The Outsider Perspective Issue 425 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to the newly minted lip-reading experts this week. The funeral ceremony for Jimmy Carter was held this week, and Obama and Trump seemed to be having an animated conversation at one point. Lip readers at the DailyMail were on it immediately. The only thing worth learning is that the two sought a private discussion elsewhere.

However, the more interesting moment came later when Joe and Jill Biden took their seat next to Kamala Harris and her husband. To say Jill and Kamala had a frosty moment is an understatement. You’d find more warmth during a blizzard in Antarctica. No lip-reading or body language experts are required.

There’s some outright hate in that relationship, and I suspect that will boil over in the upcoming memoirs about this White House.

But first, a massive wildfire is burning down parts of Los Angeles, CA. I’ll touch on that and the various political flashpoints—links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Senator John Fetterman plans to visit Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago this week. He will be the first Democratic Senator to make the trek. Also notable, Fetterman was a co-sponsor of the Laken Riley Act, which requires law enforcement to arrest and detain illegal aliens who have committed a crime. Fetterman is shaping up to be more of a Machin/Sinema-type Senator in this Congress. Whether or not this is a real turn for him is unknown. But he’s driving a determined centrist course to keep a high approval rating in his state.

Where you can find me this week

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Horse Race Ep. 019: Would Biden Have Won? | Elections To Watch In 2025

Justin Trudeau Is Out And The Free World Rejoices – Conservative Institute

Jimmy Carter’s Legacy Is One We Should Never Repeat – Conservative Institute

Donald Trump Should Call The International Criminal Court’s Bluff – Conservative Institute

Progressive Democrats Can’t Respond To Natural Disasters

For politicians, natural disasters are pass/fail tests you know are coming. Every Governor, Senator, or Representative will have to deal with a natural disaster at some point. California Democrats are witnessing a wildfire rip through Los Angeles, and they’re failing—abysmally.

As of Thursday night, the Palisades Fire had burned nearly 20,000 acres of land and destroyed more than 5,000 structures. According to Gavin Newsom, it is 6% contained—that is not a typo—six percent.

The separate Eaton County fire has burned nearly 14,000 acres and is uncontained. Other, more minor yet still severe fires are occurring elsewhere.

The situation is not ending, either. The National Weather Service warned California on Thursday:

After a brief reprieve from dangerous fire weather conditions across the Southern California Coast, critical fire weather will ramp up again as strong Santa Ana winds strengthen once again. While winds won’t be nearly as strong as the past few days, terrain induced winds of 20 to 30 mph with gusts of 40 to 60 mph will still be strong enough to be of concern. Combined with low relative humidity and dry fuels, the potential exists for ongoing fires to worsen and new ignitions to rapidly spread. Dangerous conditions are expected to continue tonight before waning Friday morning.

Once those winds come down, the fires should be under more control over the weekend. Longer-range models suggest the wind issue could return early next week, so there will be real pressure on California firefighters to gain containment of the fire on Saturday and Sunday before winds risk spreading things again.

LA Mayor Karen Bass, a one-time short-lister for Joe Biden’s Vice President in 2020, is flailing around with few answers, and Gavin Newsom is right behind her. As Bass was waiting to deplane, after returning from a bizarre international trip to Ghana, reporters asked her: “Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning, and do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madam Mayor?”

Bass had nothing to say. She stood there in stone silence.

I watched the news conference late Thursday with all the leading Los Angeles authorities on the stage, and Bass struggled. She’s fighting for her political life, and a lot of blame is aimed at her. After her, Gavin Newsom is next in line.

The main bone of contention is a memo written by Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley dated December 4, 2024, who “warned that recent budget cuts approved by Mayor Karen Bass’ severely limited’ LAFD’s ability to respond to ‘large scale emergencies.‘” There’s more:

“The reduction … has severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires,“ Crowley said in a memo dated December 4, 2024, and published Wednesday by KNBC in Los Angeles.

The 2024 Los Angeles city budget included approximately $17 million cut from LAFD. According to the city, these cuts were in part to account for multiple positions that would not be filled; they also redirected certain funds to emergency health services, due to the fact that the majority of FD calls were for medical emergencies and not fires.

The main question reporters asked both the mayor and the fire chief was simple and devastating: Are these budget cuts preventing your fire departments from being able to respond?

Both dodged that question, and Karen Bass was livid during the Q&A session. As many Republicans noted, Democrats are ill-served by never facing hard questions from the press when they suddenly get thrust into a complicated situation that demands hard questions. Democrats don’t know how to respond to that.

Another set of Democrats are mad at the “politicization” of the event. I had to stifle a laugh at that complaint. When Texas got hit by a brutal winter storm a few years back, it was a political firestorm. Democrats blasted Republican leadership. Ted Cruz got torched by Democrats for being on vacation while Texas was frozen over.

One of the people who had words about Ted Cruz was Karen Bass, who got called back from a Ghana trip. And you can throw a rock and find some way that Gavin Newsom has blasted Republican leaders in multiple states.

But it’s hard to avoid comparing Newsom’s leadership, or lack thereof, and how Florida runs during multiple hurricanes. Wildfires are a known commodity, just like hurricanes. If you’re the governor of California or the mayor of a city, responding to wildfires is one of your top jobs. If it catches you off guard, that speaks to a failure.

Last year, there was a large outbreak of wildfires across California, Oregon, and Washington. On September 7, 2024, The New York Times ran a piece titled: “In California, Controlled Fires Can Save Homes. Why Aren’t More Happening? Experts say these intentional burns reduce the risk of wildfires and more should be done. But real barriers remain.“

A few weeks later, the news got worse: The U.S. Forest Service halted prescribed fires in California. From October 24, 2024:

This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,“ a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.

The pause comes amid the crucial fall window for planned, controlled burns, which remove fuel and can protect homes from future wildfires — raising concerns that the move will increase long-term fire risks.

“There are two times in the year when it’s safe to do prescribed fire: in the fall right before the rains come, and in the spring when things are dry enough to burn but not dry enough to burn it in a dangerous way,“ said Michael Wara, energy and climate expert at Stanford University. He worries half of the prescribed fire season on federal lands will be sacrificed because of this decision.

So what you have is a series of bad policy decisions compounding each other, resulting in events like this. Wildfires can’t be stopped, but they can be slowed and defanged. California does not take the necessary steps to do these things.

If Florida responded to a hurricane by not having crews ready to restore power, rebuild, and restore communities, we’d correctly blast them for being unprepared. California got caught with its pants down during an entirely predictable event. That’s not politicizing an event—it’s stating the obvious.

What’s driving Democrats even more crazy is that Donald Trump has hammered the state for the same issues ever since he was elected. And now there’s a massive fire ripping through LA as Trump enters office.

Something I’ve wondered, because this lack of response is becoming typical in far-left blue states, is whether the Democratic focus on climate change as the reason why anything terrible happens in nature is incapacitating them. If you believe natural disasters are all caused by climate change, you seem less likely to be prepared for predictable events.

This is no commentary on the science itself but rather on the mindset it engenders. There’s a certain fatalism about that mindset, and it prevents states from taking common-sense measures to be prepared for disasters that always happen.

More long-term, though. These kinds of disasters can have a significant tailwind. In the aftermath of Katrina, thousands of people never returned. Democrats took it on the nose in that state. I’m not expecting California to flip to a Republican state – but if your entire life just went up in smoke, will you stick around to rebuild under California building regulations? Or leave?

It wouldn’t shock me if this spurred a second migration of Republican-leaning voters out of California. Bad policies are one thing, but being unable to fight natural disasters and provide essential resources breaks most people’s social contract with their government. If you can’t even put out a fire or take responsibility, why stay?

Links of the week

A Timeline of Mayor Karen Bass’s Disqualifying Conduct during the L.A. Fire Disaster – National Review

Paradise Lost: The burning of L.A. is not just a natural disaster. It’s a man-made catastrophe. – The Free Press

The Los Angeles Wildfires: An Avoidable Tragedy: State efforts to prevent them have been costly and impractical, with grim results. – City Journal

Watching Your House Burn on a Ring Camera – New York Magazine

Wildfires Put Spotlight on CA Water Policies, Inept Preparation – RealClearPolitics

Xi Jinping to send top-level China envoy to Donald Trump’s inauguration: Unusual diplomatic overture comes as Beijing braces for escalating tensions with new administration – Financial Times

The Monarch of Mar-a-Lago: Trump is now at the zenith of his power. The moment he’s sworn in on January 20, he’s just the plain, old president of the United States. – Niall Ferguson, The Free Press

The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West – The Free Press

Special relationship of rape apologists in America and Britain – Washington Examiner

The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland. – Chris Cutrone, Compact

NYT Reporter Regrets Kavanaugh Hit: “I Have Learned Some Lessons” – Chronicles