Blazes are breaking out all around the Los Angeles area, and it s all horrifying. We re bringing you all the news updates, and a breakdown of exactly what happened in California that led to the magnitude of this particular wildfire, why this is a lot of mismanagement in California, and why we should all be worried.
00:00:04.000We're bringing you all the news updates and a breakdown of exactly what happened in California that led to the magnitude of this particular wildfire, why this is a lot of mismanagement in California.
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00:00:33.000All righty, so according to the Wall Street Journal, portions of the heavily populated Hollywood neighborhood in Los Angeles were ordered to evacuate Wednesday evening as a new fire broke out in the hills above the center of the city, which is currently battling numerous deadly blazes.
00:00:46.000If you look at a map of the LA area, effectively, these wildfires now surround nearly the entirety of Metro Los Angeles.
00:00:53.000They range from the Pacific Palisades, which is on the coast in California, all the way inland.
00:01:12.000The region's firefighting resources have been stretched to their limits.
00:01:15.000And the authorities appear to have no containment in hand.
00:01:19.000At this point, the winds are simply too high.
00:01:22.000According to the Wall Street Journal, those devastating fires have been driven.
00:01:26.000By high-intensity winds, the Santa Ana winds, that blow from the deserts of interior California and Nevada out to the Pacific.
00:01:33.000Those Santa Ana winds are feared by Californians because they are fast-moving, dry, and extremely warm, which means they can push embers from one fire into an entirely different area.
00:02:08.000This is from NBC News Channel 4. Where we're looking here directly to the south, right next to the Aldi, is Elliott Arts Magnet Middle School, which also caught fire earlier this morning.
00:02:23.000And now we're seeing it across the street at the grocery store.
00:02:26.000We're seeing some folks here that are making their way up on Lake Avenue right here.
00:02:30.000here but this is a busy thoroughfare as you can see people are sort of walking around and filming this is because there are not the resources available to actually put out these fires even in heavily populated areas there's footage that came out a little bit earlier this morning aerial footage of pacific palisades and the entire place looks to have basically been burned to the ground over on msnbc reporter steve gutenberg's camera feed cut in the middle of his coverage of what was going on in pacific palisades that's how bad the situation was
00:02:57.000we should use this current and his compassion We've totally lost it.
00:03:10.000It's the actor Steve Guttenberg who is calling into MSNBC. James Woods has lost his home in the area.
00:03:17.000Again, this is a very wealthy enclave of California.
00:03:20.000It's not just hitting that very wealthy enclave.
00:05:32.000Karen Bass was, until last night, in Ghana.
00:05:35.000What the hell she was doing in Ghana, nobody knows.
00:05:37.000Remember, Karen Bass was actively considered as a vice presidential candidate for Joe Biden in 2020. And this is how thin the Democratic bench is.
00:05:46.000Here is an L.A. County Board of Superpowers member defending Karen Bass's performance.
00:05:50.000Remember, Ted Cruz was really bad because even though he had actually zero authority, Do you know if Karen Bass is on her way back to Los Angeles?
00:06:19.000She is, and I've been in contact with her.
00:06:23.000She's very, very, very engaged in this and is going to be here today.
00:06:28.000And so I, you know, she is, with technology the way it is, she has been in contact up in the air and is going to be landing this morning and is going to hit the ground running.
00:06:39.000So the fact that the mayor is not in town doesn't mean that we're not getting the resources we need.
00:06:46.000And the president of the city council, who's going to be here at the press briefing, Marquis, is fully engaged as well.
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00:11:25.000Patrick Soon-Shiong, who's the billionaire owner of the LA Times, slammed Bass in an ex-post, claiming the mayor slashed the LA Fire Department budget.
00:11:32.000Quote, fires in LA are sadly no surprise.
00:11:35.000Yet the mayor cut LA Fire Department's budget by $23 million, he wrote in a tweet.
00:11:38.000Reports of empty fire hydrants raise serious questions.
00:11:45.000Rick Caruso, of course, was basically a Republican running as a Democrat in the last LA mayoral race.
00:11:51.000And it was the endorsement of a bunch of Hollywood celebrities that put Karen Bass over the top against Rick Caruso commented on Karen Bass's poor leadership.
00:12:01.000We've got a mayor that's out of the country.
00:12:33.000See, when it comes to natural disasters, natural disasters can happen anywhere at any time.
00:12:38.000There are earthquakes and wildfires and hurricanes.
00:12:41.000But the thing about wildfires in particular is that public policy matters an awful lot.
00:12:45.000See, with every natural disaster situation, public policy can mitigate the effects of the natural disaster.
00:12:51.000This is why if you have an earthquake in a first world country like the United States, not a lot of buildings are going to fall down.
00:12:56.000But if you have an earthquake in a third world country, tens of thousands of people might die.
00:13:00.000Same magnitude, it's just the buildings are built to code in places like the United States.
00:13:05.000When it comes to hurricane response, how you respond matters.
00:13:08.000This is why Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, handled disasters really, really well.
00:13:12.000When it comes to mitigation and response, when it comes to preparedness, California has been an absolute disaster area that is true for years.
00:13:20.000They've not done anything that they could have done to mitigate the effects of seasons like this.
00:13:25.000Gavin Newsom, the absolutely execrable governor of California who has spent more money than any governor in the history of the state of California by a long shot who spends billions of dollars on useless rail.
00:13:35.000By the way, I used to be a host in Los Angeles and I actually had the opportunity to interview Gavin Newsom and I asked him about his dumb high-speed rail.
00:13:42.000At the time, he was running for governor and he said it's a dumb idea.
00:13:45.000Then, of course, he immediately reversed himself to spend billions of dollars on a rail that goes nowhere and has never been built.
00:13:51.000But Gavin Newsom was out there trying to pretend that he was handling the situation even as half the state is apparently on fire.
00:14:00.000Here at the Palisades Fire, you can see behind me how quickly this is growing.
00:14:04.000Hundreds and hundreds of personnel all throughout the state of California are here.
00:14:08.000Coming from Northern California, we pre-positioned 110 engines.
00:14:12.000We've got fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, dozers, water tenders, specialty personnel, putting everything we can to not only suppress this fire, but to prevent additional fires over the course of the next few days.
00:14:24.000Unprecedented winds for this time of year, and of course, this time of year, traditionally, Now, again, one of the beautiful things about being a Democrat is you blame everybody but yourself, even though you're the person with authority.
00:14:51.000So Gavin Newsom was, in fact, talking yesterday about...
00:14:55.000Whether he had any responsibility for anything that's going on, and it turns out everyone else who's not Gavin Newsom is to blame.
00:15:04.000Obviously, in the Palisades, it ran out last night in the hydrants.
00:15:06.000I was trying to fire fire on this block.
00:15:08.000They left because there was no water in the hydrant here.
00:15:10.000The local folks are trying to figure that out.
00:15:13.000I mean, just when you have a system that's not dissimilar to what we've seen in other extraordinarily large-scale fires, whether it be pipe, electricity, or whether it just be the complete overwhelm of the system.
00:15:24.000I mean, those hydrants are typical for two or three fires, maybe one fire.
00:15:36.000Statewide policy actually matters a good deal.
00:15:38.000And you know who's been talking about this pretty openly and repeatedly for years and years at this point would be one Donald J. Trump, the president-elect of the United States.
00:15:47.000In fact, it was just last year on Joe Rogan.
00:15:50.000That he was talking about how California was not doing enough to stop wildfires.
00:16:31.000Not only dangerous, billions of dollars a year they spend on forest fires.
00:16:36.000And, you know, there's a case with the environment.
00:16:38.000They're not allowed to rake their forests because you're not allowed to touch it.
00:16:43.000And all they have to do is clean their forest, meaning rake it up, get rid of the leaves, get rid of, you know, leaves that are sitting there for five years.
00:16:51.000Well, certainly get rid of the dead fall.
00:16:53.000And get rid of the trees that have fallen.
00:16:59.000By the way, he's right about all of this.
00:17:00.000California's had a significant water shortage for years because they refused to build the infrastructure necessary, the reservoirs and the dams necessary to actually, you know, hold the water from the seasons where it is raining in California.
00:17:45.000You don't see close to the level of burn in other states, but our teams are working well together in putting these massive and many fires out.
00:17:50.000Great firefighters also open up the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the north.
00:17:54.000Don't pour it out into the Pacific Ocean.
00:17:57.000California desperately needs water, and you can have it now.
00:17:59.000That was Trump writing on Twitter back in 2019. He was right about all of this.
00:18:03.000So let's go through all of this mismanagement because there's a ton of mismanagement ranging.
00:18:08.000It is a perfect storm, not just in terms of the fire conditions, but in terms of the political conditions for fires to rage out of control.
00:18:16.000From DEI to budgeting, from environmentalism to blaming climate change, Democrats have done a horrifying job on all of this.
00:18:26.000Again, you can't blame Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass for the fires.
00:18:29.000You can blame them for not doing the preparation necessary to deal with some of the most perfectly predictable weather that California has.
00:18:36.000You see wildfires pretty much every year in California.
00:18:39.000I mean, last year we were there in 2020, there was a very large wildfire in many of these same areas.
00:18:44.000So let's begin with DEI and firefighting.
00:18:48.000So California, LA in particular, has spent an awful lot of time attempting to do its firefighting staffing with intersectional characteristics in mind.
00:18:58.000Now, this is not a rip on the current firefighters in Los Angeles.
00:19:02.000It is a suggestion that the misprioritization Of effective firefighting below the race and sexual identity of the people who are doing the firefighting is stupid and wrong and backwards.
00:19:17.000And that if I were to Google LA Fire Department, what I should have seen over the course of the last several years is LA Fire Department staffing up with best possible not, not enough lesbian black women in LA Fire Department.
00:19:29.000Unfortunately, it's the latter that you see.
00:19:31.000So all the way back in 2017, I actually testified in front of Congress.
00:19:36.000About DEI, intersectionality, and all this sort of stuff with Adam Carolla.
00:19:40.000Adam Carolla, of course, is a very prominent host, podcast host, radio host in Los Angeles.
00:19:47.000And Adam, in 2017, talked about how he had attempted at one point to join the LA Fire Department and was told he couldn't because he was, you know, just a big white guy.
00:19:56.000I want to talk about my white privilege so badly.
00:20:01.000I graduated North Hollywood High with a 1.7 GPA. I could not find a job.
00:20:06.000I walked to a fire station in North Hollywood.
00:20:09.000I was 19. I was living in the garage of my family home.
00:20:12.000My mom was on welfare and food stamps.
00:20:14.000And I said, can I get a job as a fireman?
00:20:17.000And they said, no, because you're not black, Hispanic, or a woman.
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00:23:20.000In 2021, Robin Abkarian, one of the worst columnists in America, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Had a piece titled, quote, the LA Fire Department's sexism problem.
00:23:29.000Yeah, that was the main problem there.
00:23:33.000When I reached Chris Larson on Thursday's shoes in Spokane, Washington, attending an international conference for female firefighters, Larson, 55, is president of LA Women in the Fire Service and has worked as an LA firefighter for 31 years.
00:23:44.000Over time, she's risen to the rank of battalion chief and is currently the only black female officer in the department.
00:23:50.000She is, as are many of her firefighter sisters, deeply unhappy about the dearth of women on the force and about the fact that women are hazed, harassed, or disrespected by some of their male colleagues.
00:24:00.000This is an especially fraught moment for the LA Fire Department.
00:24:03.000This is in 2021. Talking about how terrible it was that there weren't enough LGBTQ people in the LA Fire Department.
00:24:13.000In 2022, at the behest of the left, then Mayor Eric Garcetti stood alongside current Fire Chief Kristen Crowley and launched the L.A. Fire Department's first ever Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Bureau, focused on ensuring a safe, diverse and inclusive workplace for all.
00:24:29.000Garcetti said, we believe in and are committed to justice in Los Angeles and we focus an equity lens on every aspect of our work.
00:24:36.000Of course, Kristen Crowley is herself a lesbian, which means that she is highly qualified to be L.A. Fire Department Chief.
00:24:43.000And that's obviously the main qualification they were looking for.
00:24:53.000She took time out of her already busy schedule to tell us about her vision for the department's future, one that includes a three-year strategic plan to increase diversity.
00:25:02.000People ask me, well, what number are you looking for?
00:25:07.000Out of 3,300 city firefighters, only 115 are women right now.
00:25:12.000She's already looking at ways to change that.
00:25:14.000She's quick to point out that doing so has a greater purpose, attracting the best and brightest for the job.
00:25:20.000They feel included, they feel valued, and they feel part of a cohesive team.
00:25:28.000Really slow clap for the geniuses who decided that we needed racial diversity and sexual diversity in firefighting as the top priority over at the LA Fire Department.
00:25:37.000NPR in 2023 covered this diversity initiative.
00:25:41.000The byline over there suggests, quote, firefighting is mostly white and male.
00:25:44.000A California program aims to change that.
00:25:47.000Well, man, oh man, have you guys succeeded.
00:26:33.000Now, Half West Hollywood may be on fire by This evening.
00:26:45.000But the important thing is that the fire department chief is herself not straight.
00:26:49.000That is the thing that matters most of all.
00:26:52.000But again, when it comes to the DEI and the fire department, that is a problem.
00:26:56.000It is also a tertiary or quaternary problem when it comes to the list of problems here.
00:27:01.000Top of the list would be things like lying about your wildfire prevention efforts, which is what Gavin Newsom did back in 2021. According to CAP Radio, quote, on Gavin Newsom's first full day in office, January 8th, 2019, the newly elected governor stood before the cameras clad in jeans and sneakers and surrounded by emergency responders and declared war on wildfires.
00:27:21.000Everybody has had enough, the governor said.
00:27:22.000He said climate change was sparking more fires more frequently.
00:27:26.000And he said that the state's response had to fundamentally change.
00:27:29.000But two and a half years later, as California approaches what could be the worst wildfire season on record, it does so with little evidence of the year-round attention Newsom promised.
00:27:37.000An investigation from Cap Radio and NPR's California newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention.
00:27:45.000This is 2021. The investigation found Newsom overstated by an astounding 690 percent the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state's most vulnerable communities.
00:27:59.000Newsom has claimed that 35 priority projects carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres, but the state's own data show the actual number is 11,399 acres.
00:28:12.000Overall, California's response, this is NPR reporting, has faltered under Newsom.
00:28:16.000After an initial jump during his first year in office, data obtained by Cap Radio and NPR's California newsroom show Cal Fire's fuel reduction output dropped by half in 2020 to levels below Governor Jerry Brown's final year.
00:28:27.000At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire's wildfire prevention budget.
00:28:34.000It's circa 2021. Gavin Newsom, the most amazing governor who wanted to run for president.
00:28:42.000And it's not just on the statewide level.
00:28:45.000Just weeks ago, LA Mayor Karen Bass cut the fire department budget by nearly $20 million.
00:28:52.000According to the New York Post, LA Mayor Karen Bass faced scorching criticism Wednesday.
00:28:57.000As it was revealed, she cut the city's fire department budget by $17.6 million ahead of this week's devastating fires, as she prioritized funds for its massive homeless population that largely went unspent, according to a report.
00:29:08.000The cut was the second largest in Bass's 2024-25 fiscal budget city figure show, and it wasn't even the gunning she wanted.
00:29:15.000She actually wanted to cut $23 million from the fire department budget.
00:29:19.000In fact, the cuts were so bad that even Crowley...
00:30:07.000Chad Pergram, Senior Congressional Correspondent for Fox News, interviewed Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, who made his career, made his business career, with a company that fought wildfires.
00:30:20.000And what Sheehy said is, quote, those of us in the wildfire community have been shouting from the rooftops for years this was going to happen.
00:30:25.000We're going to have the big one in a wildland-urban interface environment, which is what this is.
00:30:55.000They did not do backfires in order to burn and clear burn some of the areas that were most likely to become tinder for a giant wildfire like this.
00:31:05.000In fact, the firefighters were running out of hydrant water in the middle of this.
00:31:57.000The Sites Reservoir, which was a very important reservoir for holding water for situations like this, which was planned in a remote corner of the western Sacramento Valley for at least 40 years, still has not been built.
00:32:20.000Also, worth noting, California did in fact release reservoir water not all that long ago.
00:32:26.000According to Newsweek, in February 2024, CBS 8 reported that billions of gallons of water had been released from local reservoirs over the prior year out of an effort to keep water levels low should dams fail and inundate surrounding areas.
00:32:39.000You know, it would have helped that if you had built more dams and more reservoirs, but you didn't have it.
00:32:43.000So, in short, They release water because they didn't do the infrastructure work.
00:32:49.000And then the water is not there when you need it.
00:32:52.000Again, slow clap for the geniuses in California.
00:32:55.000And of course, so much of this is also tied to the insane environmental policies.
00:32:58.000You can't build anything in California from houses to reservoirs without going through years of legal wrangling.
00:33:04.000You can't do controlled burns because you're afraid you'll be sued.
00:33:08.000As Isaiah Taylor, the founder of Valatomics, makes clear, he says, In 2007, the Sierra Club successfully sued the Forest Service to prevent them from creating a categorical exclusion to NEPA for controlled burns.
00:33:22.000The CE would have allowed the Forest Service to conduct burns without having to perform a full environmental impact survey.
00:33:28.000The median time for that is three and a half years.
00:33:31.000The John Muir Project helped claw back the full scope of the categorical exclusions from the 2018 omnibus bill as well.
00:33:40.000Bureau of Land Management was served with a notice of intent to sue by the Center for Biological Diversity for their fuel reduction plan in the Great Basin.
00:33:48.000The Bureau of Land Management then backed off because they were afraid of the legal consequences.
00:33:52.000The environmentalist groups have sued everybody into the ground to stop them from doing precisely the things they need to do in order to prevent wildfires like this.
00:34:20.000Even were that true, it would not alleviate their responsibility to mitigate the effects.
00:34:27.000That is literally what they are elected to do.
00:34:31.000When you have David Jolly reporting over at MSNBC, and when he says, we didn't do enough to address climate change.
00:34:39.000Nothing would have addressed climate change in time to stop these wildfires.
00:34:44.000When you say climate change, what you really mean is don't blame the politicians who are really to blame.
00:34:50.000We don't do enough to prevent the change of climate science or change of climate or address climate science.
00:34:56.000But we also are ignoring the fact that we have this this significant risk peril in communities across the country.
00:35:05.000And the government either is going to help subsidize paying for that risk on the front end or is going to have to bail it out on the back end.
00:35:12.000Bailing it out is always more expensive and less responsible.
00:35:29.000That is just a workaround to the fact that Democrats have done a horrifying job of handling their bleep when it comes to actual governance.
00:35:35.000All right, coming up, we'll get to Joe Biden's inane response to all of this.
00:35:46.000We want you to be with us for every single moment.
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00:37:20.00010-pound, four-ounce baby girl, a baby boy.
00:37:23.000So I remember this tape for a lot of wrong reasons. - Well, I mean, clearly our country's in the best of hands Can't imagine why he would have lost re-election to Donald Trump and why his vice president did lose her election to Donald Trump.
00:37:39.000Meanwhile, President Trump correctly surmised that Gavin Newsom is to blame.
00:37:44.000President Trump spoke about this yesterday.
00:37:47.000He put out a statement, quote, Governor Gavin Newsom refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him.
00:37:52.000It would have allowed millions of gallons of water from excess rain and snow melt from the north to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.
00:38:00.000He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called the Smelt by giving it less water.
00:38:04.000It didn't work, but didn't care about the people of California.
00:39:08.000Well, I have to say, big L for media coverage goes to David Muir.
00:39:13.000Who humiliated himself in the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, made a fool of himself, but he wasn't done making a fool of himself.
00:39:21.000Muir, who of course works for ABC News, he was reporting the wildfire and he had to make sure, he was wearing some sort of firefighting outfit, which I don't understand, he's not a firefighter, that's weird.
00:39:30.000But in any case, he wanted to dress up as a firefighter, he was cosplaying as a firefighter, but he needed to make sure that it was form-fitting enough, his firefighting outfit.
00:39:39.000He didn't want to look like he was swimming in his fake firefighter outfit.
00:40:16.000Well, speaking of Joe Biden, there is more bad news for Joe Biden.
00:40:20.000A new poll finds that Americans think that Joe Biden is the worst president since Richard Nixon, which, by the way, is selling Richard Nixon kind of short because Richard Nixon did do some good things as opposed to Joe Biden, who has done only bad things.
00:40:31.000The survey was conducted between December 2nd and 18th of last year and found that only 6% of respondents believe Joe Biden's presidency was outstanding.
00:40:38.000Those are all the members of Joe Biden's immediate family.
00:40:48.000That last total is the highest for any president included in the poll.
00:40:51.000His net positive of minus 35 is better only than Nixon's minus 42. That is not good at all, but it is accurate because he has been, indeed, an absolutely horrifying president.
00:43:01.000The advice and consent process is part of the constitutional process, but they're going to move fast.
00:43:05.000Democrats, however, are going to do their best to hold up the works.
00:43:08.000Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is not, in fact, a Native American, she was out there ripping Donald Trump's nominees, suggesting the reason that Donald Trump is talking about Greenland and the Panama Canal is because he's trying to misdirect away from talk about his nominees.
00:43:26.000I want to make a second point, and that is, why is Donald Trump doing this?
00:43:30.000And I think the answer is, let's have a big distraction and several more questions so we don't spend more time on Pete Hegseth, the nominee to be the head of the Department of Defense.
00:43:42.000So we don't spend more time on Tulsi Gabbard, who has been in the pocket of Putin and is not someone who should be trusted with our secrets.
00:43:55.000On Robert Kennedy's views on vaccines.
00:43:58.000In other words, we have a job in front of us right now.
00:44:01.000And that is advise and consent on the nominees who are there to run our government.
00:44:08.000Donald Trump would love it if we spend no time talking about them and all of our time talking about this idea and that idea and something else.
00:44:19.000Well, the plan for Democrats is to create as much chaos as possible.
00:44:24.000According to Axios, he's privately pressing his senators to create fireworks when they question President-elect Trump's nominees in coming weeks.
00:44:31.000Schumer told his top committee Democrats in a closed meeting, quote, Republicans have spent four years attacking the Democratic brand.
00:44:35.000We need to use the hearings to begin returning the favor.
00:44:38.000So he wants them to ask questions of RFK about vaccines.
00:44:41.000He wants them to ask Pete Hegseth about what the MAGA agenda looks like and all the rest.
00:44:49.000Around the world, many world leaders are upset with President Trump for saying obvious things like perhaps the Panama Canal should not, in fact, be under the sway of the Chinese government.
00:44:57.000The leader of the Panama Canal Authority undenied President Trump's claim that China is controlling the vital trade route on Wednesday.
00:45:04.000He said Trump's suggestion the U.S. ships get preferential rates will, quote, lead to chaos.
00:45:09.000Ricoarte Vasquez Morales said, quote, the accusations that China is running the canal are unfounded.
00:45:15.000China has no involvement whatsoever in our operations.
00:45:41.000We sort of handed it to them under Jimmy Carter, another one of Jimmy Carter's brilliant decisions.
00:45:47.000You know, Donald Trump certainly has leverage to apply if he wishes to apply it.
00:45:51.000Applying it not on behalf of seizing sovereignty over the Panama Canal, but on behalf of cutting ties with Chinese companies would be, I think, one very positive impact of the new Trump administration.
00:46:02.000Meanwhile, other players overseas are very, very upset because, of course, Donald Trump and his allies have been getting involved in foreign policy.
00:46:10.000The Mexican president has responded to Trump's plan to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
00:46:15.000By suggesting that they would rename the United States.
00:46:21.000Claudia Scheinbaum clapped back at Trump, saying that parts of the United States should be called America Mexicana.
00:46:29.000Her playful reaction came as Mexico sent serious messages that will defend the human rights of Mexicans in the U.S. who may be abused during Trump's planned mass deportations.
00:46:37.000So apparently she stood in front of a 1607 map showing the territory of northern Mexico and part of the present-day United States mixed together.
00:46:44.000Scheinbaum said, without prompting from reporters, the joint region that used to belong to Mexico should be called America Mexicana or Mexican American.
00:46:52.000Well, I mean, sorry that your country lost.
00:47:25.000I do not think that we should be injecting more loose money into the system.
00:47:29.000The interest rates have been artificially low for decades.
00:47:33.000And the economy, I think, will do better if we have a predictable regime of interest rates.
00:47:38.000The Federal Reserve, however, is blaming their lack of cuts on President Trump.
00:47:43.000The Federal Reserve officials saw risks of higher than expected inflation due in part to potential tariffs by President-elect Trump when they made a finely balanced decision last month to lower the interest rates.
00:47:51.000But apparently, they say they're not going to cut any further.
00:48:00.000Alrighty, in just a second, we're going to get into the latest from the UK where the Labour government has now denied a petition to investigate the grooming gang scandal that has plagued the country.