CALIFORNIA SCHEMING

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Report from the battlefield:

A Third of LAFD's Service Calls Involve Homeless 'Rubbish Fires'

...fire calls involving homeless persons during that same period accounted for 32.91%, or nearly one-third, of all LAFD fire activity, the report states...

Rubbish Fires have seen a 475% increase from 5,541 to 31,964 between 2014 and 2024. “While not all of those have been documented as directly associated with PEH, many have,“ the report states.

Rubbish fires are now the most common call the LAFD gets and nearly half of them are associated with homeless people. The LAFD's budget is just over $800 million per year, so a large percentage of that spending is effectively spent dealing with fires started by homeless people. The figures are even more striking when you consider what a small percentage of the population in LA is homeless.

The report says that while homeless individuals make up just 1.2% of LA’s population, they are responsible for 12% of LAFD emergency medical services incidents and 33% of fires. This means compared to other people in Los Angeles, homeless people are 10 times more likely to use EMS services and 28 times more likely to be “involved” in a fire — all at taxpayers’ expense.

LA County is the largest county in the nation with about 10 million residents so even 1% is a lot of people. The head of the firefighters union says it's not sustainable.

"We don't want to criminalize homelessness, but we need additional resources strictly for homelessness," said Freddy Escobar, president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles. "We need more funding."...

"I don't know what the fix is, but I can tell you the members that I represent cannot sustain the call load of what we are doing for homelessness," Escobar said.

RELATED:

California enjoys the distinction of having 30% of the nation’s homeless living within its borders.

  • Changes over Time:

  • California had the largest absolute increase: in 2022, 8,948 more individuals experiencing chronic patterns of homelessness were counted than in 2020.

  • Of the 25 states that experienced increases in the number of individuals with chronic patterns of homelessness between 2007 and 2022, the largest absolute increase occurred in California, with 17,419 more individuals experiencing chronic patterns of homelessness in 2022 than in 2007.

But gee, they’re throwing so much money at the problem surely it must be doing some good? It is, for NGOs, politicians, and their friends. The homeless? Not so much.

Los Angeles is spending up to $837,000 to house a single homeless person

So, what’s the difficulty here? Simple: As long as homelessness is a lucrative source of grift, the problem will persist. And there’s a lot of grift being generated in the appropriately-named Golden State.

Maybe — maybe — things will change, but as we’re presently witnessing across the country, the grifters are dug in deeply, and won’t go easily.

APRIL 8 2025:

DOJ investigating SoCal homeless spending for fraud, hints at arrests

California’s new U.S. attorney announced Tuesday he is investigating billions of dollars of homeless spending for fraud and corruption, and promised to arrest individuals found to have violated federal law.

“California has spent more than $24 billion over the past five years to address homelessness,” said newly appointed U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli. “But officials have been unable to account for all the expenditures and outcomes, and the homeless crisis has only gotten worse.”

“Taxpayers deserve answers for where and how their hard-earned money has been spent,” continued Essayli. “If state and local officials cannot provide proper oversight and accountability, we will do it for them. If we discover any federal laws were violated, we will make arrests.”

Essayli’s task force will include federal assistance from the FBI, the IRS, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Essayli’s announcement cited a court-ordered audit of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency that found the agency systematically paid out funds without verifying services had been provided, and that “insufficient financial accountability led to an inability to trace substantial funds.” Essayli was pictured with the judge who ordered the audit — U.S. District Judge David Carter — touring LA’s infamous Skid Row before the announcement.

Los Angeles County has since voted to defund LAHSA, in a move that was strongly opposed by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who downplayed the audit and is facing a recall effort for her wildfire response and what critics call her poor city management.

Harvard summons former National Lampoon editors back to their alma mater to save its $53 billion hedge fund

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Harvard researchers say they might have to lay off workers and euthanize research animals due to funding freeze

“We were going to do it the other way around”, said Cynthia Smedley, Harvard Fund CFO, “but our polls showed that a threat to workers instead of bunny rabbits generated far less sympathy from the public.”

Maybe if he threw in a couple of Hunter paintings as part of the deal

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Joe Biden ‘having trouble booking gigs’ with $300K per speech asking price 

WASHINGTON —

Former President Joe Biden’s attempt to bill $300,000 per speaking appearance is finding few takers, The Post has learned — as some of his own former aides say it’s time for the 82-year-old to leave the spotlight for good after reminiscing about “colored kids” Tuesday in his first public address since leaving office.

A source familiar with Biden’s faltering speaking career said that the 46th president’s standard pitch is $300,000 — 25% below Barack Obama’s $400,000 asking price upon leaving office in 2017.

It’s unclear how negotiable Biden’s rate is.

If travel is required, a private jet and expenses for five staffers also is expected for Biden, who has been repped since leaving office by the Creative Artists Agency.

Union welfare

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The Trump Administration Could Finally Put an End to California's High Speed Rail

Intended to run from Los Angeles to San Francisco and voter-approved for a $30 billion total cost, the project will now be a train from nowhere to nowhere, and the revised estimated cost, surely to be exceeded, is now $100 billion. Governor Noisome and his union supporters want the rest of the country to bail it out; others don’t.

…. [R]ecently we've learned about ongoing funding problems with the project which needs another $7 billion by next summer to keep going.

During a budget hearing focused on transportation in the State Assembly on Wednesday, Helen Kerstein with the California Legislative Analyst's Office told lawmakers the project faces a $7 billion budget gap and the funds need to be secured by next June. If not, Kerstein said it will create yet another delay for plans to finish the project's first segment between Merced and Bakersfield.

"There is no specific plan to meet that roughly $7 billion gap, we also think there is some risk that gap could grow," Kerstein said. "This isn't a way out in the future funding gap. This is a pretty immediate funding gap."

That's a very immediate funding deadline for a rail project that isn't scheduled to be operational this decade. That has led to a call for the state to finally cut its losses on this project.

A new report from the conservative advocacy group Unleash Prosperity calls for an end to federal funding for California's high-speed rail project and for the project's scope to be truncated to protect taxpayers...

"It's been a 25-year boondoggle now and the cost of this was supposed to be roughly $30 billion when the voters approved a referendum for this in California," Steve Moore, economist and co-founder of Unleash Prosperity, told FOX Business in an interview. "The latest estimates are now well over $100 billion, so that's a more than tripling of the cost of this big rail project."...

"The other obvious problem is that the whole idea of the high-speed rail was to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco, two huge metropolitan areas with huge populations. Well, because of a lot of geographical problems with getting through the mountains, they can't do that, so it's not going to start or end in San Francisco. So the ridership, if it ever gets built, is going to be multiples lower than what it was supposed to be when the whole thing was first designed," Moore added.

The Trump administration wants to cut off all future federal funding which means California would have to come up with that money on its own.

The Transportation Department duly began an investigation in February into $4.1 billion in grants awarded under former President Joe Biden, echoing Trump’s efforts in his first term to withdraw a $1 billion grant awarded by the Obama administration.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during a Wednesday appearance on Fox Business that the Federal Railroad Administration is close to wrapping up the investigation and that if “what many people have reported on is true, we’re gonna pull the funding for this boondoggle endeavor.”

And who does like it?

…. [T]he only group that seems truly happy about this boondoggle are the unions. This has been great for them. They want many more years of over-spending with no end in sight.

Union leaders have made it clear that maintaining high-speed rail’s slice of the pie is their top priority. The project has employed nearly 15,000 union workers since construction started in 2015, more than any other infrastructure undertaking in the country.

“We believe it’s worked extremely well,” said Chris Hannan, president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California. “We’d like to see it get reauthorized for a longer period of time to help us have even more vision as we’re building out the state of California.”

I wondered whether Trump/DOGE wasn't acting precipitously here; then I looked up who was running this "bipartisan" organization

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DOGE Strikes Again: Staffers at This Federal Agency Were Just Placed on Leave

Agency staff at AmeriCorps received notices this week that they were being placed on leave "effective immediately." This came after President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) visited the agency's headquarters.

Reportedly, DOGE promised to cut the agency’s workforce “up to 50 percent or more.” When the notices went out, they were sent to hundreds of the agency’s 650 full-time staffers. 

I’m sure the organization has achieved some good things since it was created in 1993, but I also suspect that, like every other federal agency, and it has become bloated and partisan. Slash away.

According to Wikipedia, there are supposed to be a total of 26 directors, 15 of whom are appointed by the President. Of those 8, “no more than 8 may be affiliated withe the same political party”. Nothing in the enabling language says there must be members of another political party, so I suppose that, technically, the rules are being complied with by simply leaving some seats vacant. But the results are exactly what you’d expect for this type of organization.

The Greenwich gift that keeps on giving

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TayTay was on Hannity last night. Even the 30 seconds I wasted on it isn’t worth your attention, so I’m not posting it here. But this guy’s question is pretty good:

"But who will make our linoleum? Pick our fruit? Empty our bedpans?”"

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This is why we can’t have nice things — thanks, you orange-headed bastard!

Georgia Factory Used Forced Labor of Trafficked Chinese Migrants

Federal officials said that around 60 Chinese nationals were being held in tiny rooms and forced to work long hours in the flooring manufacturing plant.

At least our Democrats and their flying monkeys on the bench are doing there best to bring Kilmar back so he can resume supplying sex slaves*, but man does not live by prostitutes alone; what about all our other needs and wants that must be met, tasks American citizens and legally documented workers won’t do for cheap? As Representative Jaypal has noted, if illegals aren’t around to pick our vegetables, collect garbage, clean bathrooms and care for old people at subminimum wages, we’d all have to either pay much more money or live in soiled diapers as we slowly sank into a sea of trash and starved to death.

Hank, “Tip Over Guam” Johnson shares his pal Jay’s concern: In addition to his fear that too many illegals lined up at the border will cause Texas to slide into the Rio Grande, he frets that, without Biden’s Army, strawberries will rot on the ground and bedpans will overflow.

Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat, said Wednesday that immigrants "coming across" the border are needed in America for construction efforts, to "put food on our table," and to clean up hospitals.

"We would have nobody taking care of the building, the construction of our homes," he added. "We wouldn't have anybody cleaning up in the hospitals….”

Projection much?

Moments earlier, Johnson said Republicans enjoy seeing immigrants "lined up at the border because they know that's a stream of labor ready to be exploited with cheap, if any, compensation."

"I mean, if you could get back to slavery you would gladly do so," Johnson told the Republicans on the committee. "But if you could pay people $1 an hour, you'd settle for that. That's the race to the bottom that we have with immigrants lined up at the border and trying to get in and go to work."

Nancy Box Wine agrees:

PELOSI SAYS FARMERS NEED ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ‘TO PICK THE CROPS’ IN FLORIDA

* Related story about the Left’s new poster child, the wife beating MS-13er Kilmar Abrego

Biden’s FBI Ordered TN Highway Patrol to Release ‘Maryland Man’ Recently Deported to El Salvador After He Was Detained in 2022 Traffic Stop on Suspicion of Human Trafficking

The Tennessee Star learned on Wednesday that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an alleged member of the Central American gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) who was deported to El Salvador under President Donald Trump amid legal action claiming the removal was by mistake, was suspected of being engaged in human trafficking by a Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) officer who detained him in December 2022, leading the THP to contact the FBI for guidance. Within two hours, the FBI ultimately requested the THP release Garcia and the passengers in his vehicle. THP complied with the request.

The Star learned from sources familiar with the incident that Abrego Garcia was stopped for an unknown reason on December 6, 2022, and that the THP officer responsible for the stop immediately discovered Abrego Garcia was transporting seven passengers, with eight individuals inside the vehicle.

During a nearly two-hour traffic stop, the THP officer determined that Abrego Garcia (pictured above) was operating the vehicle without a valid driver’s license and began searching for information about him.

One source told The Star that THP ultimately discovered Abrego Garcia was on a terrorist watch list, but could not locate Abrego Garcia on a deportation list. Another source told The Star that THP did not discover Abrego Garcia on a terrorist watch list but that another one of the seven passengers in the vehicle may have been on a terrorist watch list.

THP subsequently called the FBI, which was then led by former Director Christopher Wray under the Biden administration. The FBI instructed the THP officers at the scene to capture photographs of all eight people in the vehicle and document its contents.

Once the photographs were captured, this source told The Star that the FBI requested THP release all eight individuals and that the THP officers complied with this request.

The Star learned that the circumstances of the stop made the THP officer responsible for the stop concerned that Abrego Garcia was engaged in human trafficking, but that Abrego Garcia and his passengers were nonetheless released at the request of the FBI.