Tag: Los Angeles

Categories
ideological culture political challengers

Post-Conflagration L.A.

Spencer Pratt, Karen Bass, Los Angeles, mayor, election, AI

Though Angelinos started voting early in the mayoral race, today is L.A.’s election day. It’s a race watched with varying degrees of enthusiasm and alarm across the country. Polls show no candidate close to a majority, which means the top two will likely face-off in a November runoff.* 

Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star, has run a study-worthy campaign and could finish close to the top.  He’s a former Palisades homeowner. He now lives in a trailer on his property, upon which he cannot yet re-build after the fires that swept through the area in January 2025. And he’s built his campaign around the government’s absolute failure on every level to assist — or just get out of the way — of a recovery.

His video ads — and satirical contributions by fans — have been magnificent.

Erstwhile Castro-loving incumbent Mayor Karen Bass — who was celebrating in Ghana during the conflagration, basking in the glory of the continent’s first woman president — is in no small part responsible for the city’s worse-than-inept response to the fires. And candidate Pratt isn’t letting anyone forget it. 

A month ago, Mayor Bass blasted Pratt for “exploiting the grief of people in the Palisades,” calling it “reprehensible.” A weird twist of the reality of Pratt’s righteously indignant stance. What she did and didn’t do during and after the Palisade Fires are better described as “reprehensible.” 

The other major candidate is Councilwoman Nithya Raman, an outspoken homeless advocate who didn’t like it at all that homeless started camping outside her home.

Yesterday, the race was described as “neck-and-neck” by KTLA-5, with Hollywood actors Jane Fonda and Samuel L. Jackson cited as “supporting Mayor Bass, while Chelsea Handler and Mindy Kaling are backing Councilwoman Raman.”

In most other cities these endorsements would likely fizzle.

But in L.A. . . . ?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The latest UC Berkeley/LA Times poll shows Mayor Bass with 26%, Councilwomen Raman with 25% and Pratt with 22% support. Los Angeles does not use the same Top Two system that California uses statewide, whereby the top two vote getters move on to the General Election. In L.A., if a candidate garners a majority, the race is over. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
regulation too much government

Regulating BBQ

Los Angeles, busybody, regulations, busybodies

Los Angeles councilwoman Nithya Raman wants city officials to impose new regulations on backyard grilling when conditions are dry and windy. The mayoral candidate proposed restricting “backyard barbecues, fire pits and other open flames” in residential neighborhoods when such conditions exist.

Cities often prohibit burning leaves on windy days, in part because burning leaves may spread too easily when it’s blustery. But barbecues are more contained.

National Review’s Noah Rothman suggests that the caution would be more plausible if California had ever suffered a “rash of fires — or even just one — attributable to the careless mishandling of charcoal briquettes.”

Accidental causes of conflagrations tend to be things like lightning strikes and faulty power lines. These work in conjunction with poorly managed forests.

Arson, a big danger in recent years, comes in a variety of forms, as Mr. Rothman explains. “The record-breaking 2024 Park Fire was set by an intoxicated motorist who pushed his car into some flammable brush after an accident.”

The Palisades Fire was “first set by an embittered anti-capitalist vigilante” who hated the rich.

Arson and drunk driving are already illegal.

Anybody can try to cook hamburgers by setting a fire in the middle of high vegetation and calling this a “barbecue.” But that’s not the kind of thing Raman had in mind.

Fortunately, another councilwoman, Monica Rodriguez, managed to block Raman’s effort to toss a wet blanket on barbecues.

“The last thing Angelenos need,” Rodriguez says, “is a ban on hosting a carne asada in their own backyard.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment folly ideological culture

Stop & Go on Crime

crime, Democrats, law enforcement

In last week’s news conference, President Biden seemed to wave a green light to Vladimir Putin: Russian military forces may make a “minor incursion” into neighboring Ukraine. Was Biden applying to diplomacy, I wondered, the permissive posture so many other Democratic officials have taken, domestically? Crime’s fine, if small enough. 

If so, Biden’s not leading — Democrats around the country are changing direction. 

“We are in a crisis,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced last month, declaring a state of emergency. “Too many people are dying in this city. Too many people are sprawled all over our streets. And now we have a plan to address it.”

Her approach? Simple: End the “reign of criminals” by taking “the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement . . . and less tolerant of all the bullsh*t that has destroyed our city.”

The New York Times called it “a sharp break with the liberal conventions that have guided her city for decades.” 

“About time,” was California Governor Gavin Newsom’s response.

When Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner responded to questions about rising crime by arguing, “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence,” former Mayor Michael Nutter expressed incredulity.

“How many more Black and brown people, and others,” Nutter wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “would have to be gunned down in our streets daily to meet your definition of a ‘crisis’?”

Still, upon taking office weeks ago, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg “ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies . . .” the New York Post reported.

“The identical platform,” noted a police supervisor, “has not worked out in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore.”

Or anywhere else. Ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment

Sweat the Small Stuff

Like most Americans, I pride myself on being able to detect irony at seven paces. Skimming through the news, I can certainly detect sarcasm (which is to irony what a cannon is to sidearms), as in this first paragraph from Reason magazine’s online pages:

Los Angeles City Council today approved a new citation system. . . . This new system allows the Los Angeles Police Department to cite residents for a whole host of minor crimes that used to result in warnings (and potentially misdemeanor charges if police felt like pressing the matter). Now it’s a way for the city to extract more money from residents for minor issues, and I’m sure that won’t be abused at all.

The point that Scott Shackford is making: the new system will be abused. When he tells us that “the city predicts it’s going to take in $1.59 million in revenue a year,” we see the reason for predictable abuse: money as well as power.

Mr. Shackford worries about the effects, about the people who will be caught in this net for all sorts of small little infractions of laws that they probably don’t even know exist. He wonders, he says, “if I should warn my neighbors, several of whom have friendly dogs they take outside to walk without leashes. It’s rarely a problem and I don’t hear complaints (except for this one little dog with a Napoleonic complex. There’s always one).”

My big worry? These sorts of laws (like: don’t put signage up on telephone poles, though “everybody is doing it”) hit the poor the hardest. The fines, starting at $250 a pop, are not insignificant.

A few of those and you might as well call yourself a member of a persecuted class.

Welcome, friend. The modern state seems bent on making us all members of that class.

No irony, here; just Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.