The Other California Fire

A second California fire that's been edged out of the news by the ones in the Los Angeles area is a fire at a battery storage facility at Moss Landing near Monterey on the Central Coast.

The site's battery energy storage facility is the largest commercial battery energy storage facility in the world. The energy storage facility stores excess daytime electrical energy for later use during periods of lower electricity production (usually at night.) Such excess energy is typically produced by renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

. . . Utilities in California are required by a 2013 law to provide significant battery storage by 2024. The Moss Landing Power Plant site has since been chosen as California's primary location to provide battery based energy storage in order to better utilize renewable energy sources such as solar and wind on a grid-wide commercial scale. On June 29, 2018 Vistra Corp announced that it planned on building at the Moss Landing Power Station site, what became the world's largest commercial electric battery energy storage site.

The point of this is to overcome the disadvantage of solar and wind generated power, that it works only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. A giant battery storage facility will store surplus power generated when the sun shines and the wind blows and return it to the grid when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. At least, that's the idea. But:

Power company Vistra​’s flagship grid battery project, housed in and around a historic power plant dating back to 1950, erupted into flames Thursday night [January 16] and prompted nearby residents to evacuate from Moss Landing, California.

The cause of the fire is not known, but local authorities have reported that much of the building that housed the batteries was destroyed as of Friday morning. That makes this by far the most destructive of the four battery fires that have afflicted the small coastal town since it became a linchpin in California’s clean energy overhaul. And the dramatic conflagration complicates the energy-storage industry’s efforts to win community support for more large batteries, which are seen as crucial to cleaning up the electrical system.

Lithium batteries in particular have developed a reputation for catching fire. There have been previous fires at the Moss Landing facility; the one last week is only the most severe. However, lithium-ion batteries of the type used in large-scale storage facilities are difficult to extinguish:

A large Li-ion fire, such as in an EV, may need to burn out. Water with copper material can be used, but this may not be available and is costly for fire halls. Increasingly, experts advise using water even with large Li-ion fires. Water lowers combustion temperature but is not recommended for battery fires containing lithium-metal.

In fact, the local fire deparment at Moss Landing had experience with battery fires at the faciity and discovered that no amount of water would extinguish such a fire. Last week, they simply stood by and let the fire burn itself out after destroying the facility over a period of several days. Exactly how or when it can be returned to service is unclear, especially since the basic design of the facility may have been part of the problem.

Statements from utility officials in the wake of the fire have referred to it as a "wake-up call" for the industry, since it reflects basic questions of both safety and reliability for basttery storage facilities, and these in turn are integral to the reliability of renewable electric power sources. If the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine, electricity needs to be stored, but if the storage systems aren't safe or reliable, it throws the whole idea of renewable energy into question.

This is just one instance where the federal government may need to find an opportunity to inject common sense into California politics.

More Dribbles Out On Joe Biden's Decline

Speaker Mike Johnson reveals just how out of the loop and cognitively impaired Joe Biden was as President after meeting with Biden and discussing his LNG Executive Order:

“Biden was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed.”

Scary.
pic.twitter.com/Clbytug8e3

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 18, 2025

All of a sudden, Speaker Mike Johnson and Democrat Leader Schumer are getting in line to say they knew all along that Joe wasn't running on all cylinders. This suggests to me that even more will be coming out as Trump's staff gains access to White House records, but it's nevertheless significant that the House Speaker and then-Senate Majority Leader were aware of serious problems with Joe's ability to perform his duties but nevertheless did nothing, at least partly because they currently have no constitutional ability to initiate any sort of action.

Sen Schumer is now trying to cover himself by claiming he met with Joe on July 13 of last year, just before the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, PA, but after the problem had become clear to the whole country in the June 27 debate:

Schumer told Joe Biden that top Democrats in the House and Senate had lost faith in him and warned if he lost to Trump, Democrats would lose the Senate and wouldn’t take back the House.

“If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that 50 years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window,” Schumer said, according to The Times. “But worse — you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

“If I were you,” Mr. Schumer said to Biden around 5 o’clock in the evening on July 13, “I wouldn’t run, and I’m urging you not to run.”

But it's transparently clear that the big confab with the top congressional Democrats came only in the wake of the June 27 debate and the episodes in Europe. The problem wasn't that Joe was losing it; the problem was that they could no longer cover it up. This is clear from Speaker Johnson's account of his experience the previous January, as quoted from the interview embedded at the top of this post:

They wouldn't let me meet with him, and his staff kept giving me excuses. This went on for like eight or nine weeks, "I'm sorry Mr. Speaker, he doesn't have time." What are you talking about? I'm second in line to the presidency, he has time. I need to talk to him. We had, I can't say the classified parts, but we had some big national concerns at the time that I was losing sleep over. Finally, I just went to the whole press corps and said the president is not being allowed to meet with the speaker so they start putting pressure on him.

Long story short, they finally relented, they invited me to the White House, I show up and I realize it's actually an ambush because it's not just me and the president. It's actually Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem, the CIA Director, and everybody, and then so I walk into the Oval, and I say, "Ah, I know what this is. . ."

This is consistent with reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in prior weeks that Biden's inner circle worked to minimize his contacts with outsiders:

At least one Cabinet member stopped asking for calls with Biden "because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome," a source told the Wall Street Journal. Cabinet members with particularly infrequent access to Biden reportedly included Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Donors also noticed how staffers worked to mask signs of Biden's "decline," the Wall Street Journal reported.

Johnson continued in the interview,

We sit down, we're in the midst of it and I'm saying, "We don't need to have this conversation." The president reaches over, just like this, we were sitting right next to the fireplace in the Oval, and he says, "The Speaker and I just need a couple minutes together. We y'all just leave us alone?" And I looked up on the faces of some of staff standing around the wall, and they were like, "No, he did it."

He called it, he's the commander in chief, so everybody leaves, and he and I are standing awkwardly in the middle of the Oval Office right over the rug by that coffee table, and I said, "Mr. President, thanks for the moments, you know, this is very important, I've got some big national security things I need to talk to you about that I've heard, and I think you know, but first, real quickly, Mr. President, can I ask you a question?"

"I can't answer this for my constituents in Louisiana. Sir, why did you pause LNG exports? Liquified natural gas is in great demand by our allies, why would you do that? Cause you understand, we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you're fueling Putin's war machine?" And he looked at me, stunned, and he said, "I didn't do that." And I said, "Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order like three weeks ago." He said, "No, I didn't do that," he was arguing with me.

As best anyone could tell, Biden was told that what he was signing only authorized some sort of LNG study, not a pause in LNG exports:

I said, "No you're not sir, you paused it, I have the terminal, the export terminal in our state, I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, to our national security."

I thought, "We are in serious trouble." Who's running the country?" I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn't know.

Given the circumstances, it would be perfectly reasonable for Speaker Johnson to conclude the country's in "serious trouble" -- but, er, given that, what did he do? And this was in late January 2024, five months before the June 27 debate that finally convinced Leader Schumer and Speaker Emerita Pelosi that they couldn't cover Joe's condition up any longer -- so they resorted to extraconstitutional means to push him out as a presidential candidate. Let's recall that Section 4 of the 25th Amendment provides:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

Let's recall that the House Speaker in the first half of 2024 was Mike Johnson; the President pro tempore of the Senate was Patty Murray. But they would have had a completely passive role in removing Biden under the 25th Amendment; the reponsibility was on the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet simply to notify Johnson and Murray of Biden's inability. But neither Johnson, Murray, Harris, nor anyone in the cabinet was involved in sidelining Joe, at least from the self-serving accounts we've had so far from Schumer and Pelosi.

So, exactly what happened? One part of the question hasn't been answered at all, which is who was actually running the country? Whose decision was it, for instance, to write an executive order pausing LNG exports but to tell Joe he was signing something else? Were any laws broken?

But then there's a whole set of additional questions. The 25th Amendment was written and ratified principally to solve the problem of how to replace a vice president who succeeds to the presidency and leaves the vice presidency vacant until the next presidential election. But its provisions for removing an incapacitated president are apparently not workable; the vice president and the cabinet clearly have too much interest in keeping an incapacitated president in office as long as possible. There need to be additional checks and balances.

This is just one more on a long list of items Trump and Congress will need to address in the new term.

The LA Recall Election Of 1938

The self-satisfied gent with the fussy Hitler mustache in the photo is Frank L Shaw (1877-1958), who was mayor of Los Angeles fron 1933 to 1938. He was the only mayor of LA ever to be recalled, and in my view, he'll likely keep that distinction barring major changes -- as Greg Gutfeld puts it about the current situation, lots of ash, no phoenix. The newspaper story below (click on the image for a more legible copy) gives the outline of the story that led to his recall, but as Wikipedia points out, "His administration was seen as one of the most corrupt in Los Angeles history, although he had some defenders and was never charged officially with any crime."

The prevailing "whig history" view of the episode portrays it in pure good-guy-vs-bad-guy terms: Fletcher Bowron, a Superior Court judge, ran against Shaw on a so-called "fusion ticket" of all good elements to recall Shaw, and he won. He was characterized by Time as "a fiercely honest man, and is eternally intent on protecting Los Angeles from itself." According to Wikipedia, he:

earned the reputation of being lawful, unlike his predecessor. This was part of what he called the Los Angeles Urban Reform Revival.

Los Angeles grew enormously during the war years, with very large defense industries. After the war Bowron began construction of the Los Angeles International Airport and the 1st phases of the elaborate freeway system. . . . A high priority was eliminating organized crime from the city's police department. He forced the resignation of numerous officers, and prevented Los Angeles from becoming a wide open town. Bowron ran on nonpartisan fusion tickets, but his popularity declined in his 4th term. The Los Angeles Citizens Committee demanded his recall, claiming he was responsible for high taxes and continued police corruption. In 1952 he lost his reelection bid in the Republican primary to Norris Poulson, a conservative opponent of public housing.

Much of the reform in the police department, however, came via his appointment of William H Parker as police chief, which he did in 1950, only three years before he left office. Parker, who was behind popular television shows that portrayed Los Angeles police like Dragnet, vied with J Edgar Hoover as the public face of law enforcement throughout the 1950s, well after Bowron's retirement.

In fact, the urban reform movement was never quite happy with Bowron. Clifford Clinton, a good-government advocate who'd been a Bowron ally in the 1938 recall, broke with him and ran against him in the 1945 mayoral election:

By the early 1940s, Clifford Clinton had become disenchanted with reform Mayor Fletcher Bowron. . . . [A] poll of potential voters revealed strong support for Clinton as a mayoral challenger.

Clinton initially refused. When liberal county Supervisor John Anson Ford announced he would challenge Boweon, Clinton reconsidered because he didn't believe Ford could win. Ford had lost to Mayor Shaw in 1937.

He joined the race and published a treatise of his plan for the city in a 14-page pamphlet, "The Clock Strikes Twelve: It's Time To Act." During the campaign, Clinton pushed for better leadership to deal with ongoing corruption, infrastructure, and racial polarization.

On election night, Clinton came in a distant second, losing to Bowron.

In fact, Bowron turned out to be a politician much like any other. He ran for reelection in the spring of 1941, only months before Pearl Harbor, and he actively sought the support of Japanese-Amnerican voters:

During the 1941 municipal election, Bowron campaigned in Little Tokyo, and John Aiso was among those who tried to attract Japanese American voters for Bowron. He won the election with an estimated 55% of the vote.

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Bowron reassured listeners on his weekly radio program that there was no threat of an attack on Southern California shores. However by January 1942, Bowron became one of the early elected officials to call for the incarceration of Japanese Americans, urging that Japanese Americans be moved several miles inland and be put to work for the war effort, such as raising food.

On January 27, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors discharged all Japanese American county employees and adopted a resolution, urging the federal government to remove Japanese Americans from the coastal areas. Bowron took similar steps and forced all Los Angeles City employees of Japanese descent to take a leave of absence. Bowron's office also embarked on a propaganda campaign to try to control the Japanese American population by encouraging the community to inform on each other and by emphasizing dire consequences for anyone caught committing acts of sabotage.

. . . When the federal government started releasing Japanese Americans from the incarceration camps in 1943, Bowron used his radio program to vehemently oppose their return to Southern California. He felt there could be an outbreak of violence and emphasized that the city could not provide housing or police protection to any returning Japanese Americans. He also continued to publicly advocate that all Japanese Americans should have their U.S. citizenship revoked.

The bottom line is that at least the old-fashioned urban reform movement, grounded in the Progressive era that gave us putative reforms like the recall, didn't cure much of anything that ailed LA. Even if it were possible to recall the current Mayor Bass -- which I very much doubt; a change of heart among the 1% in Pacific Palisades isn't enough to swing an election -- based on the historical record, it isn't going to change much of anything. A new populist coalition, on the other hand, that united the aspirations of the working and middle classes of all backgrounds, might be a different matter.

That wouldn't be a repeat of 1938. Nevertheless, so far, lots of ash, no phoenix.

LA Fire Department "Class 1"?

My first job after I left academe was as a writer with the LA City statistical bureau. In that job, I worked a lot with the fire department, and one of the first things I learned was that LAFD is a "Class 1" department. Its apparatus proudly carried, and in fact still carries, a "Class 1" designation, as you can see in the photo above (click on the image for a better view). Here's an explanation of what the ISO "Class 1" means:

ISO stands for Insurance Services Office (ISO), which is an independent, for-profit organization. The ISO scores fire departments on how they are doing against its organization’s standards to determine property insurance costs.

After analyzing the data it collects, the ISO assigns a Public Protection Classification (PPC) on a scale from 1 to 10. The higher the ISO fire protection class (with Class 1 being the best), the “better” the department – at least in the eyes of the ISO.

To determine ISO rating for fire departments, the organization conducts a field survey and scores your department across four key areas using the Fire Suppression Rating Schedule (FSRS).

These areas include Emergency Communication Systems (10 points); Fire Departments, covering personnel, capabilities, training, equipment, etc. (50 points); Water Supply (40 points); and Community Risk Reduction (extra credit of up to 5.5 points).

It uses a 100-point scale (with the potential of 105.5 with the Community Risk Reduction extra credit), and the more points you score, the better your ISO fire rating.

I hadn't thought about the fire department in many years, except the other day, I noticed that Glendale Fire Department apparatus also now carries a "Class 1" designation -- but at least back in the day, Glendale was held in low regard by other fire departments in the area. There was a major scandal when their chief arson investigator turned out to moonlight as an arsonist when he wasn't on duty. So with all the controversy over the LA Fire Department's DEI policies, staff cuts, derelict apparatus, and empty hydrants, I assdumed LAFD had almost certainly lost its "Class 1" designation.

It turns out I'm not the only person to ask this question. Here's some of the discussion on an EMT forum:

I don’t think they ever stopped putting class 1 although I have heard that supposedly they no long have a class 1 rating

. . . I've "heard" that they haven't actually had an ISO evaluation for several decades, but they always continued to put "Class 1" on their rigs

But according to the first link above, "Class 1" doesn't necessarily mean what people think it does anyhow:

While it’s a common perception that homeowner’s insurance premiums are directly tied to the ISO fire rating, this isn’t necessarily true. Many insurers do provide discounts for lower PPC scores, but their rating structure is complex and constantly changing. And in some states, the score is not even a factor at all.

. . . Ultimately, a lower score reflects well on a fire department. Like accreditation, a good ISO fire rating demonstrates a commitment to excellence as verified by a third-party reviewal.

Plus, it really is an honor to be able to claim an ISO Fire Protection Class 1 rating. You all work hard as a team, so to come out on top with a high ISO score is something you want to shout from the top of your fire truck.

But the EMT discussion also raises the question of whether the LAFD actually holds a current "Class 1" designation. And if it does, why are major insurers nevertherless pulling out of areas in the City with high fire risk? The link goes on,

While this isn’t totally on the fire department, you will need to advocate to your city or county’s leaders in order to make community water supply a priority.

Water supply is the single biggest contributor to lower scores. So, if you want to improve your ISO score and you have an inadequate water supply, your fire department needs to get the issue onto the radar of city officials.

Clearly water supply -- the dormant Santa Ynez Reservoir and the dry hydrants -- was a major factor in the Palisades fire, but neither the ISO nor the mayor and City Council seems to have addressed it. It will be a major task to get the community behind reforming the current fire department priorities. A letter to Chief Crowley from current and retired Fire Department officers calling for her resignation is a potential first step:

Last week, complaints about funding for her department boiled over into a public dispute between Mayor Karen Bass and Chief Crowley. This week, veteran fire managers charged that she and her staff should have positioned more engines in advance in high-risk areas like Pacific Palisades, where the fires began on Jan. 7.

. . . A Jan. 13 letter signed by unnamed “retired and active L.A.F.D. chief officers” accused her of a host of management failures and called for her to step down. “A large number of chief officers do not believe you are up to the task,” the five-page letter read in part.

. . . Even before the fire, the chief faced strong political challenges, Dr. Guerra said. Her appointment in early 2022 by the prior mayor, Mr. Garcetti, was seen as an attempt to steady the department after years of complaints of harassment and discrimination raised by female L.A.F.D. firefighters.

Clearly a goal of reform-oriented community leaders -- if in fact these ever surface -- will need to focus local politics away from DEI and back to basic issues of community safety. This won't happen until both Chief Crowley and Mayor Bass are out of office, but before that happens, community leaders are going to have to emerge who can defenestrate them. That could possibly include figues like former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, and LA Times owner Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong. But Soon-Shiong in particular will need to grow a spine.

The LA Fires And The Homeless-Industrial Complex

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 management and distribution.'

. . . While the fire department's budget steadily grew from from $674.27 million in 2019 to $819.64 million in 2025, this year it faced a significant fall from $837.19 million in 2024.

In a December memo, Crowley said the cut of $17.6million 'adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education.'

. . . A leaked memo last week revealed that Karen Bass had demanded the LAFD make an additional $49million budget cut, on top of the $17.6million cut.

The extra cuts, requested just days before fires broke out and devastated swathes of Los Angeles, would have shut down 16 fire stations and crippled the department's ability to respond to emergencies, sources previously told DailyMail.com.

There's also the unanswered question of why the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been empty and under repair since 2022, when a mandated update was supposed to have been finished in 2012, which I covered in this post. The LA Department of Water and Power's explanation completely glosses over this extended tmeline:

In a memo posted by the LADWP attempting to combat misinformation regarding water supply, they clarified that “LADWP was required to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir out of service to meet safe drinking water regulations,” but stated that “water supply remained strong to the area.”

But the safe drinking water updates were supposed to have been finsihed in 2012, while the reservoir has been in and out of service over a dozen years since then. This sounds as though the LADWP's budget is being squeezed just as much as the fire department. Where is this money going?

The best answer I've heard is from Alex Villanueva, who was LA County Sheriff from 2018 to 2022. Villanueva, although a Democrat, was also a Trump-style populist who during his tenure took an increasing interest in the homeless problem. In particular, he took on homeless encampments in places like Venice Beach, whose local city councilman had advocated pro-encampment policies:

When it comes to law enforcement in Venice, the Los Angeles Police Department has long been the agency in charge.

But now Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva is sending deputies in to patrol the boardwalk and beach in an effort to crack down on Venice's growing homelessness problem.

And it's sparking an ugly political spat.

That prompted a series of angry tweets from Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who called Villanueva a "roadblock" to progress, accused him of exploiting the homeless for political gain, and called the effort a PR blitz promising Villanueva's "notorious brand of justice."

"The city of LA created this problem," Villanueva said Monday in Venice. "This is a failure of leadership from the very top."

As LA County Sheriff, Villanueva insisted he had legal authority over law enforcement anywhere in the county, whether or not, as in this case, LAPD was also responsible, and if LAPD wasn't going to act, the sheriff's office would. Villanueva also pointed out that the sheriff is a separately elected official, and he doesn't take orders from any other politicians.

In effect, Villanueva was taking on the county and state machine, which promptly found a candidate to run against him in the 2022 election, and Villanueva was defeated. But he's continued to make his point: the homeless problem exists because politicians make money off it:

Over the past decade, $6.5 billion has been spent trying to solve Los Angeles County’s homelessness crisis. However, instead of decreasing, its homeless population has increased to nearly 70,000 from its 2011 total of 39,000, according to last year’s point-in-time count.

The worsening of the issue can be partially attributed to it being profitable for many organizations and individuals, Alex Villanueva, former Los Angeles County Sheriff, said in a recent Epoch Time’s California Insider interview.

“They’re not doing anything about it because the homeless industrial complex is alive and well,” he said.

According to Villanueva, many nonprofit organizations receive county funding to help solve the issue, but there are no clear guidelines on how such funding should be used.

“There’s no governance, there’s no oversight, there’s no accountability on the results. [The county] just keeps shoveling money at them, and the problem keeps getting worse and worse,” he said.

Unfortunately, Mayor Bass is on board with the homeless-industrial complex:

For the 2023-2024 fiscal year, Los Angeles budgeted $837 million for the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), which was roughly 65% the size of the homeless budget of $1.3 billion.

An analysis by L.A.'s city comptroller last year found that roughly half the budget for homelessness went unspent.

Bass had proposed a larger budget cut to the LAFD, about $23 million, but it was not adopted.

This is where the fire department's budget, as well as related projects like the dormant Santa Ynez Reservoir, is going. I can only surmise that the homeless budget, which is comparable to the City's in in LA County and supported in part by a sales tax increment, is embedded with local politicians because there's a skim -- some amount of this multibillion-dollar expenditure is kicked back to the politicians themselves. This is inevitably going to come out as the federal budget battles heat up. It can't happen soon enough.

Where Do Politics Stand After The Fires?

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%. Two years later, even before the fires, Caruso was flirting with the ides of running against her again:

Real estate developer Rick Caruso made it clear two years ago that he wouldn’t run again for Los Angeles mayor if he lost to Karen Bass.

But lately, Caruso has been behaving a bit like a candidate.

He's shown more energy since the fires:

Amid a flurry of largely right-wing backlash of California public officials’ handling of the deadly wildfires near Los Angeles, the billionaire Rick Caruso, who unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for Los Angeles mayor, emerged as the most notable critic, tearing into his former opponent in L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and earning the support of the world’s richest man and GOP megadonor Elon Musk.

. . . Caruso, whose criticism differed from the likes of President-elect Donald Trump, who swiped at California Gov. Gavin Newsom for not greenlighting a fictitious “water restoration declaration,” led a band of local politicians critical of the city, including Traci Park, the city council member representing the neighborhoods worst hit by the fires, who told the Los Angeles Times she has “more questions than answers” on how what she called the “chronic under-investment” in infrastructure contributed to the fire’s severity.

But whether Caruso will actually run again or even back a recall effort is still unclear. Other efforts to recall Bass or somehow force her resignation are so far just wishful thinking:

More than 86,000 outraged Los Angeles residents demand the ouster of lefty Mayor Karen Bass in a new petition, ripping her “gross mismanagement” in her disastrous response to the devastating wildfires ravaging the city.

“We . . . urgently call for the immediate recall of [Bass] due to her gross mismanagement and failure to effectively respond to the devastating 2025 fires in and around the city,” reads the Change.org petition created Wednesday, which had amassed more than 65,000 signatures by Saturday morning.

Bass was 7,400 miles away in Africa, at the inauguration of Ghana’s president, as flames began engulfing the City of Angels.

However, a Change.org petition is nothing but a Change.org petition. In California, a recall petition must be formally filed as part of a legal process, and it must have the verified signatuires of at least 10% of the voters. As of last year, Los Angeles City had 2,130,581 registered voters, which means a successful recall petition would need at least 213,058 verified signatures. The two unsuccessful recall petitions against George Gascon were thrown out by machine judges who rejected tens of thousands of signatures, and we may assume any such petition against Mayor Bass would have the same result.

At least there's a slightly less Quixotic effort against Gov Newsom:

A recall attempt to knock California Gov. Gavin Newsom out of office is underway as he faces sharp criticism for his handling of the Los Angeles wildfires — with opponents labeling his leadership a “series of catastrophic failures.”

Organizers against Newsom vowed to file papers in the next two weeks in hopes of jumpstarting the process that could lead to the Democrat’s ouster in the middle of his second term in the governor’s mansion.

. . . A notice of intent needs to be filed first and then recall supporters must collect about 1.3 million signatures in five months, according to the outlet.

. . . Newsom, 57, easily survived the 2021 recall vote in a state where Democrats hold a clear advantage in voter registration over Republicans.

A spokesperson for Newsom dismissed the latest attempt to throw the Dem out of office, insisting to Newsweek that the governor is “100 percent focused on the fires, ongoing rescue efforts and the recovery process — not politics.”

“Readers still should have the context that the same group of far-right Trump acolytes have launched six different recall attempts against the governor since he’s taken office, each of which have failed spectacularly,” spokesperson Nathan Click said in a statement.

The only hope for a new recall attempt, if Newsom repeats his 2021 strategy to characterize the organizers as Trump supporters, would be to rely on a general shift in opinion about Trump and hope it rubs off in the local context. Last November, Trump was able to benefit from a view that electing Biden in 2020 was a mistake. Now we have people like Dr Soon-Shiong saying endorsing Bass for mayor was an equivalent mistake. But for such a movement to succeed, it will need much more than Change.og petitoins and wishful thinking.

Has Dr Pat Soon-Shiong Been Redpilled?

“Competence matters”: LA Times owner says that it was a “mistake” for his paper to endorse Karen Bass for Mayor in 2022pic.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 and has been described as an adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell." The man is hardly a firebrand.

Beyond that, Soon-Shiong has owned the LA Times since 2018. Why is he making these changes only now? Beyond that, according to the link,

In 2020, Soon-Shiong blocked the editorial board from making any endorsement in the Democratic presidential primaries, overruling its intended endorsement of Elizabeth Warren; the paper did endorse Biden in the general election.

During Soon-Shiong's ownership of the Los Angeles Times, his daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, became interested in the newspaper and sought to influence coverage, in both the newsroom and opinion pages. Many Times staffers expressed alarm at the younger Soon-Shiong's activity, which they viewed as meddling, including privately and publicly contacting staffers to advocate her views.

As it happens, Nika Soon-Shiong has her own Wikipedia entry.

Nika Soon-Shiong (born February 26, 1993) is an American politician and activist who served as a Public Safety Commissioner of West Hollywood from 2021 to 2022. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Fund for Guaranteed Income and was also part of the Compton Pledge and Long Beach Pledge guaranteed income programs.

Guaranteed income? Sounds a little woozy to me. During her time as a Public Safety Commissioner of West Hollywood,

As a commissioner representing concerns of the citizens, she questioned policing in the city. Soon-Shiong was met with backlash for this, with [West Hollywood council member Lindsey] Horvath responding to the backlash against Soon-Shiong saying it was "rooted in racism". In June 2022, the West Hollywood City Council voted to reduce the number of sheriffs in the city and replace them with unarmed security guards, a move which Soon-Shiong called "pragmatic and fiscally responsible", but said it "could have gone further."

It's worth noting that the questioning from Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine was generally fawning and didn't mention his daughter's far-left politics or her own meddling at the Times.

While I mentioned an LA Times story favorably in last Saturday's post because, unlike any other media coverage, it gave a timeline and hard specifics of the so-called "Sunset Fire" that threw into question the other sensationalist coverage, the Times itself hasn't provided general coverage of the fires that even its own opinion writer wished it would:

Once we reached our destination I began what would turn into a 24-hour obsession with fire maps — on The Times website, the Watch Duty app, protect.genasys.com. None of which told me what I wanted to know: How fast was the fire moving toward my home and those of my friends and neighbors?

In fact, it took Fox News a week finally to put up the sort of map people had been wanting to see, not the Times (click in the image for a larger view; there's also more info at the link):

In fact, the Halperin interview had me scratching my head. When the Chandler family owned the Times, especially during the Norman Chandler era, there was a sense of community responsibility that went with publishing a regional paper. Indeed, there was something of a consensus among influential figures, certainly the Chandlers, but others like H F Ahmanson, the Disneys, the Gettys, and Leo S Bing, on what was good for the region -- and this would have included a reliable water supply and effective fire protection.

What puzzled me most about the Soon-Shiong interview was Patrick's apparent shallowness about the continuing need for this kind of leadership. Instead, he just makes glib statements on how “competence matters”. Where does he fit in? Where does the Times fit in? If our current leaders aren't competent, what are influential citizens going to do about it? I'm getting no sense of direction.

Instead he hears people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg making noises, and he thinks maybe he should look like he's making the same sort of noises -- but there's no there there.