WARNING: Voting for a Republican may be hazardous to your health. That is the warning label I have called for on ballots. Today I’m calling for it to be printed in bold red letters. Let me explain why.

The debacle in Texas which when the final numbers are tallied will have killed scores if not hundreds, cost millions of dollars in damage and billions of dollars in lost commerce was caused mainly by incompetent Republican management. Originally, they tried to blame it on green energy and by some strange extension the latest right wing bogey woman, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. The latest is that it was a “black swan” weather event.

As to AOC it appears her total involvement was raising $2 million for relief. Can Texas Republicans say “Thank you”?

If it was a “black swan” that swan seems to visit Texas about every decade. Similar events have occurred twice before during the current consecutive run of Republican governors (George W. Bush, Rick Perry and Greg Abbott).

If you listen to right wing mythology the events were caused by a failure of power generating windmills and unbelievably low temperatures. The windmills did fail however let’s examine their impact and the cause of the failure. Wind power accounts for less than ten percent of the Texas grid’s power generating capacity. The reason they failed was because the management of the power grid failed to heed warnings and winterize them. That is the same reason the natural gas component of the gird (which is a huge factor) failed.

In order to avoid federal regulation and oversight Texas has its own power grid which covers most of the state. If you listen to former Texas Governor and Secretary of Energy (under Trump) Rick Perry, Texans will gladly endure hardship in order to avoid federal regulations. I wonder who did that polling! The far western portion of the state is not part of the Texas grid and did not suffer any outages.

This is far from scientific but during the outage I happened to monitor the temperature in Dallas along with a Virginia suburb of DC and a far western North Carolina city. They were very similar and often Dallas was slightly warmer or the same. I’m not comparing Dallas with Buffalo, New York, Minneapolis, Minnesota or Anchorage, Alaska; I’m comparing it with other cities in the old confederacy. The temperatures were far from extreme – about as far as the management was from competent.

I couldn’t leave this topic without a word about Texas Senator Ted Cruz. I remember my family’s 2016 Thanksgiving dinner. We all did the what we are thankful for thing. I said I was thankful that Donald Trump, not Cruz won the election. I, like all my family of voting age, voted for Hillary Clinton and feared how bad Trump might be. (Did we get that one correct!) My explanation was that while both are bad Cruz is smart and therefore would have been worse. Going on the Cancun vacation while his state was in the midst of a disaster caused by his own political party was an incredibly stupid political move especially for an intelligent politician. Perhaps Cruz has just become accustomed to getting out of things by lying and being a hypocrite.

Oh. I forgot despicable; did I mention that at one point he blamed his decision on his kids.

I don’t know who the 2024 Republican presidential nominee will be but I think I saw two eliminate themselves in the last few weeks: Marco Rubio and Cruz. Oh, they will both still throw their hats into the ring but neither will come out with the crown.

Both could have eliminated a foe if they had voted guilty in the impeachment trial. (I know the numbers but if they had come out publically that would have started a landslide which would have included Mitch McConnell.) Rubio is up for reelection in 2022 and how does he “out Trump” Ivanka Trump if, as rumored, she challenges him in the primary? If he fails to defend his Senate seat he is damaged goods.

This scandal is a series of anti-Cruz ads that write themselves. In fact, with Texas trending blue -which I contend this event will accelerate – Cruz could be in trouble even defending his Senate seat in 2024 if he pulls a “2016 Marco Rubio”. (I won’t run for reelection – until I drop out of the presidential race that is.)

Texas has had a Republican governor since January of 1995. Think it’s time for a change and a bold red letter warning label?

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