It’s another snow day in Northern Virginia, but that isn’t stopping climate change hysterics and progressive public policy incompetence apologists from blaming California’s latest wildfire catastrophe on global warming—not L.A.’s incompetent mayor, not the inadequate fire department budget, not the arsonists who may have started the fires, and not LA’s DEI water head, who left a crucial reservoir disconnected, resulting in fire hydrants not functioning.
Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones was hired at a $750,000 salary in May, double that of her predecessor. To be fair, she had a background in California fires: she was previously a top executive at electricity company PG&E, a senior vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) from 2021 to 2023. That’s the company with the power lines that sparked responsible for the second-largest wildfire in California history, Dixie, in 2021. Before that, the company’s involvement in the 2018 Camp Fire resulted in PG&E paying a $13.5 billion legal settlement, although its liability for causing fires was estimated at $30 billion when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. It exited bankruptcy in 2020, just in time to hire Quiñones. Hey, but it’s all climate change!….Meanwhile, the discussion over at the Friday Forum (again, sorry for posting it late) about pet peeves and my late wife’s particular objection to using “that” when “who” is correct reminded me of a brilliant limerick that I had almost forgotten.
My strange friends back in Arlington, Mass. used to play a limerick game in which one of us would come up with a first line, the next would add the second line, the third would complete the third and fourth lines that have to rhyme, and my dear, brilliant, witty friend Jay Sylva would always come up with the final line, because he was so good at it. I specialized in first lines, and this time offered, “The man who had eaten my face…” (it wouldn’t have scanned with “that’). The subsequent additions left us with…
The man who had eaten my face…”
Had the nerve to come back to my place.
I said, “Stay a while!
If you’ll cough up my smile…
To which Jay immediately added, to applause and his eternal glory,
I’ll forgive you for not saying grace!”
On to today’s early list…
1. Twitter/”X” wag Cynical Publius posted yesterday, triggered by the LA. mayor’s ineptitude, “America is having a crisis of incompetence. And a big reason for that is that we also are having a crisis in accountability. There was a time in America where when a leader’s organization failed, he or she was held accountable for that organizational failure and was fired or forced to resign. But no longer. Who has been held accountable for 20+ years of strategic military failures? Who has been held accountable for the 2008 housing crash? Who has been held accountable for ruining a generation of children over a flu that escaped from an American-funded Chinese virology lab? Who has been held accountable for the cover-up of Biden’s dementia? Who has been held accountable for the disgraceful, Stalinist lawfare waged against Trump? Who is now being held accountable for a modern American city burning to the ground? Answer? NO ONE….”
2. Speaking of Mayor Bass, whose performance I raised in the context of musings about why the U.S. hasn’t elected a female President yet, several online commentators tracked down news items from 2020 stating that Bass, then in Congress, was being vetted by the Biden team as a possible Vice-President, since Joe was under orders to pick a black woman, other qualifications be damned.
3. And speaking of our pathetic, crumbling President and his Veep, yesterday Biden had an evening press conference at the White House, now that his garbled answers can no longer do any harm. “Do you regret your decision to run for re-election?” a reporter asked Biden. “Do you think 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.”
Jeez, somebody tell him. I wonder whom it is that he thinks lost to Trump?
4. And speaking of Biden, his efforts to obstruct what the incoming President was elected to do continue. His administration yesterday issued extensions of deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of people from Sudan, Ukraine, El Salvador and Venezuela. The goal is to obstruct Trump from deporting any non-citizens with Temporary Protected Status, which allows immigrants to remain in the country with work permits and a shield from deportation. Biden’s move adds another 18 months to their current protection, which was scheduled to expire in the spring. The Congressional Research Service says more than a million covered individuals from countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East had Temporary Protected Status as of 2024.
5. Again speaking of Biden, the New York Times is blaming the results of his administration’s, his party’s and its prosecutors’ introduction of political show-trials into the fabric of American politics on, of course, Donald Trump. Of course! Yesterday Trump received his non-sentence sentence for the unethical guilty verdict in the New York on arguably the most indefensible of the charges brought against Trump. Johnathan Turley accurately listed how disgusting this spectacle was:
[Judge]Merchan allowed a dead misdemeanor to be resuscitated by allowing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to effectively prosecute declined federal offenses. He allowed a jury to convict Trump without any agreement, let alone unanimity, on what actually occurred in the case. Merchan ruled that the jury did not have to agree on why Trump committed an alleged offense in describing settlement costs as legal costs. Neither the defendant nor the public will ever know what the jury ultimately found in its verdict.”
None of that matters, however, because the only reason for the prosecution and the rush to sentence Trump before he was sworn in as President was so the Axis can describe him as a “convicted felon” for his entire term in office. And that’s what many of the progressive, Trump-hating websites and blogs immediately did. The New York Times was more audacious. In its “news analysis,” The Times says that Trump has “upended” how Americans view the Presidency. See, now we no longer view the office as held by honorable men of high character.
The traditional “halo effect” the office of President traditionally bestowed on new Presidents greatly enhanced the Presidency and promoted national unity: heck, I wrote my honors thesis in American Government about it. But this was always mythology, though useful and effective mythology, and any American who didn’t know that many, if not most, of our past Presidents had serious character flaws, committed terrible acts and harbored despicable beliefs was (or is) ignorant and naive. If the Biden Presidency didn’t shatter those illusions, nothing will: Presidents are not supposed to be blithering, babbling idiots. Presidents are supposed to actually be the ones making Presidential decisions. Presidents are not supposed to pardon corrupt, criminal, influence-peddling family members whom they assisted in their scams.
The veil started be lifted in the Sixties, and it has, regrettable, almost completely fallen away. We know that Thomas Jefferson kept his wife’s half sister as his concubine, and never freed his own slaves while writing that there was a human right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We know Andrew Jackson shot people and had a racist vendetta against Native Americans. We know that Franklin Pierce spent his only, crucial, term in office drunk and clinically depressed. Grover Cleveland was probably a rapist; Woodrow Wilson was a virulent, unapologetic racist; President Harding banged maids in a White House closet. Need I go on?
Democrats set out to assassinate Donald Trump’s character with one contrived accusation after another: a majority of their party thinks he colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. The “lawfare” that they waged to defeat Trump indeed further harmed the office; the Axis was willing to do that and inflict the resulting wounds to our nation, to keep power.
Ethics Alarms 
I have yet to read what the sentence without a punishment actually said. Does anyone have a resource?
Is this action legally appealable, say to the Supremes?
If it can be appealed and it is reversed who could be held accountable?
It’s like any other lower court trial. The conviction can be appealed on, oh, about a million grounds. It’s not a final adjudication until appeals have been exhausted. Remember this?
5. I’ve come to think the “they do it to stay in power” explanation is inadequate. I think “they do it because they can” is closer to the truth. There’s just so much hubris. They’re right and they’re more interested in being right in their minds rather than being in power. There’s more than a dash of self-destruction that seems to show up when you’re right all the time. I guess, “It’s the monomania, stupid.” I guess bias can make you monomaniacal.
It isn’t a singular person trying to stay in a position. It is the entire ruling class that is under threat here. Donald Trump became president without the permission of the ruling class. Once in office, he tried to overrule the ruling class on their policies. If the people can vote in officials who can challenge the ruling class, their way of life is over. Although it is an overused term, Donald Trump IS an existential threat to their existence.
If you notice, Democratic presidential candidates are chosen by the Democratic Party (that is why they have superdelegates, just in case there is a democratic revolt of ‘the rabble’). The Republican candidate is usually chosen by the media. So, the Republican candidate has to get the permission of the ruling class (via the media) to run for office. A prime example of this is Rick Perry. Remember when he was the leading candidate, then had to withdraw. Why? The media said that his dad rented a place for the family vacation that had a rock that some people said had a word spray painted on it that some people could interpret as some kind of racial slur they have never heard before. There weren’t even pictures of the rock. Why is this ‘news’? Why would anyone think that a major political figure is disqualified because of something like that? Well, it was a concerted attack by all the media and Perry knew he didn’t get the approval to run from the ruling class, so he dropped out.
Trump didn’t drop out because he had no intention of being a puppet for the ruling class. That is a threat to all of them, from the university professor to the media heads to the IRS administrators. The next thing you know, government jobs will be hired on merit and how will all the idiot children of Senators make a living and retain power?
Regarding point 1, I’m looking forward to getting an upcoming book: The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost Its Mind by Dan Davies.
Good tips, EC. Thanks. When is New Years on your planet?