Looking through Greg Abbott's campaign donations is an eye-opening exercise. You see how many megamillionaires and billionaires—people most of us have never heard of—quietly write checks to the governor for $10s and $100s of thousands on the regular. For every high-profile 1%-er (the Wilks brothers, Kelcy Warren, et al) there are five others who keep a low profile but think nothing of cutting a check for $250k.

Update on Barton Springs:

The flow at the Springs is now just 11-12 cubic feet per second (cfs). That is lower than at any time in the last 45 years and not much higher than the lowest known flow, of 9.6 cfs in 1956.
The trend appears not to be our friend (see chart). The groundwater district that manages the Barton Springs portion of the Edwards Aquifer is set to move to unprecedented Stage IV drought restrictions by the end of the month. That means some permittees will have to stop pumping altogether.

Gov. @GregAbbott_TX says school vouchers are about "freedom" for families. But whose freedom? In pitching vouchers, the governor only ever appears at expensive private Christian schools.

texasmonthly.com/news-politics/… @GregAbbott_TX Over the last few months, the governor has appeared at seven schools to pitch his voucher policy. Six of the schools have high-school tuition of ~$10k or more, almost certainly exceeding what a voucher would pay for.

The rationale seems so thin here. HISD has 76 schools and an enrollment of nearly 200,000 students. The state takeover is predicated on the performance of *a single school,* which has made huge strides in recent years.

https://twitter.com/tlangford/status/1636036724949147648

The state is essentially deposing a democratically elected school board and installing handpicked appointees for a district that by the state's own accountability measures has greatly improved in several years. How is this not just a power grab by Greg Abbott and Mike Morath?

SCOOP: In a private call with Bank of America, Texas's top regulator pledged to protect the profits made by Wall Street during the February blackouts

by @lsteffy

texasmonthly.com/news/wall-stre… @lsteffy PUC chairman Arthur D'Andrea, recently appointed by @GregAbbott_TX, apologized to Bank of America for the "uncertainty" around whether the money made by traders would have to be returned.

"The best I can do is put the weight of the commission in favor of not repricing.”

Huh. The PUC chair just called into question the "market design" of the deregulated power system. Said she wonders whether an "energy-only" market is still the way to go. (Just tuned into the Texas Senate hearing on the #TexasBlackouts.)

The @GregAbbott_TX conference has started. I'll tweet it out a bit. Live here: kxan.com/news/texas/gov… @GregAbbott_TX Since midnight, 6K megawatts have been added to the Texas grid, enough for 1.2 million households. The nuclear power plant in Bay City will be stepping up tonight, adding 2k megawatts.