July 29, 2021

March from Georgetown to Texas Capitol inspired by events in Selma

Taking a stand that helped define the civil rights movement, thousands of protesters marched 54 miles from Selma, Ala., to the state capitol in Montgomery in 1965 in support of voting rights for Black citizens.

As Democrats, civil rights leaders and voting rights groups continue to oppose Republican election bills in the Texas Legislature and across the South, activists are hoping to have a Selma-like impact with a 27-mile trek from Georgetown to Austin that they're calling the Moral March for Democracy.

The Texas march, broken into smaller legs over four mornings from Wednesday to Saturday, was organized by the Rev. Dr. William Barber with the Poor People’s Campaign and by former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s voter outreach organization, Powered by People.

The Poor People’s Campaign, a faith-based group that protests economic inequity, has led several other protests across the country to push for voting rights reforms, including some that ended in arrests in the nation’s capital.

-snip-


https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/07/28/march-georgetown-texas-capitol-inspired-selma/5390612001/


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Find out how to join the marches and rally on Saturday:
https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/
https://poweredxpeople.org/

Hope to see y’all there!

July 29, 2021

Voting rights advocates set out on 1960s-style march to Austin: 'We need federal protection'

Several dozen religious leaders and community activists began marching Wednesday toward the Texas Capitol, invoking the civil rights movement of the 1960s as they work to build momentum for national voting protections and other progressive causes.

The marchers set out just after sunrise from Christ Lutheran Church in Georgetown, about 30 miles north of Austin, snaking three by three along a frontage road in the sticky summer heat. Highway traffic droned in the distance as they chanted protest songs and voiced their demands: an end to the Senate filibuster, a $15 minimum wage, immigration reform and congressional action to combat a slate of new voting restrictions passed by Republican states.

“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around,” they sang. “I’m gonna keep on a-walking, keep on a-talking, marching down to freedom land.”

-snip-


https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/We-need-federal-protection-Voting-rights-16346222.php


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Find out how to join the marches and rally on Saturday:
https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/
https://poweredxpeople.org/

Hope to see y’all there!

July 20, 2021

So proud of the Tx Dems -- They're on for O'Donnell's hour w/Jonathan Capehart

Will replay later tonight, and I’ll look for Rhiannon’s video links, etc. and add them in here.

March 29, 2021

Also commenting to journal

I concur, this should be an OP.

March 5, 2021

ERCOT overcharged power buyers by $16 billion amid calamity, monitor says

The operators of the Texas power grid overcharged wholesale electricity customers by $16 billion due to a pricing error during the weather emergency last month that triggered extended blackouts and left more than 4 million Texans shivering amid subfreezing temperatures, a monitor reports.

Potomac Economics, a Virginia-based firm that's paid to provide an arm's-length assessment of the Texas grid, is recommending that the overcharges — billed to retail electric providers and others — be reversed.

The overcharges occurred because the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid and is commonly known as ERCOT, left wholesale prices at the maximum level allowable — $9,000 per megawatt hour — for about a day and a half too long during the emergency, Potomac said in a letter to state regulators Thursday.

The overcharges represent only a part of the costs racked up during the calamity by generators, distributors and retailers of electricity, however.

According to Potomac, real-time market costs on the Texas grid totaled about $47 billion from Feb. 14-19 because of the power outages and sky-high wholesale prices — compared with about $10 billion in real-time market costs for all of 2020.

-snip-

https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/03/04/ercot-pricing-error-spurred-16-b-grid-overcharges-monitor-says/4582419001/

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I’d like to see the results from another audit. The whole situation makes me livid.

February 25, 2021

Um, no, that's unacceptable

PUCT wiped out the pricing thresholds on the coldest morning, so previously there was no pricing basis for customers to anticipate such sky high rates.* It was ERCOT’s job to logically start sharing the grid ahead of the emergency mode that left substantial markets unable to roll power.

If everybody had to go dark for thirty minutes starting Sunday during the day, then requests to conserve might have been taken more seriously and maybe we wouldn’t have reached life or death pricing to turn up more power.

Everyday customers shouldn’t be expected to cover the costs of criminally negligent energy companies after they caused a preventable disaster.

*http://www.puc.texas.gov/agency/resources/pubs/news/2021/PUCTX-REL-COLD21-021521-EMERGorder-FIN.pdf

February 18, 2021

You're a sociopath with a salvage auction bulldozer

Who uses it to level an acre of an octogenarian’s tree farm he bought with funds from the GI bill because, as a spoiled brat, you have connections to a title company that gives you title to an improperly documented right-of-way on your deed. Then, annoy your abused neighbor with an inexplicable inability to use a dang gate to the point they’re looking at relinquishing acreage in a settlement to get them the hell of the property forever in the legal desert that is east Texas.

That’s another way.

February 17, 2021

Without wind in the mix the situation would have been worse because of the reliance on gas

So, iow, abbott was on fox selling a fraud because he’s aggressively stupid and cruel.

His gas producer buddies were making so much money pumping LNG to export, etc. at the same time operations were falling that Texas power plants weren’t willing to pay the price to crank more electricity, until the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) lifted pricing caps and floors on MONDAY. I bet this was all foreseeable in scenario planning, and abbot with his appointees at PUCT (who oversee ERCOT) waited based on the profitability of the dire situation.

He’s using the natural disaster to further harm and scare people about wind rather than seeking to bolster the infrastructure of all sources of electricity in Texas, because he’s an awful person.

February 15, 2021

ERCOT is ordering rolling blackouts due to high demand

https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644?s=20

Are asking Texans to:
- reduce their thermostat to 68° or below
- unplug unnecessary appliances
- turnoff unneeded lights
- don’t run major appliances like dishwashers and dryers

February 14, 2021

I'm writing a booklet

Think expanded, 15 page greeting card with recipes at the back. It’s not a manifesto, no, it’s a freakin’ timesaver. Is to take back the time that republican politicians and rw media are stealing from me. Time is money and they are picking my pockets and needlessly wasting lives.

It would be a full time job if I spent five hours explaining how it is that I’m not a communist, why racism is immoral and stupid, and generally what’s been happening in my life during the missing COVID year. Feel I should remind some folks how Pa was a proud Democrat and a diabetic who made an excellent, zero-carb red eye gravy.

It’s for some family members who might believe that their first cousin narrowly survived COVID due to the grace of their God and not the ventilators and healthcare workers.

It’s for the acquaintances that I’ll likely run into again, who, without semi-regular exposure to a librul like me must think I spend my time mumbling the orange guy’s name while eating avocado toast, and mailing illegal ballots.

It’s to get rid of some of the shadows on the cave wall. And to make sure that if they continue to follow the fascists that they get real specific in who it is they’re hating. Is just to make sure they despise those liberals making gravy with venison breakfast sausage drippings, strong black coffee, Tabasco, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper.

I put that on my biscuits, y’all — and they can’t stop me.