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Face a tsunami of criticism and hilarious memes, Cancun Ted slinked back into Houston this afternoon after less than 24 hours after fleeing HTX for a pleasant weekend on the beach in Mexico.  Avoiding reporters at the airport, HPD officers escorted him out the backdoor.  He was met by reporters at his home, and was as close to contrite for being a tone-deaf dickweed as I’ve ever seen him.  Here’s the report.

Here’s a little story to make you smile.

Karen got arrested yesterday in my hometown.  There were only 5 people arrested in my county yesterday. One of them, a woman, repeatedly dialed 911 demanding that they turn on her electricity. They asked her to stop calling because there were people who needed their help and there is nothing they can do about her electricity.

She finally screamed in to the phone, “I am going to keep calling back until y’all send somebody over here to turn on my electricity!”

”Oh, we’ll be right over there,” the dispatcher cheerfully responded.  Karen spent the night in jail and was bonded out this morning by a really pissed off husband.

And I see you guys know all about Ted Cruz.  But you may not have known this.

You know, like the sheriff’s department didn’t have anything better to do.

He’s on his way back and I say he gets the welcome he deserves.

UPDATE:  Yep, it’s true.  Caught red handed fleeing the power crisis in Texas, he’s been caught again booking a coach ticket and putting himself on the upgrade list for a flight back today.  This is only getting better.  Welcome back to our world, Rafael.

Here’s the upgrade list for this afternoon’s flight from Cancun to Houston.

Looks like ⁦@tedcruz⁩ is on his way back, ⁦@danpfeiffer⁩. He’s just narrowly missing the upgrade list

That’s assuming that “cru, r” is him. And I do. pic.twitter.com/CqfKa5rJfG

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) February 18, 2021

ORIGINAL POST: Yesterday evening, Ted Cruz’s twitter feed went quiet.  Now, Ted loves him some Twitter, not as much as Trump did, but still likes to spout bullshit and hyper partisan insults multiple times per day.  He’s a prolific retweeter, but hasn’t done so for hours.  Why, you ask?  Apparently, Lyin’ Ted is coordinating his relief efforts for Texans freezing in the dark from…wait for it…the beach in Cancun.  That’s right, folks, reports started emerging last night that Ted and his family were photographed multiple times on a United flight to Cancun yesterday afternoon.  Several people have confirmed the report including an advisor to Jon Ossoff.

Ted Cruz has flown to Cancun with his family while Texans are freezing and have no water or electricity pic.twitter.com/46fKMvnDJD

— Edward Hardy (@EdwardTHardy) February 18, 2021

Meanwhile, Beto lead an effort in Texas yesterday making wellness calls to 151,000 senior citizens and getting people to warming centers.  Let’s be frank: Texas voters are stupid.  First, many don’t even show up to vote.  When they do show up, they vote for a carpetbagger like Cruz because he knows how to push rightwingers’ buttons.  Only in Texas can some one of Latino descent can style himself as an anti-immigrant white supremacist and get away with it.  Cruz doesn’t care if you live or die; that’s a given based on his heartless taunting and incendiary rhetoric he regularly spouts.  To help himself politically he actually bent the knee to Trump even after he insulted Cruz’s wife and accused his father of being a conspirator in the JFK assassination.  He objected to the electoral vote to suck up to Trump.  With his reputation, Cruz going off to Cancun in the middle of a statewide crisis is totally believable.  We’ll monitor this story.  Oh, and Lyin’ Ted is now Cancun Ted.

The 2021 Power Catastrophe was decades in the making, especially after 1999 when ERCOT with the PUC blessings established a “market based” power generation regime.  Independent power producers (IPPs) are paid only for power they generate, not for investment in weatherproofing or maintenance.  As a result, many plants simply shut down when it’s not economic to generate power, and shut down when the weather gets extreme as it has been this week.  That’s exactly what happened this week; when fuel gas supply skyrocketed due to demand, power generation became uneconomic because most contract prices for power are fixed.  Rather than operate at a loss, the IPPs shut down, knocking over 4 million Texans off the grid.  That result is unacceptable, and everyone, including Greg Abbott and John Cornyn know it.  Rather than take responsibility for the catastrophe that they helped create (along with Rootin’ Tootin’ Rick Perry) they immediately called for an “investigation” into their own goddam actions and decisions that they made.  The other thing they did?  They lied that the problem was caused by “frozen windmills” and solar panels.  Cornyn even retweeted a picture of a helicopter deicing a wind turbine IN SWEDEN, claiming it was in Texas.  Abbott got on Fox News, and told the same lie that renewables don’t work and the Green New Deal would destroy the economy.  That’s correct – Cornyn and Abbott are politicizing a crisis where Texans are dying to score cheap political points. Cruz, of course, when called out for mocking California last summer during the wild fires, characteristically crawled back under his rock.

Here’s a map of current power outages nationwide.  Have a look at this, knowing that the same weather that affected Texas also crossed the western United States and is currently moving into the eastern United States:

Notice anything interesting?  There are no extended power outages outside of Texas in the areas managed by ERCOT.  The line across the Appalachians is where the storm currently is and where power will be quickly restored.  Texas, not so much.  This is a massive failure in public policy caused by decades of mythological and magical thinking that the “free market” cures all ills and that the federal government is always bad.  Neither has ever been true and never will be.

So, when your Republican friends start howling about “frozen windmills” stop them in their tracks and call bullshit.  Because it’s bullshit.

The sky got a little brighter today when Rush Limbaugh died at age 70.  He announced sometime ago that he had stage 4 cancer and died from that today.  Limbaugh spent almost 30 years spewing bile and hatred over the radio waves culminating in Trump ruining the reputation of the Medal of Freedom by awarding it to Rush last year.

I’m not shedding any tears.  If that sounds harsh, it’s intended to be.