I’ve run out of colloquialisms about how mad I am at the Texas Government. Y’all give me your best in the comments if you don’t mind me using them in the future. I’m madder than ….. (fill in the blank)

The Texas Observer ran this story. I’ll do my best to sum it up but y’all go read the details over there- it’s good work.

Let’s review the facts:

• Texas power grid fails and hundreds of Texans die
• Texans who live suffer billions of dollars in damage from broken pipes and water damage (My personal number was $3,544.00)
• Kelcy Warren’s company, Energy Transfer Partners, makes $2.4 Billion in that same week
• Greg Abbott assures Texans all that can be done to fix the grid is done (you be the judge – here’s what they did)
• Kelcy Warren donates a cool $1 million dollars to Greg Abbott’s re-election campaign.

I assumed it was some kind of violation of election finance law for any one person to donate such a huge sum to a campaign. I checked and sure enough, as of May 2015 an individual can make a donation of any amount to a campaign. (Who was governor in May of 2015? Greg Abbott).

The blatant corruption is exhausting. I’m more tired than a one-legged woman in an ass-kicking contest.

Governor Abbott, who is slimier than a bucket of snails, has called a special session of the Texas legislature. It is well within his right to do – as a Texas Governor can call a special session for any reason she wishes just so long as she states a reason. In this case, he has outlined 13 reasons that are so important that the Republican majority legislature failed to pass them in a regular session. I suggest you wipe your rear end with that memo and read my list, because it’s a hell of a lot more honest.

Reasons for calling a special session:

1. Democrats denied the legislature a quorum, and ain’t no way the GOP is gonna accept the fact that they lost a battle. See: Trump 2020 election.
2. He wants to distract from the power grid disasters of 2021 – there is no mention of doing any legislative work on the power grid or ERCOT, despite the fact that it’s the real elephant in the room – even bigger than Allen West running for Governor.
3. Texans must perform genital checks on children playing tee-ball.
4. One-upping his Republican primary opponents Huffines and West by using state funds to build a wall. He never seemed interested in doing so until he was up for re-election against GQP candidates crazier than him.
5. He needs to dog-whistle the racist voters by using the words “Critical race theory.”
6. Make it somehow harder for brown people to vote.
7. – 13. He’s campaigning for re-election. 

We all know that Abbott called this session to rile up his base. In his list of thirteen priorities, there is not one single mention of the energy grid or ERCOT. Notably, there is no mention of vaccines or COVID-19, either, because his base is still pissed off at him for being somewhat responsible and making some businesses reduce capacity or close during a pandemic that killed 52,715 Texans as of today.

Texas Republicans don’t care if you fail at legislating so bad that thousands die unnecessarily from disease or freezing to death, they just want to make sure you can be really mean.

Abbott is doing his damnedest, isn’t he?

Texas in the national news yesterday:

• Ken Paxton’s lawsuit to attempt ONCE AGAIN to repeal the ACA was tossed by Scotus.
• Greg Abbott commits $250 million of Texans’ money and then begs for donations to build Trump’s wall that takes private land to create a solution that doesn’t work.  Ask the Chinese about that.
• Abbott signs SEVEN bills that unravel 150 years of gun safety laws allowing any idiot to carry a firearm in public with no license, no background check, and no training.
• ERCOT asks us to reduce power usage due to normal summer weather.  This is after Abbott smugly announced that laws that he signed that will do nothing to fix our state power grid has fixed our power grid.

Like one person posted on social media yesterday:

“We are flying electric helicopters on Mars, but Texans can’t run their dryers.  That’s because scientists are in charge of Mars and Republicans are in charge of Texas.”

Yesterday, with great fanfare, Greg Abbott signed bills that would do virtually nothing to fix the power grid that massively failed during the Polar Vortex in February, knocking out the power in almost 5 million homes and causing the deaths estimated by some to be as high as 700.  Let’s be clear – the electrical power grid in Texas is managed differently than ANY OTHER STATE, and it doesn’t work.  It’s never worked, and never will work as long as incompetent politicians like Abbott stay in charge.  Texas is not connected to the national grid; the system is deregulated to the point where there are no requirements for minimum baseload generation; the system is designed to maximize profits for the generators and retailers and offers virtually no assurance of maintaining power for consumers during weather events such as hurricanes, extreme heat, or extreme cold.  AND, Texas consumers in the ERCOT system pay MORE for the privilege of having less reliable power than all those other poor slobs in the rest of the country who labor under the socialist thumb of regulated power companies that do their jobs and are held accountable. The Texas system is broken, and Abbott’s pronouncements yesterday that everything is fixed is simply false.  He’s lying to us, he knows he’s lying to us, but is lying nonetheless because that’s what is donors and base want to hear.  Period.

Here’s what the bills DIDN’T include: relief to consumers for gross overcharges of power during the Polar Vortex; any baseload power requirements; any weather hardening requirements with set penalties for not doing so; interconnections with the national grids; no minimum reliability requirements.  Here’s what the bills DID include: handing oversight board selection over to the legislature and governor.  Now the PUC and ERCOT are completely controlled by Republicans who HATE government oversight.  The bills also provided for generators and suppliers to issue state guaranteed bonds to pay for the exploding overcharges during the Polar Vortex.  Who pays for those bonds?  YOU DO, through surcharges to your monthly bill.  Yep, YOU.  The only positive in these bills is that floating wholesale style pricing for consumers has been disallowed.

The result of this new legislation?  Texas consumers in the ERCOT system are still at great risk for brownouts and blackouts during  extreme weather.  We’re still standing alone from the national grids with still no reliability requirements or programs to add generating capacity outside of the “free market” which actually isn’t free.  In short, Abbott and the legislature have once again shirked their duty to serve Texans while getting their pockets lined by those profiting from the existing system.  So, when you’re boiling this summer or freezing next winter with no power, remember who did it to you and maybe think about changing your vote at the next election.  After all, you get what you vote for.

Arlington must have Republicans taking care of the drinking water, y’all.

Lets go back in time, just a few months, to December of 2020. Representative Ron Wright (R), infamous for complaining that there is no federal protection for the ever-persecuted white American male, is the U.S. Representative for the 6th Congressional District of Texas. He believes that the 2020 election was fraudulent and votes against certifying the election results on the day of the Capitol riot, January 6.

Not long after Rep. Wright made it back to Arlington, he tested positive for COVID. And died. He had spent the entire last year battling lung cancer and tweeting that businesses and schools should re-open because COVID-19 isn’t all that dangerous.

Moving forward, 23 people have filed to run for his seat. Texans will be voting in a special election May 1. One of the candidates, former wrestler and current carpetbagger Dan Rodimer, has already had himself gossiped about at the beauty salon for being a fool. Not to be outdone, let me introduce y’all to one of the ladies running for Wright’s seat.

Sery Kim is Korean. Last week, there was a forum for the GOP candidates where they could out-stupid each other to try and win the Republican votes. Kim decided to play the race-card.

On the subject of Chinese immigrants, “I don’t want them here at all,” Sery Kim said. “They steal our intellectual property, they give us coronavirus, they don’t hold themselves accountable.” She said the racist part out-loud. Trump voters love that.

“And quite frankly, I can say that because I’m Korean,” she added.

She has refused to apologize, saying it’s the big bad liberal media’s fault and that she “will not back down from speaking the truth.” She lost the endorsements of the two Korean Republican Representatives in the House: Young Kim and Michelle Steel.

In a political climate where you’ve got to be a giant jack-ass to get on the ballot, she just might have a shot.

As I was writing this, I saw some more political news out of Arlington. Governor Abbott has turned down the offer to throw out the first pitch at the Ranger’s game this week, citing Major League Baseball’s opposition to Georgia’s restrictive Voter ID law. I’d wager three jars of El Jefe’s South Texas Pucker Up & Slap Yo’ Knee Bread n’ Butter pickles that Abbott expects to be boo’d out of the stadium by Texans still pissed off about last month’s power grid failure. Besides, no one watches the Rangers anyway. Go ‘Stros!

That’s right, folks, even as Greg Magical Thinking Abbott proclaimed the Coronavirus pandemic over and rescinded all statewide restrictions, the pandemic continues to rage and continues to take lives.   Our positivity rate is 13.5% this week, nearly triple the rate the CDC recommends before opening.  On top of that, Texas ranks 48th in vaccinations, with less than 7% of Texans vaccinated.  The positivity rate now is about the same as last October when the pandemic was beginning its holiday spike that killed thousands of Texans.  What Abbott is doing is stupid.  The real tragedy is that he’s smart enough to know it’s stupid, but having now lost a lot of the center after letting millions of Texans freeze in the dark, his only path to keeping his job next year is to take the Trump path, whip up the extreme right mouthbreathers.

This is classic right-winger response to crises, just like the Great Blackout of 2021 – break the system, make sure it doesn’t function properly, take huge risks while falsely boasting about how great we are, don’t do anything when obvious problems show themselves, then pretend it’s someone else’s fault and throw a staffer under the bus when the system fails.  During the blackout, Abbott threw wind farms, the PUC, and ERCOT all under the bus even though the responsibility for the disaster lay right in his lap and that of the state legislature.

Everyone needs to brace for the next big wave that is certain to come, extending the misery in Texas even longer. Texas’ response to the pandemic has been nothing more than piss-poor.  For comparison, let’s look at a country with similar populations with much better results: Taiwan.  Texas has 29 million people.  Taiwan, 24 million.  Deaths in Texas? 44,000.  Taiwan? 9.  That’s right, 9.  Taiwan did it right.  They never locked down, but implemented strong quarantine rules, contact tracing, and most important, PAID their people to stay home.  Like most of Europe, Taiwan took the financial stress out of the equation.  By contrast, Abbott and the idiots in the legislature added to people’s misery by providing little to no assistance.  He then re-opened the economy in May just as the pandemic was starting to rock.  Realizing his blunder in July, he then implemented stronger shut down measures and a statewide mandate, but kept the state purse strings tied tight.   The result was predictable.  Add Abbott’s blundering to Trump’s gross negligence and incompetence, and you get some of the worst COVID response on the planet.  Thanks for nothing.

Oh, and one last tidbit.  Abbott made this announcement from a Mexican restaurant in Lubbock which, by coincidence, is not connected to ERCOT and didn’t experience the blackouts most of Texas suffered.  Apparently the places in Texas he won’t get booed off the stage are getting a lot smaller.  Asshole.