedIn Profile was perfect: “With a tenure at Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spanning seven months, our team has taken significant strides towards realizing a sustainable energy vision for the city. Harnessing project management skills and engineering acumen, we’ve focused on the integration of clean energy solutions and enhancing infrastructure resilience.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 11th, 2025

January 10, 2025

DANIEL GREENFIELD: The LAFD is Run by Three Lesbians Named ‘Kirsten.’

Mayor Eric Garcetti had promised to bring the number of women up to 5% from 3.5% and now the LAFD is approaching 8%. No one was allowed to ask if this was going to make the LAFD any better at fighting fires now that it was hiring in order to hit a diversity target.

Beyond DEI, every stupid woke idea found a home under Crowley’s regime. After taking over, Crowley debuted the first “electric fire engine” to fight “pollution”, instead it was sidelined by a water leak. The vaccine mandate ousted some firefighters and suspended others. Last year, with a shortage of firefighters, the LAFD began trying to bring some of them back.

Los Angeles and the LAFD fought the Firefighters4Freedom Foundation group which represented 500 members of the LAFD. Now the LAFD has been reduced to begging for volunteers with firefighting experience. The DEI LAFD seems to be a whole lot more diverse, but also a lot less competent at deploying manpower than the old organization used to be.

While the LAFD might have lost a whole lot white men who knew how to fight fires, it gained a lot of DEI hires who knew how to pursue diversity, inclusion and all the pronoun stuff.

And while LA might have lost a lot of buildings, it gained a lot of lesbian fire chiefs.

Exit questions from center-left comedienne Whitney Cummings:

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 10th, 2025

CALIFORNIA’S IN THE BEST OF HANDS: Pacific Palisades reservoir was offline and empty when firestorm exploded.

A large reservoir in Pacific Palisades that is part of the Los Angeles water supply system was out of use when a ferocious wildfire destroyed thousands of homes and other structures nearby.

Officials told The Times that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been closed for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117 million gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades.

The revelation comes among growing questions about why firefighters ran out of water while battling the blaze. Numerous fire hydrants in higher-elevation streets of the Palisades went dry, leaving firefighters struggling with low water pressure as they combated the flames.

I’m sure this is all the fault of global warming and Donald Trump:

Posted at 2:36 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 10th, 2025

NEW: Bass Demanded $49M in Additional LAFD Cuts One Week Before Wildfires.

The LAFD is still going through a FY2024/2025 $48.8 million budget reduction exercise with the CAO. The Fire Chief, Board of Fire Commissioners, COA, and UFLAC are steadfast in their message of defending what resources we currently have in place. The only way to provide a cost savings would be to close as many as 16 fire stations (not resources, fire stations); this equates to at least one fire station per City Council District. The details of this plan have not yet been developed. This is a worst-case scenario and is NOT happening yet. The Fire Chief will have a “Chat with the Chief” webinar next week to clarify the situation and the budget.

I’ll just assume that the webinar was postponed … indefinitely.

The LAFD has already had its budget slashed enough that it can’t conduct necessary maintenance tasks, on its own equipment and on infrastructure for fighting fires. One LAFD veteran told the Daily Mail that they don’t even have the budget to test hydrants any longer, and that Bass has been draining those resources to fund homeless programs:

‘They’re trying to allocate more money for the homeless, and they need to start taking from everybody.

‘But we already exhausted our budget. It’s already tapped. That’s why they cut the fire academy in half, so they could save more money. That’s why we’re not testing if hydrants work any more. We’re doing everything we can to save money.

“Charlie Peters’ ‘Fireman First’ principle says you always threaten to cut firemen in order to create a public outcry against budget cuts. You’re not supposed to actually do it,” Mickey Kaus tweeted yesterday, as a reminder of just how incompetent Bass is.

More at the Free Press: Paradise Lost.

But this isn’t just about Bass. A great city can survive a bad mayor, or even a series of bad mayors. This is a story about the failure of California to prevent, or capably mitigate, a long-predicted catastrophe, and how a state that was once a model of good governance came to prioritize the boutique concerns of ambitious politicians over the basics of what government must do.

There are always excuses in moments like these, some more valid than others. California is, in a sense, built to burn: Its warm climate and vast woodlands can, and often are, a deadly combination. Any city, regardless of who’s running it, would struggle with winds reaching 100 miles per hour, especially one sitting on a tinderbox of dry vegetation. Climate change exacerbates the issue.

But none of that explains how one of America’s great cities—the biggest in the fifth-largest economy in the world—is burning to the ground. The failure here, at heart, is an entirely human one.

California loves to spend, increasingly moving toward a model of governance where good money constantly chases after bad. Newsom has spent some $22 billion to combat homelessness since he took office and yet, there has been a 3 percent increase in homelessness in the last year. Newsom also made California the first state to have its Medicaid program cover illegal immigrants. This blatant sop to progressive activists is now expected to cost Californians $6.5 billion a year.

Finally, as Glenn warned in August of 2020, when “defund the police” fever was in full bloom in David Brooks’ latte towns across America, “the breakdown of law and order won’t go as [leftists] hope. Ultimately, the police are there to protect criminals from the populace, not the other way around. Get rid of the police, and armed vigilantism is what you’ll get. And what you’ll deserve.”

Especially if this is the same man, given that there’s a yellow blowtorch is visible in both tweets:

Posted at 2:23 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 10th, 2025

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: Pharmageddon: Walgreens to shutter 12 San Francisco stores.

A day that began with a new mayor’s promises of a cleaner, safer, and more prosperous San Francisco ended with a deflating dose of reality. Walgreens will close a dozen locations around the city at the end of February, The Standard has learned.

The closures include known theft hot spots and the Market Street store where a security guard fatally shot alleged shoplifter Banko Brown in 2023.

A Walgreens spokesperson told The Standard via email that the closures are due to costs from “increased regulatory and reimbursement pressures” that hamper the company’s ability to pay for rent, staffing, and supply needs. The pharmacy chain pledged to work with the community to minimize “customer disruptions.”

Gooder and harder, Northern California.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 10th, 2025

JIM TREACHER: California Dreamin’ Meets Reality.

It’s pleasant to believe things that aren’t true. It comforts you and makes you feel good about yourself. It wraps you in the warm, cuddly delusion that you’re better than the people who disagree with you.

Right up until the moment reality burns your house down.

It turns out the greatest danger to Los Angelinos isn’t sexism or fascism or 1/6 or the price of almond milk. It’s fire. And all that tax money they keep paying to their state and local government hasn’t saved them.

I hate when people say “Let me see if I get this straight,” because usually they don’t. But here’s my understanding of the Los Angeles wildfires so far:

Fortunately though, California officials are laser-focused on resolving this crisis. And when I say laser-focused, what I really mean is this: CA Dem Becomes Sputtering Mess When Asked Why Assembly Is Holding Special Session on Trump As Fires Rage.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 10th, 2025

ZUT ALORS! Pakistan Airlines advert shows plane flying into Eiffel Tower:

Pakistan’s national airline has come under fire for a “tone deaf” advert that appears to show a plane flying into the Eiffel Tower.

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), which was banned from flying to the UK, US and EU in 2020 amid safety concerns, on Friday announced it had resumed flights to Europe after the ban was lifted.

In a post on social media, the airline published an image showing a plane and the Eiffel Tower against the French tricolour flag, accompanied by the caption: “Paris, we’re coming today.”

But critics pointed out that the advert appeared to show the plane heading straight for the Paris landmark.

Whoops:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 10th, 2025

NIALL FERGUSON: The Monarch of Mar-a-Lago.

Alexander Hamilton, famously, was among the strongest supporters of a monarchical order. He himself proposed that the president be elected for life—a position supported by James Madison, John Adams, and George Washington himself. And Hamilton wanted the president to have “an absolute negative (i.e., unlimited veto) on the laws” passed by Congress.

The counterargument against American monarchy was as much cultural as constitutional. As Adams explained in a letter in 1776, “A Monarchy would. . . produce So much Taste and Politeness, So much Elegance in Dress, Furniture, Equipage, So much Musick and Dancing, So much Fencing and Skaiting; So much Cards and Backgammon; so much Horse Racing and Cock fighting; so many Balls and Assemblies, so many Plays and Concerts that the very Imagination of them makes me feel vain, light, frivolous and insignificant.” Not everyone accepted the radical Whig position that the presidency was nothing more than an “executive magistracy. . . for carrying the will of the Legislature into effect.”

The result, enshrined in the Constitution, was a compromise. The president was elected for four years, but there were no term limits until 1951. He had a veto over legislation, but not an unlimited one.

Since November 5, there has been no shortage at Mar-a-Lago of the frivolities and luxuries Adams associated with monarchy. Though one pays to play, Trump’s Palm Beach club is unmistakably reminiscent of a royal palace, and Trump holds court there with regal relish. Its décor a gaudy fusion of Las Vegas and Renaissance Florence (as seen on TV), Mar-a-Lago’s most striking features are the absence of art, aside from a “capitalist-realist” depiction of a young Trump as a tennis champion; the centrally located, elevated, and roped-off royal dining table in the middle of the alfresco restaurant; and the multiple stages on which the monarch can present himself to the courtiers.

Moreover, like most courts in history, Trump’s is a scene of ferocious intrigue. The power of patronage is essential to monarchy, and—after four years in the political wilderness—Trump has learned how to turn the traditional process of naming administration appointees into something between The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and The Apprentice.

* * * * * * * * *

The problem is that this is almost certainly the zenith of Trump’s power. At Mar-a-Lago, he truly is King of the World. The world leaders and tech CEOs all come to do homage and pay tribute. Apple’s Tim Cook donated $1 million to the inauguration. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg—all must kiss the ring. Best of all, His Royal Highness can troll the world with impunity. Canada for 51st state? Take back the Panama Canal? Stake a claim to Greenland? Rename the Gulf of Mexico? The whims and memes of the Sun(tanned) King can conjure up a new American empire just for the lols.

However, the moment he’s sworn in on January 20, Trump’s just the plain, old president of the United States, for four years, with congressional majorities only for the first half of that term (unless the midterms defy history), and with his powers deliberately circumscribed by a constitution designed, despite Alexander Hamilton, to prevent a King of America.

I’m hoping that as Scott Adams tweets, Trump’s boasts about annexing Greenland, making Canada the 51st state, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, etc are designed to overwhelm the DNC-MSM with over-the-top lunacy “so his critics don’t know which way to aim their fake news.” We’ll know how disciplined Trump 2.0 is pretty quickly once he’s in office, firing off executive orders, and as Glenn wrote in November, the GOP Congress has “bills lined up like airplanes on a runway.” We’ll see.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 10th, 2025

VDH ON THE L.A. FIRES: “A DEI Green New Deal hydrogen bomb.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 10th, 2025
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