In addition to pointing out this meme’s amnesia of CA electric grid failures, the water crisis is not in all of MS, it’s in Jackson. Which has a Democratic mayor and 6/7 council members are Democrats.
https://ballotpedia.org/Jackson,_Mississippi#City_council
▪️As for TX’s electric grid, it ironically has the most renewable energy production of any state, particularly for wind. This has made the grid highly vulnerable to periods when wind drops off, and highly dependent on gas as its only reliable backup.
https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=TX
▪️In 2009, coal-fired plants generated ~37% of Texas’s electricity while wind provided ~6%. Since then, 3 Texas coal-fired plants have closed & the use of wind power has more than quadrupled In the same period, energy consumption rose by 20%.
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2020/august/ercot.php
▪️To pre-empt the objection that it was gas and not renewables that failed in the great freeze of ‘21, this ignores that wind and solar provided virtually 0 power during the crisis (chart posted in comments). They would have been far worse off with more renewables, not better. Many areas with far harsher winters have resilient fossil fuel grids.
▪️And there are no new plans for additional nuclear or coal plants in TX, only more solar and wind (and some gas for backup). Thus, in a sense Republicans have screwed up their electric grid, but not in the sense this meme would assume.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/01/11/to-keep-up-with-growth-texas-needs-more-big-baseload-electric-power-plants/
It’s bizarre to see them seesaw back and forth that Trump is totally clueless and aloof, just golfing all day, then all of a sudden he’s a dangerous king/dictator who’s diligently plotting to seize absolute power.
▪️This one is frustrating because, while it’s nice to see the vigor and speed that DOGE is acting with, they’re also sloppy with some of their findings. This is not some bombshell, millions of dead people’s SS numbers aren’t being paid out to fraudsters.
▪️This problem has been known for some time, you can read an inspector general’s report from 2015 about millions of names on the SS “numident” not being correctly annotated for deaths, even though they were older than 112 (the oldest known American at the time).
https://oig-files.ssa.gov/audits/full/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
▪️There are innocent explanations for some of these. Expatriates that died outside the country, for example. Or immigrants given temporary work permit who returned to their country, people issued new numbers for various reasons, etc. However, most are simply due to the govt not diligently keeping track of deaths.
▪️It’s embarrassing that the govt has millions of numbers on the numident that are ...
