…cold comfort [DOT 17/2/21]

…so this might be a little slapdash on account of my starting it late (I mean, it’s the early hours but there’s not a lot of time between now & 06:00) so it may be mercifully brief comapred to sometimes…but that makes it arguably a good time to ask if anyone fancies trying to take a turn lining up a DOT?

…they’re more or less a dealer’s choice kind of a deal but you might be stuck with my efforts for the next little while if nobody fancies the gig as sadly we might not have the gift of meg for a little while on account of the offline world requiring more of her for the next little while…& I’m pretty sure I won’t be the only one feeling that absence pretty keenly…so have a think & shout if you might feel like running of a post or two to greet the rest of us of a morning

…meanwhile…you might be wondering why things aren’t going great in texas just at the minute

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/17/conservatives-falsely-blame-renewables-for-texas-storm-outages

While the dangerously cold weather and accompanying power outages sweeping the Lone Star State are touching nearly all Texans in some way, the crisis is especially dire for the state’s most vulnerable and marginalized communities — whose lives have already been threatened by disaster, disease and destitution in recent years. Many were simply trying not to freeze to death inside their homes and cars and on the streets as they braced for another storm Tuesday night.

Texas’s crippled energy system cannot generate enough electricity to power the millions of homes on its grid — from sprawling suburban mansions to the houses and apartments occupied by families already suffering from hunger and poverty. A vivid metaphor for the state’s entrenched inequities emerged Monday night: The illuminated Texas skylines of downtown buildings and newly filled luxury hotels cast against the darkened silhouettes of freezing neighborhoods.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/texas-storm-hurts-most-vulnerable-again/2021/02/16/story.html

…vivid metaphor, you say

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/why-texas-energy-grid-unable-to-handle-winter-storms

…what do you suppose makes for one of those?

I just went to look him up pic.twitter.com/CkIHNt9akK

— Don Ford (@TheWordofDon) February 16, 2021

…well, there’s a bit more to it I suppose

When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time.

What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.
[…]
And yet the temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/16/ercot-texas-electric-grid-failure/

So here we are. Millions of chilly folks have received a stark reminder that our daily lives are governed by the flip of a few switches. When electricity flows, we’re part of the 21st century; shut it off, and we feel ourselves reeling backward toward the Dark Ages. Yet local companies lack motivation and capital to build a stronger grid on their own.

This is a job for the federal government. By law and by regulation, Congress and the Biden administration should set standards for efficiency and reliability that local utility companies must meet, and provide grants and other financing to pay for upgrades. This may not have the cool factor of a sleek electric car or a battery-powered house, but it is the urgent here-and-now.

This is more than a matter of comfort in a cold snap. Intelligence agencies warn that the United States’ power grids are increasingly vulnerable to attacks from hackers sponsored by foreign adversaries. Hardening the nation’s electrical supply against cyberwarfare is clearly a federal responsibility and a matter of national security. It only makes sense to engineer a more efficient, flexible and reliable electricity network at the same time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-texas-weather-is-a-chilling-reminder-about-our-battered-power-grid/2021/02/16/story.html

…but that covers more of the broad strokes than it should

One of the best encapsulations of the past few years of politics came from President Donald Trump about a month after he lost his reelection bid last year.

“We’re all victims,” he told an audience at a rally Dec. 5 in Georgia. “Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims, every one of you.”

This sentiment was central to Trump’s appeal to many Republican voters. In the 2016 election, a sense that White Americans were losing out in modern society was a better predictor of support for Trump than economic disadvantages. Trump voters, more than anyone else, saw racism against Whites as a potent problem and were more likely to view Whites as victims of discrimination at rates similar to racial and ethnic minorities. Trump promised to make America great again — to wind back the clock to a time before things such as Black Lives Matter, to a time when the distributions of the rewards of American society weren’t questioned.

It’s hard to articulate this sentiment explicitly, though, particularly to a group of Americans who are at the same time hyping their profane indifference to feelings and hawking mugs to hold liberal tears. So it’s coded, packaged in other ways.

Such as the framing offered by Del. Kirk Cox (R-Va.), a candidate for governor in the state.

“There’s been so much silencing and shaming because of cancel culture. It’s gone too far,” he said in an ad released on Twitter. “We can’t even have a competition of ideas and for representative democracy to work, you have to have that. The left simply cannot be allowed to ignore other opinions. So I, as governor, will not stand for that.”

Eighty-one percent of Republicans familiar with the term who view “cancel culture” as a very serious problem say that conservatives are more likely to be negatively affected by it.

The reason is obvious. “Cancel culture” is a concept predicated on categorizing particular views as verboten, and those views are often ones that overlap with a sense that Whites and men are imperiled. This is by no means always true; some concern about “cancel culture” also derives from social media bans, which are frequently predicated on toxic behavior. But it’s often the case that the concern expressed as part of the backlash to the perceived phenomenon is the same concern that Trump expressed to applause during the first Republican primary debate in August 2015: His obnoxious comments about women were simply a mark that he wouldn’t be beholden to a “politically correct” worldview.
[…]
Concern about “cancel culture” is an explicit manifestation of victimization by those who see themselves as a focus of questions about accountability and power. The message is that the cultural elites, including the media, are trying to silence opposing views. But it’s often a convenient claim, as when Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) parlayed the cancellation of a book deal into hours of media coverage centered on his plight — and a new book deal.

None of this is simple. That, too, is the point. Conflating all criticism into some Big-Brother-esque effort at silencing half the country is a facile approach to the moment. Which, of course, is why it’s appealing to political actors.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/16/cancel-culture-blends-into-victim-culture/

…sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the one trying to do the cancelling wants a victim or wants to play the victim, though…which may of course be because they’re a peevishly-perfidious, petulanty-perfunctory pernicious pestilence of pettifogging pique precipitously prating, pouting, posturing, prattling & propagandizing…or at least getting someone who can spell & knows where the caps lock key lives to do it for you while you sulk like the old-man-baby you are, anyway

Oh man, long Trump statement going after Mitch McConnell pic.twitter.com/houXKQzymT

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) February 16, 2021

Trump attacks McConnell as ‘political hack’, says he will back pro-Trump candidates [WaPo]

The 600-word statement, coming three days after the Senate acquitted him in his second impeachment trial, was trained solely on Mr. McConnell and sought to paint Mr. Trump as the best leader of the G.O.P. going forward.

The statement did not include any sign of contrition from Mr. Trump for his remarks to a crowd of supporters who then attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. Nor did it include any acknowledgment of his role during the violent hours in which his own vice president and members of Congress were under threat from the mob of Trump supporters.

Rather, Mr. Trump chose to focus on Mr. McConnell as he broke an unusually lengthy silence by his standards, after being permanently barred from his formerly favorite medium — Twitter — last month because of tweets that he posted during the Capitol riot.
[…]
What Mr. McConnell has not done, though, is openly declare political war on Mr. Trump in the fashion that the former president did to him on Tuesday. While telling associates he knew he would have to oppose the former president in some primaries next year, he had hoped to unify his caucus by turning attention to Mr. Biden.

But if Mr. McConnell wasn’t eager to begin an open and protracted feud with Mr. Trump, at least not yet, the freshly acquitted, ever-pugnacious and newly deplatformed former president was happy to do so. One person close to Mr. Trump said his initial version of the statement was more incendiary than what was released publicly.
[…]
The former president’s statement was the longest one he has issued since leaving office on Jan. 20. He has been mindful that he is the target of multiple investigations, people close to him said, and has been advised against appearing to taunt prosecutors or people who might sue him in civil courts. Still, Mr. Trump’s ability to stay silent through situations that anger him tends to last only so long.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/us/politics/trump-mitch-mcconnell-republicans.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-blasts-mcconnell-as-hack-who-lacks-political-insight

The fate of one’s legacy used to be a reason to pause and reconsider some intemperate act, some plundering of institutions. No more. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has made his disinterest in his legacy plain. He is not a man concerned with the way in which he will be viewed by history. His focus is on how much power he has right now compared with how much was in his grip back then — back when men like him didn’t have to worry about whether their words mattered or that their pronouncements would be questioned.

Back when McConnell’s party was in the majority, he refused to schedule the impeachment trial of Donald Trump while he was still the sitting president of the United States. Instead, McConnell grumpily ensured the trial would not begin until Trump was out of office, at which point, McConnell argued that the Senate no longer had constitutional jurisdiction over Trump because he was no longer the current president. So, McConnell voted to acquit him of inciting a riot, based on a loophole of his own imagining.

And then McConnell, who typically swallows his words as if he’s choking on his own hubris, stood on the Senate floor over the weekend and spoke with startling precision and clarity and relative generosity toward his colleagues across the aisle about the former president’s role in the attack of the Capitol: “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.” And then McConnell went on to explain his sleight of hand in an essay in the Wall Street Journal in which he bragged about respecting the limits of the Constitution rather than addressing the reality that any actual limits were simply those that he had placed upon himself.

McConnell penned himself in where he deemed the ground to be the most fertile for his personal power to continue to flourish. How will history view his duplicity? What does it matter? He’ll be long gone. There was very little about McConnell’s actions that appeased either side of the argument. His two-sided gestures moved no one to his corner. The former president issued a statement Tuesday calling McConnell “a dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again.” But movement wasn’t the point. McConnell simply wanted to stay precisely where he has been for so long.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/16/mcconnell-shows-that-legacies-dont-matter-when-facts-no-longer-do/

…if you’re wondering what got hair furor’s daiper all soggy, though…there’s a chance this might be part of it

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/16/trump-giuliani-lawsuit-capitol-riot-bennie-thompson-naacp

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit accusing former president Donald Trump, lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and two extremist groups whose members have been charged in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol of illegally conspiring to intimidate and block Congress’s certification of the 2020 election.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) alleged in federal court in Washington that Trump’s and Giuliani’s false claims that the election was stolen fomented a raid that violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 law enacted after the Civil War to bar violent interference in Congress’s constitutional duties.

The lawsuit alleges that Trump, Giuliani, and members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys far-right groups sought to harass and impede lawmakers, and temporarily succeeded, forcing Thompson and others to don gas masks and take cover on the House gallery floor before being evacuated to shelter in the Longworth House Office Building with more than 200 other representatives, staffers and relatives.

Trump’s “gleeful support of violent white supremacists” instigated the assault, gravely endangered lawmakers and encouraged future authoritarianism, Thompson said in a statement. “While the majority of Republicans in the Senate abdicated their responsibility to hold the President accountable, we must hold him accountable for the insurrection that he so blatantly planned.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/congressman-naacp-sue-trump-giuliani-over-capitol-riot

Impeachment’s Over. Bring On the Criminal Investigations. [NYT]

…& there’s only so many times you can fire rudy before people stop paying attention

…although…maybe he forgot he fired him…on account of the dementia & all…a lot of people are saying it

Steve Bannon believed Trump had early stage dementia, TV producer claims [Guardian]

…it’s not like his last lot of replacements covered themselves in glory, after all…more of a steeped-in-bullshit kind of a shower, that lot

The lawyers assembled by the former president to represent him in his Senate impeachment trial hardly knew one another. They prevailed in the end, but it wasn’t pretty.

Stumbles, Clashes and Egos: Behind the Scenes With Trump’s Legal Team [NYT]

…what’s that saying about putting lipstick on a pig?

Mr. Trump’s acquittal on Saturday in his impeachment trial served as the first test of his continuing influence over Republicans, with all but seven senators in the party voting against conviction. But in Michigan, one of the key battleground states Mr. Trump lost in the November election — and home to two of the 10 House Republicans who supported impeaching him — there are growing signs of a party not in flux, but united in doubling down on the same themes that defined Mr. Trump’s political style: conspiracy theories, fealty to the leader, a web of misinformation and intolerance.
[…]
With loyalty to Mr. Trump as the all-encompassing point of dispute, Republicans are struggling with the idea of the proverbial big tent, and politicians like Mr. Upton and Mr. Meijer are at the forefront of the conflict. In the months since Election Day, as the president attacked the democratic process and a mob descended on the seat of American government in his name, the dangers of walking in his political shadow have rarely been more clear. However, what’s also clear is that his party shows little desire to break with him or his grievances.

The outcome of this tug of war will decide the direction of a party that is shut out of control in Congress and the White House, and must focus on making electoral gains in the 2022 midterm elections. The G.O.P. tent has made room for conspiracy theories like birtherism and QAnon, as well as for extremist elected officials like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Is there room for anti-Trumpers?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/us/politics/michigan-republicans-trump.html

…I’d go on…because I have a tendency to do that…but I’m out of time & need to pick some tunes…suffice to say that I’ll be saving my sympathies for those who deserve them…so where these self-styled victims of self-instigated “cancellation” are concerned those would be…hmmm…what would be a “vivid metaphor”?