Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Let there be snark.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

No one could have predicted…

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

You are here: Home / Climate Change / How about that weather? / Holy Shirtballs, Texas…

Holy Shirtballs, Texas…

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I worried about school vacation week leading to further Covid-19 superspreader events, but I didn’t have a sufficiently evil imagination when it came to Ted Cruz:

One small (relatively) bright spot…

Reader Interactions

90Comments

  2. 2.

    Betty Cracker

    It’s easy to have schadenfreude for Texas. Until you realize it’s largely a state of BIPOC folks, gerrymandered out of representation, enduring a Republican regime.

    Hear, hear. The same is true of many failed shithole states, including mine.

  3. 3.

    debbie

    Apparently, El Paso TX’s grid is separate from the rest of the state and has fared far better. Good for them.

  5. 5.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    “joke’s on you suckers, we went with the cheap non-winterization package on all our valves and instrumentation to own the cons”

    I suspect that a lot of the savings went into certain pockets that converted them into boats that participated in Trump floatillas, along with the shiny $70K F350s  that pull them (and serve as commuter vehicles as well).

  7. 7.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    All schadenfreude is directed at the GOP politicians who run the state and any people who support them.  Not interested is seeing people using the innocent as human shields against deserved derision.

  8. 8.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @debbie:

    And he’s a former secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, too! Okay, probably the worst one (except for maybe whoever replaced him), but still.

  10. 10.

    OzarkHillbilly

    It’s looking like power plants in Texas unplugged to avoid skyrocketing natural gas spot market rates that went to hundreds of $$ to avoid losses. @ERCOT_ISO has now passed an emergency order allowing them to charge consumers those spot market prices. Capitalism at its finest.

    Good thing it wasn’t wind, can you imagine the skyrocketing spot market rates on a still west Texas day?

  13. 13.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud: “All” — really? I guess we read different internets then. Appropriately targeted schadenfreude isn’t the issue. Blunderbuss gloating — which totally exists — is.

  14. 14.

    John S.

    @Betty Cracker: Yup. After 35+ years of living in Florida, my wife (and I)  may have had enough. The bubble of South Florida is no longer sufficient to keep out the creeping doom that is a state run by Republicans.

  16. 16.

    OzarkHillbilly

    I think it safe to say that Perry’s political career is dead in the water and the pumps are failing.

  17. 17.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    As with Rush’s passing, there will be some people who say that any schadenfreude is inappropriate.  I’m not sure how you police it.  The Texas GOP has done a lot of harm to people in other states, especially after natural disasters.  Even up top, you have Abbot talking shit about Minneapolis. 

    But I’ll admit, my internets is relatively free of extreme rhetoric.

  22. 22.

    Anya

    It’s easy to have schadenfreude for Texas. Until you realize it’s largely a state of BIPOC folks, gerrymandered out of representation, enduring a Republican regime.

    No schadenfreude from me and I have a huge sympathy for anyone stuck in toxic culture war politics as a governing philosophy but the claim above is isn’t entirely true. You can’t gerrymander state wide elections. Greg Abbott won by 55.8% and there is a huge chance he’ll win again.

    I won’t pretend I know about Texas politics more than I read on some articles here and there but one thing I see is Texas more than any other state in the country is the weird jock culture. The obsessive belief in concepts of rugged individualism, the bride and absolute belief in “everything is bigger in Texas” (not even true but WTF cares anyway), and gun obsession are more damaging than gerrymandering. One can argue they lead to gerrymandering. It’s like Texas as a state is stuck in high school. I will never understand why a whole state adapted this destructive culture and embraced toxic masculinity as a defining cultural value.

  24. 24.

    John S.

    @Baud: My wife’s cutting remark yesterday was that the reason for all this cold weather is that with Rush Limbaugh dead, there has been a huge reduction in hot air.

    Science teacher jokes can be funny!

  26. 26.

    marklar

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Do you know why the trees bend
    At the west Texas border?
    Do you know why they bend
    Sway and twine?
    The trees bend because of the wind
    Across that lonesome border
    The trees bend because of the wind
    Almost all the time.  – Joe Ely

  29. 29.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud: It’s really not that hard to slam the people who deserve to be slammed without sliming the innocent too. Asking people to be more precise in their condemnation isn’t anything like using the innocent as “human shields” to spare the guilty, and it’s not analogous to the Limbaugh situation, unless maybe someone used his demise to express the hope that all radio hosts die of cancer or something.

  31. 31.

    Delk

    Somebody working at that Cancun resort has family living in Texas. Shame if Ted’s trip was spoiled with painful, explosive diarrhea.

  32. 32.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    Limbaugh presumably has a family that is sad at his passing. Perhaps some of them are innocent.  I would not expect anyone to hold back out of concerns for their feelings.  Same here.

    I’m all for greater precision, but I don’t mind using “Texas” to refer to the state’s longstanding Republican leadership.

  34. 34.

    satby

    @rikyrah: Good morning!

    Eh, Texas. Longest year of my life was the month I had to spend working in Dallas. While people queried me constantly about how I could even want to go back to my hometown (subtext: with its crime and those people) instead of move there. I’m sure nice people live there, just never met any.

  35. 35.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    The Daily Show has clips of Conservative Pundits denouncing AOC and Windmills for failing Conservatism and just by the bored tones in their voice as they are saying it, even the Right knows they are full of it and it’s getting old. That might be why they love Trump so much, Trump is so messed up in the head he believes the BS he says and so says it with conviction.

  36. 36.

    Baud

    For the record, I support Biden’s giving Texas all the assistance they need and would oppose him acting in. Trump like fashion with respect to offering help.

  37. 37.

    WayneL140

    It’s cold down here! I live in College Station, and this has been a difficult week. My 84 year old mother lives outside of town and has not had water since Saturday when she had to drain her pipes. Her electricity has been off and on all week. And she can’t go anywhere because our roads are a skating rink from days of freezing rain. I lived for years in Mass, and this is way, way worse than any nor’easter. We are not equipped for it.

    Yes, we have incredibly ignorant (and evil) politicians who cannot imagine their radical policies have failed. Must have been our liberal fault. When two out of three voters are GOP-Q, we are doomed. Nothing is going to change. Fuck Ted Cruz. He is the face of the entire Republican Party.

  38. 38.

    Ken

    I don’t know why people are surprised that electricity rates are going way up. It’s basic capitalism that when supply drops, prices rise, so obviously the electric company has to charge you a huge amount if they’re not delivering anything at all.

    (Sorry, just prepping for a career as a political pundit.)

  39. 39.

    Quinerly

    @debbie: Southern New Mexico is on that grid. I’m hearing from acquaintances there that they are fine. We used to have a commenter here in the AM from Las Cruces, NM. Haven’t seen him in awhile.

  40. 40.

    Ken

    @Baud: Oh, definitely, but if they can find a way to stencil “Compliments of the Biden Administration” on every generator and water bottle I wouldn’t object.

  42. 42.

    Ken

    @Baud: Limbaugh presumably has a family that is sad at his passing.

    Three, wasn’t it?  Or more? I think one of the people on that meme (“Twelve wives, nine draft deferments, fourteen bankruptcies…”) had four wives.

  43. 43.

    Marmot

    @Baud:  I’m all for greater precision, but I don’t mind using “Texas” to refer to the state’s longstanding Republican leadership.

    But you see, many, many of us Texans just see you being lazy or cruel or stupid when you do that.

  45. 45.

    Ramalama

    I hope Texans get help asap. I also hope the Feds just charge the free marketeers of a local government with something along the lines of regulations so that it doesn’t happen again? I mean if Texas were a failed state the IMF would offer relief in exchange for TERMS.

  46. 46.

    Marmot

    @Salty Sam:

    @Anya: It’s like Texas as a state is stuck in high school

    Damn! You nailed it!

    Because you two can’t tell the difference between TeeVee stereotypes from the ‘50s and real life?

  47. 47.

    trnc

    @Baud: ​
     

    For the record, I support Biden’s giving Texas all the assistance they need and would oppose him acting in. Trump like fashion with respect to offering help.

    Completely agree, but as the stuck on stupid years go by, I become more irritated. Continuing to have no state income tax and then looking to the feds to fix every budget shortage gets old, especially when some of those shortages are non-emergency related.

  48. 48.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud: I don’t think the Limbaugh family analogy holds up either because the issue here is attacking the innocent and the guilty alike because you can’t be bothered to be precise, which isn’t the same thing as disregarding an innocent party’s sorrow over an attack on a guilty party. If a Texan objects to attacks on Texas Republicans, that’s not the same issue.

    Anyhoo, my point is it’s illogical and counterproductive to substitute “Texas” or “Florida” (or whatever failed state is currently being criticized) when you mean “Texas Republicans” or “Florida Republicans.” It erases non-Republicans in both places, and it probably doesn’t help voter outreach efforts either. I’ve done it myself, but I’m trying to do better.

  49. 49.

    Ken

    I don’t suppose there’s an obscure law that would require both of a state’s Senators to sign off before release of Federal funds?  It would be nice to see Cruz’s vacation cut short.

  50. 50.

    Salty Sam

    @Marmot: I’m not quite sure what you mean by the 50’s TV reference, but as a lifelong Texan, I was only commenting that @Anya’s description of Texan Bro’ Culture is a thing I’ve noticed my entire adult life, and frequently despaired of.  I’ve lost friends to it because I wouldn’t join them in worship of GW Bush and his misbegotten war, general conservative principles, etc.

    Yep, she NAILED it.   But that’s just MY opinion, ymmv.

  52. 52.

    Baud

    @Marmot:

    That’s fine.  We should never speak critically of “Democrats” again then. Instead we should always name the specific Democrats that are a problem. I can live with that rule.

  53. 53.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker: See my comment above about “Democrats.” If we’re going to eliminate all collective nouns from our vocabulary because of imprecision, then we should be consistent.

  54. 54.

    Amir Khalid

    54th!

    This kind of incompetence in government would, in a normal place, cost you the next election. So my question is, just how normal is Texas?​​

  55. 55.

    Geminid

    @Betty Cracker: Joe Biden lost Texas to trump 46.5% to 52.1%. One could say this 5.6% margin was not especially close. Another way of looking at the matter, though, would be to say that for every 9 Texans voting Republican, there were 8 Texans voting Democratic. And if only one out of 15 Republican voters had flipped, Biden would have won by a narrow margin.

  56. 56.

    Baud

    I mean, how many people here said they were ashamed for the United States when Trump was president, even though everyone here actively opposed his election. We consistently used geographic names to refer to political entities.

  58. 58.

    Marmot

    Dude, that’s how Texas has been portrayed on television since forever. Don’t act ignorant.

    I have worked hard to get Dems elected here, with good people, and I can’t abide some lazy confirmation bias on her part or yours.

    Bummer about your personal experiences. I have not lived in those places, but I know them. It’s about time we all grasped that our national problem is with rural voters.

  59. 59.

    Ken

    @debbie: El Paso and New Mexico are part of the Western Interconnection. BTW the first map on that page is easy to misread – the heavy black borders mark the interconnects, not the colors. The Texas interconnect is the blue blob.

    I was going to make a joke about El Paso being able to draw on Hoover Dam (“Provides Hydro power to every city”), but I’m not sure how many Civ2 players are still out there.

  60. 60.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud: Saw it and found it as unpersuasive as your previous arguments on why broadly directed schadenfreude is A-OK. Also can’t help but recall that when someone criticizes “Democrats” as a collective entity, you’re the first person to object.

  62. 62.

    kindness

    It was nice to end on saving the turtles. I’m a little burnt out on Texas politicians right now.

  63. 63.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    So you admit criticizing “Democrats” is always wrong? How about “progressives” and “conservatives”?  Should we always only speak of specific individuals when we criticize? I’m happy to have that discussion, as long as we apply the rules consistently.

  64. 64.

    debbie

    @Ken:

    Wiki makes it sound like it’s part of the national grid, which is good. Proof that Abbot, Perry, and whoever else made a very bad choice. I know Texans have great memories and strong senses of vengeance, so this will be fun to watch.

  65. 65.

    Woodrow/asim

    @Anya: You can’t gerrymander state wide elections.

    I read “gerrymander” as shorthand for a host of issues with voting in Texas, as well as other states.

  66. 66.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Delk:

    Shame if Ted’s trip was spoiled with painful, explosive diarrhea. 

    You wanna send me a new sarcasm detector?  Mine just exploded. :)

  67. 67.

    Low Key Swagger

    @Baud: Not an English major and certainly not a pendant (something I can find a bit irritating, especially in these days of autocorrect, phone typing, etc) but wouldn’t a simple solution be to insert a qualifier in there…such as “some” Democrats, “some Texans and the like?  We can get so bogged down in here sometimes.

  68. 68.

    Salty Sam

    @Marmot:  Dude, I don’t have any argument about your lived experiences in Texas, but don’t try to blow smoke up MY ass about it.  I’ve lived in some of the reddest parts of the state, worked in jobs where every other person I was working alongside exhibited the same toxic masculinity and retrograde politics that Anya described. As much as I despise their culture, these are people I have to live and work with, even as they disparage me and my beliefs.

    I appreciate your hard work to get Dems elected in Texas-  you and i are working towards the same goal.  But just because you haven’t lived the same sort of experience in Texas that *i* have doesn’t mean that my experience doesn’t count.  I used the well known acronym, but for clarity, I’ll repeat the full phrase- Your Mileage May Vary.

  69. 69.

    WereBear

    @Marmot:

    It’s about time we all grasped that our national problem is with rural voters.

     
    Yes. This. Are there any Republican cities? Worthy of the name?

    And in part, I do blame the rurals, themselves. I am from them, I grew up around that mindset, and it still is embedded in relatives I am distant from.

    They have always had a problem gracefully yielding to change, of any kind. They have deep, unacknowledged, prejudices. And that ancient defensiveness of “we don’t need no fill-in-the-blank cultural and technological advances” are as stubborn as their hypocrisies about it.

    They all have a smart phone and microwave and want to go to the doctor when they are sick. Book-learnin’ is just fine when they need a dentist or CPA.

    They painted themselves in this corner.

  70. 70.

    Baud

    @Low Key Swagger:

    There are a lot of options when it comes to language.  For me, when elected officials in Texas, who have been all Republicans for a long time, have invited derision because of their past behavior toward others, it does not cross to rhetorical line to refer to them collectively as “Texas,” even though a large number of individual Texans are innocent, and even those who are not-innocent should be assisted in this disaster.

    Elected officials do and say things in the names of the people they represent.  Like when Bush tortured people, we can say that the United States tortured people, even though millions of us opposed it.

    And if I’m not clear, anyone who refers to “Texas” in the context of saying that Texans should suffer should be condemned.  I’m interested in defeating bad actors, not in causing or taking joy in anyone’s individual suffering.

  74. 74.

    Low Key Swagger

    Matthew Dowd on MSNBC:  “Blaming the Green New Deal for the crisis in Texas is like a restaurant owner, upon learning all of his customers suffered food poisoning, blames the fact that the menu is printed on recycled paper.”

  75. 75.

    docNC

    I don’t feel bad for Texans.  They voted for this.  Elections have consequences, right?  When you have state-wide crappy governance, you have to change it, or, well, this.  If you just moved there, you likely didn’t read the fine print past “no state income taxes!, low gas tax! Low electricity rates!”

    But, let’s make sure the COVID relief package helps the shitily-run red Taker States too.

  77. 77.

    A Ghost to Most

    Texass and Floriduh are prime examples of what happens when selfish assholes are free to privatize the profit and socialize the risk.

  81. 81.

    Edmund Dantes

    @Low Key Swagger: this only works if the idea was to consider recycled paper but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Green New Deal doesn’t exist.

    Also, the whole windmills thing was actually a part of the “free market” working. No government Texas regulation forced them to be put up. They are just one of the cheapest to get going so when prices spike and your allowed to charge usury rates more money in your pocket cause your power generation variable cost doesn’t change like Gas or Coal plants that need a supply of gas/coal to burn

  82. 82.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud: I actually DO object (with tiresome frequency!) when people heap derisions on “progressives” when they really mean Chapo Trap House-type jerks. Yesterday I took issue when a fellow commenter here blasted “Democrats” as weaklings who wouldn’t fight back.

    So yeah, I guess do object to broad-based negative and inaccurate characterizations of a large group when the description doesn’t apply to a significant portion of said group, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the same thing as insisting that “we always only speak of specific individuals” when offering a critique.

    Especially in the case of schadenfreude about a disaster that is killing people, it doesn’t cost anything to qualify a collective noun for greater accuracy, and if you know (or should know) that broad-based gloating could be hurtful to or misleading about lots of innocent bystanders, why wouldn’t you?

  85. 85.

    glory b

    @Baud: I was reading Tom Nichols twitter thread on this, he said it is appropriate to mourn for the evil he did, and a discussion of it is appropriate, without gloating over his death.

    Don’t forget, Texas brought the lawsuit seeking to overturn the votes of people in the urban areas of my state, Pennsylvania. It was a lesson in standing 101, for all of the folks curious about legal procedure.

    Short version, standing=you don’t have a dog in this fight.

  86. 86.

    Geminid

    @Quinerly: Another commenter had just moved to El Paso a year ago. I hope she is doing OK in her new home. Her Congresswoman, Veronica Escobar, is one of the talented Representatives in the Democratic class of ’18.

  87. 87.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Baud: @Betty Cracker:​Let me put forth (for the first[!] time anywhere AFAIK) the notion that those of us not $$$fortune$$ate enough to be bazillionaires have only four basic roles in this society:

    1. Human shields. Mainly folks who work in Customer Support for those enterprises the bazillionaire owners are greedily sucking the $$$ out of by denying services that people have paid good money for. You can’t get to those mofos because they put overworked & underpaid people between you & them to absorb all the fury.
    2. Hostages. These constitute the workforce of the megacorps, i.e., all those who do the actual work rather than sit on their duffs in big offices collecting big compensation. In the rare instance a political jurisdiction gets around to trying to charge a megacorp the actual cost its local facility imposes on the citizenry, they reply airily, Oh, if you actually try to make us pay up, we’ll just move the facility somewhere that won’t, and you can pay the costs for all our former employess that now have no jobs.
    3. Cannon fodder.For our youth, the future of our society: Want to go to college but lacking either family bigbucks or the brilliance/notoriety/luck to snag a free-ride scholarship? Join the Armed Forces, travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them if they don’t kill you first. And if you come back without PTSD or more drastic injuries, you might make it through community college before the funds run out…
    4. Cash cows. IOW, the rest of us. Fine print in contracts, obscure statutes we fall afoul of, baked-in conditions that ensure we pay through the nose for things/services we might not even want or need so that whoever owns the corps that make/perform them get a nice ROI without muss or fuss. They grab us by the ankles, turn us upside down, shake hard, then collect the scattered lucre before we can pick ourselves up from the ground.**

    The chemical formula HHCC or H2C2 being that of acetylene, I have taken to calling this the Acetylene Proviso.

    (You’re very welcome!)

    ​​** FTR I stole this visual from an editorial cartoon by “KAL” in the Baltimore Sun many years ago, describing the “Flexible Inverted Ratio” method of military contracting charges…​

    And I do so loathe having to edit these posts againg&again&again to fix the formatting that Text View has fucked up on the last go-’round…​

  88. 88.

    Martin

    It’s looking like power plants in Texas unplugged to avoid skyrocketing natural gas spot market rates that went to hundreds of $$ to avoid losses.

    Boy, if only there were some lesson that Texas could have learned from California from, I dunno, 2000 that would have helped them recognize that an unregulated spot energy market up against an inelastic demand (if I don’t turn on the heat my family will die) results in prices that approach infinity.

  89. 89.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ken:

    It’s basic capitalism that when supply drops, prices rise, so obviously the electric company has to charge you a huge amount if they’re not delivering anything at all.

    Except for the price of labor. Supply and demand rules do not apply to labor, because mumble “why do you hate America?”

  90. 90.

    Chris T.

    @OzarkHillbilly: [quoting someone else, I think] It’s looking like power plants in Texas unplugged to avoid skyrocketing natural gas spot market rates that went to hundreds of $$ to avoid losses.

    This probably isn’t the case: some stuff I followed last night suggested that the “spark spread”, i.e., the profit you make by igniting the natgas in your power-plant and selling the resulting electricity, was huge despite the high gas price.

    There could well be other (related) problems, such as credit limits: one buys the gas on credit, sells the electric generation, and uses the money from the generation to pay the gas bill, keeping whatever is left over. When the gas is $50 per unit and you need a million units, that means you need a 50 million dollar line of credit (on which, after the spark spread, you net 10 million by selling for 60 million). Now the gas price jumps 10x and you need $500 million credit. Sure, you’ll sell the electricity for $2000 million and make $1500 million … but you don’t have that kind of credit, so you can’t buy the gas. (Insert sobbing and wailing at the lost profit opportunity here.)

    There are all kinds of issues with these sorts of loosely-regulated or unregulated markets, and times like these expose the flaws, the lines of cleavage where pressure breaks the system and someone can make billions. (The electricity market is a many-multi-billion-dollar market: biggest on the planet!  Bigger than oil, but with more players, so fewer dollars per player.) Look for TX to experience CA-style problems a few years down the line.

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