Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Texas Hall of Shame

It's something about Houston area GOP politicians. Cruz lives in Houston; Gary Gates is from Fort Bend County, adjacent to Harris County and considered the "Houston area" around here. The odd thing is, while Houston was hit hard with lost power and water, most of the state was much colder and had a great deal more snow to make things worse.  Toughing it out in Houston just meant sitting tight for a few days.  We didn't lose any plumbing at Chez Adventist, but we were without water or power for most of the week.  You make do.

And of course, now that he's back, Paxton wants to find somebody to sue.  But first, his story doesn't quite add up:

Ian Prior, Paxton's campaign spokesman, told the Tribune Monday that the attorney general traveled to meet his Utah counterpart — Attorney General Sean Reyes —about the multistate lawsuit Texas is leading against Google that accuses the internet giant of anticompetitive conduct in advertising.

Prior said the lawsuit was one among a list of issues the two met about "over the course of several days." Richard Piatt, a spokesperson for Reyes, confirmed in an email that the pair met in Salt Lake City on Wednesday and Friday, where they engaged in "lengthy discussions, mostly about the Google antitrust case." Piatt said Paxton accompanied Reyes to Murray – a nearby suburb – to attend a demonstration of Utah’s law enforcement deescalation training scenario simulator.

"This is a program that AG Paxton has been considering implementing in Texas," Prior added.

....

On the day of Paxton's Wednesday meeting, the state's electrical grid operator reported 2.7 million households in Texas remained without power. Water infrastructure in many cities was also being strained. By Thursday, nearly half the state had had its water disrupted in some way. Many lost running water altogether, while others were issued boil-water notices.

“AG Paxton did lose power, but did not leave Texas until after power had returned to most of the state, including his own home,” Prior said in a statement.

Trying to figure out how 2.7 households is not "most of the state" (back of the envelope calculating says that's about two Houstons worth of households; and in fact most of the state didn’t get power back until Friday), but anyway...

Follow up questions about whether the attorney general was back in Texas on Monday were not answered.

Oops.

A spokesperson for Angela Paxton confirmed that she was also on the trip, which she said "included meetings that benefit her efforts to promote human dignity and support law enforcement."

This is, if anything, worse, since the Legislature is in session for once every two years, and it will be only her second session as a state senator.  Is she back in Austin yet?  If she was my senator, I'd want to know.

While away, Ken Paxton's office did send a handful of advisories about his office's plans to investigate the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — the state's grid operator — "and other entities that grossly mishandled this week’s extreme winter weather."

“We will get to the bottom of this power failure and I will tirelessly pursue justice for Texans," he said in a press release Friday. The release made no mention of his whereabouts.

There's a reason Paxton wants to do that, and it ain't in the name of justice.

The Texas attorney general's office has stayed in the headlines as of late. Paxton was indicted for felony securities fraud more than five years ago, though his criminal trial is still pending. Lately, the agency has been hemorrhaging top deputies. Several of them resigned or were fired last fall after accusing Paxton of accepting a bribe. They said he used his office to help a donor who was facing civil lawsuits and a criminal investigation. Paxton has denied the allegations, which the FBI is reportedly investigating.

Yeah, Sen. Cancun is not the only cloth-headed idiot/bald-faced liar in the state. 

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