For a while now I’ve had this feeling that Stephen Colbert reads Daily Kos. Or maybe enough people his staff do. But I had never seen Daily Kos cited on Colbert’s Late Show, like Axios and BuzzFeed often are. Until last night.
I think that’s cued up to when he starts talking about Texas. If it’s not and you have already seen the preceding, you can skip ahead to about 5:45. He cites the New York Times for some background information about the Texas power grid in relation to federal regulation. And then he cited our own Mark Sumner’s article “Messing with Texas: The Lone Star state’s power grid is working exactly as designed.”
Here’s a longer quotation of Mark’s article:
In more modern times, with trades moving just as fast as the electricity comes down the line, the size of the price spikes can be enormous. On Monday, the Houston Chronicle reported that electricity in Texas approached $9,000 per megawatt/hour. At that rate, the average home in the United States would rack up a monthly bill of around $96,000. So … that’s quite high. If any of this—a purposely constrained statewide market, free floating prices subject to wild changes, and consumers left facing blackouts and unpredictable prices—rings a little bell at the back of your head, there’s also this: Enron got its start dabbling in these markets from its Houston, Texas, headquarters in the 1980s.
And then after some more Forbes and New York Times citations, Colbert cited Daily Kos again, for another Mark Sumner article, this time “Four days into widespread outages, misery in Texas is immense … so Ted Cruz is going on vacation.”
This one was definitely more for the headline than anything else.
Some installations were able to generate more profit on Monday and Tuesday alone than they would have gained through an entire year of normal operation.
In the first cited Daily Kos article, Mark linked to a Bloomberg article, and in the second one he linked to a page on the website of the U. S. Energy Information Administration. That’s one of those obscure “deep state” agencies that have probably helped a lot more ordinary people than we realize.
So in both cases, the information is available from theoretically neutral sources. But the appearance of neutrality is all too often used to hide facts people need to know. People in Texas, for example, needed to know about the disastrous consequences their insufficiently regulated power grid might cause.
Here on Daily Kos neither staffers like Mark or community members such as myself feel the need to write seemingly neutral headlines. And at least in Mark’s case, those bolder headlines are more useful to late night comedians like Stephen Colbert, as they cut through the fog of lies of myopically greedy capitalists.
On a much lighter note, I’d like to reiterate Colbert’s identification of one silver lining to Ted Cruz’s ill-advised trip: his dog Snowflake got to spend a couple of days away from Ted Cruz. Yeah, he named his dog that.