Sick of hearing how "frozen windmills" (which even Gov. Abbott said only comprised 10% of Texas's power grid) supposedly left good Texans out in the cold? Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, reminds us that deregulation left the Texas power grid vulnerable to winter storms, and that's not just about Texas refusing to join the federal power grid that could have enabled them to get free excess power from California this month -- it's about letting power utilities do whatever made them the most money, rather than whatever made the power grid the most reliable, as federal regulation mandated before the early '90s. Trigger alert: the woman with the $450 electric bill for one day's power who paid only $33 for the entire month of February last year.
It's tempting to watch the Arizona Republican Party's machinations in the wake of Mr. Trump's election loss and conclude that the party is dead, but remember that if Democrats do nothing over the next two years, a bet no one's ever lost their shirt taking, then even a rabid raccoon can become Arizona's Governor or beat Sen. Kelly in 2022. How would that work? The same way it always does: the crazy people get behind their nominee, and then the party regulars, sensing victory, "hold their noses" and tell themselves they can control the crazy people, a stratagem that has historically led to very little soul-searching among its practitioners.
In a related note, we can also make too much of reports like these, describing the thousands who've left the Republican Party after the January 6 attempted coup, and not just because "5,000 voters leaving the party" happens in the context of over 480,000 registered Republicans (and about twice as many independents, at least some of whom lean right) in Connecticut as of late October. You could argue that January 6 was probably the last straw for a lot of these folks -- or you could argue that folks may formally abandon a party and still not abandon it in their hearts, and that the next big election is almost two years away, and that's plenty of time for easily-imaginable circumstances (like, again, a do-nothing Democratic government) to bring them back.
How the mighty fall: Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D?-NY), lionized with such titles as "America's Boyfriend" for his performance as the anti-Trump during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, now finds himself more of a pariah after getting caught covering up COVID-related deaths at nursing homes. Our "liberal" media may have trouble understanding how this could have happened, but I suspect most real liberals don't; should we pretend to care about Mr. Cuomo's fall as a sort of rope-a-dope game for the American right? I kid, of course -- I'm a terrible liar, and why not just primary him out in 2022? No actors need apply.
Finally, you've heard that Ted Cruz is the Senator other Senators love to hate? Well, you have to wonder if his wife's friends view her similarly, after one of them in a group chat leaked her texts concerning their now-infamous Cancún trip to the New York Times. Yikes, Mrs. Cruz actually said their house was "FREEZING" (caps in original), and I bet millions of good Texans would have used more than all-caps to tell you how they felt! Of course, most good Texans also can't simply slip off in the middle of a pandemic to some $300-a-night hotel room south of the border when things get tough.
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