In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As I follow the unfolding scandal of the LA fires, the issue that begins to stand out is the reduction of resources to the Los Angeles City Fire Department, for instance : In a preliminary budget request for 2025/26, signed by Fire Chief Kristin Rowley, made on October 29, the LAFD asked for $96,535,000 to fund a 'fleet replacement plan'. . . . The firefighting force said in its request to the city: 'Many vehicles have surpasses their expected service life, leading to increased maintenance costs, reduces parts availability and potential downtime.' And in its formal proposal to the city in November, it requested $24,063,000 for 'new fleet/apparatus purchases'. In the preliminary budget request, the LAFD also asked for more than $1.9million to restore 16 maintenance positions 'deleted' in last year's budget. It said in its request: 'The positions support fleet maintenance, equipment engineering, purchasing and warehouse managemen...

Karen Bass was at a cocktail party while the Palisades burned. https://t.co/xjk1BcncKd pic.twitter.com/qgeulSklac — Eric Spiegelman (@ericspiegelman) January 15, 2025 Efforts to recall or defeat political figures like Gov Newsom, Mayor Bass, or others have been generally feckless in recent years. Los Angeles County voters failed twice to secure enough signatures to recall soft-on-crime district attorney George Gascon before they ultimately did vote him out in his reelection bid last year. A 2021 effort to recall Gov Newsom failed, and he was reelected in 2022 : Gov. Gavin Newsom sailed to reelection Tuesday night, easily defeating Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle in an outcome seen as so inevitable that he barely campaigned for reelection. He's term limited now, and he has to find a new job, possibly running for president in 2028, if he wants to continue his career. Mayor Karen Bass won her first mayoral election against developer Rick Caruso in 2022 by about 10%....

“Competence matters”: LA Times owner says that it was a “mistake” for his paper to endorse Karen Bass for Mayor in 2022 pic.twitter.com/Y6btIn2dW7 — Rantingly (@rantinglydotcom) January 13, 2025 Mark Halperin had Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, currently best known as the owner of the Los Angeles Times, on his Morning Meeting 2WAY show yesterday morning for an extended interview, along with his co-hosts Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine. For all rhe hoopla, there wasn't much to it: Dr Soon-Shiong is best known for vetoing the Times editorial board's decision to endorse Kamala for president last November, then asking CNN conservative commentator Scott Jennings to join the same editorial board. More recently, as we see above, he's said it was a “mistake” for his paper to endorse Karen Bass for Mayor in 2022, which he repeated in the Halperin interview. And that's just about it. What's the big deal? Wikipedia says Jennings "worked in the George W. Bush administration a...

The current news about the Los Angrles fires carries a remarkable echo of the great LA noir film Chinatown (1974). The MacGuffin of that film involves the suspicion of Hollis Mulwray, the Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Departmnent of Water and Power, that huge quantities of water are being diverted from a city reservoir every night despite a drought. Mulwray is murdered as he tries to investigate, which leaves private detective Jake Gittes to unravel the mystery. Much of this year's story involves Janisse Quiñones, the Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and why a city reservoir intended to store water for the Pacific Palisades area was empty and unable to provide water to fight fires in that part of the city , which resulted in local hydrants going dry at a critical time. 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 Quiñ...

sd1002055 Nation Gets Preview Of Gavin Newsom Presidency https://t.co/b0iygizkHt pic.twitter.com/Hqmnt2STLs — The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 10, 2025 As I seem to keep pointing out here, I've worked in the disaster recovery and crisis management fields, and what puzzles me about the state and local response to the LA fires is the total ignorance by anyone in leadership, either at the political or operational level, of basic principles. For instance, there needs to be a central figure who can deliver regular and credible reports on what's being done, like the FBI's James Kallstrom with the TWA 800 explosion. With no one competent available to fill this role, it's fallen to Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass. Both of them, rather than being available to answer questions, have hidden from the press and stonewalled or ducked obvious questions about the dry fire hydrants or the empty reservoir. A competent Kallstrom type would acknowledge the situation and go on ...

As the title of this blog implies, we live in Hollywood, which is a considerable distance from either the Palisades Fire or the Eaton Fire. and thanks be to the Almighty, we were neither burned out nor ordered to evacuate. On the other hand, the powerful wind gusts that fed the fires also brought down trees across the whole region, which in turn took down power lines and left several million households without electricity. Our own neighborhood was out from Wednesday morning to noon yesterday, so although we and our neighbors were safe, we were incommunicado. The emerging consensus seems to be that the fires cmnstitute the worst disaster in Los Angeles history, which would put it above the previous top, the 1938 Los Angeles floods . Other lesser disasters include the 1933 Long Beach eartrhquake, the 1961 Bel Air fire, the 1965 Watts riots, the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, the 1992 Rodney King riots, and the 1994 Northridgw earthquake. But there were also strong reminders of the 1942 Bat...

As I reflected further on Archbishop Garcia-Siller's history of intemperate posts -- oddly reminiscent of Trump's own back in the day -- I thought about the timeline of his tenure as Archbishop of San Antonio. He was named to that post in 2010. I first learned about him when he removed Fr Christopher Phillips as pastor of the Our Lady of the Atonement parish in early 2017, and my editorial position on the old Cold Case File blog was that Phillips was overrated and something of a charlatan, and the archbishop's move was fully justified . I still think this way. Oddly, the archbishop's current pattern of making posts on X that he's had to delete, walk back, and apologize for, didn't begin until 2019. But then he stayed away from open controversy until this past year, when in May he had to delete, walk back, and apologize for two posts critical of Israel and the Jews in general. Then, following the New Orleans Bourbon Street attack, he indirectly blamed "tr...