The post election audit Clown Show of Maricopa County ballots has been a complete disaster from the first moment it was conceived.  Ordered by Senate Republicans in March, said 60 day audit is now going on 6 months and has probably set the state GOP back, oh, say to the Reagan era.  Everyone associated with the “audit” have made fools of themselves in front of the entire nation, and Trump has happily led them down this primrose path dropping hints of “they can’t believe what they’re finding” when in fact they’ve found nothing.  In the process, God knows how much damage they’ve done, and the elections commission for the county has already said they’ll have to replace all the voting machines after they were compromised by the “auditors”.

To pour gasoline on the fire of incompetence, the report of the results of this months long fiasco has been once again delayed because…wait for it…the CEO of Cyber Ninjas and some of his key staff are “quite ill” with COVID.  Dollar to a donut that none of these idiots were vaccinated because, well, they’re idiots, and Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate President didn’t answer the question if they had been vaccinated.

You just can’t make this up.

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.”

At least one Arizona state senator has awakened from his stupid coma and realized how the botched and completely unnecessary “audit” of Maricopa County election ballots has made his state a laughingstock.  In an interview with the NYTimes, state senator Paul Boyer said,

“It makes us look like idiots.  Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”

Well, no shit.  You’ve just now figured that out, Paul?  Just how ridiculous did you think it was going to be? What in ANY of your party’s efforts gave you the slightest impression that all of you wouldn’t look like idiots?  You approved an audit that hired an unqualified partisan company whose CEO buys into The Big Lie.  Then they didn’t hire anyone who’s ever audited an election.  Then you barred the press, and now keep the ballots in an insecure place.  No matter the result of this “audit” (and I know what the result will be), at least half of Americans won’t believe it because you made ZERO effort to make it even appear to be impartial. This “audit” is not about restoring faith in our elections, it’s about destroying faith in our elections so you and your other partisan pals around the country can justify passing voter suppression laws and even authorizing yourselves to TAKE OVER THE PROCESS if you don’t like the results.

So, FUCK YOU, Paul, and the partisan nag you rode in on.  You’re the problem and most certainly should have nothing to do with the solution.  Late repentance makes you yet another charter member of The Jeff Flake I’m a Coward Club.  You only speak out AFTER it matters.

That is all.

Right now, I’m typing this on my iPad sitting in front of my fireplace in my house with no power, no heat, frozen pipes in one bathroom and wearing the warmest sweater I own.  I’m one of those 60% of  Houstonians who got randomly picked to not have power this week because some idiot arbitrarily made that decision. Oh, and yes, my next door neighbor does have power.  If you don’t have power and are looking for someone to blame for that condition, I have one question for you.  Who do you vote for on Election Day?  If your answer is Republicans, then my answer is to light a candle, walk into your iced up bathroom, hold up the candle to the mirror and look.  The person in the mirror is who’s responsible for you freezing in the dark.

There are three major power systems in the US – the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and…wait for it…Texas.  Why?  Texas didn’t want those big, bad, federal bureaucrats telling it what to do.  It’s been that way all the way back to WWII after the Federal Power Act was signed to provide regulation for interstate power transmission between states.  Under that act, all power that is transmitted over state lines had to conform with federal regulations for safety, measurement, and pricing.  Texas said no thanks to that, preferring to keep everything intrastate and telling surrounding states to kiss our big red butt.   The big NY blackout in 1962 provided more impetus for Texas to emphasize that independence, forming ERCOT in 1965.  Ironically, that acronym stands for Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is most certainly not.

During the deregulation craze of the late ‘90s, the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) issued several rules, including Rule 2000, which provided for the deregulation of the production, transmission, trading, and selling of electricity.  ERCOT took that opportunity to go full “free market” becoming a hub for trading, selling, and buying electricity, designing a system that brought IPPs (independent power producers), local utilities, and industrial customers together.  The problem?  No one was put in charge or held accountable for reliability.  All that works fine in normal times, but in weather events, system upsets, and growth in demand, it’s perfectly set up for Fingerpoint City, which leads us to the clusterfuck that is the week of February 14, 2021.

A little information about how power is generated in Texas – about 50% of our power it generated by natural gas fired generation; 20% comes from coal; 20% from wind, 10% from nukes, and the rest from other renewables including solar, which is only about 1%, which, in my opinion, is unacceptably low.   Also, the Texas Public Utility Commission, which has been a Republican lap dog for decades, has rules that are not enforced.  For example, we’re supposed to have 15% excess capacity for peak demand, but they NEVER enforce that requirement.  In fact, that number has hovered in the 7 to 8% for YEARS.  Worse, we had a wake up call in 2011 when we had a big freeze.  The problem is that ERCOT, Perry, and Abbott have all ignored that wake up call, increasing demand and reliability issues.  Add that to Texas silly anti-federal government dogma, and you get this slow motion disaster that we’re all living.

Abbott woke up from his stupid coma today, and declared that “reforming” ERCOT is now on his emergency legislative agenda for this session.  That’s a laugh, since his last “emergencies” were non-existent voter fraud claims and fretting over who uses which public bathrooms.

Abbott’s had his chance, Perry before him, as has the TXLeg which has been populated by mouth breathers and morons for two decades.  Texas, just like the federal government, can’t survive without an actual functioning government.  Abbott has gotten away for way too long with his cavalier “let them eat cake” strategy.  His cynical “local control until I disagree” strategy hasn’t worked and will never work.  Abbott, Patrick, and all the mouthbreathers and morons have had control long enough.  Texas deserves better.  We deserve a government with adult supervision run by leaders who focus on reliable power, stable government, dependable healthcare, and appropriate education, not the libertarian fever dream that Texas has become.

Impeach Abbott.  Impeach Patrick.  Vote the rest of the bums out.  Maybe millions of Texans spending a week freezing in the dark might just change their votes.

One of the constant threads that wound through Trump’s infestation of the WH was poor grammar, poor usage, and careless misspellings.  Bringing this characteristic to the end, his lawyers’ answer today to the single article of impeachment filed by the House, Trump’s lawyers, in the introductory paragraph, actually misspelled…wait for it…United States.  That’s right, folks, in the very introduction of his defense of the indefensible, United States was spelled Unites States.  These are supposedly high dollar lawyers with deep experience, and they are so careless in carrying out their responsibilities that they didn’t even bother to spellcheck.  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Over the last 3 years and 7 months, Trump’s incompetence and abject corruption has laid bare many weaknesses in our democratic republic which used to be known as the leader of the free world.  5 million Americans have been sickened by it and over 160,000 have died because of it.  The one death we don’t talk about, though?  The myth that Libertarianism as a system of government works.  Libertarianism doesn’t work, has never worked, and never will work.  The problem is that a huge number of Americans and the majority of Republicans have bought into the myth, and that buy-in is literally causing one COVID death every 80 seconds.

Libertarianism now dominates the rhetoric of all Republicans, and many idiots like Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott spout bullshit in a continuous stream.  The ideology puts all responsibility on individuals, mistakenly asserting that the “free market” drives all aspects of society, therefore society will be most efficient in that free market.  That’s nonsense, of course, but that’s what they believe.  The problem is, though, that people who believe in this ideology have no actual understanding of markets and how they work.  Free markets require 5 factors to exist: The first two factors are parity between buyers and sellers where negotiations are on level ground.  There also needs to be active competition within the market.  The last two factors are readily available alternatives to buyers and low barriers to entry of new entrants.

These are the only conditions where a market can thrive and call itself “free”.  So, let’s look at a market, say, healthcare.  In the US, healthcare is employment based.  Your company determines your health care plan not you.  If you don’t have employment based healthcare, it’s worse; insurance companies have so much power that they dictate what you get and what you pay.  There’s no price negotiation as they wheel you in to the emergency room.  How about utilities?  Again, not a free market.  States like Texas claim to have an open market in electricity, but the choices are limited and larger power companies dominate AND own all the infrastructure to provide electricity.  Negotiation nibbles around the edges of a gigantic protected market.  I could go on and on, but you get my point.

So, any objective person who understands markets knows that Libertarianism is the snake oil of politics, and will NEVER work.  Ever.  And that truth is playing out daily in our lives as the US economy continues to stumble from one virus outbreak to the next, hospitals overrun and businesses destroyed because Libertarians stupidly believe that Trump is playing out their fantasies that global health risks will just solve themselves.  It’s the law of the jungle kind of thing, where only the strong survive.

Most other developed countries have figured out this problem.  Most of Europe is open and back to some level of normalcy.  Those countries, with functioning central governments, locked down early and longer (they listen to their scientists), beat back the pandemic, and are now open with some restrictions and rapid response to outbreaks.  Those countries also kept paying the payrolls of companies who were shutdown, preventing the grief and crisis created by our own non-functioning government of passing out short term pittance and sporadically ordering businesses closed with ZERO support.  It’s no wonder there is unrest among the unemployed and bankrupted businesses, but even those people tend believe the manure pumped out by Trump News Channel that it’s all somehow a hoax or the fault of the party out of power.

The actual fault for this continuing disaster lay in two places: Trump for sure, for his corruption, and incompetence; but worse, the Libertarians in the Congress and state governments who have abandoned their jobs and left individuals and companies to fend for themselves.  History will not be kind to the handling of this pandemic.