This is a good article re the CA fires. Moonbean has a lot of blood on his hands as does PG&E.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/16/misguided-environmentalism-blame-californias-wildfires/
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Trump is right. Mismanagement and over regulation deserve most of the blame, but he should keep in mind that the federal government owns 57 percent of California forest land. This mismanagement is also not a result of a lack of care. Believe me, Californians care.
Growing up, we spend almost as much time talking about fire safety as we do hiding under our desks practicing for earthquakes. We see just as much of Smokey the Bear as we do of Mickey Mouse. California and federal agencies have mismanaged forests, not because they don’t care, but because they chose the agenda of environmentalists over commonsense forest management. The result has been deadly.
The federal government owns 45.8 percent of California’s land, while 4 percent is owned by the state and 51 percent is privately owned. CAL FIRE manages both state and private land. Part of the reason it is so difficult to manage California forests is the bureaucratic milieu.
The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of land, has 28,000 employees, and has an annual outlay of $7 billion a year, according to a 2017 Analytical Perspective from the budget of the U.S. government.
For decades, environmental protection schemes have usurped common sense. For example, most fire ecologists say that the surest way of preventing massive forest fires is to use prescribed burns. The California Environmental Protection Agency states that “prescribed burning is the intentional use of fire to reduce wildfire hazards, clear downed trees, control plant diseases, improve rangeland and wildlife habitats, and restore natural ecosystems.” Prescribed burns keep forests healthy by burning up the underbrush that accumulates on the forest floor and by thinning trees.
Yet for decades the Forest Service has suppressed most fires. According to a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection executive summary: “Land and fire management have in many cases increased fire hazard.
In some shrub types, fire suppression appears to have shifted the fire regime away from more, smaller fires toward fewer, larger fire.” Despite scientific evidence, the federal government continues spending more money on fire suppression than prescribed burns. The Forest Service has performed prescribed burns on an average of 2,187,64 2 acres a year for the past ten years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
This means the Forest Service has only performed prescribed burns on 11.3 percent of the land they manage. When explaining to Mother Jones why the California Wine Country fires were so bad last October, fire ecologist Sasha Berleman said, “We have 100 years of fire suppression that has led to this huge accumulation of fuel loads.” The policy of fire suppression has created what insurance companies call “mega catastrophes,” a term that describes disasters that result in insured losses of more than $1 billion.
Mega catastrophes are becoming the norm in California. In 2017, there were 5,906 fires on state and private land, Kathleen Schori, an assistant chief at CAL FIRE, said in a phone interview. “Extreme fire behavior has become more commonplace,” says the Forest Service.
“The laws of the past 45 years have not only failed to protect the forest environment, they have done immeasurable harm to our forests,” said Republican Rep. Tom McClintock, who represents a northeastern district in California, in a congressional hearing. “Time and again, we see vivid boundaries between the young, healthy, growing forests managed by state, local, and private landholders, and the choked, dying, or burned federal forests.”
Big League Politics has obtained a photo showing four ballots with the exact same voter identifier in Alameda County, California.
All four ballots say Count: 421, VBMP (Vote-by-mail-permit) 164325, Extract 15. They are also labeled as “official ballots” for the general election in Alameda County for election day, Nov. 6 2018.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3706543/posts#comment
More meanwhile,
Monica Showalter at AT has the goods on Young Kim's loss in So Cal to crooked Gil Cisneros--dem donor and serial briber. Young led nicely in all precincts from around her district at poll closings, only to wake up one morning to trail by 3,000. This one stinks...it's a longtime conservative district.