Though seemingly impossible from the seat in his wheelchair, governor Greg Abbott has been doing the Texas Side Step now going on two weeks since the days-long massive power failure and other cascading events, including the failure of water systems throughout the state.  He’s blaming everyone but himself, backed up by a chorus of other conservative Republican libertarian politicians.

Let’s again place blame where the responsibility for this catastrophe actually lay – in the laps of every statewide and legislative politician who has served at any time during the last 25 years.  Late last week, Texas Monthly laid out the history of power deregulation in Texas and the disaster it predictably precipitated.  Not only is Texas an island unto itself when it comes to power, this island is less reliable, AND Texans get to pay more for that privilege.

The fallout from this disaster is an open wound to Texas voters, even as Abbott has shot a few hostages and is now urging the state to “move on”.  He’s urging an investigation into ERCOT, the state’s grid manager, but has ignored the actual problem – him, the two previous governors, Perry and GWB, and the state legislature that has had a single party death grip on power for 19 years in the House and 25 years in the Senate.  Even after calls for tightening regulations after the 2011 and 2017 blackouts, the legislature, under conservative Republican libertarian leadership let every single bill mandating standards and winterizing to die in committee, just so no conservative Republican libertarian would have been forced to vote against it.  And Abbott has now blamed everyone but himself and the cronies he installed at the real problem, the Texas PUC.

This is the point of conservatism Repubulicanism libertarianism power – you get all the perks, but don’t take responsibility when something goes wrong.  Here are some other really clear examples of conservatism Repubulicanism libertarianism that has gripped our state and federal government now for decades: 1) The US Senate and House delegating their Constitutional trade authority to the president; 2) Delegating acts of war to the President (Patriot Act, and others); 3) Pushing the responsibility of care for the mentally ill to the states, but unfunded (Reagan); 4) Privatizing (prisons, air traffic functions, military support functions, and numerous other functions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars per year; 5) Failing to address the Coronavirus pandemic; 6) Delegating all pandemic response to the states (unfunded).  It goes on and on.  Even conservative Repubulican libertarian Florida governor Ron DeSantis declared this last weekend that he believes NO vaccine distribution plan for his state is best.  You see, if you don’t make a decision, you can’t get blamed.

Conservatism Repubulicanism libertarianism works great until it doesn’t.  This is not a matter of ideology here; this is the difference between people who believe in government and those who don’t.  We have now had a state controlled for two and a half decades by those who don’t believe in a functioning government, and the results are not pretty.

Will freezing Texans in the dark for days change votes?  One would only hope.

Just as we figured, the Texas Power Scandal is growing, and it’s going to be as bad as we feared.  It turns out that the Abbott appointees to the PUC have been systematically undoing safety and reliability protocols put in place after the 2011 power grid failure.  In November of last year, the PUC unilaterally canceled the contract with the Texas Reliability Entity, the outside entity which had been monitoring compliance of Texas power grid since the FERC delegated congressional authority to a private non-profit corporation to monitor the national grid.  No entity replaced Texas RE, so no one was minding the store on compliance, winterizing, and reliability.

Even worse, the previous July, the PUC disbanded the Oversight and Enforcement Division, firing it’s chief attorney and reassigning the rest of the staff within the agency.  This committee had been charged with overseeing power providers’ operations and enforcing safety and reliability rules.

So, Greg Abbott, whose appointees had dismantled the PUC’s safety and compliance functions of Texas power producers, is now calling for heads to roll – the heads that he appointed himself.  I think he can start the rolling with his own.

When GWB and other “free market” politicians were pushing deregulation of power markets back in the 1990s, “competition” and “low prices” were the most used words by them and other propagandists to get the bill passed and overcome the fears of consumers at the change.  Two decades later, those lies have been exposed for what they are, lies.  I’ve suspected it for years, but have never really dug into the numbers to prove it.  That liberal rag, The Wall Street Journal, did that digging for us, and published the results.  AND, those results will piss you off like it did me.  I hope you’re sitting down – Since 2004, Texas power consumers forced to buy from retailers have overpaid by $28 BILLION than if we had just stayed regulated.

That’s right; not only did we hand our power grid over to unregulated operators that has led to several major power outages including the one last week where the body count is now 80, we’ve paid extra for the privilege.

Republicans Libertarians have two answers to every problem: cut taxes, and privatize.  As we’ve talked about before, when you only have a hammer in your tool box, every problem looks like a nail.  As we’ve learned with many other services, including health insurance, prisons and military functions, privatizing costs more, provides worse service, and endangers lives when you insert profits into the equation.  We were infected with the disease of privatizing by Reagan when he blamed government for all ills.  He is the one who kicked off the now 4 decades long disassembly of our social safety nets putting millions of Americans at risk and costing hundreds of billions of our dollars.

Even with calls for reform and Abbott’s hostage video last night, the propaganda of “free markets” has been embedded in conservatives’ Libertarians’ DNA and I fear that the misinformation is so pervasive that even this failure will be swept under the rug like all the others and the “reform” will be a little nibbling around the edges keeping the profits in place and keeping Texans’ wellbeing at risk as politicians kick the can down the road.  After all, these are the clowns who say it’s OK for a gun nut to shop at Kroger for this weekly supply of Twinkies with an AR-15 strapped to his chest.  How can we expect them to actually fix a system whose beneficiaries pours millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of those who protect them?

Dan Patrick, in an unsurprising response to the power crisis in Texas where at least 80 people have died and millions froze in the dark for days, told Fox Noise this week that those bitching about their high power bills should have “read the fine print” in their power contracts.

Here’s some fine print for you.  FUCK YOU, Dan, and the horse your rode in on.

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.

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.