Who Should Pay to Fix ‘El Lay’?

If you’re like me, you spent the better part of last week—too much, actually—watching the dog and pony show that was the Senate confirmation hearings.

You got to see some angry Democrats blowing off steam, in many cases making fools of themselves in vain attempts to dent Donald Trump’s well-prepared nominees.

Specifically I remember Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and America’s greatest serial political liar—at least in my lifetime—Adam Schiff (D-CA) going remarkably far out over their skis in a manner not likely to help their causes with the public. Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, summed up Ms. Hirono’s weird obsession with sex with “This lady has issues.”

But speaking of Schiff, always buried not far beneath the hearings and often the subject of questions was that significant parts of his home city, dubbed “El Lay” by Snoop Dogg (among others) in this video, were burning to the ground.

Most affected so far were Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Altadena but the disaster was extensive and continuing with at least 12,300 structures destroyed.

One estimate from investment bank Keefe Bruyette & Woods put losses at $40bn, but that was early in the week. And those were insured losses, so we are nowhere near knowing what the reconstruction, to the extent it occurs and how it will occur, will cost.

The insurance question is key. A number of homeowners didn’t have it or were left with little. The California legislature in its “woke wisdom,” capped premiums and companies like All State and State Farm pulled out, leaving many people without insurance or with the paltry, especially given real estate in Malibu and the Palisades, Fair ‘Plan. It seems the companies knew what the legislators didn’t or didn’t want to think about—that wildfires, many dwarfing the current catastrophe, have been occurring regularly in the area since the days of the wooly mammoth and even before. (No, Virginia, it doesn’t have anything to do with climate change.)

According to the California State Water Resources Control Board, “Prehistoric fire occurrence covered about 5.5 to 19 million acres each year in California, according to the estimates presented, or roughly 5.5 to 19 percent of the area of the state.” The latter is roughly the size of South Carolina.

So who will pay to rebuild LA?

The Democrat senators at the hearings, sometimes parsimonious regarding the also extensive and still ongoing red state reconstruction in North Carolina and East Tennessee, grilled some of the nominees, mainly Kristi Noem nominated for Homeland Security, for assurance they would not punish ultra-blue California.

They shouldn’t. Not too much anyway.

But they should—in fact must-- protect ditzy California from itself.

They have to do that for the remaining citizens of that state, the ones who bloody well knew they lived in a fire zone, not to mention an earthquake zone, and for the rest of us across the country who will be paying for it.

In other words, strings (meaning serious meticulous oversight, not just the obvious means tests) should be on the money so it is not frittered away as so much is in that state. Otherwise it will be as useful as the billions of our taxpayer dollars sent to Ukraine that end up in the hands of local oligarchs. (Oh, excuse me. That’s supposed to be Republicans now.]

This oversight is totally necessary because the once Golden State has elected some of the most atrocious leadership in the country for the last several decades. Pretending they were something called “woke” (requiescat in pace), in reality they were incompetent veering to corrupt or vice-versa. It’s what happens when you have a one-party state. It’s bad enough when you have two.

The litany is endless but perhaps the best example is the fiasco of the bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, or so it was initially promised back in the days of Jerry Brown. Then we learned it was actually going up the Central Valley where it is essentially useless. So many billions have been spent that you can’t get a straight answer with or without the local equivalent of a FOIA. The total budget, besting the wildfire thus far, has multiplied so many times you’d need a supercomputer to keep up. The billions, spent and projected, have three figures in them, but still not one yard of track. Where did the money go? Is it those oligarchs again? Which ones?

Lately, this endless mega-boondoggle has been under the management of the man Donald Trump calls Governor Newscum. Although I usually like Trump’s policies, I’m not always down with his name calling. In this case I am. It perfectly fits the man who wined and dined maskless with his also maskless financial backers during COVID at the French Laundry, while the rest of us hoi polloi were being hectored to death. It’s also the same guy who caved to the environmental bores (yes, that’s what they are) defending the likes of the barely-existing delta smelt against the needs of his state’s farmers who feed the country, leaving California parched in the process. And then there’s the matter of the non-existent brush-clearing…

But enough of him. How about the LA mayor, Karen Bass, the woman who took decades to figure out Fidel Castro was a wannabe Stalin with a cigar? A bit slow-witted, no? Or maybe corrupt. She’s the woman who gave her buddy $750,000 per annum salary—doubling her predecessor-- to head the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Nice work if you can get it, but it turned out her friend was incompetent and water didn’t come out of the hydrants. At the same time, Ms. Bass, as we all know, was off in Ghana after she had promised never to leave the country. What we didn’t know was that after being informed of the spreading wildfire she…. went to a cocktail party. Since then she has done everything possible to stonewall questions about her competence while pointing the blame at her other DEI hires.

So, as I said, no money for these clowns without supervision. (That’s assuming they don’t resign, which they should as it’s the honorable thing, not that they would ever consider that.)

While Mr. Trump is at it, he might consider some demands, like their ending the Sanctuary state nonsense and passing legislation that requires verifiable citizenship to vote, not just a utility bill that suffices at present. And then there’s the matter of fixing the insurance legislation, not to mention a whole lot more that comes under the heading of reactionary virtue signaling, plus, most obviously, doing away with that braindead dangerous money sink DEI that is destroying their once great universities (among other places) and cleaning up the homeless mess that has ruined their once beautiful cities. But they have known that for years.

Most of all, as Nat King Cole once put it, they ought to “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” Quit being liberal-progressive conformists incapable of thinking out of the box, the latter being their real problem, conformity. There’s a reason California has been hemorrhaging citizens for several years, myself among them. This new disaster is likely to make the state lose a lot more. That could be fatal for the already fragile tax base. Take heed.