March 11, 2025 • 36 mins
The John Kobylt Show Hour 1 (03/11) - Mayor Karen Bass held a press conference regarding crime and safety concerns in MacArthur Park but she was asked about deleting her text messages related to the fires as well. Gov. Gavin Newsom is the subject of a new book. Chris LeGras comes on the show to talk about the audit into LAHSA. Mayor Karen Bass has a terrible approval rating regarding how she handled the fires in January.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Can't. I am six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
You're listening to the John Cobelt Podcast on the iHeartRadio app.
We are on from one until four o'clock and then
after four o'clock John Cobelt Show on demand on the
iHeart app. We have a lot lined up here and
I want I'm gonna get right into it. Karen Bass
had a bit of a press conference today. It was
(00:24):
supposed to be primarily about the alleged cleanup in MacArthur Park,
which it's its own big issue. You know, the MacArthur
Park area should be so beautiful, but it is so
so frightening and disgusting. We used to years ago. If
I used to be in that general area, and so
I saw it many times and I still pass it occasionally.
(00:46):
It's like, oh my god, so so many drug addicts,
so many vagrants, and mental illness and and and drug addicts.
Just it's just over whelming. And add to that all
the crime in the area. There are gang members there.
There are hundreds, it seems, vendors, mostly illegal aliens, who
(01:11):
are selling stolen merchandise in most cases, and then gang
members are selling guns and drugs. It's a cesspool. I
actually haven't seen anything like that in any other city
in the United States. I mean, it is something out
of the third world, and we're going to talk about
it a little later on in the show, because I
(01:34):
want to first go to the questions at this news conference,
when Karen Bass started getting asked, for example, about all
the texts that The Ally Times found were deleted the
week of the fires and really for the past couple
of months. Karen Bass deleted all the texts that The
(01:56):
Times requested about the fires.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
And then some lawyer.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Who works for the city gave a nonsense answer claiming
that there's a nineteen eighty one Attorney General opinion about
saving government information that's ephemeral, and except text messages didn't
exist in nineteen eighty one, so whatever his ruling was
wouldn't apply to it. Maybe would apply to scraps of
(02:25):
paper at a restaurant. I don't know. But Bass deleted everything,
which means, in my experience, that means your hiding stuff, period,
end of story. Any politician that's been caught hiding stuff,
deleting emails, deleting texts, erasing audio tape, losing audio tape,
it's always to cover up stuff that is either illegal,
(02:48):
or embarrassing stuff that would end their careers.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So I'm going to assume, is my opinion.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
I'm going to assume that she deleted lawer texts because
what was on there was so embarrassing she'd go up
and smoke right away.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Well let's uh, let's play a cut. Seven.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
This is Bass being asked multiple times about her texts.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I want to know why they were deleted, and also people,
if you texted, and who returned messages to you, if
their messages were also.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
Deleted, and you know that's so let me just say
that my phone did automatic delete after thirty days. We've
been swamped with cpr A and so it took a while.
But we're also looking to see if there's some other
way to retrieve the messages.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Stop stop right there. So I answered the question we
had yesterday. She had thirty day delete. Now the Times
asked for the texts, I think on the tenth January tenth,
and the fire started on the seventh, so they wanted texts,
you know, between the seventh and the tenth.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Uh, and for three weeks they were available.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
So she says, if she's telling the truth on anything,
and I have grave doubts about that, but then they
didn't get a response at all until this past week.
So under that thirty day rule, the entire month of
January disappeared for sure into mid February. Yeah, about about
(04:18):
six five, six weeks worth of fire texts disappeared. If
that's her only phone, we don't know. We don't know
how many phones she works on. We don't know if
she's got extra phones on the side in order to
conduct business that she doesn't want anyone to know about.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
That's that's what these people do. Continue to cut.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Treat the messages. So stay tuned and we'll follow up
on your CPI requests.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
I got your text message question in Julia, I thought.
Speaker 5 (04:54):
I know, so I'm wondering.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I know, I think there were other pr as file
for your.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Text Yes, yeah, so let me just say that it
took a while. It took us a while to respond
to the text messages, and by that time they had
already deleted. But we are looking to see if we
can retrieve them in another way. So stay tuned. Yes,
(05:20):
but we get hundreds of.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Them, we're looking to retrieve them in another way. What
would be the other way.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
The cloud? The cloud?
Speaker 2 (05:30):
And how long would it take to figure out if
the text messages are on the cloud.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Five minutes less than five minutes, right.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
They got this request in January, January tenth, so it's
been two months and they haven't found the other way.
They're bound by law to give the La Times all
the relevant documents, and they're bound by law to hold
on to all the messages.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
And they screwed up.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And then they had their attorney, David Michaelson, give a
piece of nonsense garbage. You have an answer to the Times.
Let's uh, this is good. I'm gonna I'm gonna pay
cut nine. Bass was asked if anyone on her staff
was fired for not notifying her about the fire warnings.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Remember she was going to go ahead.
Speaker 5 (06:21):
More than a dozen of your staffers were advised of
the ving wind and rove.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Fire condisions before you left the country.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
You were also told to they didn't share that information
with you.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
I'm wondering since then, of any stuff in your office,
you would been fired or discipline as a result of
failing to person.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
And let me just say that the messages that my
staff received, mass emails that basically talked about a tentative
meeting on Monday. They received that on Friday, did not
see that it didn't rise to the level of something
that was critical. So yes, we are evaluating everything. In
(07:04):
my office, in the fire department, in the Emergency management department,
all of.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
It is being evaluated.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
She's referring to a grand meeting that was going to
happen Monday on how to deal with the impending fires.
And I don't know what kind of verbiage that government
workers used to communicate with each other that it was
a tentative meeting, But the warnings themselves from the National
(07:32):
Weather Service, which is all that matters, was extremely definitive.
As we've talked about many times. It was the harshest
language that you could use to talk about the deadly
fires that were coming. It was a critical situation. They
(07:52):
even used a color scheme that was the highest danger color,
which was purple. They went beyond red, they went purple.
And we've gone through this over and over again. So
she what she's doing is intentionally mixing the two things
up here. There is no possible way on the planet.
I don't believe her at all. There's no possible way
(08:16):
that she didn't know, and there's no possible way that
the staff under her didn't have conversations. And that's why
the text messages are all deleted. That's why I'm sure
the emails were deleted. I'm sure everything's been deleted. They
(08:38):
did a big dump and flush because it's been such
a deadly, destructive, overwhelming disaster and they want to distance
themselves as best they can. And she really is just
full of crap, she really is. She ought to get
(08:59):
the Gavin newsoone ward for for for for b s.
I mean that that it's nice to see, you know,
at least there's a pulse in some of the reporters
pushing on that. All right, when we come back. Gavin
Newsom is the subject of a new book, one of
(09:23):
one of one of the subjects.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
The title is Fool's Gold The Radicals, con Artists and
Traders who killed the California Dream and now threaten Us,
All written by Susan Crabtree and Jeded mcfatter. And they
write about the enormous amount of money that Gavin Newsom
has gotten out PG and it gotten from PG and
(09:47):
E the state's largest utility. He and his wife have
really made out and in return, Uh, Gavin Newsom bailed
out PG and A and also has not gone after
PG and E for the enormous amounts of carbon and
(10:07):
toxic smoke from the fires that they started, unlike the
way he goes after the oil companies. And I've been
telling you for years about this, that Newsom and his
wife are totally corrupted by PG and A. She's corrupted
because she put together a series of gender justice films.
(10:30):
Can you imagine what a gender justice film by Gavin
Newsom's wife is like. That's got to be excruciating. And
PG and E paid out ransom to avoid getting punished
by the state for all for the fires they started
and all the pollution that they sent into the air,
(10:53):
real pollution. We'll talk about that coming up next.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
You're listening to John Belts on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I just read a minute ago that and this is
a big loss. Rosie O'Donnell has moved to Ireland. Don't
be so broken up that almost sad.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Ireland is a very beautiful place. It is. It is well.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
She she took her daughter there and she's done, and
she's getting her Irish citizenship. And I didn't know this.
Allen DeGeneres moved to England, so that that's uh, two
enormous losses to America there, and of course it's over Trump.
(11:46):
It's like I love the pretentiousness of celebrities who announced
the world I'm leaving the country now because of the
way you voted. I'm moving to it. I'm moving to Ireland.
I'm moving to England. You are going to have to
live without me who asked you? I don't care where
(12:07):
you live. I never knew where Rosie o'donnald lived. Now
one morning of my life that I wake up and say, Jay,
where does Rosie live? She could have been living across
the street. I didn't, So she's in Ireland, Jesus. And
you know they apparently they just post endlessly about where
they moved to all their righteous anger. Gavin Newsom is
(12:32):
one of the subjects of a new book called Fool's Gold,
The Radicals, con artists and traders who killed the California
Dream and now threaten us all. It's by political writer
Susan Crabtree and Jed McPhatter, and they have profiled Newsom
as part of the book and detailed the corruption that
Newsome and his wife are involved in. You may remember
(12:56):
when PG and E burned down Paradise, California, eighty four people.
You remember that, and everybody wondered, well, geez, god, with
all the lawsuits and all the responsibility that PG and
IT had, PG and HE had, what's going to happen
to them? Well what happened to them is Gavin Newsom
bailed them out financially. The state bailed out PG and E.
(13:20):
And not only did they kill a lot of people
with their badly maintained equipment and greedy executives, they spewed
tremendous amounts of pollution and toxic smoke into the air.
One of those fires makes up for many, many years
(13:42):
of climate change successes, you know, whatever the state has
saved in the amount of carbon dioxide being put in
the air because of all the climate restrictions. I think
I read about twenty years worth was wiped out from
just one of these fires. So a whole climate policy
(14:06):
has been a huge, expensive waste of time because there's
been so many fires, many of them started by the
utilities Son southern California. Edison most likely started the Altadena fire,
and pgene's biggest.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Prize was Paradise, and that's official.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
They pleaded guilty in twenty twenty to eighty four counts
of involuntary manslaughter. Eighty four counts. It was the campfire
happened November twenty eighteen, and it burned one hundred and
fifty three thousand acres, thirteen thousand homes, killed eighty five people.
It was eighty five people, and it was eighty four
(14:47):
counts of manslaughter.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
And of course.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Nobody goes to prison because what you should have had
was those neglectful, corrupt executives being hauled off to the
death chamber. But instead new and worked with the legislature
that allowed the utility to continue operating and then signed
a deal so that they would get twenty one billion
dollars in insurance protections. And Newsom also never went after
(15:19):
PG and E for all the toxic gases they put
into the atmosphere. Instead, he sues the oil and gas companies,
claiming that they've lied to the public about climate change.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
The PG and E got off very easily.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
In fact, they got quite the benefits. Now his wife
and this is one of my favorite facts in the
whole world. Jennifer Sidebill Newsom and Gavin Newsom over the
last two decades, they have gotten seven hundred thousand dollars
(15:56):
in donations from PG and E. Money went to two places,
oh Newsom's campaign accounts, as he ran for various things mayor,
lieutenant governor, and governor, but his wife got a bundle
of money. First, gender justice films. I have no idea
(16:21):
what that could be like to sit through one of those,
if there's any Is there any, hey, Eric, when you
get a chance.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
It's not a rush.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Let's just look up and see if this is on
YouTube or maybe there's a trailer or something. I just
want to hear what a gender justice film sounds like.
And to see that PG and E made a payoff.
I I I'm guessing it wasn't released in theaters, one
of which was screened at PG and e's corporate offices
(16:56):
in San Francisco in twenty eleven.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Is that how Newsom deals with PG and E When
they start fires. It's like, all right, well, you know,
we won't charge anyone with crimes and we won't find
you any significant amounts of money, but you know what
punishment's going to be. You got to sit through my
wife's gender justice film. That's what you gotta do you
think Gavin Newsom gives three hoots about gender justice?
Speaker 1 (17:24):
But she, boy, she must be annoying. She must be
incredibly annoying.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Gender justice and actually goes through the trouble of making
the films and makes her husband shake down.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
PG and A.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Oh there's a party, yeah, Friday night at my house.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Your homework tonight, John is when Eric finds these for you. Yeah,
I already found the trailer. Well there the trailer.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, but it's like over two and a half minutes,
so we can do it later in the shop.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I will do it. Oh, that's a good tease. Who's
gonna turn away? Huh?
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Please don't go anywhere, all right, we'll get to it later.
We do have a lot of stuff coming up. Yesterday
we told you that there was a Judge David o'carter,
federal judge who presiding over a lawsuit involving the Los
Angeles Homelesses Service Authority that they have done next to
(18:21):
nothing to clean the homeless out of LA and an
audit finally came out. Judge Carter ordered an audit, and
late last week we found out that there are about
two billion dollars in homeless money that has evaporated. They
don't know where it went and whether it did any
(18:43):
good because they just lost track. Chris Lagras, who's a journalist,
he wrote a report in All Aspect report dot com
about this, and we are going to discuss things with
him next because this is this cannot be overlooked, this
finding about billions of dollars unaccounted for in the Los
(19:07):
Angeles Homeless Services criminal racket.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
You're listening to John Cobel's on demand from KFI A
six forty.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
You can follow us at John Cobelt Radio on social
media at John Cobelt Radio. Yesterday, last couple of days,
we've talked about this audit that came out last week
Federal Judge David Carter, who is presiding over a lawsuit
against the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority also known as LASA,
(19:41):
because obviously LA City and County are still aw wash
with tens of thousands of homeless people after we all
spent billions of dollars and Judge Carter wanted to know
where all the money's gone. Well, the audit came out
late last week and found out that billions of dollars
basically unaccounted for.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
They don't know exactly where it went or what it did.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
It was from the firm Alvarez and marshl And this
is not the first audit that showed the corruption that's
going on here. I think the whole place is a
criminal enterprise. They did an audit in twenty twenty four
the La County Auditor Controller's Office and it's a disaster.
I'm going to talk to Chrys Legras here. He's a writer, journalist.
(20:29):
He's got a report on All aspectreport dot com. And
there's one thing he writes that I want to lay
out to set the scene here. You may remember we
found out the fire department only gets half as much
as it should, right, half the funding it should. They
have half the firefighters that it should. Where's the money go?
(20:52):
City of La spends one point three billion dollars a
year on homelessness. One point three billion. That is ten
percent of the city's total budget. It serves one tenth
of one percent of the population, ten percent of the budget,
zero point one percent of the population. And of that funding,
(21:14):
over three hundred million went to Losso let's get Crys
Lagra on, Chris.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
How are you?
Speaker 5 (21:19):
I'm doing great? John Good to talk to you. How
are you.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
I'm good.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
The people on the inside at LASA, they know all
the money's getting wasted. There's no accounting for it. You
can do audits from here to the end of time.
Nobody's going to figure it out. They know all this.
It's got to be on purpose.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
Well. As I often say, John, you know, if we
were to ever actually solve the whole mostness crisis, a
lot of people would have to get real jobs, right, Yeah,
So I think it's kind of one of these these
open secrets. I mean when you consider that losses budget
in twenty fourteen was sixty sixty three million dollars. Ten
(22:01):
years later it was almost nine hundred million dollars and
the head count so in that time, the homeless population
in LA increased by forty two percent, losses budget increased
by thirteen hundred percent. So not only are they wasting money,
they're they're accelerating the pace of the waste. And I
(22:24):
think that this is all a giant scam with these
quote unquote nonprofits where the executives are making half a
million or a million dollars a year are all in
on it, and they don't want to solve this crisis,
because again, it's a really easy way to make money.
I mean, Valicia Adams Kellum makes almost half a million
(22:45):
dollars a year, almost twice her creditis or. She's not
going to give up.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
That gig, and she just gave a two million dollar
contract two million dollar contractor her husband's nonprofit.
Speaker 5 (22:55):
Well, and that's a really interesting point, John, And I'm
going to make a weird anount here, but I know
you'll you and your audience will get the connection. It's
just like Mayor Karen Bass deleting her texts during the
January wildfires. They're openly defying both city and state law
(23:16):
because they know that they are not going to be
held to account. The La Times will maybe stomp its
feet a little bit and write a story or two,
and then it's back to business as usual. And I
think that's the point that Angelino's really need to become
aware of. And I know, again, your audience is more
aware than most. We really need to wake up to
(23:38):
the fact that that they're not even trying to hide
it anymore. I mean, at least Eric Gard said he
kind of pretended to follow the law. Right at this point,
they're just brazen about it because we live in a
one party you know, mini dictatorship. They know that, you know,
there's one or two people that are going to make noise.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
You know.
Speaker 5 (23:57):
Tracy Park and Monica Rodriguez, to their everlasting credit, have
been speaking out on all of these issues. But they're
two out of fifteen, and all of the special interest
and all of the money and the campaign money is
against them and is against us as the people of
Los Angeles, and LASSA is exhibit A for all of
(24:20):
the rots and corruption and incompetence in our city these days.
And we just need to clean house, you know, with
the exception of the Tracys and the Monicas of the world,
we need to clean house. And it's up to the
people of Los Angeles. I mean, that's kind of what
I wrote at the end of my piece the other day,
is this is now all all out there again. They're
(24:42):
not trying to hide it anymore. So now that's to us.
And if we don't start voting the right way, I mean, honestly, John,
and I know you agree, we have only ourselves to blame.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Oh absolutely, this is the way people vote, and they
not only vote badly, they don't really pay attention to
what's going on.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
And right, there isn't a whole lot of media covering
this stuff.
Speaker 5 (25:05):
No, no, remember the road diet ballot initiative last March.
People just see healthy streets, la well, golly, I want
healthy streets. And let me let me give you an
example from the audits. One of the things that they found,
and this is the perfect encapsulation of everything we're talking about.
On a per bed, per day basis and shelters overseen
(25:29):
by LASSA, personnel expenses raged from seven dollars to sixty
seven dollars, meal expenses ranged from seven dollars to eighteen dollars,
and security expenses ranged from two dollars to thirty two dollars.
If you ran a private business like that, you'd be
out of you'd be bankrupt within the week. But they
(25:52):
know that there is this, you know, flow of taxpayer money.
And we have enough of these leftists and these MB's
city Council and goodness knows and Sacramento. And again that's
why they can just now be so brazen about it,
because who's going to hold.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Them to account?
Speaker 5 (26:08):
The ELSA times, right, I know, I mean, we do it,
you do it.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Occasionally there's a random story on television, you know which,
and most so many people now are looking at social
media for their news, and that's not an organized system,
you know, run by a news department. So it's just
whatever random feeds they're connected to. And there's just plenty
of nonsense. So I don't think we've ever had a
(26:38):
time where people are more ignorant of what's going on,
which is why there's so much corruption, just just out
and out theft and there's no consequences.
Speaker 5 (26:48):
I do think on the flip side, you know, I know,
you know, you talk to people all the time. I
talk to people all the time. There is there is
a crown swell building and I think, you know, this
loss of audit, people know that the money is being wasted.
If people know that their hard earned tax dollars are
being wasted on corrupt nonprofits and corrupt city employees, and
(27:14):
I do since a groundswell. And I think Karen Bass
being out of the country when the national screaming for
five days, the massive hurricane force red flag event was
on the way, I don't think her being here. I mean,
she's been so incompetent. I don't think her being here
substanquently would have made any difference, but it was such
(27:36):
a symbol. It was her Gavin Newsom at the French
laundry moment, right, Yes, and I think she is mortally
wounded politically. I hope to God that the quality candidate
sooner rather than later announces against her, because she is
beyond beatable at this point. And it wasn't just her
being out of the country. It's the fact that going
(27:58):
back to Lassa and I know this is not administered
through loss so but it's the same bucket. You know,
her Inside say according to analysis an analysis that Tim
Campbell at City Watch, and then I urge everybody to
check out Tim. He's great, he's on this stuff. He
did a he's an actuaryle type guy, and he did
an analysis of his own and he determined that Inside's
(28:19):
Safe is spending as much as seventeen thousand dollars per
month per individual to keep him in a Nottel motel
fleabag somewhere downtown.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Seventeen thousand to keep wait, wait, wait, seventeen thousand to
keep a single homeless person in a fleabag motel.
Speaker 5 (28:37):
Yes, I'll send, I'll send send me.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, send us, send me the story or a link
to the story and we'll be on that next. Chris,
thank you for coming on. I got to run, I
got as always, I could talk to you all day, Chris.
Speaker 5 (28:51):
Even though we talk about depressing stuff, it's always a
pleasure though.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
All right, Chris, he's got a piece at all Aspect
report dot com about the audit he mentioned Karen Bass. Yeah,
there's a new poll out that the La Times published
on her job rating for the fire. How well did
(29:14):
the public think she handled the Palisades fire. We'll tell
you about that next.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI A
six forty.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
We're on for one until four after four o'clock.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Whatever you missed, you get on the podcast John Cobelt's
show on demand, same as the radio show. We had
been talking this hour off and on about Karen Bass's performance.
She gave a press conference this morning and it was
supposed to be primarily about the cleanup of MacArthur Park,
and we have more on that coming up in minutes.
(29:50):
But we were playing clips because the press conference veered
into her deleted text messages, which they're still.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Looking for them.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
She deleted did an enormous number of text messages claiming
that it was a thirty day auto delete, which is
a thing. But the LA Times asked for the text
messages on January tenth, that's three days after the fire started,
(30:20):
and they didn't respond. They didn't respond, and they let
all those messages automatically delete unless they manually did it themselves,
which I suspect is very possible. I'm sure everybody realized
as they watched a whole freaking town burn that it
is time to start destroying evidence. So emails, texts out
(30:46):
the door. And if you saw the poll today in
the Los Angeles Times, boy, you could see why huh,
Because they interviewed they pulled almost two thousand registered voters
living in the city of Los Angeles. This was with
UC Berkeley. They're pulling unit isg You know what percentage
(31:12):
of LA City residents think that Bass did a good
or excellent job on the fire. Nineteen percent. Now I
am shocked, that's its highest nineteen percent. Who's the nineteen percent?
That's a fifth of the city. They're watching the Palisades
(31:34):
burn for weeks on end and Bass is in Ghana
and she wouldn't speak, and she was lying to everybody.
Steve Soberoff was misled, and the people donating money to
Steve sober Off felt they were misled. And she was
making all these claims when she wasn't just stonewalling.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
And the palace.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
It turns out she had no advanced planning going on,
not with the fire department, not with emergency services, not
with anybody. There was no evidence that Karen Bass existed
in the five days before the fire in any way,
not just physically, but there's no record that she participated
any meetings, phone calls, texts, emails. Now anything that she
(32:25):
was in after the fact has been raised. Now on
the other end of things, forty one percent thinks she
did a poor or a very poor job. Twenty two
percent thinks she did a fair job, which is like
a c.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
But so yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Add up those three categories and you get about sixty
three percent, And then there's eighteen percent of the public
with no opinion.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
No oion.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Can you imagine watching the worst fire in the history
of a city in the United States, worst in history,
and it's the only thing on television right It was
on ten stations every day.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
It's all you did.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
If you scrawled on your your your stupid social media sites.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
That's all there was. I don't have an opinion. I
don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
I don't know if she did good, I don't know
if she did bad, well, she did horrible. You can't
get elected with those numbers. Forty one percent said poor
or very poor. Then there was a second question, how
much confidence do you have in Bass to guide to
LA through its recovery. Only eleven percent set a great
deal of confidence, and that recovery is going to go
(33:47):
beyond not only this current term, but the next term,
and the next term is not going to be hers.
But you need a credible candidate running against her. Thirty
let's see, fifty four percent said little or no confidence
in Karen Bass to get LA through the recovery. You
would think politically she'd be dead right. You can never
(34:10):
be sure, because, honest to god, this is an incredibly
stupid public in California when it comes to paying attention
to the news and voting and not being blinded by
stupid ideological concerns.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
She is and we've seen a lot of them.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
She is one of the most incompetent, helpless, hopeless, hapless
public officials I've ever seen in my life and doesn't
surprise me in the least. And I said that one
hundred times before the election. She had no executive experience,
which means an ability to be a leader and make
decisions quickly, make correct decisions, quickly, get ahead of the game.
(34:55):
Later on we'll talk about her MacArthur Park press conference
as well. All right, two o'clock, Well, actually the later
on is coming up right after two o'clock. MacArthur Park
has been with one of the most disgusting places in
Los Angeles. Beautiful park, beautiful lake there overrun by violent
(35:19):
gangs shooting each other. It's an open air drug market.
There's syringes everywhere, Homeless people screaming and writhing in the night,
mental patience of people, it's just and and And they
have vendors, they call them vendors. These are these are
(35:42):
criminals who process stolen merchandise. Somebody does the stealing, they
do the selling on the streets. It's it's it's the
majority of legal alien and MacArthur Park is a shambles. Well,
Karen Bass held a press conference today. They did some
work claiming that we were cleaning it up. One who
(36:05):
disagrees is John Ally, and he's been an activist who's
We've had him on a number of times in Santa
Monica where he owns properties and he also manages properties
in that Westlake neighborhood. We'll tell you all about it
coming up, Devermark live in the CAFI twenty four our newsroom. Hey,
you've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You
can always hear the show live on KFI Am six
(36:27):
forty from one to four pm every Monday through Friday,
and of course anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Can't. I am six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
You're listening to the John Cobelt Podcast on the iHeartRadio app.
We are on from one until four o'clock and then
after four o'clock John Cobelt Show on demand on the
iHeart app. We have a lot lined up here and
I want I'm gonna get right into it. Karen Bass
had a bit of a press conference today. It was
(00:24):
supposed to be primarily about the alleged cleanup in MacArthur Park,
which it's its own big issue. You know, the MacArthur
Park area should be so beautiful, but it is so
so frightening and disgusting. We used to years ago. If
I used to be in that general area, and so
I saw it many times and I still pass it occasionally.
(00:46):
It's like, oh my god, so so many drug addicts,
so many vagrants, and mental illness and and and drug addicts.
Just it's just over whelming. And add to that all
the crime in the area. There are gang members there.
There are hundreds, it seems, vendors, mostly illegal aliens, who
(01:11):
are selling stolen merchandise in most cases, and then gang
members are selling guns and drugs. It's a cesspool. I
actually haven't seen anything like that in any other city
in the United States. I mean, it is something out
of the third world, and we're going to talk about
it a little later on in the show, because I
(01:34):
want to first go to the questions at this news conference,
when Karen Bass started getting asked, for example, about all
the texts that The Ally Times found were deleted the
week of the fires and really for the past couple
of months. Karen Bass deleted all the texts that The
(01:56):
Times requested about the fires.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
And then some lawyer.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Who works for the city gave a nonsense answer claiming
that there's a nineteen eighty one Attorney General opinion about
saving government information that's ephemeral, and except text messages didn't
exist in nineteen eighty one, so whatever his ruling was
wouldn't apply to it. Maybe would apply to scraps of
(02:25):
paper at a restaurant. I don't know. But Bass deleted everything,
which means, in my experience, that means your hiding stuff, period,
end of story. Any politician that's been caught hiding stuff,
deleting emails, deleting texts, erasing audio tape, losing audio tape,
it's always to cover up stuff that is either illegal,
(02:48):
or embarrassing stuff that would end their careers.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So I'm going to assume, is my opinion.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
I'm going to assume that she deleted lawer texts because
what was on there was so embarrassing she'd go up
and smoke right away.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Well let's uh, let's play a cut. Seven.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
This is Bass being asked multiple times about her texts.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I want to know why they were deleted, and also people,
if you texted, and who returned messages to you, if
their messages were also.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
Deleted, and you know that's so let me just say
that my phone did automatic delete after thirty days. We've
been swamped with cpr A and so it took a while.
But we're also looking to see if there's some other
way to retrieve the messages.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Stop stop right there. So I answered the question we
had yesterday. She had thirty day delete. Now the Times
asked for the texts, I think on the tenth January tenth,
and the fire started on the seventh, so they wanted texts,
you know, between the seventh and the tenth.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Uh, and for three weeks they were available.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
So she says, if she's telling the truth on anything,
and I have grave doubts about that, but then they
didn't get a response at all until this past week.
So under that thirty day rule, the entire month of
January disappeared for sure into mid February. Yeah, about about
(04:18):
six five, six weeks worth of fire texts disappeared. If
that's her only phone, we don't know. We don't know
how many phones she works on. We don't know if
she's got extra phones on the side in order to
conduct business that she doesn't want anyone to know about.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
That's that's what these people do. Continue to cut.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Treat the messages. So stay tuned and we'll follow up
on your CPI requests.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
I got your text message question in Julia, I thought.
Speaker 5 (04:54):
I know, so I'm wondering.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I know, I think there were other pr as file
for your.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Text Yes, yeah, so let me just say that it
took a while. It took us a while to respond
to the text messages, and by that time they had
already deleted. But we are looking to see if we
can retrieve them in another way. So stay tuned. Yes,
(05:20):
but we get hundreds of.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Them, we're looking to retrieve them in another way. What
would be the other way.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
The cloud? The cloud?
Speaker 2 (05:30):
And how long would it take to figure out if
the text messages are on the cloud.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Five minutes less than five minutes, right.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
They got this request in January, January tenth, so it's
been two months and they haven't found the other way.
They're bound by law to give the La Times all
the relevant documents, and they're bound by law to hold
on to all the messages.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
And they screwed up.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
And then they had their attorney, David Michaelson, give a
piece of nonsense garbage. You have an answer to the Times.
Let's uh, this is good. I'm gonna I'm gonna pay
cut nine. Bass was asked if anyone on her staff
was fired for not notifying her about the fire warnings.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Remember she was going to go ahead.
Speaker 5 (06:21):
More than a dozen of your staffers were advised of
the ving wind and rove.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Fire condisions before you left the country.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
You were also told to they didn't share that information
with you.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
I'm wondering since then, of any stuff in your office,
you would been fired or discipline as a result of
failing to person.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
And let me just say that the messages that my
staff received, mass emails that basically talked about a tentative
meeting on Monday. They received that on Friday, did not
see that it didn't rise to the level of something
that was critical. So yes, we are evaluating everything. In
(07:04):
my office, in the fire department, in the Emergency management department,
all of.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
It is being evaluated.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
She's referring to a grand meeting that was going to
happen Monday on how to deal with the impending fires.
And I don't know what kind of verbiage that government
workers used to communicate with each other that it was
a tentative meeting, But the warnings themselves from the National
(07:32):
Weather Service, which is all that matters, was extremely definitive.
As we've talked about many times. It was the harshest
language that you could use to talk about the deadly
fires that were coming. It was a critical situation. They
(07:52):
even used a color scheme that was the highest danger color,
which was purple. They went beyond red, they went purple.
And we've gone through this over and over again. So
she what she's doing is intentionally mixing the two things
up here. There is no possible way on the planet.
I don't believe her at all. There's no possible way
(08:16):
that she didn't know, and there's no possible way that
the staff under her didn't have conversations. And that's why
the text messages are all deleted. That's why I'm sure
the emails were deleted. I'm sure everything's been deleted. They
(08:38):
did a big dump and flush because it's been such
a deadly, destructive, overwhelming disaster and they want to distance
themselves as best they can. And she really is just
full of crap, she really is. She ought to get
(08:59):
the Gavin newsoone ward for for for for b s.
I mean that that it's nice to see, you know,
at least there's a pulse in some of the reporters
pushing on that. All right, when we come back. Gavin
Newsom is the subject of a new book, one of
(09:23):
one of one of the subjects.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
The title is Fool's Gold The Radicals, con Artists and
Traders who killed the California Dream and now threaten Us,
All written by Susan Crabtree and Jeded mcfatter. And they
write about the enormous amount of money that Gavin Newsom
has gotten out PG and it gotten from PG and
(09:47):
E the state's largest utility. He and his wife have
really made out and in return, Uh, Gavin Newsom bailed
out PG and A and also has not gone after
PG and E for the enormous amounts of carbon and
(10:07):
toxic smoke from the fires that they started, unlike the
way he goes after the oil companies. And I've been
telling you for years about this, that Newsom and his
wife are totally corrupted by PG and A. She's corrupted
because she put together a series of gender justice films.
(10:30):
Can you imagine what a gender justice film by Gavin
Newsom's wife is like. That's got to be excruciating. And
PG and E paid out ransom to avoid getting punished
by the state for all for the fires they started
and all the pollution that they sent into the air,
(10:53):
real pollution. We'll talk about that coming up next.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
You're listening to John Belts on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I just read a minute ago that and this is
a big loss. Rosie O'Donnell has moved to Ireland. Don't
be so broken up that almost sad.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Ireland is a very beautiful place. It is. It is well.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
She she took her daughter there and she's done, and
she's getting her Irish citizenship. And I didn't know this.
Allen DeGeneres moved to England, so that that's uh, two
enormous losses to America there, and of course it's over Trump.
(11:46):
It's like I love the pretentiousness of celebrities who announced
the world I'm leaving the country now because of the
way you voted. I'm moving to it. I'm moving to Ireland.
I'm moving to England. You are going to have to
live without me who asked you? I don't care where
(12:07):
you live. I never knew where Rosie o'donnald lived. Now
one morning of my life that I wake up and say, Jay,
where does Rosie live? She could have been living across
the street. I didn't, So she's in Ireland, Jesus. And
you know they apparently they just post endlessly about where
they moved to all their righteous anger. Gavin Newsom is
(12:32):
one of the subjects of a new book called Fool's Gold,
The Radicals, con artists and traders who killed the California
Dream and now threaten us all. It's by political writer
Susan Crabtree and Jed McPhatter, and they have profiled Newsom
as part of the book and detailed the corruption that
Newsome and his wife are involved in. You may remember
(12:56):
when PG and E burned down Paradise, California, eighty four people.
You remember that, and everybody wondered, well, geez, god, with
all the lawsuits and all the responsibility that PG and
IT had, PG and HE had, what's going to happen
to them? Well what happened to them is Gavin Newsom
bailed them out financially. The state bailed out PG and E.
(13:20):
And not only did they kill a lot of people
with their badly maintained equipment and greedy executives, they spewed
tremendous amounts of pollution and toxic smoke into the air.
One of those fires makes up for many, many years
(13:42):
of climate change successes, you know, whatever the state has
saved in the amount of carbon dioxide being put in
the air because of all the climate restrictions. I think
I read about twenty years worth was wiped out from
just one of these fires. So a whole climate policy
(14:06):
has been a huge, expensive waste of time because there's
been so many fires, many of them started by the
utilities Son southern California. Edison most likely started the Altadena fire,
and pgene's biggest.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Prize was Paradise, and that's official.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
They pleaded guilty in twenty twenty to eighty four counts
of involuntary manslaughter. Eighty four counts. It was the campfire
happened November twenty eighteen, and it burned one hundred and
fifty three thousand acres, thirteen thousand homes, killed eighty five people.
It was eighty five people, and it was eighty four
(14:47):
counts of manslaughter.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
And of course.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Nobody goes to prison because what you should have had
was those neglectful, corrupt executives being hauled off to the
death chamber. But instead new and worked with the legislature
that allowed the utility to continue operating and then signed
a deal so that they would get twenty one billion
dollars in insurance protections. And Newsom also never went after
(15:19):
PG and E for all the toxic gases they put
into the atmosphere. Instead, he sues the oil and gas companies,
claiming that they've lied to the public about climate change.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
The PG and E got off very easily.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
In fact, they got quite the benefits. Now his wife
and this is one of my favorite facts in the
whole world. Jennifer Sidebill Newsom and Gavin Newsom over the
last two decades, they have gotten seven hundred thousand dollars
(15:56):
in donations from PG and E. Money went to two places,
oh Newsom's campaign accounts, as he ran for various things mayor,
lieutenant governor, and governor, but his wife got a bundle
of money. First, gender justice films. I have no idea
(16:21):
what that could be like to sit through one of those,
if there's any Is there any, hey, Eric, when you
get a chance.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
It's not a rush.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Let's just look up and see if this is on
YouTube or maybe there's a trailer or something. I just
want to hear what a gender justice film sounds like.
And to see that PG and E made a payoff.
I I I'm guessing it wasn't released in theaters, one
of which was screened at PG and e's corporate offices
(16:56):
in San Francisco in twenty eleven.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Is that how Newsom deals with PG and E When
they start fires. It's like, all right, well, you know,
we won't charge anyone with crimes and we won't find
you any significant amounts of money, but you know what
punishment's going to be. You got to sit through my
wife's gender justice film. That's what you gotta do you
think Gavin Newsom gives three hoots about gender justice?
Speaker 1 (17:24):
But she, boy, she must be annoying. She must be
incredibly annoying.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Gender justice and actually goes through the trouble of making
the films and makes her husband shake down.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
PG and A.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Oh there's a party, yeah, Friday night at my house.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Your homework tonight, John is when Eric finds these for you. Yeah,
I already found the trailer. Well there the trailer.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, but it's like over two and a half minutes,
so we can do it later in the shop.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I will do it. Oh, that's a good tease. Who's
gonna turn away? Huh?
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Please don't go anywhere, all right, we'll get to it later.
We do have a lot of stuff coming up. Yesterday
we told you that there was a Judge David o'carter,
federal judge who presiding over a lawsuit involving the Los
Angeles Homelesses Service Authority that they have done next to
(18:21):
nothing to clean the homeless out of LA and an
audit finally came out. Judge Carter ordered an audit, and
late last week we found out that there are about
two billion dollars in homeless money that has evaporated. They
don't know where it went and whether it did any
(18:43):
good because they just lost track. Chris Lagras, who's a journalist,
he wrote a report in All Aspect report dot com
about this, and we are going to discuss things with
him next because this is this cannot be overlooked, this
finding about billions of dollars unaccounted for in the Los
(19:07):
Angeles Homeless Services criminal racket.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
You're listening to John Cobel's on demand from KFI A
six forty.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
You can follow us at John Cobelt Radio on social
media at John Cobelt Radio. Yesterday, last couple of days,
we've talked about this audit that came out last week
Federal Judge David Carter, who is presiding over a lawsuit
against the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority also known as LASA,
(19:41):
because obviously LA City and County are still aw wash
with tens of thousands of homeless people after we all
spent billions of dollars and Judge Carter wanted to know
where all the money's gone. Well, the audit came out
late last week and found out that billions of dollars
basically unaccounted for.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
They don't know exactly where it went or what it did.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
It was from the firm Alvarez and marshl And this
is not the first audit that showed the corruption that's
going on here. I think the whole place is a
criminal enterprise. They did an audit in twenty twenty four
the La County Auditor Controller's Office and it's a disaster.
I'm going to talk to Chrys Legras here. He's a writer, journalist.
(20:29):
He's got a report on All aspectreport dot com. And
there's one thing he writes that I want to lay
out to set the scene here. You may remember we
found out the fire department only gets half as much
as it should, right, half the funding it should. They
have half the firefighters that it should. Where's the money go?
(20:52):
City of La spends one point three billion dollars a
year on homelessness. One point three billion. That is ten
percent of the city's total budget. It serves one tenth
of one percent of the population, ten percent of the budget,
zero point one percent of the population. And of that funding,
(21:14):
over three hundred million went to Losso let's get Crys
Lagra on, Chris.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
How are you?
Speaker 5 (21:19):
I'm doing great? John Good to talk to you. How
are you.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
I'm good.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
The people on the inside at LASA, they know all
the money's getting wasted. There's no accounting for it. You
can do audits from here to the end of time.
Nobody's going to figure it out. They know all this.
It's got to be on purpose.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
Well. As I often say, John, you know, if we
were to ever actually solve the whole mostness crisis, a
lot of people would have to get real jobs, right, Yeah,
So I think it's kind of one of these these
open secrets. I mean when you consider that losses budget
in twenty fourteen was sixty sixty three million dollars. Ten
(22:01):
years later it was almost nine hundred million dollars and
the head count so in that time, the homeless population
in LA increased by forty two percent, losses budget increased
by thirteen hundred percent. So not only are they wasting money,
they're they're accelerating the pace of the waste. And I
(22:24):
think that this is all a giant scam with these
quote unquote nonprofits where the executives are making half a
million or a million dollars a year are all in
on it, and they don't want to solve this crisis,
because again, it's a really easy way to make money.
I mean, Valicia Adams Kellum makes almost half a million
(22:45):
dollars a year, almost twice her creditis or. She's not
going to give up.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
That gig, and she just gave a two million dollar
contract two million dollar contractor her husband's nonprofit.
Speaker 5 (22:55):
Well, and that's a really interesting point, John, And I'm
going to make a weird anount here, but I know
you'll you and your audience will get the connection. It's
just like Mayor Karen Bass deleting her texts during the
January wildfires. They're openly defying both city and state law
(23:16):
because they know that they are not going to be
held to account. The La Times will maybe stomp its
feet a little bit and write a story or two,
and then it's back to business as usual. And I
think that's the point that Angelino's really need to become
aware of. And I know, again, your audience is more
aware than most. We really need to wake up to
(23:38):
the fact that that they're not even trying to hide
it anymore. I mean, at least Eric Gard said he
kind of pretended to follow the law. Right at this point,
they're just brazen about it because we live in a
one party you know, mini dictatorship. They know that, you know,
there's one or two people that are going to make noise.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
You know.
Speaker 5 (23:57):
Tracy Park and Monica Rodriguez, to their everlasting credit, have
been speaking out on all of these issues. But they're
two out of fifteen, and all of the special interest
and all of the money and the campaign money is
against them and is against us as the people of
Los Angeles, and LASSA is exhibit A for all of
(24:20):
the rots and corruption and incompetence in our city these days.
And we just need to clean house, you know, with
the exception of the Tracys and the Monicas of the world,
we need to clean house. And it's up to the
people of Los Angeles. I mean, that's kind of what
I wrote at the end of my piece the other day,
is this is now all all out there again. They're
(24:42):
not trying to hide it anymore. So now that's to us.
And if we don't start voting the right way, I mean, honestly, John,
and I know you agree, we have only ourselves to blame.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Oh absolutely, this is the way people vote, and they
not only vote badly, they don't really pay attention to
what's going on.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
And right, there isn't a whole lot of media covering
this stuff.
Speaker 5 (25:05):
No, no, remember the road diet ballot initiative last March.
People just see healthy streets, la well, golly, I want
healthy streets. And let me let me give you an
example from the audits. One of the things that they found,
and this is the perfect encapsulation of everything we're talking about.
On a per bed, per day basis and shelters overseen
(25:29):
by LASSA, personnel expenses raged from seven dollars to sixty
seven dollars, meal expenses ranged from seven dollars to eighteen dollars,
and security expenses ranged from two dollars to thirty two dollars.
If you ran a private business like that, you'd be
out of you'd be bankrupt within the week. But they
(25:52):
know that there is this, you know, flow of taxpayer money.
And we have enough of these leftists and these MB's
city Council and goodness knows and Sacramento. And again that's
why they can just now be so brazen about it,
because who's going to hold.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Them to account?
Speaker 5 (26:08):
The ELSA times, right, I know, I mean, we do it,
you do it.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Occasionally there's a random story on television, you know which,
and most so many people now are looking at social
media for their news, and that's not an organized system,
you know, run by a news department. So it's just
whatever random feeds they're connected to. And there's just plenty
of nonsense. So I don't think we've ever had a
(26:38):
time where people are more ignorant of what's going on,
which is why there's so much corruption, just just out
and out theft and there's no consequences.
Speaker 5 (26:48):
I do think on the flip side, you know, I know,
you know, you talk to people all the time. I
talk to people all the time. There is there is
a crown swell building and I think, you know, this
loss of audit, people know that the money is being wasted.
If people know that their hard earned tax dollars are
being wasted on corrupt nonprofits and corrupt city employees, and
(27:14):
I do since a groundswell. And I think Karen Bass
being out of the country when the national screaming for
five days, the massive hurricane force red flag event was
on the way, I don't think her being here. I mean,
she's been so incompetent. I don't think her being here
substanquently would have made any difference, but it was such
(27:36):
a symbol. It was her Gavin Newsom at the French
laundry moment, right, Yes, and I think she is mortally
wounded politically. I hope to God that the quality candidate
sooner rather than later announces against her, because she is
beyond beatable at this point. And it wasn't just her
being out of the country. It's the fact that going
(27:58):
back to Lassa and I know this is not administered
through loss so but it's the same bucket. You know,
her Inside say according to analysis an analysis that Tim
Campbell at City Watch, and then I urge everybody to
check out Tim. He's great, he's on this stuff. He
did a he's an actuaryle type guy, and he did
an analysis of his own and he determined that Inside's
(28:19):
Safe is spending as much as seventeen thousand dollars per
month per individual to keep him in a Nottel motel
fleabag somewhere downtown.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Seventeen thousand to keep wait, wait, wait, seventeen thousand to
keep a single homeless person in a fleabag motel.
Speaker 5 (28:37):
Yes, I'll send, I'll send send me.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, send us, send me the story or a link
to the story and we'll be on that next. Chris,
thank you for coming on. I got to run, I
got as always, I could talk to you all day, Chris.
Speaker 5 (28:51):
Even though we talk about depressing stuff, it's always a
pleasure though.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
All right, Chris, he's got a piece at all Aspect
report dot com about the audit he mentioned Karen Bass. Yeah,
there's a new poll out that the La Times published
on her job rating for the fire. How well did
(29:14):
the public think she handled the Palisades fire. We'll tell
you about that next.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI A
six forty.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
We're on for one until four after four o'clock.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Whatever you missed, you get on the podcast John Cobelt's
show on demand, same as the radio show. We had
been talking this hour off and on about Karen Bass's performance.
She gave a press conference this morning and it was
supposed to be primarily about the cleanup of MacArthur Park,
and we have more on that coming up in minutes.
(29:50):
But we were playing clips because the press conference veered
into her deleted text messages, which they're still.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Looking for them.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
She deleted did an enormous number of text messages claiming
that it was a thirty day auto delete, which is
a thing. But the LA Times asked for the text
messages on January tenth, that's three days after the fire started,
(30:20):
and they didn't respond. They didn't respond, and they let
all those messages automatically delete unless they manually did it themselves,
which I suspect is very possible. I'm sure everybody realized
as they watched a whole freaking town burn that it
is time to start destroying evidence. So emails, texts out
(30:46):
the door. And if you saw the poll today in
the Los Angeles Times, boy, you could see why huh,
Because they interviewed they pulled almost two thousand registered voters
living in the city of Los Angeles. This was with
UC Berkeley. They're pulling unit isg You know what percentage
(31:12):
of LA City residents think that Bass did a good
or excellent job on the fire. Nineteen percent. Now I
am shocked, that's its highest nineteen percent. Who's the nineteen percent?
That's a fifth of the city. They're watching the Palisades
(31:34):
burn for weeks on end and Bass is in Ghana
and she wouldn't speak, and she was lying to everybody.
Steve Soberoff was misled, and the people donating money to
Steve sober Off felt they were misled. And she was
making all these claims when she wasn't just stonewalling.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
And the palace.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
It turns out she had no advanced planning going on,
not with the fire department, not with emergency services, not
with anybody. There was no evidence that Karen Bass existed
in the five days before the fire in any way,
not just physically, but there's no record that she participated
any meetings, phone calls, texts, emails. Now anything that she
(32:25):
was in after the fact has been raised. Now on
the other end of things, forty one percent thinks she
did a poor or a very poor job. Twenty two
percent thinks she did a fair job, which is like
a c.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
But so yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Add up those three categories and you get about sixty
three percent, And then there's eighteen percent of the public
with no opinion.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
No oion.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Can you imagine watching the worst fire in the history
of a city in the United States, worst in history,
and it's the only thing on television right It was
on ten stations every day.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
It's all you did.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
If you scrawled on your your your stupid social media sites.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
That's all there was. I don't have an opinion. I
don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
I don't know if she did good, I don't know
if she did bad, well, she did horrible. You can't
get elected with those numbers. Forty one percent said poor
or very poor. Then there was a second question, how
much confidence do you have in Bass to guide to
LA through its recovery. Only eleven percent set a great
deal of confidence, and that recovery is going to go
(33:47):
beyond not only this current term, but the next term,
and the next term is not going to be hers.
But you need a credible candidate running against her. Thirty
let's see, fifty four percent said little or no confidence
in Karen Bass to get LA through the recovery. You
would think politically she'd be dead right. You can never
(34:10):
be sure, because, honest to god, this is an incredibly
stupid public in California when it comes to paying attention
to the news and voting and not being blinded by
stupid ideological concerns.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
She is and we've seen a lot of them.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
She is one of the most incompetent, helpless, hopeless, hapless
public officials I've ever seen in my life and doesn't
surprise me in the least. And I said that one
hundred times before the election. She had no executive experience,
which means an ability to be a leader and make
decisions quickly, make correct decisions, quickly, get ahead of the game.
(34:55):
Later on we'll talk about her MacArthur Park press conference
as well. All right, two o'clock, Well, actually the later
on is coming up right after two o'clock. MacArthur Park
has been with one of the most disgusting places in
Los Angeles. Beautiful park, beautiful lake there overrun by violent
(35:19):
gangs shooting each other. It's an open air drug market.
There's syringes everywhere, Homeless people screaming and writhing in the night,
mental patience of people, it's just and and And they
have vendors, they call them vendors. These are these are
(35:42):
criminals who process stolen merchandise. Somebody does the stealing, they
do the selling on the streets. It's it's it's the
majority of legal alien and MacArthur Park is a shambles. Well,
Karen Bass held a press conference today. They did some
work claiming that we were cleaning it up. One who
(36:05):
disagrees is John Ally, and he's been an activist who's
We've had him on a number of times in Santa
Monica where he owns properties and he also manages properties
in that Westlake neighborhood. We'll tell you all about it
coming up, Devermark live in the CAFI twenty four our newsroom. Hey,
you've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You
can always hear the show live on KFI Am six
(36:27):
forty from one to four pm every Monday through Friday,
and of course anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
The John Kobylt Show News
Host
John Kobylt
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