Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 30
Texas in crisis, Ted Cruz in Cancún, two brutal knockouts, Rush, and lots of good news (for real).
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
Check out the introduction post here and the entire archive of previous newsletters here.
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What a week
A personal update: we feel very fortunate. We lost power around 2 am Monday morning. We got our power back Wednesday night, at the same time we lost our water. It was cold. We stayed home and we got through it. Unlike so many others we didn’t have to worry about busted pipes, flooding, or cold newborns.
Caitlin and I are thankful for understanding employers and co-workers, and we’re grateful for our friends and neighbors. Big shouts to Sally and Will. We’re really going to miss them when they move in a couple of weeks.
There’s been a lot written about what happened and why. There are a lot of furious people and there are a lot of reasons to be upset. One story really stood out to me:
ERCOT officials spent 37 seconds on winter storm preparedness at Feb. 9 meeting
Yes, you read that headline correctly. ERCOT, the energy provider for most of Texas had a 2.5-hour meeting two days before the historic storm. This storm was widely tracked and forecasted for weeks. It was not a surprise. Perhaps, this group of executives should have spent more time preparing for a possible event.
During their last meeting ahead of the winter storm that left millions of Texans without electricity and potable water for days on end, top officials at the state electric grid operator spent less than one minute discussing the impending storm and whether the state was prepared.
The residency of some board members, including the two new leaders, faced scrutiny this week from state lawmakers. Five of the 15 current members do not reside in Texas.
The board members also deleted their names and contact information from the ERCOT website after things starting going wrong. Thanks for nothing.
Our state lawmakers did nothing to help
I really don’t mean to pile on and sound like a partisan hack, so forgive me for not being balanced with my attacks this week. My first instinct in a crisis is never to blame the government. But, our statewide elected leaders really stepped in it. So many totally unforced and unforgivable errors.
In any other state, the blame for a power outage of this magnitude would fall squarely on the energy companies. But, of course, Texas is different. When our Republican-led legislature decided to secede from the rest of the country and create our own power grid, they celebrated independence. Many including Ted Cruz relished in the failures of the western grid when California burned. When things are good, the Texas GOP cheerleads. When things go bad, the state Republicans get the blame.
Although infuriating, the failures of our elected leaders are totally unsurprising. Seriously, Rick Perry hasn’t been the Governor in six years. Why would he talk to reporters?! The public had largely forgotten about Rick, but for some reason, he decides to interject himself at the worst possible time.
This brings us to the current occupant of the Governor’s Mansion.
Where’s the Governor?
It was clear by Tuesday afternoon that Texas was in a full-blown crisis — and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) had largely been out of sight.
More than 4 million households did not have power amid dangerously cold temperatures, and an increasing number did not have heat or running water. Some families were burning furniture to stay warm, grocery stores were emptying, and people were dying. In the freezing darkness, many desperate Texans felt they were left to fend for themselves.
Then he went on Fox News.
“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said, looking more relaxed as he chatted with host Sean Hannity, falsely blaming his state’s problems on environmental policies pushed by liberals.
“He hasn’t done anything,” said Conor Kenny, a Democrat who is a former planning commission chairman in Austin. “All he has done is call for an investigation into his own administration.”
Lede of the Week
From One night in Cancun: Ted Cruz’s disastrous decision to go on vacation during Texas storm crisis
Usually, it takes at least one full day in Cancún to do something embarrassing you’ll never live down.
But for Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), it took just 10 hours — from when his United plane touched down at Cancún International Airport at 7:52 p.m. Wednesday to when he booked a return flight back to Houston around 6 a.m. Thursday — for the state’s junior senator to apparently realize he had made a horrible mistake.
Cruz landed back home in Texas almost exactly 24 hours after he departed, saying he was ready to take on the devastating winter storms that have left millions of Texans without power or safe drinking water and at least 30 dead in the state.
But his brief tropical sojourn yielded at least two unflattering nicknames on social media — Cancun Cruz and Flyin’ Ted — and prompted a Twitter-fueled news cycle that seemed to unite a broken nation.
Lede of the Week Pt. 2
From Texas is freezing, but the roast of Ted Cruz is on
Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This is conventional wisdom in Washington. While not technically true — his family members like him, presumably, and his approval rating among Texas Republicans last month was 76 percent — it feels essentially true. Maybe it’s the exhausting smarm, the squirrelly ambition, the hollow theatrics. Maybe it’s how he tried to block relief aid after Hurricane Sandy, or how he helped to shut down the government in 2013. The Victorian facial hair hasn’t helped; it lends an incongruous quality of statesmanship to a man viewed by his colleagues as a pest.
“Lucifer in the flesh,” Republican John A. Boehner, the former speaker of the House, called him in 2016.
“If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in 2016.
Said Democrat Al Franken in 2017, when he was still in the Senate: “I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz.”
Everyone is piling on Ted Cruz. Columnists, reporters, even cartoonists. I’ve got plenty more to say about Senator Cruz and the entire situation. Subscribe to my podcast, Mind of Micah, to get new episodes as soon as they are released. I promise some Ted Cruz commentary this week along with some non-political content. I promise.
Knockouts of the Week
No silly commentary needed. These are both vicious, KO-of-the-year caliber.
Rush died
I spent way too much time this weekend reading obits for Rush Limbaugh. Here are some highlights.
From Rolling Stone:
He wasn’t selling political ideas — and he never has. He was selling political attitude. The swaggering certitude. The mocking dismissiveness. The freedom to offend. The right to assert your privilege without guilt or embarrassment.
Now that Limbaugh was the Man in Republican America — declared by none other than Ronald Reagan, in a letter to the host, “the Number One voice for conservatism in our country” — where did he want to lead the GOP? What was he for, exactly? Well, “I consider myself a defender of corporate America.” There was that. Plainly enough, he was also a champion of white male privilege and Buchanan-style xenophobia (to put it mildly). But try — even today — naming one policy that Rush Limbaugh famously pushed, or one conservative idea he advanced. What the self-proclaimed “instrument of mass instruction” really advanced, from the get-go, was a purely Manichean view of politics: Our side all good, their side all evil.
“Any Republican candidate is better than any Democratic candidate,” Limbaugh told his audience early on. Which might sound kind of innocuous on the surface. Except that, for Limbaugh, the superiority of our side and the inferiority of them was, increasingly over the years, a deadly serious matter. It became tribal warfare.
Right. The real threat of Obama was far more tribal than ideological, of course — and thus, right up Limbaugh’s alley. Here was a president capable, among other terrifying things, of normalizing non-white rule in America. But stopping Obama was “what I was born to do,” Limbaugh boasted. And thank goodness for that, because, as he reported in the fall of 2009, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.” Limbaugh turned Obama-hating into a kind of litmus test for white pride — a way to show that you won’t be played by the liberals and their white-guilt trips. “If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians,” he declared. “And yet white guilt is still one of the dominating factors in American politics. It’s exploited, it’s played upon, it is promoted, it is used, and it’s unnecessary.”
Limbaugh spun conspiracy theories that grew wilder, more menacing, more elaborate, and more violent (“Race riots are part of the plan that this regime has”). Obama was transformed into a symbol of the bleak future that white Americans might expect if they didn’t recognize the existential peril and rise to fight it. “We live in two universes,” Limbaugh was now telling his listeners. “One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it.”
“The average Trump supporter loves Trump because he fights, man, he fights!” says Joe Walsh, the former Tea Party congressman from Illinois who became an ardent Never Trumper and a talk-show host himself. “Not because of any policy or issue or political philosophy. That’s why they loved Rush before him. It wasn’t about conservatism. I still can’t tell you after 30 years what the fuck he believes in,” says Walsh, who was a fan in Limbaugh’s early years. “But he knew how to prey on audiences’ grievances and resentments, which is what conservative talk radio does. Rush was a son of a bitch; he’d lie about the Dems, and punch them, and make fun of them. That gave him a cult-like following from the beginning. Trump sort of inherited it.”
From Slate:
Long before Stephen Colbert, Limbaugh perfected a performance designed to delight, amuse, entertain, inform, misinform, mock, and outrage people. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was trolling before that word became commonplace, and he even occasionally admitted it. “The only way to make millions is for half the nation to hate you,” he once told his cousin. She was a bit surprised at such an honest self-assessment, but Rush seemed in a pensive mood that day. The exchange occurred at his mother’s funeral.
For almost four decades, Limbaugh preserved, propagated, and promoted the legacy of the man he revered and referred to as “Ronaldus Magnus.” It’s a credit to Limbaugh’s ceaseless efforts that every president since the 1980s has had to, in some ways, grapple with Reagan’s legacy. Ultimately, that’s Limbaugh’s greatest achievement: He kept the politics of the 1980s relevant and ever-present far beyond their expiration date.
From conservative talk radio host Charlie Sykes in WaPo:
But as time went on, Limbaugh went in another direction. If Limbaugh was once a thought leader among conservatives, he ended his career very much as a follower, scrambling to keep up with his people. As his ratings and ad revenue faded, he found himself in competition with younger, crazier outlets and he spent less and less time on actual substance, leaning instead into outrage and grievance.
The fact is that Limbaugh was fundamentally uninterested in ideas, and by the time he had helped Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency, the host was essentially done with conservatism as a set of principles. “I never once talked about conservatism” during the presidential campaign, Limbaugh told his listeners after Trump’s election, “because that isn’t what this is about.”
For Trump, Limbaugh was always the role model par excellence.
Even as he faced his own mortality, Limbaugh in the past year floated conspiracy theories, toyed with the idea of secession, mocked environmental concerns, insisted the presidential election was stolen and confidently declared that the coronavirus was just “the common cold.” He seemed to raise the possibility of civil war, declaring, “There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.” To the end, he played down the attack on the Capitol, and refused to recognize the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s electoral win, insisting that the inauguration was “something that’s been arranged, rather than legitimately sought and won.”
Good News
God Bless H-E-B
H-E-B is the best grocery store chain in America. Facts. A few months ago we detailed how the grocer was more prepared for COVID than the federal or state government. This week, in the midst of the crisis, something wonderful happened.
Tim Hennessy remembers a “collective groan” on Tuesday as the lights went out in his local grocery store in Texas. He and his wife quickly grabbed their last items and pulled up to a checkout line 20 carts deep.
Around him were a couple hundred shoppers, some with only credit cards, trying to stock up during a statewide emergency. The power had been going on and off in this Austin suburb as cold weather overwhelmed the Texas grid. But no one told shoppers to put their items back if they couldn’t pay cash.
When Hennessy got to the cashier, he said, she just waved him on, thanked him and told him to drive home safely.
“And it hit us — like, wow, they’re just letting us walk out the door,” the 60-year-old man recounted. Ahead of him, shoppers were pushing carts piled high with diapers, milk, jumbo boxes of crackers — all free. He began to tear up.
The mind-set, he said, seemed to be: “You’re our customers. You probably need this stuff. Go ahead and have a nice day.”
Pay it forward.
God Bless Mattress Mack
Everyone in Houston knows about Mattress Mack. The owner of a furniture store chain, Mack is constantly in the news. Most recently, he won several million dollars betting the Super Bowl after offering a rebate promotion leading up to the game.
No one gets more free publicity than Mack, but…
McIngvale is becoming more famous for something else: turning his expansive showrooms into lifesaving shelters.
He opened his Gallery Furniture stores to people who fled Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019.
Now he’s doing it for those who have been hit hard by a deadly winter storm that has left more than 3 million Texans without power and running water in record-setting freezing temperatures.
“To whom much has been given, much is expected,” he said. “We’ve benefited from public support over the years, so it’s our obligation to open our doors and let people come in to get a respite from the storm. It’s the right thing to do.”
The quotes from people seeking shelter are absolutely heartbreaking, but at least there’s a happy ending for those who made it into Mack’s stores.
“It was 17 degrees inside. We could see our breath,” said Maten, 42. “I’d lost the feeling in my toes, and my mom’s nose was bleeding. When my neighbor told me about this place, we knew we had to get out of there.”
Maten said she nearly burst into tears when McIngvale warmly greeted them and helped them get settled for the night.
“We’re so grateful to have learned about this place. Their generosity is incredible,” said Garcia, 36. “It’s been like an adventure for the kids staying here. The first night, they fell asleep on a diagonal sofa, happy and warm.”
Alex Trebek’s TV wardrobe was just donated to men who are homeless or leaving jail
Shouts to Alex Trebek’s son for putting his dad’s old wardrobe to good use.
Matthew Trebek said he was happy his father’s clothes could be put to good use. Alex Trebek was the famed quizmaster and host of “Jeopardy!” for 37 years, until he died of pancreatic cancer at age 80 in Los Angeles last year.
“I loved the idea of guys getting a second chance to go on interviews and feel presentable in my dad’s clothes,” Matthew Trebek said. “My dad had a large wardrobe for ‘Jeopardy!’ because they taped five shows a day, two days a week. It all just kind of clicked.”
Most of the suits and shirts in Alex Trebek’s wardrobe were distributed to men seeking employment, and the bulk of the neckties will be handed out to program participants when they start new jobs
“Our guys are over the moon to wear something that was worn on television by Alex Trebek,” she said.
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