The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 2.17 Why We Need To Talk About Tim Boyd, The Truth About Texas Blackouts, Rush Limbaugh Dead

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

Lower your phone bill and get a $25 Ting credit at https://phil.ting.com  ONLY 5 DAYS LEFT @ http://ShopDeFranco.com To Get Your February Drop Hoodies, Joggers, Shirts, Beanies, & More! WATCH MY NEW Belle Delphine Podcast: https://youtu.be/v3MnF8EKdGI -- WATCH Full “A Convo With” Podcasts: https://www.youtube.com/ACW  LISTEN On The Podcast Platform Of Your Choice: http://LinksHole.com WATCH the ACW Clips channel!: https://youtube.com/ACWClips -- 00:00 - Tim Boyd Is Our D-Bag of the Day 03:21 - Texas Power Outages, ERCOT, & The Blame Game 09:58 - Sponsor 10:55 - Disney Releases First Cruella Trailer 11:32 - GameStop Stock Market Lawsuit 13:09 - Workers Strike For $15 Minimum Wage 15:00 - Rush Limbaugh Dies At 70 -- ✩ SUPPORT THE SHOW ✩ ✭ BUY our GEAR, Support the Show!: http://ShopDeFranco.com ✭ Lemme Touch Your Hair: http://BeautifulBastard.com ✭ Paid Subscription: http://DeFrancoElite.com  ✩ TODAY’S STORIES ✩  Texas Mayor Tells “Lazy” Residents “No One Owes You” Anything Amid Power Outages: https://roguerocket.com/2021/02/17/texas-mayor/ Top Texas officials Call Investigations at Electrical Grid Operator: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-power-outage-ercot/ Millions Go Without Power in Texas While Republicans Cast Blame at a Nonexistent Green New Deal: https://roguerocket.com/2021/02/17/texas-rep-green-energy/ Resources for Texans Affected by the Storm: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-power-outage-help-warming-shelter/ How You Can Help Others: https://www.dmagazine.com/style-beauty-wellness/2021/02/how-to-help-homeless-dallasites-weather-the-storm-this-weekend/#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20ways%20to,food%20pantries%20can%20stay%20stocked. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/15/how-to-help-how-get-food-shelter-resources-during-texas-winter-storm/4486821001/ Disney Releases Emma Stone “Cruella” Trailer: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/cruella-trailer-turns-emma-stone-into-disney-villain  Reddit User Behind GameStop Saga Releases Opening Statement Ahead of Hearing: https://www.axios.com/reddit-gamestop-testimony-17e00f93-b0c7-441b-b6f4-d404704c903f.html Workers in 15 Cities Strike for $15 Minimum Wage as Lawmakers Continue Debate: https://roguerocket.com/2021/02/17/workers-strike-minimum-wage/ Rush Limbaugh Dead at 70: https://nypost.com/2021/02/17/rush-limbaugh-conservative-radio-host-dead-at-70/ ✩ STORIES NOT IN TODAY’S SHOW ✩  Mexico City Bans Most Tampons Without Replacement Lined Up https://roguerocket.com/2021/02/17/mexico-city-bans-tampons/ ——————————     Edited by: James Girardier, Julie Goldberg, Maxx Enright Produced by: Amanda Morones Art Director: Brian Borst  Writing/Research: Philip DeFranco, Lili Stenn, Maddie Crichton, Cory Ray, Neena Pesqueda, Brian Espinoza Production Team: Zack Taylor ———————————— #DeFranco #Texas #EmmaStone Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So let's talk about Tim Boyd. Actually, wait, welcome back to the show. Friendly reminder, you have five days left. You want to buy something over at shopdefranco.com. The drop is fire, as the kids say, or maybe something else, but Tim Boyd. So if you don't know, like I expect 99.9% of people, because why would you?

The mayor of Colorado City, Texas is Tim Boyd. And Texas right now is going through a really hard time being blanketed with freezing temperatures. I mean, hell, the last time we talked about it was Monday. 2.7 million people at that time did not have power. The situation has not gotten better. We're gonna dive in on the updates, everything that's happening there in a second.

But first, we gotta talk about Tim Boyd. Because when community members turned to a local Facebook group to ask if the city or the county had emergency shelter plans in place to keep people warm, Mayor Tim Boyd sent this comforting message. Let me hurt some feelings while I have a minute. No one owes you or your family anything,

nor is it the local government's responsibility to support you during trying times like this. Sink or swim, it's your choice. The city and county, along with power providers or any other service, owes you nothing. I'm sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout. If you don't have electricity, you step up and come up with a game plan

to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water, you deal with out and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family. If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because you're lazy is direct result of your raising.

Only the strong will survive and the weak will perish. He then goes on to say that God has provided us the tools to support ourselves during times like these, with him suggesting that socialist governments have made people believe they can depend on assistance while only a few people actually work hard. He then blah, blah, blahs some more and closes, bottom line, quit crying and looking for a handout.

Get off your ass and take care of your own family. Bottom line, don't a part of problem, be a part of the solution. And that now deleted post, of course, drew immediate backlash as Texans continue to slam the government for not delivering basic services. That outrage eventually prompted Boyd to write a follow-up post, which he also deleted.

In it, he claimed that his comments were, quote, "'taken out of context' and did not apply to the elderly." It's also been reported that Boyd has resigned, but I do want to note that he did not resign because of this, with Boyd saying that he had already turned in his resignation and had not signed up to run for mayor again ahead of the deadline a few days ago. Boyd then seemingly tries to make himself the victim of the situation,

adding that there is so much anger and harassment since his post that it caused his wife to lose her job, with him ultimately saying that he was speaking as a citizen since he is no longer mayor and called for the harassment of his family to stop. Though I will note, according to the Washington Post, it was not immediately clear if he resigned before or after writing his controversial Facebook post.

Right, because as recently as early Wednesday morning, he was still listed as mayor on Colorado City's website and city council agendas show that he had served in that role as recently as last week. But I guess the main point here is that Tim Boyd is our douchebag of the day. You know, this morning I just kept rereading Boyd's post and I was like, how, how does someone get like this?

How do you see people suffering, especially someone that at some point decided I want to be in power. And your reaction is essentially sink or swim, bitch. Who didn't hug you as a child, Tim? And did you not get those hugs because you were a garbage person or did you turn into a garbage person

because you didn't get those hugs? I'm all for the self-sufficient, pick yourself up by your bootstraps aspirational story, but that shouldn't mutate into this thing where we judge others who are suffering, where instead of extending a hand to someone who needs help, we raise a middle finger? But that's where I'll stop talking about Boyd

and then let's talk about what Texas is going through right now and some of the fallout that we're seeing. So as of this morning, there were over 3 million Texans without power. In fact, on Tuesday, the number of customers facing power outages climbed to more than 4 million at one point. So let's talk about what's happening

because there are all these different competing narratives. Right, so around 90% of the state's electrical load, right? 26 million customers is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, otherwise known as ERCOT. And as record setting freezing temperatures hit Texas, electrical demand in the state surged. The situation made even worse by the fact

that electricity can be much harder to produce in the cold, especially if you aren't prepared for it like Texas. Right, so with those two factors combined, we started seeing things at one point like the wholesale price of electricity in places like Houston, jumping from $22 to $9,000 per megawatt hour. Meaning that everyday people's electricity bills

were set to go through the roof. And because of that, the utility company Gritty, for example, actually began pleading for their customers to switch to different providers. Right, ones that are less exposed to real-time swings in the wholesale market. And they weren't the only one. You had other utility companies reportedly offering

everything from $100 rebates to waived cancellation fees as incentives to switch. But also it's not as easy as it sounds right now. Many companies have reportedly stopped talking to new customers for the moment, with some saying they won't accept anyone until this weekend. So you had that, and then on the other side of this, you had ERCOT instructing companies

to begin implementing rolling blackouts in the hopes of preventing a total blackout. So intentionally cutting power to some to keep demand from getting too high. However, and this is a big thing here, those kinds of outages are only supposed to last anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, not hours upon end, overnight, or even days.

And as far as why that's happening, in Dallas you have officials for one utility company saying they tried to trade power among neighborhoods, but were unsuccessful because of the grid's weakening stability. And so without power and it being so cold, we've seen some Texans begin turning to hotels to seek shelter.

However, many have found that those hotels are already booked and even losing power themselves with one out of power hotel in central Texas, noting that many of their customers right now are elderly or families with infants. But yeah, right now, much of the blame for the power outages in Texas has fallen on ERCOT. In fact, Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott declared ERCOT's

reform as an emergency item for the current legislative session, saying the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours, and adding far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather. This is unacceptable.

Part of that reform will almost certainly involve ERCOT's board of directors, as five of the 15 officials on that board don't appear to live in Texas, with that notably including both the company's chair and vice chair. And so with this, we've seen state representative Jeff Leach calling this completely ridiculous, promising to file a bill requiring all ERCOT officials

to live in the state. You also had Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan announcing immediate hearings into what went wrong. Also, a thing we need to talk about with this story is while ERCOT is receiving the brunt of the blame, criticism has also been lodged against renewable energy by a number of fossil fuel groups and Republicans. For example, in a lengthy Twitter thread on Tuesday,

US Representative Dan Crenshaw said, "'West Texas, where most of the wind energy is focused, "'had wind turbines that had to be de-iced. "'The little energy that power regulators planned "'on wind to supply was now gone. "'This is what happens when you force the grid "'to rely in part on wind as a power source. "'When weather conditions get bad as they did this week,

"'intermittent renewable energy like wind isn't there when you need it. We also saw Governor Abbott on Fox News saying, This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. Our wind and our solar got shut down and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid. And that thrust Texas into a situation

where it was lacking power in a statewide basis. It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary. As well as things like host Tucker Carlson on Fox News saying, So unbeknownst to most people, the Green New Deal came to Texas, the power grid in the state became totally reliant on windmills.

Then it got cold and the windmills broke because that's what happens in the Green New Deal. Right, and the list continues. You have people like Representative Lauren Boebert also blaming the Green New Deal. But very importantly the list continues. You have people like Representative Lauren Boebert also blaming the Green New Deal, but very importantly, those comments received a lot of pushback. For one, you have experts pointing to Greenland

and other Northern outposts that are able to keep their wind turbines going throughout the winter because they have mechanisms in place to account for the cold. And on top of that, the shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines by a factor of five or six.

Places like the Washington Post going on to explain that in single-digit temperatures pipes froze because of moisture in the gas. And so in fact this seems to be more of a problem caused by Texas just being unprepared for such extreme cold. You have a state that normally has mild winters and there's a heavy lack of state regulations in Texas. This specifically connected to the fact that ERCOT is Texas's independent power grid, meaning that it is actually out of reach of federal regulators. You know, while we're talking about this, I've seen a lot of people using the word unprecedented,

but as one energy fellow at the University of Houston put it, "'This is not the first time we've had this issue in Texas.'" In fact, back in 2011, following another severe cold, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp found, "'The massive amount of generator failures that were experienced raises the question whether it would have been helpful to increase reserve

levels going into the event. This action would have brought more units online earlier, might have prevented some of the freezing problems the generators experienced and could have exposed operational problems in time to implement corrections before the units were needed to meet customer demand. It's not like that's just some theoretical concept. For example, after that storm, El Paso,

which is serviced by a different grid operator than ERCOT, adopted a number of changes to prevent future outages. And now with this storm, they've only experienced 12 outages. Also, as many other people who are smarter than me have noted, no version of the Green New Deal exists in Texas or even nationwide. With some even going further,

like US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who argued the infrastructure failures in Texas or even nationwide. With some even going further, like US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who argued, the infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you don't pursue a green new deal. Weak on sweeping next gen public infrastructure investments, little focus on equity so communities are left behind, climate deniers and leadership so they don't long prep for disaster.

We need to help people now. Long-term, we must realize these are the consequences of inaction." Texas Democrats have also since issued a rebuke of Abbott's comments, collectively saying in a statement, "'If we had a governor open to alternative sources of energy, Texas might be in a situation in which we have energy reserves

to efficiently power our state instead of the reckless leadership we have witnessed time and time again from Greg Abbott.'" But as we've seen more and more over the past few years, reality be damned and you have false rumors related to renewable energy and the Korean New Deal continuing to circulate online. And it runs the full gambit, whether it be talking heads,

spouting disinformation, or just things that are not true online. Things like, for example, I saw this photo of a helicopter reportedly spraying chemicals on a turbine in Texas going viral. However, it turns out that photo was taken years ago in Sweden and the helicopter was actually just spraying warm water.

Also, I'm gonna link down below to resources for those of you affected by this storm and for anyone else who wants to help. And obviously we're gonna continue to keep our eyes on this, especially as a second wave of this storm is being forecast for later this week. Then in kind of just news that I wanted to mention, so I have at least one story that's not serious,

heavy or depressing, I don't know if you saw this. Disney released the first official trailer for Cruella today starring Emma Stone and it is not what I imagined, but maybe it's what I should have been imagining that it would be. A number of people online saying it looks like Disney's Joker, this gritty origin story about a maniac. And I'll say right now I am cautiously optimistic.

I hope they don't throw a little curve ball in there where they're like someone lied and she's actually not a villain. But yeah, to those who have seen the trailer, I'd love to know your thoughts. Are you hyped for this? Are you cautiously optimistic? Or are you like, nah, it's gonna be trash.

And then let's talk about the absolutely major update on that whole GameStop stock situation. Right, remember GameStop and AMC, Wall Street bets, Robinhood, shit in the bed. Well, the guy that was seen as being kind of the center of this story was Roaring Kitty, AKA Keith Gill. And the news today is that he is reportedly being sued for securities fraud, with him being named

in a proposed class action lawsuit in Massachusetts. Essentially the way the story goes is that Gill invests $53,000 into GameStop stock and call options in June of 2019. Insider reporting that Gill gained a cult-like following as he documented his YOLO trade and GameStop on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum for more than a year, with the value of those securities at one point peaking at $48 million last month.

As far as what the lawsuit alleges, it says that Gil misrepresented himself as an amateur investor when in reality he was a licensed securities professional. Also alleging that Gil profited from GameStop's rise by artificially inflating the price of the stock and saying Gill's deceitful and manipulative conduct not only violated numerous industry regulations and rules,

but also various securities laws by undermining the integrity of the market for GameStop shares. And going on to claim he caused enormous losses, not only to those who bought option contracts, but also to those who fell for Gill's act and bought GameStop stock during the market frenzy at greatly inflated prices.

Gill is also notably not the only person being named here. You also have Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. and a brokerage subsidiary of the company listed as defendants. The lawsuit saying they had an obligation to supervise Gill's actions in the market. Yeah, that's the story as it is now. Gill, this is gonna be a crazy week for Gill.

Obviously it's been a crazy two months for him. I mean, we're getting this news today and he's actually due to testify before Congress tomorrow. Which on that note, if you'd like to read his opening statement, he actually released it as I was finishing up today's show. I'll link to it down below. We should also talk about the hundreds of workers

at fast food restaurants in 15 different cities across the country going on strike yesterday to demand a $15 an hour minimum wage. And the strike was part of the nationwide fight for 15 movement, which has organized workers and walkouts since back in 2012. And while yes, over the years we've seen states taking on their minimum wage. And the strike was part of the nationwide fight for 15 movement, which has organized workers and walkouts since back in 2012. And while yes, over the years we've seen states taking on their minimum wage, the federal minimum wage

has not changed since 2009. It's just $7.25 an hour, which means it's been over 11 years which is the longest period of time without a raise of the minimum wage since it was first implemented back in the thirties. And so part of the reason that these strikes are nationwide news right now is they come as lawmakers are debating enacting a $15 an hour federal minimum wage as part of the 30s. And so part of the reason that these strikes are nationwide news right now is they come as lawmakers are debating enacting a $15 an hour

federal minimum wage as part of the stimulus package. President Biden made this idea a central campaign promise. And while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that a $15 increase will be included in the lower chambers version of the bill, it is unclear right now if the measure has enough support to get past the Senate. As we've talked about in the past,

the Democrats are looking to pass this a certain way so they only need 50 votes rather than 60, meaning they could technically pass this without any Republican support. They have a 50-50 split. Kamala Harris splits a tie. But you also have the two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema,

saying that they oppose including this provision in the stimulus bill. Now, notably in this situation, there is also the possibility that a minimum wage increase could be passed separately from the stimulus package. It would require bipartisan support, which feels impossible, but may not be. For example, yesterday we saw Republican Senators Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton proposing a bill that would increase the minimum wage to an unknown

number, but it would also include a provision that would prevent businesses from hiring undocumented workers. Between that and not knowing where kind of this mystery number would land, most likely less than 15, it's probably a no-go from Democrats. And as far as where Biden is landing on all this, he reaffirmed his commitment to including the minimum wage in the stimulus package while speaking at a town hall event last night. But we also saw him say there

that he was open to negotiating certain aspects, things like having a longer gradual phase-in period. Because currently the road to $15 has a five-year period under the Democrats' current plan. And then finally, we should talk about the big news that broke this morning. So Rush Limbaugh is dead at the age of 70, and I've had a number of people say,

"'Can you speak on this?' And my answer is, not really. And that's because I try to have a policy of not speaking ill of at least the recently deceased. And I don't have anything positive to say. The only thing I can say is that this is the passing of a man that if he did not exist, I might not have this job.

I'm so annoyed and bothered by something that he covered. It had to be at what, 15 or 16 years ago at this point, I started making videos about the news and it eventually became this show. But as far as the public reaction on social media, could not be more divided. You have some primarily on the right saying this is the sad passing of a pioneer

of conservative talk radio, but also on the opposite end, you had people cracking jokes, seemingly happy. I mean, rest in piss was trending on Twitter. People sharing clips and articles that in general, people said showed that Limbaugh was racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, in general, a fear mongering bigot. Surely that divide and argument,

it's gonna be something that we're gonna see online for a little while and it's gonna be ugly. But yeah, that is essentially where the story ends. And of course, with this, or really anything that stood out to you today, I'd love to know your thoughts in those comments down below because this is the end of the video.

As always, thank you for being a part of my daily dives into the news, hitting that subscribe button, liking, all the good stuff. If you're craving some more news, I got you covered right here. But as always, I love yo faces and I'll see you tomorrow.