I get it now. Ted and Heidi Cruz wanted their children to be safe, to have basic sanitary services like heat and running water, to leave behind a third-world apocalyptic nightmare for a safer place. Like so many parents before them, they decided to cross the Mexican border.
— Julie Roginsky (@julieroginsky) February 19, 2021
To the surprise of no one (including, probably, Ted Cruz), his kids’ schoolmates’ parents don’t like him, either…
Cruz family's Cancun trip rattles their elite private school
Parents demand enforcement of quarantine rules that will keep the senator’s children out of class. https://t.co/PrngXdYcpB
— Jon Cooper ???? (@joncoopertweets) February 20, 2021
Late-night hosts, TV pundits slam Cruz for taking "the world’s shortest spring break" to Cancun https://t.co/Q3ZZJNEQRM
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 19, 2021
… “One poor Texan,” Trevor Noah noted during his monologue on Thursday, “had to travel 800 miles just to get heat, water and electricity.”…
“I’m not even mad that you were selfish,” Noah said, addressing the senator directly. “I’m mad that you were so stupid. How can you be in politics for 10 years and still have no idea how bad this would make you look?”…
Do you know why we can fly a helicopter on Mars, but can’t turn on a light in Texas?
Because scientists are in charge of Mars, and Republicans are in charge of Texas
— Sylvester Tweetycat (@STweetycat) February 19, 2021
Open Thread: It Be Raining Plane Parts In My Hood
patrick II
I remember a video of Cruz during his primary run for President of him trying to embrace his daughter and the daughter avoiding him. So, he may not have a great relationship with one of them, so when they suggest that they leave town and head for warmer climes, he may have acted like a father desperate to have a better relationship with his daughter(s), saw a chance to please her, and spend a nice few days with her. I can understand why he might impulsively say yes against his better judgment.
I might feel a little bad for him, but it’s Ted Cruz.
Ruckus
It’s fucking little teddy cruz. What else is there to say?
Has he ever, as in all of his miserable, shitty life ever done anything even reasonably close to right, decent and proper? One thing, one event, big or small? I’m not holding my breath waiting for an answer.
Thing is, he’s not all that unusual in his political circle of douchebags deluxe. Is he more insufferable than any of his cohorts? Or just one among many?
smike
Woo-hoo!
Frist in the coveted 2nd spot.
Well, shucks…
piratedan
while I enjoy this well deserved dunking of Senator Cruz, I don’t want to allow it to distract us from these other more noteworthy (imho) events..
Geoduck
Cruz did a photo-op where he handed out a couple of bundles of bottled water, and posted it on Twitter. Unsurprisingly, he’s getting savaged in the replies.
rikyrah
It’s just GQP governance from top to bottom
lgerard
This is the moment when “a taco truck on very corner” would have paid off.
Debbie (Aussie)
Can someone explain to me how people are being charged thousands of dollars for not having any electricity. I’m sorry I can’t remember where I saw it. The customers were part of a group that were ‘floating’ their kw/h $.
Texas is really fucked up. Any chance this might change things at a state or local level?
Halteclere
@Debbie (Aussie): Some electrical plans are tied directly to the wholesale cost of electricity at the moment of usage. When there were few generating plants available for operation, the market costs for electricity soared
These people then got walloped when they’d have a couple hours of power and try to heat up their houses.
patrick II
@Halteclere:
One might call it price gouging. In some places there are laws against that.
Ruckus
@Debbie (Aussie):
I’d say highly unlikely. They have no incentive to change, any more than little teddy does. And they need incentive to change because they are not going to recognize any reason on their own. They make money off of it and that is the total sum of their give a damn. Even if they could actually make more. There is a reason TX is screwed up, it benefits someone, somehow in charge of something. Here is the info on the national grids operating in the US.
Martin
@Debbie (Aussie): There’s a service called Griddy that lets you buy power at wholesale + small % rates. They don’t have consumer price caps because Texas permits that kind of thing.
So when natural gas prices jumped from $2/thousand cubic feet to $1000, consumers got their power. It’s also why some power producers turned the generators off. And that didn’t just affect Texas but other states as well. The difference was that other grids could rely on production from other sources and from multiple states away.
Not many consumers faced those bills. Most are on regulated utilities. And Griddy told them to switch providers immediately when they saw the price spike coming, but there was a freeze on provider switching, so they were stuck.
Martin
@patrick II: If the prices were set by a market, then it’s not price gouging. It’s just bad regulation.
Halteclere
@patrick II: True, but this is state government-sanctioned price gouging.
opiejeanne
@Martin: I understood that there was no regulation.
HumboldtBlue
This child’s energy combined with daddy hype man could power Texas for a year.
JAFD
Ao I am now forced to do by the Ministry of Un-Wokeness and Cultural De-Appropriation (AKA Ms. Bari Weiss’ latest punditry), I confess that I once had this ‘rap’ as my answering machine tape message (Those of you who know nought of ‘answering machine tape messages’ can attend my consciounness-lowernig seminar, “Love a History Major – It Will Be A Date to Remember”).
Four-seven-one-seven-eleven-zip
That is the number you called,
now let me give you a tip.
‘Cause I ain’t at home
like you thought I might be,
So when you hear the tone,
leave a message for me.
Let me know what you’re thinking
and what’s goin’ on,
And I’ll get back to you.
when I stop bein’ gone.
So give me your number,
in the digits of ten.
(not binary, please)
Speak loud and clear,
then repeat it again.
‘Cause you gotta let me know,
how to get back to you.
Speak up now,
’cause my rap is through
(I’ll let myself out)
(Sorry. The line spacing got weird. FYWP)
Halteclere
@Ruckus: the only way this would ever change would be if there was a political change. There is no one who can be sued for this, to pressure change. Only the state politicians can be pressured by voting in somone who would fix this.
Governor Abbot is making noises about requiring winterization on the state power generators, but only to politically protect himself.
Martin
@Debbie (Aussie): Maybe. Not by choice or out of a sense of good governance, mind you. But the insurance cost of repairing what will probably be hundreds of thousands of homes with burst pipes is going to run into the hundreds of billions. Safe to say the insurance companies are going to sue the everloving fuck out of every power and gas company that has ever even heard of ERCOT, and I’d be willing a ton of them pull out of the state entirely until they’re convinced this will never happen again.
The feds could also put legislation in place like we have for wildfires where the full cost of the fire is carried by parties that were responsible. In the case of the gender reveal party that started a fire, I think the cost get shared by everyone who attended. That’s why PG&E is basically ruined – their liability for a number of these fires is vastly more than they can pay. You don’t have to have intended to pay, but if its deemed to be negligence (PG&E not maintaining their equipment) then they get the bill.
Do the same here. Stick the power companies with the liability for property damage if they were negligent. At the very least it makes the natural gas bill worth paying, rather than shutting generation down and killing people.
Martin
@opiejeanne: There was some. And some of it was ultimately counterproductive. Having consumer price caps but no mechanism to limit wholesale natural gas prices meant that utilities were limited in how much they could charge consumers for gas that was astronomically expensive. Other questions will come up why there wasn’t more storage of gas so that they could avoid at least some of the spot pricing,
It’s a little tricky to get right – even CA who normally puts a lot of regulatory energy into things fucked this up two decades ago in almost exactly the same way. Not giving Texas a pass on this, rather you need a lot of different circuit breakers to prevent these kinds of problems. And we’ll have to see what the investigations show for why the spot prices for natural gas shot up so high.
Halteclere
@Martin: The hard part will be finding the power generator companies responsible and negligent. They will all claim they are working within the appropriate requirements, and this storm was a force majeure event.
And ERCOT will claim to just be an overseer of the Texas grid, and that they have limited power to control the power generators.
Ruckus
@Halteclere:
Exactly.
And I doubt that Abbot has the stones to stand up to his party in any meaningful way.
Fair Economist
@Halteclere: I think the natural gas market manipulations are at least as much of a problem as the electricity manipulations. Griddy’s story essentially claims the gas prices drove the electrical prices. Obviously when the spot price of natgas is 500 times the normal contracted price a company makes a fortune if it can shut down 90% of its production but sell the remaining sliver on spot as an “emergency allocation”. That’s still 50 times the normal income!
It will be interesting to find out who made the billions from the wild prices increases.
Halteclere
@Ruckus: Abbot is a zebra embedded in a herd of zebras. He’s never going to do something that makes him stand out from the standard Republican orthodoxy. He doesn’t appear to be a believer in the loony ideas of the party, but he has no problem giving the right signals to those groups.
No, no real change will ever come from an Abbot-led Texas.
HumboldtBlue
Follow Snowflake
Steeplejack
Explainer on Texas power outage.
cmorenc
Back in 2016 when the race for the GOP nomination was effectively narrowing down to Trump vs Cruz, I recall vacillating with dread about which was the more noxiously dangerous as a potential President, and calming myself by thinking it unlikely we’d ever have to suffer the experience of either one of them becoming President.
Halteclere
@Steeplejack: That is some good insight.
I’d like to see a similar discussion on why it takes months to bring a grid back up if one were allowed to fail. I’m aware of the challenges of building up a network of generators and users so that user loads don’t overtax the connected generator capabilities, and the challenges of ensuring the generators are in synch when they come online. So one generator has to be the first to come online, right? And then all other generators synchronize to that one. But what are the other issues?
Starfish
@piratedan: You are right. There have been a lot of people making comments like that first tweet here, and these people are telling us that they are not great.
By comparing Texas to other countries, we are disparaging other countries AND not reckoning with the mess that we have allowed politicians to make of this country.
Starfish
@piratedan: How did the churches and grocery stores respond?
There are churches that have ministries for disasters and respond to them. A number of the largest grocers have an emergency operations center and respond to disasters by bringing in supplies for disasters early. What people buy during events like hurricane preparation is predictable.
mrmoshpotato
“Why is my smarmy, shitpile ass being persecuted?”
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue:
TS (the original)
@Martin:
And were people using Griddy in the first place because it was cheap? or do they just live in an area it services?
Geminid
@Halteclere: Abbot is typical of Republican politicians. He has gone along with the tea party/”populist” wave that has overwhelmed the Chamber of Commerce/tradionals who used to call the shots in the Republican party. These radical activists can swing disproportionate weight in primaries and dominate party institutions, like the state chairmanship now held by carpetbagging Alan West.
Enough actual voters have gone along for the party to win statewide, but by shrinking margins. In 2012 President Obama lost Texas by 16 points; last year Joe Biden lost by 5.6%. Many people despair of Texas ever electing a Democrat for statewide office, but this disaster will shake Texans’ faith in the party that has dominated the state for three decades.
Even if most Republican voters stay loyal, a shift of a small minority can swing next year’s elections. The 5.6% by which Biden lost Texas could be seen as a comfortable margin for Republicans. But looking at the matter another way, for every nine Republican voters there were eight Democratic voters, and a swing of 1 out of 15 Republican voters would have given Biden a narrow victory.
Beto O’Rourke should strike while the iron is hot, and announce for Governor by summer. Texans will still be shaken by this disaster. And Democrats should field a strong group of legislative candidates. There are limits to gerrymandering in the face of demographic change and political shifts. Virginia showed this in recent years, when the Democrats in the House of Delegates went from a 35-65 minority going into the 2017 elections to a 55-45 majority coming out of 2019, on a Republican-drawn map.
snoey
@TS (the original): Optional service provider. Wholesale price directly to you no markup plus a 10 dollar a month overhead charge. Pretty good deal until it isn’t.
evap
@Geminid: The limits to gerrymandering is a key point. Gerrymandering works by making many districts just barely GOP (or whatever party is gerrymandering), so that a small shift towards the other party can cause many districts to shift. This is starting to happen in Georgia to some extent. Let’s hope it happens in Texas as well.
Geminid
@evap: Gerrymandering also tends to give Republican conservatives unfounded confidence that leads to overreach. Demographic changes account for some of recent Virginia Democratic success, but the rightward lurch of the Republican party left many conservative-leaning moderates behind. Especially independents.
BellyCat
@Geminid: Excellent points about how easily the electorate could shift.
Salty Sam
I used to work in Facilities Management for the largest grocery retailer in Texas, HEB. Back in the early aughts, our department helped set up a mobile disaster response unit- five or six semi-trailers that provides communications (satellite uplink), food/water, medical facilities/mobile pharmacy, and mobile banking (people need access to cash in an emergency!). It is a world-class operation, and has been deployed many times across Texas, for hurricanes, floods, the great Bastrop wildfire, etc.
There’s not much they could do when the ENTIRE STATE was down.
debbie
@Geoduck:
Wonderful! Just make it worse, Teddy, just dig that hole deeper!
debbie
@Steeplejack:
Thank you for this, but I don’t give a shit if the benefit is less than the cost. It’s their fucking job to keep the power going. Period.
karen marie
@patrick II: Oh, please. That’s not what happened. His wife’s an adult and could have taken the kids on her own. Ted Cruz is a senator representing a state in crisis. Rather than do anything to help, he decided to go on vacation, because he’s a Republican and that’s what they do – leave it to others to clean up their mess.
Dorothy A. Winsor
A friend who lives in Texas had surgery on her face a week or two ago. Yesterday, the doctor took out stiches. They had to stand by the window for light because he had no power. It was like a scene out of Dr. Quinn
Skepticat
I may have seen this here yesterday, but it still makes me laugh.
Geminid
@Skepticat: One twitter wag wrote, “Ted Cruz likes to tell people to ‘Come and take it.’ He must mean his job.”
WaterGirl
@smike: You could think of it as the second second spot.
H.E.Wolf
1. “stand up to” is an unfortunate metaphor in this case. Gov. Abbott is paralyzed below the waist, because of a spinal cord injury from an accident in his 20s.
2. “stones” is also an unfortunate metaphor, implying as it does that male testicles are a prerequisite to courageous action.
As Queen Elizabeth the First of England correctly noted (according to the metaphor of her era), courage resides in the stomach. :)
Geminid
@H.E.Wolf: You are very right about point #2. “Guts” would be a better word to denote moral courage. The term “moral courage,” as distinguished from physical courage, was itself often used in the 19th century, not so much now. But words like “stones,” “balls” etc. are poor and invidious ways to describe this human quality.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Martin: doesn’t Texas has some law that limits corporate damage liability to something pathetic? When that grain elevator exploded a few years back they said it wasn’t enough money to replace the cars that were destroyed, much less the houses. Most likely the home owners are going to eat the cost.
Kristine
@evap:
Unexpected good news. I didn’t realize that gerrymandering could backfire.
Subsole
@H.E.Wolf:
Re: #1
I would be a lot more moved by his wheelchair if he wasn’t constantly hiding behind it while he stripped protections from everybody else who needs one.
Point#2 is a very, very good point. Spine, guts, stomach…
My gramps also called it ‘sand’, which I always really liked as an expression.
Another Scott
It was nice to see Cruz get dragged multiple times on SNL last night.
Speaking of unavailable power, ScienceMag:
(Emphasis added.)
It’s a very tough problem. It’s interesting that this is yet another technology that would require lots of lithium. Maybe someone should be working on a way to transmutate sodium (or something) into lithium at scale. ;-)
And, of course, the MotU are making noises about how smart they are and how their brilliant idea will make it work when those know-nothing eggheads have been doing it wrong all these many decades. Look for them to demand subsidies and patents and royalties and rents in the near future. :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Who thinks roadmaps and goals and investing in R&D are vital, but keep the Gateses and Bezoses of the world away from the public purse.”)
The Moar You Know
@cmorenc: I stand by the same thing I said in 2016; no contest, Rafael Cruz. Trump was, for all his horror, a bumbling lazy incompetent who did a lot of damage but frankly didn’t get much done as he was too busy eating Quarter Pounders and tweeting.
Rafael would have gotten a lot done. And we’d truly be fucked.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Gates has also invested in Direct Air Capture technologies to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. He is not the only one. Occidental Petroleum is building a direct air capture plant in Texas to pull 500,000 tons of CO2 a year out of the air, then inject it into the oil field below to produce “carbon neutral” oil. While many are skeptical of this technology, British climate scientist Myles Allen doubts that we can achieve the IPCC goal of a net neutral carbon economy by 2050 without substantial deployment of carbon negative technologies.
Allen served on the IPCC task force that advocated this goal, and he lays out his views on this issue in his February, 2019 article in The Journal of the Atomic Scientists, titled “A Green New Deal: the View from Across the Pond.” The Journal are the folks with the Doomsday Clock on the cover. They publish a lot of good reporting on climate issues.
Another Scott
@Geminid: You mean The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of course. https://TheBulletin.org
:-) (I went to college at Chicago so I have a soft spot for them.)
Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Another Scott: That’s right, the Bulletin. Thanks. They also published a very good article by U. Mass. economist Robert Pollin about the Green New Deal, March 2019, I think. I learned a lot from that one.
smedley the uncertain
@Geminid: Intestinal fortitude was a term I heard in my youth.
Chris T.
Right. But this is not really a problem; everyone knows how to do that.
The reason ERCOT called for the rolling blackouts is that there’s only so much power that can flow through various bottlenecks. The details get complicated (“VARs”, reactive power, and heating and so on) but if you screw this up you can blow out the really big transformers in the really big substations.
There aren’t a lot of these in stock. If one blows up, well, that’s messy and potentially tragic (starting fires). And then you get the one spare from the warehouse in Ft Worth, or wherever it is, load the parts on trucks and bring it wherever it goes and install it. If two blow up, well, you get the one spare and buy a second from outside the state. If lots of them blow up … you’re SOL.
Kent
Because it was a bit cheaper than the normal fixed rate plans. In TX you can pick any of 100 different plans so no one was stuck or assigned to Griddy. They just picked it because in normal times it was probably $5 or $10 per month cheaper than a fixed price plan.
J R in WV
@Chris T.:
Years ago we were in NYC in November staying at a tall hotel in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, when there was a transformer fire across the East River, near JFK IIRC. The fire was blue hot, we had a good view from something like the 25th floor of the strange light shining on the overcast.
The newscasts all worked the angle that “No, it isn’t an attack by aliens, just an electrical fire!” because the light was that strange. And ConEd didn’t drop the airport at all or the residential customers for any length of time. Was quite a bright blue-white light, though! 400,000 volts will do that!
Skepticat
In an empty parking lot. Do you suppose that’s his own vehicle?
Green Leaf Air
Cruz did a photo-op where he handed out a couple of bundles of bottled water, and post it on Twitter. Unsurprisingly, he’s getting savaged in the replies.