Gym Jordan was on MTP this morning babbling about how law enforcement has been weaponized, but only when it comes to conservatives being investigated.  He’s all over the “weaponized” FBI trying to protect school board members whose lives are being threatened, but completely blind to the tsunami of blatant law breaking on his own side.  When Chuck Todd brought up the fact that the NY Assistant US Attorney, Charles McGonigal, has been charged with taking money from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, Jordan stated he was going to investigate that, but brushed Todd off when he pointed out that Paul Manafort was Deripaska’s primary contact between the TFG campaign and the Russians.  He wants to investigate the Steele dossier, but is not interested in investigating whether the US Attorney’s office in NY was suppressing the dossier and leaking other stories to the press intended to damage Hillary during the 2016.  The new conservative House majority has only a few goals for this term – cementing in their own power, hamstringing the federal government, and exacting revenge for TFG’s loss in 2020.  That’s it, period.  They don’t give a flying shit about their country or their constituents; their only tools are retribution and disinformation.

When asked about the George Floyd act and reforming policing in the US, Jordan took the usual position of conservatives today, saying that the US government has no role in policing reform and that it must be handled at “state and local levels”.  This is the strategy now followed by most Republicans who shirk responsibility to avoid being blamed for the consequences.  It’s also the SCOTUS’s normal response to all issues of privacy, individual rights, civil rights, and voting rights.  The Court, under Roberts, has now taken the position of taking no position on critical issues like privacy, gun safety laws, campaign finance, radical gerrymandering, and systemic voter suppression, punting all those issues to the state level which in 35 states is under the iron fisted control of minority Republicans cemented into power by…wait for it…radical gerrymandering and voter suppression.  The Court has also gone so far as drawing the idiotic conclusions that money doesn’t corrupt and that magically the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed.

At the state level, DeSantis and Abbott are the poster children for shirking their duty.  They both habitually override local county and city officials who are trying to protect their own citizens by grabbing power at the state level to hamstring them, but then take no responsibility for massive failures like the 2021 Texas power failure that killed 700 Texans.  By keep a “free market” ideology where free markets don’t exist, they avoid blame when their own constituents suffer from their negligence.  By hiding behind idiotic libertarian ideology that has never worked anywhere on the planet, they can blame faceless villains rather than doing their goddam jobs to improve the lives of their constituents.

This is the biggest fraud that’s been committed against the American people, but they retain power through two strategies – using disinformation to blame non-existent bogeymen for their own failures, and radical gerrymandering that creates a base of voters who believe their destructionist rhetoric and bullshit.  AND, it’s getting worse, not better.

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.

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.