Mayor Karen Bass Partied While Her City Burned

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

 

For the last five weekdays, this newsletter has ripped Los Angeles and California elected officials, and the federal U.S. Forest Service, over the decisions leading up to and during the opening days of the wildfires. But I have largely held back on criticizing the leadership of the Los Angeles city and county fire departments — for now — in part because these guys still have their hands full fighting the fire. But this morning, Paul Pringle, Alene Tchekmedyian, and Dakota Smith of the Los Angeles Times report a troubling scoop:

 

As the Los Angeles Fire Department faced extraordinary warnings of life-threatening winds, top commanders decided not to assign for emergency deployment roughly 1,000 available firefighters and dozens of water-carrying engines in advance of the fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades and continues to burn, interviews and internal LAFD records show.

 

Fire officials chose not to order the firefighters to remain on duty for a second shift last Tuesday as the winds were building — which would have doubled the personnel on hand — and staffed just five of more than 40 engines that are available to aid in battling wildfires, according to the records obtained by The Times, as well as interviews with LAFD officials and former chiefs with knowledge of city operations.

 

The forecast from the National Weather Service is that a “Particularly Dangerous Situation Red Flag Warning remains in effect” with “‘extremely rare and dangerous fire weather conditions” from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. local time Wednesday.” With the crisis still ongoing, this may not be the precise moment for the public to turn their ire at the leadership of the LAFD. But that moment is coming, probably sooner than those officials think.

 

Meanwhile, the L.A. Times has a second infuriating scoop this morning, this one about the city’s initially absentee mayor, Karen Bass: “As the Palisades fire exploded in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, Mayor Karen Bass was posing for photos at an embassy cocktail party in Ghana, pictures posted on social media show.” You can see the photos of Bass at the party here and here.

 

The paper reports that Bass’s spokesman said the mayor left the embassy cocktail party between 12 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. Los Angeles time on January 7.

 

At 10:30 a.m. that day, the Los Angeles Fire Department reported a brush fire in the Pacific Palisades. At 11:22 a.m. local time, the local L.A. City Emergency Management Department sent out a city-wide alert that the fire department was “currently addressing a fast-moving brush fire situation in the Palisades Hills area” that was “already exceeding 10 acres. Please avoid traffic into this area, and if nearby — follow instructions from Fire officials in the area.”

 

On Tuesday, CBS News’s Jonathan Vigliotti asked Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, “Looking back, would you have taken that trip overseas?” With her weird, inappropriate grin refusing to budge, Bass answered, “You know, I am going to focus today . . . on what we know. Thank you.”

 

The 71-year-old mayor walked away as reporters shouted questions, a galling and uncanny parallel to the soon-to-depart 82-year-old president. It seems fair to ask if Bass is in some sort of state of psychological denial, unable to grapple with the harsh fact that when she chose to gallivant to the other side of the world for an inauguration, the worst disaster in her city’s history struck. A city alongside the San Andreas Fault that has lived in fear of “the big one” for generations is finding that the local leadership proved powerless in the face of moving walls of fire, descending down the hillsides.

 

You don’t have to be a crazy right-winger to conclude that as long as Bass remains in the mayor’s office, the rest of the country will see Los Angeles as a dysfunctional urban dystopia, with swaths of the city reduced to an ashen hellscape, and the nominal governance a clown show.

 

Peter Hamby, writing in Puck:

 

The National Weather Service warned of dangerous fire conditions on Friday, January 3. Bass knew about it, because we all did. If you live in L.A., you got the weather alert, on the news or on your phone. The mayor’s office certainly did. Despite that, Bass boarded a plane the following day for Ghana as part of a delegation attending the inauguration of the country’s president. And as The New York Times reported over the weekend, Bass had promised during her mayoral campaign never to leave the country. It got worse on the return trip — a long way home — when a Sky News reporter happened upon Bass and an aide at the airport. The reporter asked Bass, repeatedly, to deliver a message to the city. Bass ignored him, on camera, for 90 painful seconds, in stone-faced silence. The clip is devastating, a campaign ad ready-made, the moment for which she will always be remembered. “If it is true that she left the country on a Saturday after the warning came out, that is a dereliction of duty,” Endeavor C.E.O. Ari Emanuel, who donated to Bass’s 2022 campaign, told me.

 

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong appeared on the podcast of Sean Spicer and Mark Halperin Monday and said, “We’ll accept some blame. . . . At the L.A. Times, we endorsed Karen Bass. I think, right now, up front, that was a mistake, and we admit that.”

 

The position “host of Shark Tank” does not appear in our Constitution, but it’s hard to begrudge Kevin O’Leary for his contention that federal assistance to the city ought to be conditioned on new leadership. Why would anyone expect Bass to perform better as mayor in the days ahead than she has so far?

 

House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Monday, “Obviously there’s been water resources management, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems. And it does come down to leadership and it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects. . . . So that’s something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid. That’s my personal view.”

 

Get Ready for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth

 

Iowa Republican senator Joni Ernst will support the nomination of Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense — and with that, the confirmation fight is effectively over, if not technically over. All, or almost all, of the Republican senators will vote to confirm, and all, or almost all, of the Democratic senators will oppose the nomination.

 

As I said yesterday, when your party has 47 likely “no” votes, you must frame your hearing questions in the way most likely to persuade four members of the majority party — presuming, of course you genuinely want to torpedo the nomination and not just go viral for fundraising.

 

So, what would persuade a Republican senator? Well, Elon Musk, one of the guys running Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, has argued there’s no need for manned aircraft anymore, and that only “idiots” “are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.”

 

·        The F-35 is built at Air Force Plant 4 in Fort Worth, Texas. That plant employs roughly 17,000 people.

 

·        The F-15X is manufactured at the Boeing facility in Saint Louis, Mo. Boeing will end the F/A-18E-F Super Hornet production line in 2025.

 

·        Lockheed Martin’s Greenville, S.C., site is the home of the F-16 Fighting Falcon production line, made for export; as of August, the production line has a back order of around 124 jets and a likely deal for 40 more jets to Turkey.

 

The continued manufacture of manned fighter aircraft matters a great deal to Texas Republican senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, Missouri Republican senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, and South Carolina Republican senators Lindey Graham and Tim Scott. At minimum, those GOP senators will want assurances that the shift to drone-focused aerial fleet will not cost jobs in their home state.

 

If you really wanted to torpedo the Hegseth nomination, you would try to get Hegseth to either admit Musk has a point and that the era of manned fighter jets is ending, and that there’s no need to keep making them, or you try to drive a wedge between Hegseth and Musk.

 

Hegseth largely punted on the issue of drones vs. manned fighters and the composition of the U.S. Air Force when the issue was raised by Senator Ted Budd (R., N.C.). (Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, N.C., received its first F-35C Lightning II jet in September.)

 

Hegseth promised to “look under the hood” of the NGAD program but provided few clues on how he might come out in the debate over how much to rely on manned fighters or drones.

 

“In the Indo-Pacific, say, interoperability, range could matter because it’s such a large battle space,” Hegseth said. “Unmanned will be a very important part of the way future wars are fought—just the idea of survivability for a human being drives cost and time in a way unmanned systems do not.”

 

If a Senate Democrat had wanted to, they could have put Hegseth on the spot, either looking like a guy willing to preserve the status quo and resist innovation and change to preserve jobs in key states, or they could have made him a really tough vote for those six GOP senators. But that approach would require knowing some things about how drones are changing modern warfare, the arguments about how manned aircraft and drones compare, and where those manned aircraft are made.

 

Instead, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) quizzed Hegseth over the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, asking him if he could name one member and how many countries were in the bloc.

 

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is not a military alliance and the U.S. is not a member state, although the U.S. has “comprehensive strategic partnership” status with the group.

 

Do you think that question persuaded any GOP senators? Me neither.