stacks I've ever seen. Because if you include his immersion in the news you know as a news person you had his talent for speaking in public you had his Ivy League background you had his really super relevant military experience and recently. That's like one of the strongest talent stacks I've ever seen.

But if you haven't seen yet the meme there's a meme I would show it to you but you'll see it all over the place of Hegseth with his head is in the middle of the meme and he's just sort of looking around just casually and then there's four boxes of four of the female senators who are literally yelling at him and they all play at once while Pete is just sort of in the middle and then you hear all four of them talking over each other and their faces like rabid dogs except it's like your worst relationship experience if you've ever been male. Now I know you're going to say Scott you're being sexist because you could have put a bunch of men in that and it would have looked the same. No it wouldn't. No it wouldn't. It wouldn't look the same if you put a bunch of men there. It would look you know maybe some of them are asking crazy questions but it wouldn't be the same. Wouldn't be the same. So as memes go as soon as I saw it I thought to myself this might be one of the best I've ever seen. Because you have to know also that the context was that Pete had I think before he was nominated he said things about women in combat like him not being in favor. So the women were attacking mostly about that and some accusations about his personal life that had been debunked. But watching him answer the questions so confidently and so clearly and so perfectly state what he wanted to do which is increase the lethality of it and to focus on that and do the job of the military not all the side stuff. So well said, so well presented, so confident. Wow wow.

Now I know that I will be blamed for being all in on Trump stuff and this sounds like one of those times. I think this is just recognizing quality that's all it looks like to me. So if the Democrats ran somebody who could do what he did to basically weather this situation, give me a clear statement of exactly what he wants to do that matches exactly with what I want to do, well I would say good things about that Democrat. I promise you I would. I say good things about Fetterman when he's good. I say good things about AOC when her persuasion is right. I don't like most of the rest but I think I would compliment a Democrat in this situation. I just like this. It was totally good.

One of my favorite parts was Senator Reed asked him what does jag off mean. So JAG refers to the legal group of the military which branch is that? Just is that just the Air Force? I forget but it's legal term. So Senator I guess at some point Pete must have said something that used the phrase jag off like as an insult to the JAG people or something. And so he's asked in public what does jag off mean. Senator Reed asked that. Now think of all the ways that you could have answered that wrong. Pete just says everybody here knows what that means. Now that was the right answer. Everything else was the wrong answer. That was one of those situations where he clearly had not prepared for it like who would know that's coming. But to give that clean an answer that was a clean answer. When you've never heard that that shows that he's got a quick mind and he can read the room. So that was perfect. The people in the room knew what it meant but God I wish I knew what it meant so you know the rest of us will never know. Jag off. Any ideas? Maybe only the people in the room knew. You know too. Okay we all know. All right.

Scott Jennings did a post where he was talking about the nomination stuff for Pete and all the characters who were weighing in on it during the questioning. And Scott Jennings said they didn't lay a glove on Hegseth today. Why do Dems send their dumbest members to do this to this important committee? Now my new nickname for Scott Jennings is Clown Slayer because his specialty besides just being the best voice on the Republican side who's on CNN is that he seems to just slay clowns like the Democrats who just shouldn't even be in the conversation. And again not because they're Democrats they are just legitimately stupid. Now are there some legitimately stupid Republicans? I assume so but I don't feel like they go I don't feel like they're in front of the parade. When you hear a Republican talking it's like oh Tom Cotton right even if you disagree brilliant guy. Oh Rand Paul. Oh well you might disagree with a few things but brilliant guy. You know Thomas Massie. Oh might disagree brilliant guy. And you know you can go that in the line. But the Democrats do seem to send their stupidest people according to Scott Jennings. But now I don't usually disagree with Scott Jennings so this might be the only time I ever do. I'm not sure that's their stupidest people. I got bad news for you. It might be their smartest. It might be. I mean you tell me which one's the smart one. Yeah you tell me. Yeah not much difference.

And then Tim Kaine was prominent but Tim Kaine looked like the pointy haired boss from Dilbert except more gay. So he looked like the gay pointy haired boss. Now as far as I know he identifies as hetero but presents as a pointy haired gay guy. So that was fun. I couldn't get my eyes off it. So and again if you know me well enough you know that I never insult the LGBTQ community because I think they're amazing. The success they've had in the United States reputationally, economically, socially is just one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.

Meanwhile over in South Korea I was trying to ignore this because I thought the story would go away but the ex-president the one who was removed by impeachment his name is Yoon Suk-yeol. Now you might not recognize that as a South Korean president name but you might be confused because it's also how a southern man in the United States insults somebody. Same thing. What you don't see it right? So in Korea he would be called Yoon Suk-yeol and if it were an insult from a southern gentleman it would be you suck y'all. You suck y'all as opposed to you suck y'all. Same thing anyway. He had been impeached and they wanted to arrest him but he used his own government security to prevent him from being arrested. So he went into his little very well protected compound and when they sent authorities to arrest him his own security which is paid by the government said nope we protect him until that job changes. You're not arresting anybody. Which I really respected. Now they came back with 1,100 people so then the security force was so outnumbered that quite reasonably they knew that the smart thing to do was to stand down and they did. So he's arrested. He was a conservative. He was arrested by something more liberal on the left. There's some insurrection charges. Does any of this sound familiar to you? Huh? Impeached. Insurrection. He's the conservative. Sound familiar? Do you think we were behind this? Do you think the United States may have backed this? I don't know. I do not know but I certainly suspect it.

All right there's a little bit more in the Palisades fire. I know you're all tired of it and if you're not a Californian this may not be too important to you but I remind you that California's economy is bigger than 35 of the other states put together. And if California gets a cold or what is it if California sneezes the whole country is going to get a cold. So if you think this doesn't affect you just wait it will. It's going to affect you. I mean it affects everybody in California whether you're in the fire zone or not. So we're all you know there's a lot you haven't heard about but we're all struggling. So things are not easy right now for anybody and that includes people who have some extra resources. Everybody's in a position they haven't been in before. So the amount of pressure on everybody is through the roof and I don't know if you can fully appreciate that unless you've been near one of these yourself. But here are some of the things we're learning now that should bother you. According to Rich McHugh from NewsNation there is video proof that there was no response from the fire department to the Pacific Palisades fire 45 minutes after it was first reported. Now I think that they can tell that by some video security from one of the houses that was near the fire and may have been involved in reporting it. So I don't know if that's confirmed because I've heard other stories that the fire department did as well as you'd expect but that's out there. So I'm going to call that an allegation because I'll bet you if you ask the fire department they'd say something different. So until I hear the other story I'll just put a pin on that one but there is some concern that they didn't mobilize in time.

Michael Shellenberger talks about some of the failures and he had a good list that I'll summarize for you. First of all here's a take from Joel Pollak and Breitbart. Joel and by the way you should be following Joel Pollak if you have any interest whatsoever in the fire because he's the only person the only one who is a local and a national reporter and is working full time to make sure that people understand what's going on. And so he's doing more than well. I don't want to get too much into the details but we're going to owe him a lot when he's done. We're going to owe him a lot. A lot of people are going to owe him a lot. So he says that in LA due to budget cuts that the fire department was not deployed. Wait do I have this wrong? This may have been Shellenberger too. So there's some thought from some of the smartest people who were watching that what should happen as soon as there's a long term weather forecast and I didn't know this by the way that what LA should have done and what would have been actually normal is as soon as they had the forecast that said wait a minute we're going to have no rain and we're going to have these winds and we know there are all kinds of ignition possibilities. So in that condition what you don't do is wait for a fire. Normally that's the fire department's job is to wait for a fire and respond. In this case you know there's a fire multiple so they can know with complete certainty there will be multiple gigantic fires. What did they do in advance? Well not enough. Here's what they should have done. They should have put a truck or two everywhere there was likely to be an ignition and they know from history what places are more likely so that they could have gotten really quickly at least with one truck to anything that just flared up. Now that's a big difference from what happened. So that didn't happen. Now why didn't it happen? Well one of the reasons is budget cuts. One of the reasons is a bunch of people got let go at some point because they didn't get vaccinated. A bunch of it is like a hundred trucks were in for repair probably also a budget thing. So between the budgets and the bad management they had completely eliminated their ability to do normal stuff. And normal in this case would have been to have enough trucks and people to pre-deploy. I think that's going to be the biggest thing.

There's reporting that the fire department did not know that the reservoir had been drained but the reservoir had been drained for nine years. If the fire department didn't know that their main source of water at least for that one area had disappeared after nine years it wasn't anybody. So I'm going to say I doubt the reporting that the fire department was not aware. It might be true that they were not officially informed but not aware a whole reservoir didn't have water and it was one of their main water sources for a place that certainly was going to catch on fire. It's not like it maybe will catch on fire. It was certainly. They didn't have anything in the air that noticed. There was no resident who pointed it out. I don't know. I'm not sure I believe that they didn't know.

Let's see what else. They should of course have water sources that were near the fires. They should have required more clearing of bushes and debris. I think that might have been a budget cut issue but the canyons were just filled with trees and debris. I don't know how much you can clean a canyon like can you really do that? Can you remove the fire debris sufficiently from a canyon that it makes that much difference? I'm going to say yes because the experts are saying so but I don't know if that's really that much of a thing.

The state or county could have spent 50 million and had a bunch of trucks maybe not the best ones they could have been used ones or lower end ones but they could be staged near the fire and that would make a big difference. The number of calls that the LA firefighters make in a year has tripled over the last 30 years while the staffing has declined by a third. So clearly they did n