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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Inferno [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-12
We begin today with team coverage of the Los Angeles fires courtesy of Amy Graff, Jonathan Wolfe, Claire Moses, and Yan Zhuang of The New York Times.
The county’s medical examiner said late Saturday that 11 people have been killed in the Eaton fire, near Pasadena, and five died in the Palisades fire, on the west side of Los Angeles. The Palisades fire on Saturday burned at least one home and threatened others in a section of the Brentwood neighborhoodcalled Mandeville Canyon, a collection of multimillion-dollar homes with stunning city views. Airplanes dropped pink flame retardant from the sky as fire crews battled the blaze at the canyon. Crews across Los Angeles on Saturday had contained 11 percent of the 22,660-acre Palisades fire and 15 percent of the 14,000-acre Eaton fire, near Altadena and Pasadena, according to Cal Fire. The two blazes, which together have killed at least 16 people and destroyed thousands of structures, rank among the five most destructive in California’s history.
While so much attention is being focused on the multimillion-dollar homes in the affected region, Adam Mahoney of Capital B News focuses on the ongoing destruction of Black neighborhoods and institutions in Altadena, CA and across Los Angeles County.
While many have focused on the multimillion-dollar mansions reduced to ash in west Los Angeles celebrity enclaves, some of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the region, including a suburb known as Altadena, have been burned to the ground. The first identified victim of the fires was Victor Shaw, a 66-year-old Black man who died with a garden hose in his hand trying to defend the home that had been in his family for nearly 55 years. Social media has been flooded with GoFundMe’s for Black families who’ve lost their generational homes, some dating back to the 1930s when the first wave of Black Southerners reached Los Angeles. Some of the region’s oldest Black institutions, like churches and restaurants, have been reduced to rubble. Recovery will present unique challenges for Altadena. Over the past four years, most major property insurance companies have stopped offering coverage in the city, and older homeowners have faced difficulties affording rising property taxes. The situation has left residents turning to California’s basic state-run insurance plan with funding challenges. The agency said last year that a major disaster like this would threaten to run the agency dry.
Edward Helmore of The Guardian reports on the politicization of the Los Angeles fires by the tacky shoe salesman and his political allies.
The politicization of the Los Angeles fires could be showing signs of intensifying. To opposing political factions, the ruin of parts of Los Angeles offers an inviting but deadly tableau on which to lay out their contrary agendas. To Democrats, the intensity with which the fires took hold, propelled by the late-season Santa Ana winds, is evidence of climate change that some Republicans deny as a political hoax. To some Republicans, including Trump, the fires are evidence of mismanagement under Democrats’ racial- and gender-equity drives. [...] Trump blamed Newsom for refusing to sign a water-restoration declaration “that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way”. On the Republican sidelines, Warren Davidson, an Ohio representative, called on Friday for federal disaster relief to be withheld from California unless the state reforms its forestry management practices.
More on the massive disinformation campaign focused on the Los Angeles fires from Parker Malloy of The New Republic.
..The same people who spent years telling us climate change isn’t real are now trying to blame the fires on the fact that the L.A. Fire Department’s chief is a woman. Never mind that Kristin Crowley worked her way up through the ranks for 22 years. Never mind that the department’s leadership is still predominantly male. The right has found a way to combine their favorite bogeymen: diversity initiatives, California governance, and climate science. [...] This is the playbook we’re going to see for every climate disaster going forward. Rather than acknowledge the role of climate change, rather than have honest discussions about infrastructure and emergency preparedness, the right will search for ways to blame their cultural grievances. Everything becomes evidence of their preferred narrative: Hydrant failures become proof of Democratic mismanagement, female leadership becomes proof of “woke” politics gone wrong, and the actual causes get buried under an avalanche of manufactured outrage. The timing with Meta’s announcement about ending fact-checking is fitting. Just as these fires demonstrate why we desperately need reliable information during disasters, Silicon Valley is busy dismantling the systems designed to provide it. Mark Zuckerberg calls this “getting back to our roots around free expression.” In reality, it’s about appeasing the incoming Trump administration, even if that means letting lies spread as fast as wildfire.
Jireh Deng of Inside Climate News reports on how urban sprawl contributed to the Los Angeles fires and how the aftereffects of these wildfires will continue for decades.
Residents across Los Angeles will continue to suffer from the worsened air quality and should take precautions to protect their health, said Rima Habre, a professor of environmental health at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. “Do not go outside. Avoid it at all cost, if possible. And if you don’t have the choice, try to wear a mask that is well-fitting,” said Habre. Indoors, families should have air filters and close their windows. “When you have structures burning, you have lead, asbestos, toxic metals” in the air. The elderly, young children, pregnant people and those with pre-existing conditions are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of wildfire smoke, she added. [...] Since 1960, the Los Angeles metropolitan area’s population has nearly doubled from more than 6 million to over 12 million today. And the ever-expanding urban sprawl contributes to climate change, said Stephen LaDochy, a geographer and climatologist at California State University, Los Angeles.
Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times wonders: what “peaceful transfer of power” are we talking about?
Imagine if Trump had lost the 2024 presidential election. Having laid the groundwork for it throughout the presidential race, he would have immediately accused Democrats of fraud. We all know that his allies in the Republican Party (which is to say, the Republican Party) would have immediately moved to try to question, undermine and even invalidate the results. And we all know that a raging, vengeful Trump would have tried, again, to overturn the results after the fact. The peaceful transfer of power is an agreement between rival political factions that the voters have the final say about who they want to lead them and that each side is entitled to govern for as long as it has a legitimate grant of power. We have no evidence that Trump would have honored this agreement had he lost.
Paul Krugman writes for his “Krugman Wonks Out” about the coming avalanche of fake official statistics from government agencies.
It’s a near certainty that Trump’s policies will raise both budget deficits and inflation. What’s less clear is whether Trump’s minions will admit that they failed to deliver. In particular, if things go as badly on the inflation and budget fronts as seems likely, how long will we be able to trust government numbers? I know that this may sound as if I’m getting into tinfoil-hat territory. Worse, I may be sounding like a Republican — because whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House, right-wing “inflation truthers” come out of the woodwork, claiming that official numbers are hiding the terrible reality of soaring prices. And, of course, Trump spent the whole campaign making utterly false claims about how much prices — for example, the price of bacon, with which he seemed oddly obsessed — had risen. In fact, U.S. statistical agencies have a long record of being scrupulously honest. But the same can’t be said of every country. There are, for example, some well-known cases of populist regimes falsifying the numbers to make inflation look lower than it really is. Most famously, Argentina’s statistical agency systematically and massively understated inflation from 2007 to 2015… [...] Nothing like that has ever happened in America. But will America still be the same country a couple of years into Trump’s second reign?
Finally today, Freddie Hayward of The New Statesman attempts to reconcile the tacky shoe salesman’s isolationism with his newfound expansionist rhetoric and threats.
If Trump’s first term was isolationist, in attacking multilateralism and trying to end the conflicts and liberal nation building that sprung out of the war on terror, then his second term might be defined by hemispheric expansionism, a desire for America to control territories in its own backyard. Since the election, Trump has said he wants to annex Greenland, force Canada to join the US through economic coercion, potentially use the military to take control of the Panama Canal and rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. In other words, Trump wants to expand America’s territory and influence in its regional sphere. Bolton warned against inferring too much from Trump’s remarks, however. “He doesn’t do grand strategy,” he told me. “He doesn’t do policy, as we normally understand that term. It’s all ad hoc, anecdotal, transactional.” But that does not mean that Trump won’t act on these statements either. So is this mere rhetoric and an attempt to distract from the president-elect’s domestic woes, such as his recent sentencing for falsifying business records? Or is it a substantive shift from isolationism towards an aggressive expansionism? If so, how will Europe respond?
Try to have the best possible day everyone, even in these times!
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