A clip from BO last night:
Right now, as I sit here in New York, about 25 people and I say about because they're searching and they're going to find, the death toll is going to be about 50 when this is all over. All right. At least 150 billion in damage. That's going to go to 250. So the fires in California right now are going to be the worst disaster, natural disaster in American history by far. Passing Katrina in New Orleans, which happened August 23rd, 2005. The damage there 20 years ago was about 150 million. This is going to be almost double that when you have inflation and all that. That's how bad this is. Now there are two tracks here. There is the fire and the struggle to put it out and then there are the politics around this disaster. There are two things. We here are concentrating on the bigger picture of politics, because the other networks and the local affiliates in Los Angeles, they have their people covering the actual on the ground stuff. So they do it very well. When you get the pictures, you see what's going on. The anchors have been largely straight. It's the pundits who are out of their blanking minds. And I'm going to deal with that now. So there's fight right now between Gavin Newsom, whose political career is over even if he doesn't know it. You can't get through something like this. And the incoming president, Donald Trump, they're brawling. Okay. Trump tried to get California relief in his first term. So he was sponsoring a number of programs that would help with water supply in the Golden State. That is a fact. Now, Congress never allotted the money to do it, so Trump didn't get the legislation he needed to bring water relief to California. Why didn't he get it? Because the California legislature in Sacramento, this is Newsom, okay, objected to a number of things. All right. So they objected to diverting water from the state's rivers into water storage facilities. So the Tuolumne River is huge, I rafted it. It's the toughest raft in the country. All right. But the legislation says you can't take any water from the rivers. Can't do that. Okay. Then the legislation said you can't divert any kind of moisture, you know, snowmelt or rain or anything like that because it might impact the fish. This is the environmental lobby. It is what they did, it's on the record. So Congress said, look, we're not going to get involved with this unless you can get it under control in California. That's what Congress said. So Trump didn't get the legislation, although, okay, he had agreement that if the California people would just get out of the way, the federal government would fund.
