Oops.
With freezing weather expected to hit a large portion of Texas this week, Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday tried to assure Texans that the state is better prepared this year than last, but said there could be local power outages throughout the state.
“Either ice on power lines … could cause a power line to go down, or it could be ice on trees that causes a tree to fall on power lines,” Abbott said.
This week’s cold front could be the first significant test of the state’s main power grid since last February’s freeze left millions of Texans without power for days in subfreezing temperatures. Hundreds of people died because of that storm.
“No one can guarantee there won’t be [power outages],” Abbott said Tuesday, just over two months after he promised the lights would stay on this winter.
Coulda fooled me. It’s almost as if you can’t believe a word this guy says.
We’re all grownups here, and we all know that power outages occur all the time, for reasons that have nothing to do with the capability or robustness of the state’s electric grid. Stuff happens, and the local folks are pretty good about responding to these situations. That’s not the point here. The point is that we had an enormous systemic failure a year ago, one that came with a tremendous cost. It was the third such failure in recent years, and there were clear lessons learned and improvements to be made from the first two that just never happened. Even after that third massive and deadly failure and the lessons we re-re-learned, we got way more blather and empty promises from Greg Abbott, who raked in millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the power grid fat cats who made absolute bank off of the debacle, than action. And now Abbott is trying to hedge his bets a little and claim that when he said there would be no power outages this winter, he didn’t really mean it. You tell me what we should do about that.
I believe the corporate fat cats. After all they brought us the best, most effective vaccines in history, that don’t prevent you from getting the illness, don’t stop you from spreading the illness, but just might mitigate the symptoms when you get it.
My guess here is that Abbott’s Legal Wizards probably told him that giving a guarantee is a legal liability, if for example, someone hears that the power won’t go out, and doesn’t get any batteries. Then, a drunk driver champagnes into the utility pole in front of that person’s home, knocking out electricity, phone, cable. Then, the person trips in the dark because of no flashlight batteries, dies, blames Abbott and sues.
As a governor, Abbott is the best choice. I won’t be voting for him, but I will say he kept us safe during the deadliest pandemic in history. Now, we see the other states are dealing with a Non-COVID death spike in young adults 18-49 and nobody is sure why. Could it be the suicides, such as former Miss USA jumping to her death? could it be substance abuse? Such as the drugs pushed by Teva and other Big Pharma that were convicted of being a public nuisance? Could it be vaccine induced side effects? Nobody knows, but nobody’s asking. If Beto got in there, all he would do is order everyone to wear masks, get vaccinated, and stay home. Of course he wouldn’t stop road rage, crime, or climate change. If you want a master to order you around, join an S&M group, but don’t put one in office. Granted, it would be great to have a Mexican American as governor, but Lyin’ Ted Cruz would even be better, even though he’s really Cuban and may have had some connection to the Kennedy assassination.