Other factors to blame: the budget cuts ordered by DEI Mayor Bass and the gonzo push to fill the fire departments with lesbians, who we all know are the equal to men in physical ability. (Which has been proven by women's absolute domination of transgenders who enter their sports at advanced ages with little prior experience.)

But I'll talk about them in a different post. Right now I want to talk about the fact that California's fire hydrants were bone dry during the fires, and that this is due to California permitting millions of gallons of freshwater run into the ocean every year instead of catching that precious water in cisterns and reservoirs.

They're wasting millions of gallons of critical fresh water -- and remember, California is a desert state where water is scarce and precious -- to save the "delta smelt," which I guess does best when fresh water is running into the sea.

How did the smelt become more important than the lives of human beings?

I don't know, but

Via David Strom, Jonathan Turley reminds us that the "endangered fish," the Snail Darter, used by the left to stop damming in Tennessee was more than endangered. It was non-existent. They just took a very common non-endangered fish and claimed they discovered a new identical sub-species, which they claimed was endangered.

It was the same fucking fish.

And voila -- instant victories in corruptly-arranged settlements. The scam has two parts: Outside "environmental" extortionists that file lawsuits, and corrupt insider bureaucrats who want to create their own laws through settlements with litigants rather than doing what ordinary citizens do, which is to petition their representatives for legislation.

In the annals of environmental law, no creature is more famous than the Snail Darter, the endangered species that shut down completion of the Tellico Dam in the 1970s. It required congressional legislation to allow the dam to be finished after years in the courts where judges maintained that the species had to be protected under the Endangered Species Act. According to the New York Times., the species may turn out to be as mythical as a unicorn.

The controversy began in 1967 when the Tennessee Valley Authority started constructing a dam on the Little Tennessee River, roughly 20 miles outside Knoxville. Environmentalists and locals opposed the project and, in 1973, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee named David Etnier went snorkeling with his students and found a possible solution. He spotted a small fish and called it a "snail darter" because of its movements and eating habits. He reportedly announced "Here's a little fish that might save your farm."

Dr. Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College, represented the snail darter before the Supreme Court. He did an excellent job and, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that "the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam" to protect the endangered snail darters.

That was then.

The Times now quotes Thomas Near, the curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum who leads a fish biology lab at the university, that "there is, technically, no snail darter." Worse yet, it was actually just another member of the eastern population of Percina uranidea, or stargazing darters, which is not considered endangered.

In other words, years of litigation and millions of dollars were spent on what was a false claim, and the courts accepted the claims hook, line, and sinker.

Trump's been telling California to stop wasting its limited supply of water -- and noting that California is causing wildfires by wasting water -- since at least as early as 2019. He also slammed Newsom for failing to clear forested areas of deadfall, which of course is the kindling that sets woods on fire. I guess "environmentalists" object to cleaning forested areas. They want them au naturel, so that they can be more au flammable.

Trump again correctly diagnosed the reasons for California's state-mandated flammability on Joe Rogan, days before the election:

He again blasted Newsom for the Smelt Fires.

Trump has been consistent and right in blaming Newsom and California's lunatic leftwing government for their constant wildfires.

So of course the media has to ride to the rescue.

A woke "news" anchor claimed that the fire hydrants in California Akshually weren't bone dry. Then he threw to an on-scene reporter who said that firefighters were saying the hydrants were bone-dry.

Dana Bash "fumed" that Trump was blaming California's government for California's problems. She claimed that it was just so hurtful to "politicize" this situation -- a standard she never applies when Democrats rush to blame conservatives or guns for mass shootings, of course.

Newsom signaled to his media allies that they needed to Swarm in to protect him -- he's the Real Victim here, because Trump said he's bad at his job.

And so they duly Swarmed around him like a phalanx of Secret Service agents:

There's some Seizing and Pouncing going on, according to Politico:

Republicans are seizing on the catastrophic wildfires that tore through the Los Angeles area early Wednesday, blaming Democratic policies for the deadly, wind-fueled conflagrations that forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.

President-elect Donald Trump lashed out at Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday, calling the fires "virtually apocalyptic" in a Truth Social post and pointing a finger at state rules protecting endangered species for limiting the amount of water that gets sent south from Northern California.

"I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "He is the blame for this."

Elon Musk also piled on, retweeting a comment by Libs of TikTok criticizing a delay in building dams and adding: "Crazy."

Note that neither Dana Bash nor Politico objected to the left claiming that "global warming" caused these fires. That was not politicizing the disaster, apparently.

For reasons they never expressed.