The Day Hell Froze Over In Texas, Con't

When government is small enough to drown in a bathtub, the solution is always brutal, late-stage capitalist exploitation of those who can least afford it, and Texas's power grid disaster is no different.

Some Texans are facing yet another crisis: how to pay enormous electric bills.

The Texas power supplier Griddy, which sells unusual plans with prices tied to the spot price of power on the Texas grid, warned its customers over the weekend that their bills would rise significantly during the storm and that they should switch providers.

Some quickly looked into doing that but found the actual changeover of service wouldn’t happen for days.

Now customers say they never dreamed they’d be billed in the four figures for five days of service.

Karen Cosby said her cost is $5,000 for usage since Saturday at her 2,700-square-foot house in Rockwall.

DeAndre Upshaw of Dallas said the electric bill for his 900-square-foot, two-story townhouse was also $5,000.

Other customers on social media expressed frustration with similar bills from Griddy, the power supplier that told its 29,000 customers on Saturday, after spot electricity prices soared, to quickly shift out of its network and find a new supplier.

Those spot prices hit $9,000 per megawatt-hour. That means $9 for a kilowatt-hour that usually costs Cosby around 7 cents, and sometimes as little as 2 cents.

In Texas’ deregulated electricity market, Griddy and some other power suppliers charge customers wholesale variable rates per kilowatt-hour. The plans are relatively new. Most Texans pay fixed rates.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, set a cap of $9,000 per megawatt-hour as an incentive to electricity suppliers to add natural gas-fired generating capacity, said Jere Thompson, retired co-founder of Dallas-based Ambit Energy.

“We all believed it [hitting that cap] would happen in the summer with peak cooling demand, but the possibility was always sitting out there,” Thompson said. Prices might hit the cap for a few hours, but no one thought they would stay at the cap for this long.

The price per megawatt-hour reached $9,000 around 10 p.m. Sunday night and stayed there for much of Monday and all of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday morning, it fell to $35 and kept dropping. At 4 p.m., it was 85 cents.

Watching the events unfold was mesmerizing, Thompson said. The retail providers are the shock absorbers when prices rise, and those companies are going to be hurt.

Customers hit with these bills should know they “are not alone in their predicament,” said Andrew Barlow, a spokesman for the Texas Public Utility Commission.

Wholesale rate-based plans “can be tantalizing to consumers when the sales emphasis is placed on the possibility of very low rates during times of pleasant weather,” he said. “But they can be financially devastating when harsh hot or cold weather creates scarcity in the wholesale energy market.”

 

It's exactly the disaster capitalism that Republicans want. Cheap, deregulated versions of everything that you need and that government should safely provide and protect, for those who can afford the least, and when it inevitably fails, the rich get richer and the poor get destroyed.

 Everything Republican is Big Casino now, including power and water, and the house always wins. 

Everyone else always loses.

 

It's About Suppression, Con't

Georgia Republicans found out the hard way that Georgia isn't a red state, it's a purple state with decades of voter suppression where one-third of the population is Black, and current governor Brian Kemp knew exactly how to steal a close election against Stacey Abrams because he was Secretary of State. As a result, the GA GOP is introducing a massive new package of voter suppression measures targeting Black and brown voters to keep them from getting to the polls in 2022.

After Donald Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, Republicans in the state’s legislature are doing everything they can to make it more difficult for Democrats to win the next one.

On Thursday, with almost no public notice, Georgia House Republicans introduced a 48-page bill to significantly change voting procedures in the state in a way that particularly targets Black voters in the Atlanta metro area. This followed similar moves by the state Senate earlier in the week.

The House bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Barry Fleming, chair of a newly created Special Committee on Election Integrity, limits the weekend early-voting period to only one Saturday before the election. Fleming claimed the provision will provide “uniformity” in voting hours across the state, but in practice it will take away voting opportunities for large, heavily Democratic counties in Atlanta, like DeKalb and Fulton, which held early voting on multiple weekends in the runup to the 2020 election when many Black voters turned out.

It specifically eliminates early voting on Sundays, when Black churches traditionally hold “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote drives. The January 5 runoffs were the first time that Democrats outnumbered Republicans during in-person early voting, and Black voters constituted a third of early voters. In the November general election, Black voters used early voting on weekends at a higher rate than whites in 43 of 50 of the state’s largest counties. Black voters make up roughly 30 percent of Georgia’s electorate, but comprised 36.7 percent of Sunday voters in 2020 and 36.4 percent of voters on early voting days Fleming wants to eliminate, according to Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams.

“This bill is Jim Crow with a suit and tie,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia.

When North Carolina Republicans eliminated Sunday voting in 2013 after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals called it “as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times” and struck it down for targeting Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

Republican leaders in Georgia notably stood up to Trump when he sought to overturn the presidential election results in the state, with GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defending the integrity of the system by holding three recounts that found no evidence of fraud. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans in the legislature from introducing bill after bill to limit voting options after Georgia turned blue, and Black voters showed up in record numbers during the January runoff to elect two Democratic senators.

The proposed reduction in early voting times in Georgia seems likely to make already-long lines in the state worse. Voters in Atlanta waited up to 11 hours to vote during the November general election, and during the June primary, voters in predominantly white areas waited six minutes to vote while voters in areas predominantly of people of color waited 51 minutes to vote.

Other provisions of the bill would add a voter-ID requirement for mail-in ballots, give voters less time to request mail-in ballots and election officials less time to send them out, throw out ballots that are cast in the wrong precinct, and restrict the use of mail-in ballot drop boxes.

The proposals “would have devastating consequences for voting rights in Georgia,” wrote a coalition of 28 voting rights groups led by Fair Fight Action, “and the people of Georgia have been blindsided by its release.”

Democrats were angry that the House bill was released at 1:53 p.m. on Thursday before a 3 p.m. hearing. “None of the Democrats had anything to say about it,” said state Rep. Rhonda Burnough, a Democrat from south Atlanta. “The public, people of color, didn’t have any opportunity to review or give an opinion.”

“There’s nothing more important fundamentally than a person’s right and the privilege of voting,” says Calvin Smyre, dean of the House and a longtime civil rights activist. “Something like this requires a lot of vetting.”

 

The Republican answer to the marketplace of ideas is "keep Black people from voting because they vote Democratic." There's basically no better example of structural racism than Republican voter suppression in states with large Black populations. They do it, because they would lose without doing it.

It's that simple.

Black Votes Matter.

Last Call For Prince Of Darkness, Con't

Our old friend Erik Prince is back in the news, former Trump Miseducation minister Betsy DeVos's brother has been a very, very naughty boy.

Erik Prince, the former head of the security contractor Blackwater Worldwide and a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was attempting to overthrow the internationally backed government, according to U.N. investigators.

A confidential U.N. report obtained by The New York Times and delivered by investigators to the Security Council on Thursday reveals how Mr. Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, gunboats and cyberwarfare capabilities, to eastern Libya at the height of a major battle in 2019.

As part of the operation, which the report said cost $80 million, the mercenaries also planned to form a hit squad that could track down and kill selected Libyan commanders.

Mr. Prince, a former Navy SEAL and the brother of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, became a symbol of the excesses of privatized American military force when his Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.

In the past decade he has relaunched himself as an executive who strikes deals — sometimes for minerals, other times involving military force — in war-addled but resource-rich countries, mostly in Africa.

During the Trump administration, Mr. Prince was a generous donor and a staunch ally of the president, often in league with figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone as they sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s critics. And Mr. Prince came under scrutiny from the Trump-Russia inquiry over his meeting with a Russian banker in 2017.

Mr. Prince refused to cooperate with the U.N. inquiry; his lawyer did not respond to questions about the report. Last year the lawyer, Matthew L. Schwartz, told the Times that Mr. Prince “had nothing whatsoever” to do with military operations in Libya.

The report raises the question of whether Mr. Prince played on his ties to the Trump administration to pull off the Libya operation.

It describes how a friend and former partner of Mr. Prince traveled to Jordan to buy surplus, American-made Cobra helicopters from the Jordanian military — a sale that ordinarily would require American government permission, according to military experts. The friend, assured officials in Jordan that he had “clearances from everywhere” and his team’s work had been approved “at the highest level,” the report found.

But the Jordanians, unimpressed by those claims, stopped the sale, forcing the mercenaries to source new aircraft from South Africa.

A Western official, speaking to the Times on the condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss confidential work, said the investigators had also obtained phone records showing that Mr. Prince’s friend and former partner made several calls to the main White House switchboard in late July 2019, after the mercenary operation ran into trouble.

The accusation that Mr. Prince violated the U.N.’s arms embargo on Libya exposes him to possible U.N. sanctions, including a travel ban and a freeze on his bank accounts and other assets — though such an outcome is uncertain.

Mr. Prince is not the only one to have been accused of violating the decade-old arms embargo on Libya. Rampant meddling by regional and global powers has fueled years of fighting, drawing mercenaries and other profiteers seeking riches from a war that has brought only death and misery to a great many Libyans.

The sheer breadth of evidence in the latest U.N. report — 121 pages of code names, cover stories, offshore bank accounts and secretive weapons transfers spanning eight countries, not to mention a brief appearance by a Hollywood friend of Mr. Prince — provides a glimpse into the secretive world of international mercenaries.

 

Let's be honest, the guy's actual job title is "James Bond Supervillain".  And if the UN has evidence of Prince violating Libya sanctions, then the US has it...and the Justice Department.

 

Have fun, Erik.

The Day Hell Froze Over In Texas, Con't

Dangerous deregulation and Republican greed resulted in a catastrophe in Texas as millions remains without power and water as more record low temperatures are headed for the Lone Star State, but the reality is things got so bad this week in Texas that the state's entire power grid almost completely collapsed, and would have been down for several months.

Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state.

The quick decision that grid operators made in the early hours of Monday morning to begin what was intended to be rolling blackouts — but lasted days for millions of Texans — occurred because operators were seeing warning signs that massive amounts of energy supply was dropping off the grid.

As natural gas fired plants, utility scale wind power and coal plants tripped offline due to the extreme cold brought by the winter storm, the amount of power supplied to the grid to be distributed across the state fell rapidly. At the same time, demand was increasing as consumers and businesses turned up the heat and stayed inside to avoid the weather.

“It needed to be addressed immediately," said Bill Magness, president of ERCOT. “It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system.”

Grid operators had to act quickly to cut the amount of power distributed, Magness said, because if they had waited, “then what happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you’re sunk.”

Magness said on Wednesday that if operators had not acted in that moment, the state could have suffered blackouts that “could have occurred for months,” and left Texas in an “indeterminately long” crisis.

While generators rapidly dropped off the grid as the weather worsened, operators monitored the difference between the supply of power on the grid and the demand for that power. As supply dwindled and demand grew, the margin narrowed to more and more dangerous levels, forcing grid operators to enact emergency protocols to either increase supply or decrease demand.

The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

“As chaotic as it was, the whole grid could’ve been in blackout,” she said. “ERCOT is getting a lot of heat, but the fact that it wasn’t worse is because of those grid operators.”

 

In other words, the rolling blackouts were needed to keep the grid from collapsing entirely, precisely because Texas cut itself off from the national power grid and didn't have the capacity to generate the power needed to keep the lights on for everyone.

Meanwhile, Texas Republicans are continuing to scream about "frozen windmills" when states that actually bother to weatherize their windmills, like Alaska, have no problems keeping them going. Texas's power infrastructure nearly imploded completely because of Republican misrule, and there's a good chance that the state's water infrastructure is now so critically damaged that Texans may be under boil advisories for weeks or months.

You voted for these Republicans, Texas.

You have the power to vote them out. And this is coming from a Kentucky Democrat.

A Taxing Explanation, Con't

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance is ramping up the Trump tax fraud investigation by stocking up on professional organized crime prosecutors like Mark Pomerantz, the man who helped bring down John Gotti, Jr.

As the Manhattan district attorney’s office steps up the criminal investigation of Donald J. Trump, it has reached outside its ranks to enlist a prominent former federal prosecutor to help scrutinize financial dealings at the former president’s company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.

The former prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, has deep experience investigating and defending white-collar and organized crime cases, bolstering the team under District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. that is examining Mr. Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization.

The investigation by Mr. Vance, a Democrat, is focused on possible tax and bank-related fraud, including whether the Trump Organization misled its lenders or local tax authorities about the value of his properties to obtain loans and tax benefits, the people with knowledge of the matter said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation. Mr. Trump has maintained he did nothing improper and has long railed against the inquiry, calling it a politically motivated “witch hunt.”

In recent months, Mr. Vance’s office has broadened the long-running investigation to include an array of financial transactions and Trump properties — including Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, various Trump hotels and the Seven Springs estate in Westchester County — as prosecutors await a ruling from the United States Supreme Court that could give them access to Mr. Trump’s tax returns.

The prosecutors have also interviewed a number of witnesses and have issued more than a dozen new subpoenas, including to one of Mr. Trump’s top lenders, Ladder Capital, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

In addition, investigators subpoenaed a company hired by Mr. Trump’s other main lender, Deutsche Bank, to assess the value of certain Trump properties, one of the people with knowledge of the previously unreported subpoenas said.

Months earlier, Mr. Vance’s office had subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank itself, The New York Times previously reported. More recently, Deutsche Bank employees provided testimony to Mr. Vance’s office about the bank’s relationship with the Trump Organization, a person briefed on the matter said.

Still, despite the burst of investigative activity, prosecutors have said the tax returns and other financial records are vital to their inquiry — and the Supreme Court has delayed a final decision for months.

 

And yes, the Roberts Court has been sitting on the Trump tax returns decision for months now, and is under no obligation to release it until as late as possible this summer or longer.

Lawsuits involving Donald Trump tore apart the Supreme Court while he was president, and the justices apparently remain riven by him. 

For nearly four months, the court has refused to act on emergency filings related to a Manhattan grand jury's subpoena of Trump tax returns, effectively thwarting part of the investigation. 

The Supreme Court's inaction marks an extraordinary departure from its usual practice of timely responses when the justices are asked to block a lower court decision on an emergency basis and has spurred questions about what is happening behind the scenes. 

Chief Justice John Roberts, based on his past pattern, may be trying to appease dueling factions among the nine justices, to avoid an order that reinforces a look of partisan politics. Yet paradoxically, the unexplained delay smacks of politics and appears to ensnarl the justices even more in the controversies of Trump. 

The Manhattan investigation, led by District Attorney Cyrus Vance, continues to draw extensive public attention. The grand jury is seeking Trump personal and business records back to 2011. Part of the probe involves hush-money payments Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to cover up alleged affairs. (Trump has denied those allegations.) 

For more than a year, Trump's attorneys have raised challenges to prevent enforcement of the subpoena. The controversy appeared to culminate at the Supreme Court last July, when the justices rejected Trump's claim that a sitting president is absolutely immune from criminal proceedings. 

The 7-2 decision crafted by Roberts left some options for Trump on appeal, but lower court judges have since spurned Trump arguments, and his lawyers returned last fall to the high court for relief. Vance agreed to wait to enforce the long-pending subpoena until the justices acted on Trump's emergency request. 

The Supreme Court's lack of response has given Trump at least a temporary reprieve. 

And his lawyers could soon seek more. CNN has learned that Trump's legal team is preparing to submit a petition to the justices by early March, based on a standard deadline for appeals, asking them to hear the merits of Trump's claim in oral arguments. 

In Trump's October filing, his lawyers continued to maintain that the grand jury subpoena was overly broad and issued in bad faith to harass him. They said it "makes sweeping demands and ... crosses the line -- even were it aimed at some other citizen instead of the President." 

The process for a petition for certiorari, as it is called, could add months to the case. If the justices agreed to hear the dispute fully on the merits, resolution could be a year off. 

A spokesman for Vance declined to comment. Lawyers for Trump also declined to comment for the record.

 

If the Roberts Court sits on this for another 15-16 months, which is entirely possible, who knows where Vance's case will be by then?  We'll find out, but it's maddening that SCOTUS is sitting on this decision.

They're doing it on purpose.

Last Call For The Day Hell Froze Over In Texas, Con't

I don't know what GOP Sen. Ted Cruz was thinking here, but this looks absolutely callous as hell and he needs to pay a cost for it.

Sen. Ted Cruz confirmed Thursday that he traveled to Cancun, Mexico, as millions of Texas residents were without power amid blackouts from the freezing weather.

In a statement, the Texas Republican said he flew with his daughters Wednesday and would be returning Thursday amid an uproar and calls to resign over the family trip.

“With school canceled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon,” Cruz said.

Photos that rapidly circulated on social media overnight showed a man who could be the senator at an airport and on an airplane. In some photos, a gray face mask was visible that appeared to be similar to one that Cruz was wearing at President Biden’s inauguration.

According to the social media postings, Cruz appeared to be in the Houston airport, preparing to board a United Airlines flight from Houston to Fort Lauderdale with continuing service to Cancun.

In Texas, more than 3 million customers were still in the dark Wednesday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide. As of Thursday morning, that figure was about 500,000.

The Texas Democratic Party called on Cruz to resign over the incident. In a statement, party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said Cruz “is proving to be an enemy to our state by abandoning us in our greatest time of need.”

“Ted Cruz jetting off to Mexico while Texans remain dying in the cold isn’t surprising but it is deeply disturbing and disappointing,” Hinojosa said. “Cruz is emblematic of what the Texas Republican Party and its leaders have become: weak, corrupt, inept, and self-serving politicians who don’t give a damn about the people they were elected to represent. They were elected by the people but have no interest or intent of doing their jobs.”

 

Now, I know Cruz isn't personally responsible for the screwups of 25 years of GOP control in Texas at the state level, and he wasn't the guy who deregulated the state's power grid and make this week's power (and now water) failure inevitable. 

But the guy's got the political instincts of a three-year-old case of yogurt left in the Death Valley sun, and I'm glad to see Dems already ripping into him over this, not that Cruz shouldn't have already been shown the door after his sedition.

Still, I think Cruz has badly underestimated how pissed Texans are over this, and "Remember the time this asshole went to Cancun while the state was a block of ice" is going to resonate for a long, long time.

 

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Republican state legislatures are getting high on their own supply when it comes to "awful force birth legislation for when SCOTUS kills Roe" as Tennessee would actually give the father veto power over abortion being performed, because women need to be trapped in goddamn 1878.

In an effort to further restrict abortion in Tennessee, two Tennessee lawmakers have introduced legislation that would allow a father to deny an abortion without the pregnant woman's consent.

SB494/HB1079, sponsored by Sen. Mark Pody, R-Lebanon and Rep. Jerry Sexton, R-Bean Station, would give a man who gets a woman pregnant the veto power to an abortion by petitioning a court for an injunction against the procedure.

Tennessee lawmakers already passed one of the nation's most restrictive abortion laws last year, although much of it is held up with legal challenges from abortion rights advocates. The ongoing court battle could stretch for months if not years.

Despite the outlook for potential lawsuits, state lawmakers appear adamant in pushing for stricter abortion laws this legislative session. Including Pody and Sexton's legislation, six bills to further restrict abortion have been filed this year.

Pody said Wednesday he introduced his bill after a Tennessee resident expressed concerns that fathers do not have a say over abortion under the current law. He said his bill would assure fathers' right to make a decision about an unborn child.

"I believe a father should have a right to say what's gonna be happening to that child," Pody said. "And if somebody is going to kill that child, he should be able to say, 'No, I don't want that child to be killed. I want to able to raise that child and love that child.'"

But the bill language has drawn criticism from abortion rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee and the state's Planned Parenthood chapter.

"This unconstitutional legislation demonstrates the condescending mindset underlying this bill: that men should control women’s bodies," ACLU of Tennessee Executive Director Hedy Weinberg said in a statement. "Women are not chattel and this bill needs to be stopped in its tracks."

 

Sure, let's give sperm donors legal authority over a woman's uterus. Let's see if we can give a wife or girlfriend veto power over a vasectomy while we're at it, right?

My God, what lunacy.  And yet, there's a very good chance that by July 2022, we'll be in a position where this will be law.

America Goes Viral, Con't

COVID-19 and the Trump Depression blew a hole in America's life expectancy numbers, with the average figure dropping the most since WWII. Which, coincidentally, was the last time America lost so many to preventable causes.

Life expectancy in the United States dropped a staggering one year during the first half of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic caused its first wave of deaths, health officials are reporting.

Minorities suffered the biggest impact, with Black Americans losing nearly three years and Hispanics, nearly two years, according to preliminary estimates Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.”

Other health experts say it shows the profound impact of COVID-19, not just on deaths directly due to infection but also from heart disease, cancer and other conditions.

“What is really quite striking in these numbers is that they only reflect the first half of the year ... I would expect that these numbers would only get worse,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a health equity researcher and dean at the University of California, San Francisco.

This is the first time the CDC has reported on life expectancy from early, partial records; more death certificates from that period may yet come in. It’s already known that 2020 was the deadliest year in U.S. history, with deaths topping 3 million for the first time.

Life expectancy is how long a baby born today can expect to live, on average. In the first half of last year, that was 77.8 years for Americans overall, down one year from 78.8 in 2019. For males it was 75.1 years and for females, 80.5 years.

As a group, Hispanics in the U.S. have had the most longevity and still do. Black people now lag white people by six years in life expectancy, reversing a trend that had been bringing their numbers closer since 1993.

Between 2019 and the first half of 2020, life expectancy decreased 2.7 years for Black people, to 72. It dropped 1.9 years for Hispanics, to 79.9, and 0.8 years for white people, to 78. The preliminary report did not analyze trends for Asian or Native Americans.

The disparity in health care outcomes for Black folk thanks to Trump and COVID was so bad, it literally knocked almost three years off our lives in six months. It's criminal what Trump did, and again, most of these horrific figures were entirely preventable if the Trump regime had taken COVID seriously.

Donald Trump made Black America suffer more than any Oval Office occupant in my lifetime, and yes, more than even Reagan. I will never forgive him for it.

StupidiNews!

• Right-wing radio icon Rush Limbaugh is dead at 70, from cancer. He's dead and gone, and good riddance.
• The first baby born after a successful uterus transplant has occurred in France, both mother and child are in good condition at a hospital in Paris.
• The White House is confirming the President Biden and Vice-President Harris both support a commission on slavery reparations for Black Americans, Republicans are firmly against it.
• Senate Democrats are pushing the Biden administration on canceling student debt for millions of Americans, the White House is considering the plan.
• NASA's Perseverance rover is expected to make planetfall on Thursday, touchdown is scheduled for 3:55 PM Eastern time and the mission is expected to greatly expand on the Curiosity rover.
  

Last Call For The Day That Hell Froze Over In Texas, Con't

Millions of Texans remain without power or water right now in freezing winter temperatures, and state officials have no idea when power will be restored. The main reason is because Texas Republicans simply do not care if residents die, because government in Republican states means it's you're problem, not the government's, so you need to get off your ass and fix it yourself.

By Tuesday morning, the residents of Colorado City, Tex., were getting anxious. More than 24 hours had passed since a deadly Arctic blast knocked out power across the state, leaving them without heat or electricity in below-freezing temperatures. To make matters worse, many also lacked running water, forcing them to haul in heavy buckets of snow each time they needed to flush their toilets.

Residents turned to a community Facebook group to ask whether the small town planned to open warming shelters, while others wondered if firefighters could do their job without water. But when Colorado City’s mayor chimed in, it was to deliver a less-than-comforting message: The local government had no responsibility to help out its citizens, and only the tough would survive.

“No one owes you [or] your family anything,” Tim Boyd wrote on Tuesday in a now-deleted Facebook post, according to KTXS and KTAB/KRBC. “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!”

Boyd’s tirade, which also demanded that “lazy” residents find their own ways of procuring water and electricity, immediately drew backlash. Later on Tuesday, Boyd announced his resignation and admitted that he could have “used better wording.”

The controversy highlighted how one of the worst winter storms in decades is testing the limits of the embrace of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism in Texas. The state’s decision to skirt federal oversight by operating its own power grid is one of the main reasons that close to 3.3 million residents in Texas still lacked electricity by early Wednesday morning, while outages in other hard-hit states had dwindled to less than one-tenth of that size. As of late Tuesday, grid operators still couldn’t predict when the lights might turn on, and advocates were warning that Texas’s poorest and most vulnerable residents were at risk of freezing to death. At least 10 deaths in Texas have been linked to the winter storm since Monday, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The failure to deliver basic services has angered countless Texans, including top-ranking elected officials. But in Colorado City, Boyd rejected the notion that municipal governments or utility companies had any obligation to provide paying customers with necessities like heat and running water during a catastrophic winter storm.

 

Hah. "Use better wording" my ass. Deep down, every single Republican believes this.  Government exists for them, and not you. When they use government, it's patriotism. When you use government, you're "lazy" and getting "handouts".

You know, like expecting power and water that you pay for.

Why aren't you providing your own power and water like the Founding Fathers? George Washington didn't whine about his internet being down. He had slaves providing everything he needed, you know.

Maybe you should try to get some of your own.

Oh wait, they basically are.

A Taxing Explanation, Con't

Newly revealed subpoenas for the Trump Organization criminal probe are pointing to serious tax issues with Trump's Seven Springs estate in New York, complete with Trump's usual fraud playbook of stiffing contractors on upkeep and property tax deferment and pocketing the difference as fraud.

 

Manhattan prosecutors conducting a criminal investigation into possible bank, tax and insurance fraud by former President Donald Trump and his company recently subpoenaed documents from an engineer who worked on an expansive property owned by the Trump family in Westchester County, north of New York City.

The engineer, Ralph Mastromonaco, told CBS News he recently received the subpoena and quickly complied, turning over maps of the 200-acre Seven Springs Estate and other documents he produced for the Trump Organization nearly a decade ago. The subpoena has not been previously reported and there is no indication that Mastromonaco is being investigated for wrongdoing.

Mastromonaco said his work included surveying Seven Springs as part of an effort by the Trump Organization to get approval for a subdivision in 2013, and that he doubts his work will prove relevant to the tax fraud investigation.

"I think they are just touching every base. I really had nothing to do with the project after (that). My role ended after they got an approval and whatever they did after that, I had nothing to do with," Mastromonaco said.

Mastromonaco's subpoena came weeks after Manhattan investigators sent another subpoena to the town clerk of Bedford, New York. Seven Springs straddles Bedford and two other affluent suburban towns, North Castle and New Castle. The grand jury subpoena, which was obtained by CBS News, requests documents related to Seven Springs valuations and tax assessments, tax appeals, and conservation easements.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance first began investigating Mr. Trump in 2018, and initially targeted hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. However, Vance's office has indicated in court filings that the investigation has since widened to look at possible crimes as wide-ranging as fraud and tax evasion.

 

Now it's entirely possible that this is just poor schlub who had the misfortune of doing a job for Donald Trump, but Trump also lies, cheats, and steals whenever he can, and yeah, if he goes away for felony tax fraud, I won't cry a single tear.

My guess would be there are a lot more people waiting in the wings in several states to serve Trump with papers, but the key is remembering that his violent cultists will absolutely attack anyone who does.

That's a concern for any DA's office, or any US Attorney's office.

The Return Of Romneybot

Mitt Romney has a plan to raise the minimum wag to...some...number above $7.25 an hour, but he'll be damned if anyone actually knows what the number would be.

As Democrats try to plot a way forward to raise the minimum wage to $15-an-hour, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, announced Tuesday that he's working on a separate bill to increase the long stagnant minimum wage while “ensuring businesses cannot hire illegal immigrants.”

Romney said he's working on the bill with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and it also includes a provision for the minimum wage to "increase automatically with inflation."

Increasing the minimum wage is a priority for the Biden administration, but Democrats have been split on the best path forward.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the head of the Senate Budget Committee and a longtime proponent of raising the minimum wage, is pushing for the measure to be included in the Covid-19 relief bill and passed through budget reconciliation, which would allow them to avoid the filibuster and pass the measure without any Republican support. Some Democrats are concerned the Senate rules might not allow the minimum wage hike to be used in reconciliation.

Romney said his bill would raise the minimum wage "gradually" but did not say to what amount or over what period of time.

"Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage in more than a decade, leaving many Americans behind. Our proposal gradually raises the minimum wage without costing jobs, setting it to increase automatically with inflation, and requires employers to verify the legal status of workers," Romney wrote in a pair of tweets about the proposed legislation.

The Democratic-controlled House Education and Labor Committee earlier this month approved a Covid-19 relief bill that includes a wage hike from $7.25 an hour to $15 over four years.

 

I love how Millionaire Mitt's plan is such a pittance that he can't even be bothered to reveal what he'd raise the minimum wage to, let alone give it a timeframe.  It's the Trump Health Care Plan™ all over again. Republicans never have details on their plans, only that they "will work better" than the ones out there, and then they spend years not actually implementing them.

Tom Cotton getting involved too lets me know this isn't a serious proposal at all, but it'll sure make the news. Mitt Romney may have voted to convict Trump, but he's still Mitt Romney, Republican jackass.

Last Call For Getting Schooled By Biden

Republicans are under the impression that now Biden and the Dems are in charge, that voters will blame the President and his party for failing to instantly fix COVID-19 school issues, when it was the Republican failure of the Trump regime that created the issue in the first place by refusing to take the pandemic seriously.

Distraught and exhausted parents are emerging as a new class of voters that could torment President Joe Biden — and the White House is moving quickly to head off the pain.

Nearing a year into the pandemic, Biden’s advisers and allies recognize that they need to respond to the spiraling angst felt by families or risk driving them into the arms of waiting Republicans.

It is a crucial test for Biden and Democrats as they try to consolidate their gains from the 2020 election. The pandemic has disrupted lives and exacerbated inequities and a raft of public and private surveys show clear political potholes and opportunities because of it. The coronavirus is spawning sweeping policy prescriptions from Democrats and Republicans alike, from billions in school reopening funds to the creation of a federal child allowance. And it’s prompting pollsters to loosely coin emerging voter demos like “women in chaos” and “families in crisis.”

Within the GOP, there is a belief that the pandemic and resulting turmoil make Biden and Democratic incumbents especially vulnerable among those demographics. Republicans see room to capitalize on the grim public health and economic situation the White House inherited from Donald Trump by trying to put Democrats on the defensive for being too removed from the pain or too slow-moving to address it.

GOP lawmakers, while offering no commitment to meaningfully engage on policy proposals, have responded to continued school closures by striking hard at Biden and Democrats, with more Republicans each week accusing the administration of scaling back their ambitious goals on everything from testing to school reopenings.

“The science says that the schools should open, but instead of listening to the science, the Biden administration is caving in to Democrat special interest groups,” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel told POLITICO. “As a result, the education of our children is suffering and hundreds of thousands of working moms are being forced out of the workforce.”

Republicans believe they’ve been aided in their attacks by mixed messaging from the administration on how and when schools should open. GOP officials have circulated several rounds of talking points on schools, with Senate, House and party leaders blasting out criticism on the issue in emails to constituents and the media on a near-daily basis.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday released long-awaited guidance on the matter, which offered step-by-step advice to reopen classrooms that health officials said was “grounded in science and the best available evidence.”

Republicans have attacked Biden’s school reopening goals as underwhelming, given that the White House has already dialed back expectations for the first 100 days. They are preparing to “hammer away” at the schools issue, including charging that Democrats have dragged their feet on reopenings to appease powerful school unions, according to an RNC official.

Even as more schools resume robust in-person schedules, the stress imposed on families by months of distance learning won’t soon fade.

“Their proposal buys into the myth from Big Labor that schools should stay shut a lot longer,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week of Biden’s “rescue” package.

White House aides and close allies acknowledge that getting kids back into classrooms is a thorny political challenge thanks to its visceral toll on families. But they insist they’re following the advice of scientists and health experts to keep children safe. They have framed their approach as part of a comprehensive, emergency effort to address several interrelated problems with necessary funding.

In interviews, they made the case that the president’s $1.9 trillion rescue package — which includes direct payments, funds for pandemic relief and money to safely reopen schools and fund local government — will be welcomed by voters because it will work.

“President Biden isn’t going to rest until students are back in school five days a week, and if Republicans agree, they should match their words with action and support the president’s Rescue Plan, which will get schools the resources they desperately need to reopen safely,” said Michael Gwin, a White House spokesperson.

 

The problem for the GOP is fourfold: they helped create the problem with schools in the first place, they haven't had a solution for a year, they are 100% against Biden's solution, and nobody believes they give a damn about moms out of work or kids in general. 

I have a very hard time believing that the party that says the economy is doing "too well" right now and that we can't afford stimulus checks to American families is going to pick up millions of voters between now and November 2022.

Well, unless Democrats manage to not pass COVID-19 relief.  Then that's a real possibility.

The Day Hell Froze Over In Texas

Decades of Republican misrule, refusal to spend on infrastructure, and a once-in-a-century winter storm exposed Texas's power grid for the unsustainable sham that it is, the only power grid not under federal jurisdiction, by the way, and as a direct result, as many as four million were left without power in the freezing cold on Monday into Tuesday.

Millions of Texans were without heat and electricity Monday as snow, ice and frigid temperatures caused a catastrophic failure of the state’s power grid.

The Texas power grid, powered largely by wind and natural gas, is relatively well equipped to handle the state’s hot and humid summers when demand for power soars. But unlike blistering summers, the severe winter weather delivered a crippling blow to power production, cutting supplies as the falling temperatures increased demand.

Natural gas shortages and frozen wind turbines were already curtailing power output when the Arctic blast began knocking generators offline early Monday morning.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which is responsible for scheduling power and ensuring the reliability of the electrical network, declared a statewide power generation shortfall emergency and asked electricity delivery companies to reduce load through controlled outages.

More than 4 million customers were without power in Texas, including 1.4 million in the Houston area, the worst power crisis in the state in a decade. The forced outages are expected to last at least through part of Tuesday, the state grid manager said.

CenterPoint Energy, the regulated utility that delivers electricity to Houston-area homes and provides natural gas service, started rolling blackouts in the Houston region at the order of state power regulators. It said customers experiencing outages should be prepared to be without power at least through Monday.

“How long is it going to be? I don’t know the answer,” said Kenny Mercado, executive vice president at the Houston utility. “The generators are doing everything they can to get back on. But their work takes time and I don’t know how long it will take. But for us to move forward, we have got to get generation back onto the grid. That is our primary need.”

Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations, said the rolling blackouts are taking more power offline for longer periods than ever before. An estimated 34,000 megawatts of power generation — more than a third of the system’s total generating capacity — had been knocked offline by the extreme winter weather amid soaring demand as residents crank up heating systems.

The U.S. Energy Department, in response to an ERCOT request, issued an order late Monday authorizing power plants throughout the state to run at maximum output levels, even if it results in exceeding pollution limits.

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants.

“The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” said Hirs. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.

 

Texas's power grid broke in the same fashion in 2011 during a February blizzard, and the state did nothing to prepare for the next time.  Well, the next time came this week, and it was a catatrophic power grid failure as a result.

 

Like most red states, Texas cut corporate taxes to attract businesses, but didn't have the money to fix basic infrastructure. Part of that tax scheme was ERCOT, the Texas power authority, that did everything it could to make the problem worse.

But the major issue was the state relying on natural gas for both heat and power in the winter, so much so that the demand so badly outstripped supply that it shut the state's power grid down completely. And let's not forget as climate change causes more weather extremes at both ends like record-breaking heat and cold, power demand will only increase.

 

Republicans are blaming "failed green energy" but the fact of the matter is it's gas, coal, and nuclear that failed in Texas. 

Main story continues to be the failure of thermal power plants -- natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants -- which ERCOT counts on to be there when needed. They've failed. Of about 70,000 MW of thermal plants in ERCOT, ~25-30,000 MW have been out since Sunday night. Huge problem.

— JesseJenkins (@JesseJenkins) February 16, 2021

 

Some 35-40% of Texas's total traditional power generation was knocked out by cold weather. Green energy isn't the problem, it's a power grid specifically designed to be as inefficient as possible because nobody wants to invest in power infrastructure, period.

The utter refusal of states to invest in infrastructure nationally is going to kill us.

The Seven With Spines, Con't

The Trumpists are coming for Mitt Romney now, demanding the Utah GOP censure him for his vote to convict Trump.

 

Some Utah Republicans are hoping to censure Sen. Mitt Romney for voting to convict former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. 

The motion, being circulated on social media, says Romney failed to “represent the average conservative Utah Republican voter” and “misrepresented himself as a Republican,” when he ran for office. 

The Utah Republican Party’s top leaders are not behind this effort. Instead, the party issued a statement Monday noting that both Romney and Sen. Mike Lee, who voted to acquit Trump, have faced criticism for their impeachment votes. “The differences between our own Utah Republicans showcase a diversity of thought, in contrast to the danger of a party fixated on ‘unanimity of thought.’ There is power in our differences as a political party, and we look forward to each senator explaining their votes to the people of Utah.” 

The draft censure of Romney includes a list of criticisms. It says Romney “embarrassed the State of Utah” when he was the only Republican senator to vote to convict Trump during his first impeachment trial. Romney had voted to remove Trump for abusing his power by pressuring Ukraine to launch an investigation into then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. 

The censure, pushed by party insiders, then attacks Romney for opposing the effort to declare Trump’s second impeachment trial unconstitutional since Trump was no longer in office, and for voting in favor of calling witnesses. It further excoriates Romney for joining six other Republicans to convict Trump on Saturday. It takes two-thirds of senators to remove a president, so Trump was acquitted. 

The censure motion concludes Romney used his “senatorial power and influence to undermine” Trump and claims “Romney appears to be an agent for the Establishment Deep State.” 

Evan McMullin, a former Republican who ran for president as an independent in 2016, said he was dumbfounded by the backlash against Romney from members of his own party. 

“Mitt has done more to defend the Constitution than any congressional Republican in modern history. He is serving the country and doing more to defend liberty than anyone else,” said McMullin. “We need to stand with him.” 

McMullin, a frequent critic of Trump during his time in office, said Romney’s courage should be celebrated, not condemned. 

“There is a tremendous need and opportunity for Utah to lead on this. There are plenty of good Republicans in Utah who are committed to the founding principles of our country, the very same kind of leadership Mitt is offering right now,” McMullin said. “This isn’t about Republicans, Democrats or independents. It’s about putting the country and Constitution first.” 

Utah GOP Chairman Derek Brown says he’s aware of the censure motion but has not seen it yet. 

“I’ve been saying the best censure occurs at the ballot box,” says Brown, a reference to 2024, when Romney would face reelection.

 

Evan McMullin, as all third-party spoilers should, can go intercourse himself with a rusty chainsaw. He's a major part of the reason we got Trump in the first place, along with Jill Stein. 

But the larger problem is that state GOP parties are declaring open season here on their own members, and while I don't expect things to get violent quite yet, we have to entertain the distinct possibility that somebody may try for Mitt, especially since he's in a red state, and would be replaced by a Republican by Gov. Spencer Cox. 

The Conserva-schism continues.