Everyone onstage for the Hawaiian number!

Some people have electricity but no water, some people have water but no heat, some people have run out of food, hundreds of communities are totally unprepared to deal with snow and ice on the roads, so Senator Ted Cruz did what any Texan who can afford it would do.  He gathered his family and flew to Cancun, Mexico, where it's 85F.  And he got rumbled and had to sneak back into the country.  In coach.  The horror.  The Family Cruz also required a police escort to Bush airport, because the Houston PD had nothing else to do.

Calgary Ted isn't even the worst person in Texas.  That would have to be Rick Perry.  You may remember him as the Secretary of Energy who didn't know what his department did, a qualification he shared with most of the Trump cabinet.  "Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business," he asserted on Kevin McCarthy's blog.  I was shocked -- Kevin McCarthy has a blog?  Wait till Texans get power back and can use their computers for something other than emergency information.  Meanwhile, FEMA is bringing generators and water for those who don't mind having the federal government in their business as an alternative to death.

Gallery Furniture in Houston has opened as a warming center/shelter.  Joel Osteen's MAGAchurch, not so much.

Unnoticed amid the weather news, covid-19 deaths passed 500,000.  America has a one-track mind. 

Geneticists at the Institute for Having Fuck-all Else To Do have sequenced DNA from a mammoth that lived in Siberia a million years ago, more or less.

Anne Sacoolas, sought in the UK for killing Harry Dunn while driving on the wrong (i.e. right) side of the road, now wants to enter "mediation" with his family.  She probably thinks this administration won't be as sympathetic to her claim of diplomatic immunity as the last one.

Walmart is raising the pay of 425,000 "associates" (shelf stockers).  Kroger, which is also racking up record profits during the pandemic, continues to announce layoffs.  This time they're closing two stores in Seattle because of a new law requiring "hazard pay" for frontline workers.  And Amazon is fighting unionization like it's 1892 in Homestead, Pa.  They even got a traffic light re-timed to make it harder to canvass workers stopped at the corner.  That's way too much power.

Dolly Parton, who twice declined a Medal of Freedom from Trump, has told the Tennessee legislature she'd rather not have her statue in the state capitol.  I'd like to think she's as appalled as I am about their new "father's rights" bill giving men the right to prevent an abortion even if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.  But she's not saying.

UPDATE:  Ted Cruz has managed to make it even worse, blaming his daughters (age 12 and 10) for demanding he take them to Cancun.  He wanted to be "a good dad."  Being a good public official was already out of the question.  At Esquire Jack Holmes wonders why he didn't have the sense to fly on a private jet, and whether it really matters in a political culture bereft of shame.

When Nancy Pelosi put Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the hero of post-Katrina New Orleans, in charge of making security recommendations for the Capitol, she may have been secretly hoping he'd say the things she's too refined to say.  He has.  On Twitter he called Josh Hawley "a little piece of shit who should be run out of DC and disbarred."  Tucker Carlson clutched his pearls so hard the string broke and they bounced all over the studio like frozen peas in a lousy Swanson TV dinner.  When pistol-packin' Lauren Boebert declined to be searched by Capitol police the general observed, "Put her stupid ass on the no-fly list."  "This is like putting Joy Reid in charge of security, this is insane," gasped Tuckie (they're both Black, see?).  I can't wait to read his other recommendations, and I can't wait for the Speaker to put them in practice. 

I know everyone is breathless about the 2024 elections, the prelude to which was played last November 8.  Nikki Haley made the mistake of saying Trump "let us down" before trying to get an audience with the once and future king.  It appears that he's lost her number.  Ah, what might have been...

"Why, thank you, Mr. President.  As soon as that photographer leaves I'll get them out."