Forget it, Jake. It's California.

"There was a desert wind blowing that night.  It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.  On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.  Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks.  Anything can happen."

"Red Wind" - Raymond Chandler 

Or sometimes, the red wind takes a little fire and makes it a conflagration.

Oh, it's been quite a first week, hasn't it? My Outlaw colleague Chris Newlin has a very good list of the worrisome things going on right now, and I was tempted to talk about the Gulf of Mex...uh...well...whatever. Just a note, Texas' own pirate congressman Dan Crenshaw is angry that US maps haven't been changed yet, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene pawed the ground in anger that our British cousins haven't adopted the new name, Gulf of America, yet.

They seem particularly anxious to get this change rolling, enough so that I wonder how many campaign contributions they got from Rand McNally. So are they in the pockets of "Big Map" now?

But then again, Rep. Tim Burchette (R-Graceland) told Matt Gaetz on his new radio show on the Ashley Madison Network, that he thought aliens were hiding under the sea, so, maybe they are on to something here.

Years ago, one of my Texas heroes, Molly Ivins took to calling Rick Perry "Governor Good Hair." I think we can safely apply that now to Gavin Newsom of California.

Anyway, innuendo aside, and I hate to cast it aside, the FEMA trailer full of misinformation surrounding the fires is worth examining.

OK, one more innuendo...

Since the President has been spouting his theories about how California should conduct its business, and congressional lickspittles like Lindsay Graham (R-Tara) and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Mudbug Acres) have dutifully aped the same script, let's take a look at the actual facts. I know, I know. It's not consistent with the current vibe, but indulge me.

Firstly, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles. I frankly don't know if she has been a good mayor or not, but a lot of MAGA acolytes have accused her of being AWOL when the fires began.

Mayor Bass was asked by President Biden to join the US delegation to the inauguration of the new President of Ghana. On January 3rd, The National Weather Service, which the administration has in its sights for elimination by the way, issued a "fire weather watch" for Los Angeles. They define it as...

A Fire Weather Watch or Red Flag Warning is issued when the combination of dry fuels and weather conditions support extreme fire danger. 

The Mayor was scheduled to travel on the next day. She arrived in Ghana on the 5th, and later that day, the Red Flag Warning was issued. CBS reports...

Warnings escalated several times on Jan 6., becoming a "particularly dangerous situation" by the late afternoon in Los Angeles. That evening Bass posted her first statement on X about the fires.

The inauguration ceremony in Ghana began at around 10 a.m. local time on Jan. 7, or around 2 a.m. Pacific Time in Los Angeles. A few hours after it ended, now 10:30 a.m. in L.A., the Palisades Fire broke out. Bass and the other delegates went to the airport, stopping briefly to pose for photos with the new President, which caused much MAGA consternation, and took off for home.

You know, like in 2019 when Hurricane Dorian grew into a Category 5 hurricane over Labor Day weekend, President Trump played golf. Twice.

Should she have turned around immediately after landing, or indeed, not gone at all, you can judge for yourself. And she obviously forgot to pack her crystal ball and her "Stop the Wind" switch..

But like any elected leader, she had access to those telephone thingies and says she was in contact during the trip. But Bass admits that in retrospect, she should have cancelled. You know, it's that admitting mistakes thing?

Now, to the issue of Los Angeles water, which is memorably explained in the brilliant film "Chinatown."

The President took Governor Newsom, or "Newscum," as he puts it in his 3rd-grade playground mien, to task. He claimed that the state didn't provide water from rain and snowmelt in the north to LA in the south. Now of course, Los Angeles is technically in the desert, or would be if a water source weren't found. Indulge me here for a rather long version of the way the Associated Press explained the lie...

California water policies misrepresented around wildfires

CLAIM: Trump told Hannity that rather than let it go into the Pacific Ocean, California Gov. Gavin Newsom “can release the water that comes from north” to help fight ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles. “There is massive amounts of water, rainwater and mountain water that comes due with the snow, comes down when — it as it melts,” he continued. Trump also claimed that “they turned off the spigot from up north in order to protect the Delta smelt. 40% of Los Angeles city water comes from state-controlled projects connected to northern California, where the Delta smelt fish live, and the state has limited the water it delivers this year. Yet the southern California reservoirs these canals help feed are at above-average levels for this time of year.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has enough water in storage to meet roughly three years of water demand, said Deven Upadhyay, the agency’s interim general manager.

“We can deliver what our agencies need,” he said.

Some fire hydrants in Los Angeles ran dry in early efforts to fight the fires, prompting a swirl of criticism on social media, including from Trump.

But state water supplies are not to blame for hydrants running dry and a key reservoir near Pacific Palisades that was not filled. The problem with the hydrants was that they were overstressed, and the Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty because it was undergoing maintenance.

Newsom has called for an investigation into how the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power managed both issues.

The farms-versus-fish debate is one of the most well-worn in California water politics and doesn’t always fall along party lines. Some environmentalists think Newsom is too friendly to farming interests. But that debate is not connected to fire-related water troubles in Los Angeles.

Two complex systems of dams and canals channel rain and snowmelt from the mountains in northern California and route it south. Both transport water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, an estuary that provides critical habitat to fish and wildlife including salmon and the delta smelt.

The delta connects inland waterways to the Pacific, and keeping a certain amount of water flowing through helps support fish populations and the waterway itself.

Trump claimed in a social media post that Newsom “...refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him 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.”

Facts First: This is false. Newsom has never refused to sign a “water restoration declaration.” In fact, there is no such document, as Newsom’s office said on social media  and experts on California water policy confirmed.

“There was no ‘water restoration declaration’ for him to sign,” Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank, said in a Wednesday interview.

Mount said Trump’s claims in the social media post don’t make “any sense” and that “none of it is true.” He said the debate related to water in the northern Delta “has nothing to do with the fires in Southern California. There’s nothing.”

“There was never a ‘water restoration declaration’ in California that the Governor refused to sign,” Brent Haddad, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an email to the AP.

As for the LA fire, simply put, urban water systems are not frankly meant for monstrous, area-wide wildfires. Maybe they should be and no doubt, that will be part of the post-mortem on all this. But the modern political knee-jerk reflex is to claim someone screwed up, and no doubt, sometimes they have. But sometimes events just overtake the best of plans. You know, like Gettysburg, or Operation Market Garden.

Or, hiring a gay Fire Chief. I'm sure Mel Gibson will report that to the White House as the new Special Envoy to Hollywood. Well, as long as an ambassador's residence goes with the title.

Now, as mentioned, the after-action report on this will produce mistakes made and revise plans for any future occurrence. You know, like whether building homes on the beaches of Florida or Texas is wise or not.

And now, the only President we have, declares that FEMA is not getting it done and he wants it done away with. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about what they actually do, and sadly, that seems to include in the White House.

I have a colleague who delighted in a conservative web article about how Amish builders have completed more homes in a few months than FEMA has after the hurricanes. The problem is, FEMA doesn't build homes. They help you repair the one you have after a disaster.

Here's what FEMA does. If your home is uninhabitable due to some disaster, they find you a place to live and pay for it. They repair your home if it is repairable. They don't build you a new one. They connect you to federal housing programs that actually can do that.

They work with other agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers to open roads and streets and restore power. They help set up food and water supplies and restore water systems. But they are not a replacement for insurance. Insurance, by the way, that is becoming rare in both Florida and California due to climate change, which the administration also refuses to acknowledge.

And part of the problem for those hit by hurricanes in the east or fires in the west is that a lot of folks, for purely political reasons, want you to distrust anything the government does. This is even when they are legitimately trying to help.

Trump says the states can do the whole recovery thing better, so give them some money and, I guess, let them hire all those FEMA folks who are fired, and let's see how that works. I'll bet you a steak dinner there will be less money for these recoveries in the future and now people will simply have to yell at the governor. And Fox will find a way to blame it on Biden.

And now, there are those in Congress, including an invertebrate Congressman from California, the gelatinous Darrel Issa, who want to put conditions on any federal aid to California unless they agree to Trump's imaginary water plan and some sort of voter ID (?).

Issa, who was prosecuted with his brother in San Jose in 1980 for allegedly faking the theft of Issa's Mercedes Benz sedan and selling it to a car dealer for $16,000, according to court records, was all for it.

In his servile response to Trump's proposed quid pro quo for California aid, Issa said, “Mr. President, we’re gonna be together next week. We are going to be putting conditions on the money that do two things: require it be done timely and affordable; and then secondly, that we protect those who will come afterwards."

This will resemble the non-existent conditions placed on Florida for hurricane relief. But then again, DeSantis didn't kiss Melania on the tarmac. Probably couldn't reach that high.

You know, there is always a lot of nonsensical talk about Texas seceding from the union, which has been illegal since 1869. But actually, California may now have a better case now.