Peter Hamby
speaker
144 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 24 Jun
Peter Hamby’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And this was what Rick Caruso was running on in 2022, because they know there's not much they can do, you know, by the stroke of a pen to fix everything. You know, the mayor has to work with the city council, you know, bring a point of view, what they want to get done. Karen Bass came in, her thing was cleaning up homelessness.
But she built herself as a problem solver because she was a coalition builder in the state assembly in California and in Congress, and she ran the CBC. But man, I talked to a lot of people yesterday who were like Democrats, by the way. Everyone here is a Democrat, basically. That's not true. We'll get to that. But they are like, is she built for this?
Like as a member of Congress, a lifelong member of a legislative body, it doesn't feel like she's cut out for this. And that's why Rick Caruso is suddenly driving the political conversation here and has a lane to run against her again.
It's not unfair. And that's the main thing. So there are, again, every Elon Musk on the internet is Googling something and posting about it because they want to like, oh, I looked up the LA Fire Department budget and it looks like they made this cut. And the owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, you know, was posting some of this stuff. And it's,
I forget what the exact definitions of these terms are from the peak disinformation panic, but I think it's more misinformation than disinformation. Something that has a kernel of truth to it, but isn't totally true. That's what he was posting about.
He should have also, I mean, him and his daughter really put their thumbs on the scale for Karen Bass in the 2022 race. Like the coverage, I sound like I'm like flacking for Caruso here and I promise I'm not, but like the coverage from the LA Times was,
news covers not just the editorials and the columns was just so i'll use the word biased they wrote one critical story of karen bass the entire campaign they wrote dozens scores on rick caruso who by the way look billionaire wants to be the mayor fair but like cover her with scrutiny As well.
So there are questions about how much she pushed to cut the fire department's budget, which influenced, you know, according to the fire chief, the amount of overtime hours they can pay. And also within that, the amount of time they could spend clearing brush and vegetation in certain areas. There are questions about did she do enough?
to refill the Santianez Reservoir, which I think contained 117 million gallons of water near the Palisades. The fire hydrants that ran dry that night, there were three of them, three tanks that had a million gallons of water, and they ran dry. That seems like a lot of water, by the way. And they said, the firefighters, that would have been enough water typically for an urban fire.
The Santa Ynez Reservoir had been empty since last February. That's 117 million gallons of water.
Yeah, no, I think that's right. And there's... Someone did a really great thread about this on Twitter X that was sent around our little friendly text chain about how... I think it was Lakshya Jain, who's a pollster on Twitter that I like. He's a Democrat, and he was just ranting about how Democrats are always bragging about... like process, you know, like we're getting things done.
Like we sent this many checks out or we have the funds allocated for all of these green charging stations for electric vehicles, but the actual charging stations haven't been built yet, you know? So it's like, we will get things done and we are in the process of getting things done rather than, you know, taking out the machete and clearing out the weeds.
So, but this is something else I asked Katie to like, pressure test some of my assumptions when I was writing this column, because she is good at that. And she, by the way, worked for a mayor's office. So she's like... This is your wife that you're referencing? Yes, my wife, yeah. And she was like, look, it will take a while for all of these facts to come out about why the fires started.
And by the way, for people on the left who are listening, there have been, as of the most recent press conference, I think... three arrests for possible arson. There are video clips of the fire right after it started near the Palisades on the Temescal Canyon Trail, which is a hiking trail.
Some of these fires I was watching that first overnight Tuesday, like there was one in Studio City, it was just like a house fire. Like, okay, some of this stuff could have been man-made.
And by the way, and this is also an ecology of fear, a bunch of wildfires in 1993 that happened around Malibu and Laguna Beach were started by homeless people and quote-unquote vagrants, to use the parlance of the time. So, all the facts will come out, Katie's saying. We'll figure that out. So, you can't blame...
a single politician or political figure for any of this, because there's such a, you know, Byzantine politics here. Like there's different jurisdictions and whatever. And by the way, Cal fire, I think Gavin Newsom for all the criticism has been doing a pretty good job of responding to a crisis. Former mayor himself, uh,
He's calling for an investigation into the empty reservoir and very conspicuously copied Karen Bass on the public letter. At the bottom, it says, CC, LA Mayor Karen Bass. And so Gavin is doing his political thing where he doesn't want to throw local officials under the bus. But any of us who've worked in politics can read between the lines. Her political capital is gone. I'll explain why.
It's not because of these various budget things or the reservoir. It's just the leadership thing. And you and I have seen this. We've been around so many dying campaigns, and we saw this with Joe Biden in the debate last summer.
Once you lose trust and credibility, especially in this era where we don't trust politicians or institutions very much at all, and in our social media era where we're grabbing whatever information suits our priors, It was gone.
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