LA Councilman Huizar Waiting for the Hammer to Fall

In this case, the object was City Councilman Jose Huizar. The once-chair of the City Council's powerful Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) committee is no longer in charge. The PLUM has traditionally been a juice committee, in the sense that its members are magnets for campaign contributions. The power to modify zoning restrictions does that. Did Huizar cross the line when it comes to repaying some of those contributions? Did he or a family member have an investment interest in anything he had a legal say over? We won't know unless or until an indictment comes down. But as they say, when you are an elected official and the FBI raids your offices, you have reason to expect something bad is about to happen to you.

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This leads to another question. All those local television stations and news media outlets who claim to be presenting the big story to Angelenos -- where have they been when it comes to covering the everyday, legal corruption of campaign contributions, not to mention the not-so-legal under-the-table stuff? The LA Times did a fine job in exposing the $600,000 in payments to local politicians over a zoning change, but only the alleged briber has been indicted, and not a one of the politicians who took the money has suffered. Why aren't the media pounding on this story?

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The Blue Wave goes Tidal

The magnitude of the blue wave is just starting to register with a lot of people. It's only in the past few days that it became clear that every single congressional seat in Orange County will now be held by a Democrat. It's shades of the old comic book Bizarro World here! We expected the Issa seat to go blue, but the seat once held by Ed Royce was lost by his mentee Young Kim, and the seat held by Dana Rohrabacher will now belong to Democrat Harley Rouda. 

But the number that I find remarkable is this -- Out of 53 total congressional seats allocated to California, fully 45 are now owned by Democrats. That's just under 85%, a representation that goes well beyond the actual registration ratio. These numbers probably won't last past the 2020 election, but for now, those Democrats help provide the wall against the Trump Party. 

Take a look at the near-final results and consider whether a lot of Republicans didn't bother to vote in the congressional races.

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Those 45 Democratic votes in the House should be put to use for the sake of Californians. The Republican tax bill was constructed to (among other things) punish us for our state income tax structure. California homeowners are hit hard due to the $10,000 limit on deductions for state and local taxes. The Republicans in effect tried to enshrine double taxation. 

The new House of Representatives should make sure that there is an immediate remedy to the changes in the income tax structure. And at an immediate political level, that remedy will be popular with Republican homeowners who make mortgage payments, even in Orange County.

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The fires are also a lesson to southern California 

What are the lessons from the most recent fire disaster? In particular, is there anything relevant to our situation with regard to a major earthquake hitting Los Angeles? What we've learned is that the northern California fires grew  so quickly and moved so rapidly that some people had only a few minutes to flee their homes. A frightening story in Daily Kos relates how a woman took a phone call from her daughter, who said, "Get out now! There's a fire." As this survivor explains, she was on the road in twenty minutes, leaving a scene in which her neighborhood was already being burned down. She lived. Some of her townfolk did not. 

But in the case of the big earthquake, we will have anywhere from zero to perhaps half a minute's advance warning. And unlike the case of a spreading brush fire, there probably won't be anywhere to go except under some piece of furniture within the same room. 

In spite of the fact that most of the inhabitants of the fire zone had at least some warning, the death toll is horrendous and climbing. At this point, we know that the larger part of a hundred people are known dead, but we don't actually know the condition of another twelve hundred who are missing. 

This is just one more concern we haven't dealt with regarding the prospect of a major earthquake in southern California. In an event which may directly affect somewhere between two and ten million people, the number of missing may be in the thousands. The circumstances will be different because the immediate action to take during an earthquake is not to flee but to shelter in place. Nevertheless, those whose homes are destroyed or badly damaged may just leave (perhaps intending to return at some later time), and the idea of reporting their survival to the authorities won't likely be the first thing on their minds. It will be up to social agencies and law enforcement in outlying areas to make records of the identities of refugees. 

Let me repeat what I've been asking at emergency preparedness sessions for the past few months: If the big earthquake hits us three weeks from now, what are people going to do? I'm not hearing much that is reassuring because I'm not really hearing much at all in answer to the question. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of Los Angeles residents don't have any idea what they should do either before, during, or after a major earthquake. 

There are things the city could do to tell them. It's just not doing so.

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Erik Loomis: The Case for Letting Malibu Burn 

I don't have time to go into this one in detail, but it's worth a read.  Not only that, but it mentions the argument by Mike Davis and the Davis critic and also onetime neighborhood council leader Brady Westwater. It's a legitimate question why we should concentrate resources on a narrow strip owned by the enormously wealthy. You might recall that it's the same question pundits have been asking about hurricane targets along the Atlantic coast. 

Next up: The Glass opera at LA Opera was a smash hit. In an after the performance interview, the composer (visiting for half a day) admitted with a bit of sheepish humor that his opera about Gandhi "sells tickets." That it does, and for a good reason. 

Memorial 

What a couple of weeks. The massacre in Thousand Oaks. The fires. The passing of Stan Lee. And the Ventura County Sheriff officer who ran into the shooting situation and died as a result.  If we want to be fair and sensitive, we might also mention in passing all those people who died in one and two person shootings every single day.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw