This morning, Greg Abbott banned vaccine passports in Texas, falsely claiming that they “reveal private health information”.  That’s the dumbest goddam thing I’ve heard since Trump recommended consuming bleach.  Protecting “private health information”?  For God’s sake I’m telling EVERYBODY.  Abbott’s confirmed once again that he’s a complete moron.

Texans shouldn't be required to show proof of vaccination & reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives.

I issued an Executive Order that prohibits government-mandated vaccine passports in Texas.

Don't tread on our personal freedoms. pic.twitter.com/weTbz4FKyH

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 6, 2021

Yesterday, Biden responded to Greg Abbott’s and Mississippi governor Tate Reeves’ announcements lifting all state restrictions that protect their citizens from Coronavirus infections.  In his response, Biden said,

“We are on the cusp of being able to fundamentally change the nature of this disease because of the way in which we’re able to get vaccines in people’s arms. … The last thing, the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking — that, ‘In the meantime, everything’s fine. Take off your mask. Forget it.’ It still matters.”

How dare Biden denigrate the memory of neanderthals so insensitively.  Their thinking was much more developed than today’s rightwing knuckle draggers.  He should be more careful with his rhetoric.

That’s right, folks, even as Greg Magical Thinking Abbott proclaimed the Coronavirus pandemic over and rescinded all statewide restrictions, the pandemic continues to rage and continues to take lives.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.

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.

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.

OK, kids, the game plan is now as obvious as my pointy toed cowboy boots on the beach.  The Texas GOP’s voter suppression efforts are now in overdrive, throwing up lawsuit after lawsuit (led by Abbott and Paxton) to stop drive-in voting, and eliminate thousands of mail in ballot drop boxes around the state.  And, this is happening all over the country.  Why, you ask?  Here’s why.

It’s become clear that Republicans have now realized that, even with their usual voter suppression tactics (removing polling locations, strict ID laws, complex and confusing mail-in ballot procedures, shifting times and places for early voting, etc.) are not going to be enough to eek out a win.  Turnout in 2018, and now in 2020 is unprecedented.  There well over 1 million more voter registrations this year than in 2016.  Biden is leading nationally by double digits and in all of the battleground states, though by only a few points in NC and FL.  The normal point shaving that is a trademark Republican tactic won’t be enough.

So, the new tactic?  Attempting to invalidate millions of votes.  It started last June when Trump’s new Postmaster General started sabotaging the Post Office by eliminating overtime, removing hundreds of mail sorting machines from primarily Democratic districts, and issuing ominous warnings to states that the Post Office my not be able to deliver mail-in ballots on time.  It’s now moved to the courts, starting with Abbott’s order to eliminate all but one mail-in ballot dropbox per county.  That order is now winding through the courts with Paxton leading the way.  NOW, Republicans have sued counties that have implemented drive through voting, calling all votes obtained with that method as “illegal”.

So here’s how it’s going to go – because of the huge turnout, Biden has a chance to win Texas by a narrow margin.  That win will be challenged by Republicans claiming that votes delivered to drop boxes and votes through drive in voting locations are “illegal” and therefore invalid.  They will seek to invalidate MILLIONS of votes to keep Texas in the red column for Trump.  Why?  Texas has 38 electoral votes.  If Biden wins Texas, it’s game over for Trump, and that could happen on election night.

That is what Republicans are trying to stop.  Even though I’m eligible to vote by mail, I’m going to drag my happy ass down to a polling location to vote in person.  I’ll do that with a big middle finger to Abbott and the rest of the criminals enabling him.