Daily Caller
‘Excuses Go Up In Flames’: California Dems Paved The Way For Los Angeles To Be Consumed By ‘The Big One’

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Nick Pope
Southern California was known for years to be vulnerable to potentially devastating wildfires, but Democratic officials did not take sufficient action before proceeding to botch the response to fires currently devastating the Los Angeles area.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom failed to follow through on a signature 2019 initiative to revamp the state’s approach to wildfires and neglected to adequately manage wildfire kindling while a key reservoir reportedly sat empty in the lead-up to the fires that have rocked Southern California this week. While there is nuance to these shortcomings, the results of the crisis makes clear that California’s top officials failed to effectively handle a predictable and dire emergency, according to emergency management and policy experts.
“We saw this coming, and we have said, ‘I told you so’ every time there’s been a super fire. This time, the super fire happens to be even more catastrophic, because it’s happening in one of the most densely-populated areas in the United States,” Edward Ring, director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s the same message, which is that we have neglected our water infrastructure. We have mismanaged our forests and chaparral in the name of environmentalism, and we’re paying the price.”
“Anybody who says this is being politicized should be ashamed of themselves, because every time this happened in the past, the people defending the policies blamed it on climate change, which is a completely politicized issue,” Ring added. “And instead of making the hard decisions that might challenge environmentalist priorities, they did things like outlawing gasoline engines and mandating electric cars. Things like that have nothing to do with land management, they have absolutely nothing to do with the actual problem that needs to be solved.”
Ring said that inadequate use of prescribed burns and the regulation-induced decline of timbering in California have increased the density of vegetation available to fuel fires, making “the whole state a tinderbox.”
Republican Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy, who has fought wildfires in the past, also said in a Wednesday Fox News interview that “the big one” was foreseeable, adding that the devastation unfolding in Southern California is largely attributable to government mismanagement of the emergency. Some forecasts, including those issued by the National Interagency Fire Center and the California Office for Emergency Services, warned that Southern California was at high risk for serious fires in January before the fires began ravaging Los Angeles.
Joe Rogan also recounted in July 2024 that a Southern California firefighter once told him that the area had been fortunate to avoid a massive fire emergency, but that the region’s luck would run out one day when the conditions were right for a devastating blaze that could threaten the entire city.
Newsom launched a $1 billion executive order in 2019 to bolster the state’s preparedness and resiliency for wildfires. However, a 2021 investigation by CapRadio — a California-focused National Public Radio outlet — concluded that Newsom’s administration was falling short on some key facets of the program while embellishing its success publicly. Specifically, the report found that “Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns” in forestry projects identified as critical for wildfire preparedness.
The 2019 executive action was taken in response to the Camp Fire of 2018, a massive fire started by downed power equipment that ravaged Northern California and killed 84 people. In response to that fire and others, news outlets and subject matter experts repeatedly pointed out that California’s lax approach to forest management creates danger by allowing fire fuel to accumulate too much.
Additionally, California’s water infrastructure has attracted scrutiny for its role in the ongoing crisis amid multiple reports that fire hydrants in some of the hardest-hit areas failed to dispense water for firefighters battling the flames. A huge spike in water demand reportedly overwhelmed underground water storage tanks and their pumping systems in higher-elevation areas as fires jumped through neighborhoods.
“The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need,” Izzy Gardo, Newsom’s communications director, said in a statement provided to the DCNF.
The state has dealt with water scarcity issues for years, and it has not built a new major reservoir since 1979 despite major population growth over the same period of time. California also allows billions of gallons of runoff water to enter the Pacific Ocean each year instead of harnessing a portion for use because the state lacks sufficient infrastructure to capture meaningful volumes of stormwater, The Los Angeles Times reported in March 2024.
However, the fire hydrants failing happened primarily because the city’s water infrastructure could not handle a massive demand spike rather than a lack of available water in the wider system, according to Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones. Additionally, a large reservoir in the vicinity of Pacific Palisades — one of the hardest-hit communities — was empty and offline when the fires exploded into a full crisis, The Los Angeles times reported Friday.
In 2014, California voters chose to enact Proposition 1, which authorized a $2.7 billion bond that would be used to fund new water storage, reservoir and dam projects. Not only did this funding fail to result in any new major reservoirs in the state, but officials actually moved in 2022 to get rid of Northern California’s Klamath River dams in order to protect salmon and steelhead.
Newsom announced Friday that he is calling for an investigation probing the factors that led up to fire hydrant failure and the reported unavailability of that articular reservoir.
Rick Caruso, a former Republican candidate for Los Angeles mayor and former head of the LADWP, said in a Thursday interview that there is ultimately no excuse for crucial infrastructure to fail when it is needed most.
“I think that career politicians have making excuses down to a fine art, and you see it rolling out and trying to explain why there wasn’t water,” Caruso said during the interview with Fox 11 Los Angeles. “Nobody wants to hear an excuse for why they lost their home, why they lost their business. The reality is, they were not prepared enough … The preparation just wasn’t right. It wasn’t enough.”
Notably, Quiñones was hired in May 2024 to run the LADWP and take home a $750,000 salary, according to local outlet ABC7. Her salary is significantly higher than that of her predecessor, and the city council said at the time that the compensation increase for the position was meant to attract top-tier talent from the private sector.
Apart from Quiñones, eight of the top ten highest-paid Los Angeles city employees in 2023 worked for the LADPW, according to analysis by OpenTheBooks, a government transparency group.
Other municipal officials have also received sharp criticism for their actions before and during the crisis. As of Friday morning, at least ten people have died, while early projections for total damages from the fires range from about $50 billion to as much as $135 billion.
Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana when the fires broke out as part of a delegation sent to the country by President Joe Biden. On her way back to the U.S., a Sky News reporter confronted Bass at an airport with basic questions about the disaster, but Bass ignored the questions until she was able to get away from the journalist.
Bass addressed the fire in public remarks delivered on Wednesday night in the city, though she received criticism for making a gaffe that indicated her prepared comments had not been adequately edited before she got up to the podium.
Additionally, Bass approved a budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) for the current fiscal year that contained $23 million less than the prior year’s amid ongoing negotiations between the city and the firefighters’ union, according to The New York Times. The city set aside unappropriated cash expecting that a deal would eventually be reached — which eventually happened in November 2024 — before moving the funds over to the fire department’s accounts, with LAFD ultimately receiving $53 million more than last year all in.
Either way, LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley complained about the budgeting issue — including reductions in funding available for overtime pay — in December 2024, writing in a memo that the cuts presented “unprecedented operational challenges ” for her department.
Crowley’s leadership of LAFD has also been scrutinized in light of the unfolding disaster. She took over the top job in 2022, with her official LAFD bio page and media reports touting her sexual orientation as a key credential.
Throughout her tenure atop LAFD, Crowley has emphasized the importance of fostering diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in her department to complement the LAFD’s official 2021 “racial equity action plan” suggesting that a demographically diverse fire department is an effective one.
“Politicians and officials can spin whatever narrative they want to cover their tracks,” Frank Ricci, a former fire department battalion chief in Connecticut who now works as a fellow for the Yankee Institute, told the DCNF. “But, when it comes to emergency management, the brutal truth is this: your preparation is only as good as its performance in a crisis. If your systems fail when they’re needed most, all your excuses go up in flames.”
Representatives for Bass and the LADWP did not respond to requests for comment.
Daily Caller
Biden Administration Was Secretly More Involved In Ukraine Than It Let On, Investigation Reveals

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Wallace White
The U.S was far more directly involved in aiding Ukrainian forces against Russia than previously understood, a New York Times investigation revealed Monday.
American backing of Ukraine was an instrumental piece in forces of the eastern European nation wounding or killing more than 700,000 Russian soldiers during the course of the war, according to the NYT. Methods the U.S. used to aid Ukraine included giving target information while officially obfuscating their nature, dispatching American advisers close to the frontlines and sweeping oversight over its use of missile systems granted by officials.
One European intelligence official was taken aback as to how deep U.S. involvement was, telling the NYT that American officials had become “part of the kill chain.”
Dear Readers:
As a nonprofit, we are dependent on the generosity of our readers.
Please consider making a small donation of any amount here. Thank you!
Ukrainian officials met in Wiesbaden in Spring 2022, the headquarters of the U.S. European Command, to discuss strategy with U.S. forces and the extent to which the U.S. would aid the Ukrainians.
During the meeting, U.S. European Command settled with Ukrainian officials that they would reportedly dispense target locations as “points of interest” to the Ukrainians, not officially calling them “targets” as they believed the language would be too “provocative.”
“If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” a U.S. official told the NYT. Most artillery strikes were carried out with the M777 Howitzer system, in part provided by the U.S.
Due to diplomatic risks, the Biden administration wanted to share intel in the most plausibly deniable way possible, with a total restriction on sharing the whereabouts of Russian military figures and targets on Russian soil, one senior U.S. official told the NYT. The information shared would have to adhere to NATO guidelines of intel sharing to not provoke the Russian’s ire against other nations in the alliance.
“Imagine how that would be for us if we knew that the Russians helped some other country assassinate our chairman,” the official told the NYT. “Like, we’d go to war.”
European Command also had sweeping oversight of the Ukrainian use of the HIMARS missile system, the Americans retaining the ability to shut off the activation key cards required to fire the missiles, according to the NYT. HIMARS strikes regularly resulted in hundreds of Russian deaths weekly.
Advisers regularly made visits to the frontlines of the war, referred to as “subject matter experts” in their official capacity, according to the NYT. Their official names only changed back to “advisers” once Ukrainian leadership changed, which was also followed by a threefold increase in advisers.
Despite the deep cooperation, there was often tension between the U.S. and Ukraine, with Kiev often accusing the Americans of being overbearing, while the Americans questioned why sometimes Ukrainians did not heed their advice, according to the NYT.
Business
Biden’s Greenhouse Gas ‘Greendoggle’ Slush Fund Is Unraveling

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Michael Chamberlain
We warned you: this gas didn’t smell right from the beginning.
The Greendoggle has made the big time! Not every shady government giveaway to special interests gets its own Wall Street Journal editorial.
But how often does the new EPA administrator announce that his staff has discovered that $20 billion that had been appropriated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF or “Greendoggle”) had been “parked” in a bank by the Biden EPA until it could be ladled out as grants to climate industry cronies? That’s what Administrator Lee Zeldin announced back in February, referencing a Biden appointee who was infamously caught on tape explaining that the agency was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” – trying to get the unspent money out of the reach of the Trump administration. Zeldin’s “clawing back” that money, and the lawsuit by “public-private investment fund” Climate United to get the $7 billion it was awarded, has got the media paying attention. Finally.
Administrator Zeldin’s announcement that EPA is taking back the $2 billion awarded to an organization tied to prominent political figures marks another auspicious turn in the GGRF saga, which Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has followed and warned about since the beginning. Passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (Mr. Orwell, please call your office …), the GGRF was a massive spending program that would provide funds to environmentalist groups to finance green technology projects. The sheer amount of money Congress shoveled at the EPA was unprecedented. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with commensurate oversight resources – Mr. Zeldin says this was by design. The result was the Greendoggle, an environmentalist slush fund administered by insiders for insiders.
According to emails PPT obtained via FOIA request, the EPA invited a group of green activist organizations and thinktanks to a highly irregular November 2022 meeting to “provide early feedback on the RFI and ask clarifying questions.” And, as PPT foresaw, several groups with ties to EPA officials are on the invitation list. EPA’s “revolving door” with radical environmental groups spun fast in the Biden years.
PPT dug in and researched the green banks, finding multiple insider connections to the Biden administration. “With $27 billion dollars sloshing around, the American public should be on high alert for waste, fraud and abuse,” we warned in October 2023.
The next month, when the “short list” of coalitions vying to become GGRF distributors was announced, the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Nick Pope, whose reporting on the GGRF since early on has been essential in exposing the Greendoggle, revealed it featured “several organizations with considerable connections to the Biden administration, as well as the Democratic Party and its allies.” To put it mildly.
As the Greendoggle came together, the legacy media remained incurious, but for anyone paying attention, it smelled bad. There seemed to be no accountability, and given the Biden EPA’s ethical track record, that was concerning, to say the least.
One of the eight entities eventually chosen was the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), a green bank whose mission is to “accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology throughout the US while maintaining a targeted focus on underserved markets.” CGC board member David Hayes left the organization for nearly two years to join the Biden White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president. He then went back to the CGC board. As PPT put it in a complaint it filed in June 2024 with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the EPA’s inspector general (and which the Zeldin EPA cited in its legal defense of the clawback), while at the White House Hayes “presumably worked at the highest level on the very GGRF program from which CGC sought funding upon his return. This timing is suspect considering CGC itself publicly announced his return to its board as part of its effort to obtain GGRF funding.” Not very subtle, but it worked. CGC got a $5 billion windfall out of the Greendoggle.
It just so happened that, while Mr. Hayes was in the administration, so was another CGC veteran, Jahi Wise. Like Hayes, Wise was a special climate assistant to the president, until he joined the EPA in December 2022 as … founding director of GGRF. Subtlety doesn’t seem to be among the skill sets CGC looks for in its people. Wise at least didn’t return to CGC after that. He joined a George Soros foundation.
The GGRF should become a metaphor for congressional shortsightedness, bureaucratic arrogance and the venality of special interests at the government trough. The “green” industry is an industry like any other, green special interests are special interests and the color of a taxpayer dollar doesn’t change because it’s being wasted in a nominally noble cause.
The Greendoggle stank, gas and all.
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
Poilievre To Create ‘Canada First’ National Energy Corridor
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
Chinese Election Interference – NDP reaction to bounty on Conservative candidate
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
Joe Tay Says He Contacted RCMP for Protection, Demands Carney Fire MP Over “Bounty” Remark
-
Censorship Industrial Complex2 days ago
Welcome to Britain, Where Critical WhatsApp Messages Are a Police Matter
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
Hong Kong-Canadian Groups Demand PM Carney Drop Liberal Candidate Over “Bounty” Remark Supporting CCP Repression
-
Daily Caller13 hours ago
Biden Administration Was Secretly More Involved In Ukraine Than It Let On, Investigation Reveals
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
Fixing Canada’s immigration system should be next government’s top priority
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
Beijing’s Echo Chamber in Parliament: Part 2 – Still No Action from Carney