After the 2018 election when Democrats gained seats in the Legislature and Beto came within three points of knocking off Ted Cruz, the Republicans in the state legislature decided they needed to focus on bread-and-butter issues and put aside the red meat social issues. So you got a legislative session whose keynote legislation was a pretty bipartisan overhaul to the state’s public school finance system focused on investing more funds in K-12, particularly underachieving schools.
But 2020 convinced them that 2018 was a blip, and this session they’ve been right back to the conservative red meat. Bills enacting permitless carry of handguns, voting restrictions, requiring the national anthem to be played at sporting events, outlawing abortion after six week and entirely if Roe vs. Wade is overturned are all on or headed to the Governor’s desk. The session ends on Monday, but the Governor has already promised to call a special session for the purpose of legislative redistricting, which will lock-in Republican dominance of the state legislature and Congressional delegation for another decade. The Lt. Governor is angling to add banning trans athletes from participating on their gender’s sports teams and prohibiting social media companies from “deplatforming” conservatives.
And after Elon started building his next Tesla factory in Austin, the legislature failed to grant Tesla the ability to sell cars/trucks in Texas. To do so, Tesla will have to first ship the vehicles outside of Texas, then return them to a “service center” to be picked up. So much for a billion dollar investment. Next legislative session is in two years.
No diss Texas State government will pay for and provide qualified personnel for hosted vaccine parties as long as their are 5 people. PER my local news KWTX
Car dealers are one of the most powerful lobbies in Texas (and most states) – there’s at least one dealership in every legislative district, they tend to be well-connected in their communities, and they have a lot of cash to throw around. And if Elon wanted to bribe the Legislature by locating a plant in Texas, the worst place he could have put it is Austin. Austin is the perennial whipping boy for Republicans in the state legislature. He’d have had better results putting his plant in Dallas or Houston, or even Lubbock.
No shit. He’s basically threatening to shut down an entire branch of government. It’s not just legislator’s salaries – there would be no funding for legislators to hire staff or to support several legislative agencies. And never mind the fact that it was only a minority of one chamber that he’s upset at!
I’m sure there was a betting pool going last weekend at the Republican Governors Conference as to who could fuck up their state the worst by the 4th of July, and this stunt might cost Abbott the lifetime supply of Turtle Wax.
Well after not having enough power because it’s too cold in Texas we are seeing alerts about consumption reductions because it is too hot and demand is skyrocketing.
The usual suspects in my linkedin feed are blaming wind power or lack thereof , despite 11K mw of total capacity being on a forced repair outage (that is 10 percent ish of total capacity) and 8k MW of that is thermal, and only 3k is renewables.
Some of them are even saying ‘don’t let the media spin the narrative look at the data it is all winds fault!’ whilst ignoring data.
Things were bad with all the storms we had over the last month I bought a 1.5Kwh Total Zero li ion batter pack that can run the fridge and keep the internet going, plus a 400watt solar panel. Last time I thought about back up power I lived in Azerbaijan before the country had a lot of money, Texan rupublicans getting us back to the stone ages one Gohmert at a time.
It could become a new measurement like the Scaramucci. Maybe apply it to the heat index. “Another Gohmert or two and this place will be hell on earth.”
