January 13, 2025 • 12 mins
The Editor in Chief of the California Globe, Katy Grimes, joins Jack & Joe to discuss how politics & the reality of the wildfires intersect...
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Did they fail you?
Speaker 2 (00:01):
That is our job, and I tell you that's why
I'm here. So let's get us what we need so
firefighters can do their jobs.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Did they fail you?
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Yes, When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we
expect there's going to be water.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
We don't control the water supply.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Our firefighters are there to protect lives and property and
to make sure that we're properly trained and equipped.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Does the buck stop with you? I mean you're governor
of California. In buying it will be the mayor of California.
We're all in this together. We're all better off. We're
all better off. We're all better off, and we're working
together to take care of people.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
So at first clip happened on Friday. It's La Fire
Chief Kristin Crowley. They had to drag the answer out
of her, but she finally did offer up. Yes, They
the city council and the mayor failed us, and then
Gavin Newsom masked this morning or last night, does the
buck stop with you? Homa Hamana Hamana HALMONA bad.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
Answer politically, indeed, to discuss the politics and the realities
of the fire and how they intertwine. Please welcome to
the show the editor in chief of the California Globe,
Katie Grimes, who's been writing about California politics for Ages
and Ages.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Katie, how are you?
Speaker 5 (01:09):
I am well, thanks for having me, Jack and Joe.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Oh, it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
So I want to use as a springboard your last
couple of columns for the Globe. First of all, what
you published last week, which touches on a couple of things.
I just if you can give the nickel version for
people of the insurance crisis in California, how many people
weren't insured or had just gotten dropped and why that is?
(01:33):
Because I heard an utterly, utterly misleading description of it
from professional liar Kristin Welker on Meet the Press Sunday.
But go ahead, Katie, what's the real situation insurance wise?
Speaker 5 (01:44):
Well, the insurance crisis in California is devastating and it's
hitting people, you know, North State, South State, everywhere. I
don't think we have any numbers at the moment of
how many people, say in Pacific Palisades, had their fire
insurance canceled, or even homeowners in many cases with insurance companies,
(02:05):
you know, fleeing the state along with half of California,
it seems, but it's it is absolutely devastating because you know,
you think back to the campfire up here in Paradise, California,
your Sacramento, and you know that was unbelievably devastating, but
it was also unbelievably costly for insurers, and then the
(02:28):
Calder Fire a couple of years later, and then.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
We're just looking for broad strokes, just a very quick
description of what's wrong with insurance in California.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
What's wrong with it is politics purely. And this goes
back to Proposition one O three, which was put on
the ballot to essentially cap the amount of premiums insurance
companies could impose on the insured, rather than fixing the
problem of why it costs so much to build and
rebuild here in California, and.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
It ordered them to only look at historical data as
opposed to current data for building costs, and the rest
of it is utterly unrealistic.
Speaker 5 (03:08):
It is entirely unrealistic. And boy, we're going to see
what a disaster, a financial disaster, this is going to
be following the fires.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
And then I know you wrote about water as well,
in the fact that California has built no water storage
in generations, even as the populations doubled.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
It's just terrible governance.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
Yes, absolutely, Not only have we not built any water
storage in years, the voters have passed over thirty two
billion dollars in water bonds to do just that in
thirty years. And the last one was Proposition one in
twenty fourteen, which would it set aside two point seven
billion dollars so that we could build the Site's reservoir
and the Temperance Flat reservoir, none of which has been done.
(03:53):
And in the meantime, the amount of water that flows
from our snowpack melt and our reign has increased from
fifty percent of the state's water to eighty percent of
the state's water goes straight out to the Pacific Ocean
to save some fish that aren't even indigenous.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Well, yeah, how fair is it to lay blame at
the foot of either the mayor of Los Angeles, the
governor of California City, Council of LA or you know,
government officials in this soon to be biggest disaster in
California history.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Well, I think Avenussen's responses show you exactly how fair
it is. He's running as fast as he can from responsibility.
And yet this is what he signed up for. When
you sign up to be governor of California, you do
sign up for the good, bad, and the ugly. And
he's not handling this very well. It is fair to
point fingers at him because so many of his policies
(04:50):
have led us to this place, even policies he's supported
long before he became governor. Leftism in California has gotten
us here.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Yeah, I know your recent column, which is terrific, the
anti American Agenda's California's Democrats catching up. You point out
that southern California is on fire. But here are Newsom's
priorities and what he has been focused on. Newsom created
the California abortion sanctuary state. He legalized abortion up until birth,
authorized a trans sanctuary state, allowing children to receive hormone
blockers chemical carastration without parental consent. He exacerbated the homeless crisis,
(05:23):
spending tens of billions of dollars to get more bums
and junkies.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
He said.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
He's embraced illegal immigrants, even providing health insurance. He's also
on board for the bottomless pit of the High speed
rail project. So and it reminds me of a conversation
we had Friday. Instead of doing the blocking and tackling
of governing, they have all these pie in the sky
progressive you know, just agendas that they're pursuing instead.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
And you didn't mention the most recent trump proofing California
against the evil Dictator is about to go in.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
Go ahead, Gatie, Yeah, I devoted an entire article to
that one. I think this shows I mean, as ridiculous
as this list sounds, when we lay it all out together,
it does show you he's doing everything but governing. And
I assume governing is not always very sexy. It doesn't
always get great headlines. And yet you know, he and
his PR team could certainly have written good headlines for
(06:17):
all the hard work he was doing behind the scenes.
But that's not what's happened. He is he's adopted this
absolutely unbelievably radical, radical agenda of things that Californians and
even those who didn't vote for him, they don't want.
They want water to be in their fire hydrants. We
want decent roads and good schools, and we want to
(06:38):
make sure that our cal fire and the local firefighters
have everything they need in terms of you know, budget
and equipment.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
You've been falling politics in California for a long time.
I was reading Mark Alprin's newsletter today and he said, hell,
hath no fury like a homeless celebrity. A Los Angeles
conservative is a liberal actor who blames news and Bass
and decades of liberal governments governance for their houses burning down.
Do you think this is like perhaps a seed change
politically for LA or maybe the state.
Speaker 5 (07:08):
It could be. And Mark Halpern's absolutely right. And I
think the reason we're getting so much attention focused on
California as opposed to say North Carolina right now, which
people are still living intents, is because of Hollywood and
the celebrities and people being you know, they have a
platform from which they can speak and they are describing
(07:29):
what's going on. And as I said, I think even
people who voted for Gavin Newsom are really really pissed
off right now and they want answers. They want to
know why this happened, and that will lead to some
changes in voting.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
I hope well, and I'm sure gavinus people would say, look,
we could walk and chew gum at the same time
we can pursue these grand progressive schemes and be good governors.
But they can't if the walking is, you know, having
a bullet train squander hundreds billions of dollars that will
never exist, and the chewing gum is making sure that
(08:04):
there's enough water storage for forty million people.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
No, you can't. You haven't. You've proven it over and
over again.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
And to the rest of the country listening, you're like, well,
why doesn't why don't you vote Democrats out office? It's
because all of the public employee unions are so powerful
in the try lawyers that they all show up, every
single one of them and vote Democrat every single time
because they're getting their backscratched slash paid.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
Yeah, exactly. It's a huge problem we have in California
in that and I think this last election showed us
there's a lot more independent slash right of center voters
as we saw who voted for Trump over six million.
But yeah, when you fight that with the public employee unions,
(08:51):
which are just ruthless, Yeah, it seems like too much
of a heavy lift.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
Yeah, the regular folks really just they can't accumulate enough
mass to take it back Katie Grimes is the editor
in chief of the California Globe.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
California Globe dot com.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
You ought a bookmarket check it all the time if
you're of a conservative bent really in any state in
the Union, or you'd just like to have your eyes
open to the truth.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
California Globe dot com. Katie, great to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Thanks, thanks very much so. The Brentwood neighborhood, which you
probably recognize that name if you follow the celebrity news,
has the fires bearing down on it with it's going
to be a couple of really really windy days.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
That neighborhood where OJ was framed for a crime. That
maybe that's right.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And that neighborhood is also home to former Senator Kamala Harris.
Maybe you've heard of her, Lebron James, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford,
doctor Dre among others. And those are some names that
can get a lot of attention. Like Katie just said,
there people are still living in tents in North Carolina
because of the biggest disaster they'd ever had in that
(09:53):
part of the country, but not enough celebrities to get
attention for that.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
I actually appreciated sixty minutes last night going heavily at
all the thousands, or you know, highlighting the many thousands
of working class folks, just regular people in various sections
of the Greater Los Angeles metro area that are now
homeless and hopeless, and all of their baby pictures are gone.
They don't know where they're going to go and what
they're going to do. I mean, obviously baby pictures is
(10:20):
one example, but it's just heartbreaking.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
The number of people I've seen on TV saying, literally
the only thing I had of what is have is
what you see me wearing. I can't imagine the to
do list you have when you're in that situation.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Where do you start? Oh my god, would that be overwhelming?
Speaker 4 (10:43):
And as I said before, just to put a cap
on this, has it been an extremely dry year in
southern California? Yes, were those incredibly powerful wins freakish and
rare one hundred percent. There are aspects of this fire
that are not the fault of governance.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
On the other hand, there are aspects of it that are.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
And if this draws people's attention to the utterly incompetent
doesn't even describe it. It's incompetent, dishonest, just klepto main
maniacal governance of California over the last quite a few years,
if it draws attention to that good, whether it directly
applies to how a particular fire started or not.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Karen Bass is an avowed communist.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
She cut the fire budget, according to her chief, to
a damaging level to support drug addicts and illegal immigrants
and proudly did so.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Uh did you see over the weekend where she was
at least hinting that people are criticizing her because she's blacked.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Oh yeah, a couple of celebrities are out saying that.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Yeah, go ahead, hey, put the final nail in the
coffin of your fake accusations of racism.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Do it now? That was perfect.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
And the state level, when you start talking about not
having enough money for this or that, come on, you
don't get to say that.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
As long as there's a bullet train project. You gotta
end that before you can ever say a word.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
About not having enough money for this or that. Amen,
Oh my god, we got more on the waist here.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
We're all better off. We're all better off. We're all
better off, and we're working together.
Speaker 5 (12:17):
Armstrong and Getty
Did they fail you?
Speaker 2 (00:01):
That is our job, and I tell you that's why
I'm here. So let's get us what we need so
firefighters can do their jobs.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Did they fail you?
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Yes, When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we
expect there's going to be water.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
We don't control the water supply.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Our firefighters are there to protect lives and property and
to make sure that we're properly trained and equipped.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Does the buck stop with you? I mean you're governor
of California. In buying it will be the mayor of California.
We're all in this together. We're all better off. We're
all better off. We're all better off, and we're working
together to take care of people.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
So at first clip happened on Friday. It's La Fire
Chief Kristin Crowley. They had to drag the answer out
of her, but she finally did offer up. Yes, They
the city council and the mayor failed us, and then
Gavin Newsom masked this morning or last night, does the
buck stop with you? Homa Hamana Hamana HALMONA bad.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
Answer politically, indeed, to discuss the politics and the realities
of the fire and how they intertwine. Please welcome to
the show the editor in chief of the California Globe,
Katie Grimes, who's been writing about California politics for Ages
and Ages.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Katie, how are you?
Speaker 5 (01:09):
I am well, thanks for having me, Jack and Joe.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Oh, it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
So I want to use as a springboard your last
couple of columns for the Globe. First of all, what
you published last week, which touches on a couple of things.
I just if you can give the nickel version for
people of the insurance crisis in California, how many people
weren't insured or had just gotten dropped and why that is?
(01:33):
Because I heard an utterly, utterly misleading description of it
from professional liar Kristin Welker on Meet the Press Sunday.
But go ahead, Katie, what's the real situation insurance wise?
Speaker 5 (01:44):
Well, the insurance crisis in California is devastating and it's
hitting people, you know, North State, South State, everywhere. I
don't think we have any numbers at the moment of
how many people, say in Pacific Palisades, had their fire
insurance canceled, or even homeowners in many cases with insurance companies,
(02:05):
you know, fleeing the state along with half of California,
it seems, but it's it is absolutely devastating because you know,
you think back to the campfire up here in Paradise, California,
your Sacramento, and you know that was unbelievably devastating, but
it was also unbelievably costly for insurers, and then the
(02:28):
Calder Fire a couple of years later, and then.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
We're just looking for broad strokes, just a very quick
description of what's wrong with insurance in California.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
What's wrong with it is politics purely. And this goes
back to Proposition one O three, which was put on
the ballot to essentially cap the amount of premiums insurance
companies could impose on the insured, rather than fixing the
problem of why it costs so much to build and
rebuild here in California, and.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
It ordered them to only look at historical data as
opposed to current data for building costs, and the rest
of it is utterly unrealistic.
Speaker 5 (03:08):
It is entirely unrealistic. And boy, we're going to see
what a disaster, a financial disaster, this is going to
be following the fires.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
And then I know you wrote about water as well,
in the fact that California has built no water storage
in generations, even as the populations doubled.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
It's just terrible governance.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
Yes, absolutely, Not only have we not built any water
storage in years, the voters have passed over thirty two
billion dollars in water bonds to do just that in
thirty years. And the last one was Proposition one in
twenty fourteen, which would it set aside two point seven
billion dollars so that we could build the Site's reservoir
and the Temperance Flat reservoir, none of which has been done.
(03:53):
And in the meantime, the amount of water that flows
from our snowpack melt and our reign has increased from
fifty percent of the state's water to eighty percent of
the state's water goes straight out to the Pacific Ocean
to save some fish that aren't even indigenous.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Well, yeah, how fair is it to lay blame at
the foot of either the mayor of Los Angeles, the
governor of California City, Council of LA or you know,
government officials in this soon to be biggest disaster in
California history.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Well, I think Avenussen's responses show you exactly how fair
it is. He's running as fast as he can from responsibility.
And yet this is what he signed up for. When
you sign up to be governor of California, you do
sign up for the good, bad, and the ugly. And
he's not handling this very well. It is fair to
point fingers at him because so many of his policies
(04:50):
have led us to this place, even policies he's supported
long before he became governor. Leftism in California has gotten
us here.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Yeah, I know your recent column, which is terrific, the
anti American Agenda's California's Democrats catching up. You point out
that southern California is on fire. But here are Newsom's
priorities and what he has been focused on. Newsom created
the California abortion sanctuary state. He legalized abortion up until birth,
authorized a trans sanctuary state, allowing children to receive hormone
blockers chemical carastration without parental consent. He exacerbated the homeless crisis,
(05:23):
spending tens of billions of dollars to get more bums
and junkies.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
He said.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
He's embraced illegal immigrants, even providing health insurance. He's also
on board for the bottomless pit of the High speed
rail project. So and it reminds me of a conversation
we had Friday. Instead of doing the blocking and tackling
of governing, they have all these pie in the sky
progressive you know, just agendas that they're pursuing instead.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
And you didn't mention the most recent trump proofing California
against the evil Dictator is about to go in.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
Go ahead, Gatie, Yeah, I devoted an entire article to
that one. I think this shows I mean, as ridiculous
as this list sounds, when we lay it all out together,
it does show you he's doing everything but governing. And
I assume governing is not always very sexy. It doesn't
always get great headlines. And yet you know, he and
his PR team could certainly have written good headlines for
(06:17):
all the hard work he was doing behind the scenes.
But that's not what's happened. He is he's adopted this
absolutely unbelievably radical, radical agenda of things that Californians and
even those who didn't vote for him, they don't want.
They want water to be in their fire hydrants. We
want decent roads and good schools, and we want to
(06:38):
make sure that our cal fire and the local firefighters
have everything they need in terms of you know, budget
and equipment.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
You've been falling politics in California for a long time.
I was reading Mark Alprin's newsletter today and he said, hell,
hath no fury like a homeless celebrity. A Los Angeles
conservative is a liberal actor who blames news and Bass
and decades of liberal governments governance for their houses burning down.
Do you think this is like perhaps a seed change
politically for LA or maybe the state.
Speaker 5 (07:08):
It could be. And Mark Halpern's absolutely right. And I
think the reason we're getting so much attention focused on
California as opposed to say North Carolina right now, which
people are still living intents, is because of Hollywood and
the celebrities and people being you know, they have a
platform from which they can speak and they are describing
(07:29):
what's going on. And as I said, I think even
people who voted for Gavin Newsom are really really pissed
off right now and they want answers. They want to
know why this happened, and that will lead to some
changes in voting.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
I hope well, and I'm sure gavinus people would say, look,
we could walk and chew gum at the same time
we can pursue these grand progressive schemes and be good governors.
But they can't if the walking is, you know, having
a bullet train squander hundreds billions of dollars that will
never exist, and the chewing gum is making sure that
(08:04):
there's enough water storage for forty million people.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
No, you can't. You haven't. You've proven it over and
over again.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
And to the rest of the country listening, you're like, well,
why doesn't why don't you vote Democrats out office? It's
because all of the public employee unions are so powerful
in the try lawyers that they all show up, every
single one of them and vote Democrat every single time
because they're getting their backscratched slash paid.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
Yeah, exactly. It's a huge problem we have in California
in that and I think this last election showed us
there's a lot more independent slash right of center voters
as we saw who voted for Trump over six million.
But yeah, when you fight that with the public employee unions,
(08:51):
which are just ruthless, Yeah, it seems like too much
of a heavy lift.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
Yeah, the regular folks really just they can't accumulate enough
mass to take it back Katie Grimes is the editor
in chief of the California Globe.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
California Globe dot com.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
You ought a bookmarket check it all the time if
you're of a conservative bent really in any state in
the Union, or you'd just like to have your eyes
open to the truth.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
California Globe dot com. Katie, great to talk to you.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Thanks, thanks very much so. The Brentwood neighborhood, which you
probably recognize that name if you follow the celebrity news,
has the fires bearing down on it with it's going
to be a couple of really really windy days.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
That neighborhood where OJ was framed for a crime. That
maybe that's right.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And that neighborhood is also home to former Senator Kamala Harris.
Maybe you've heard of her, Lebron James, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford,
doctor Dre among others. And those are some names that
can get a lot of attention. Like Katie just said,
there people are still living in tents in North Carolina
because of the biggest disaster they'd ever had in that
(09:53):
part of the country, but not enough celebrities to get
attention for that.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
I actually appreciated sixty minutes last night going heavily at
all the thousands, or you know, highlighting the many thousands
of working class folks, just regular people in various sections
of the Greater Los Angeles metro area that are now
homeless and hopeless, and all of their baby pictures are gone.
They don't know where they're going to go and what
they're going to do. I mean, obviously baby pictures is
(10:20):
one example, but it's just heartbreaking.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
The number of people I've seen on TV saying, literally
the only thing I had of what is have is
what you see me wearing. I can't imagine the to
do list you have when you're in that situation.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Where do you start? Oh my god, would that be overwhelming?
Speaker 4 (10:43):
And as I said before, just to put a cap
on this, has it been an extremely dry year in
southern California? Yes, were those incredibly powerful wins freakish and
rare one hundred percent. There are aspects of this fire
that are not the fault of governance.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
On the other hand, there are aspects of it that are.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
And if this draws people's attention to the utterly incompetent
doesn't even describe it. It's incompetent, dishonest, just klepto main
maniacal governance of California over the last quite a few years,
if it draws attention to that good, whether it directly
applies to how a particular fire started or not.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Karen Bass is an avowed communist.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
She cut the fire budget, according to her chief, to
a damaging level to support drug addicts and illegal immigrants
and proudly did so.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Uh did you see over the weekend where she was
at least hinting that people are criticizing her because she's blacked.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Oh yeah, a couple of celebrities are out saying that.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Yeah, go ahead, hey, put the final nail in the
coffin of your fake accusations of racism.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Do it now? That was perfect.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
And the state level, when you start talking about not
having enough money for this or that, come on, you
don't get to say that.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
As long as there's a bullet train project. You gotta
end that before you can ever say a word.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
About not having enough money for this or that. Amen,
Oh my god, we got more on the waist here.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
We're all better off. We're all better off. We're all
better off, and we're working together.
Speaker 5 (12:17):
Armstrong and Getty
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Joe Getty
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