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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.