To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Areas of dense fog in the morning. Mostly sunny. Highs in the lower 80s. Light and variable winds, becoming south around 5 mph in the afternoon. Friday Night: Partly cloudy in the evening, then becoming mostly clear. Patchy dense fog after midnight. Lows in the upper 50s. Southeast winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today, Flagler Cares’ Carrie Baird and Cheryl Tristam discuss the Keep the Holiday Lights on program, with AdventHealth’s Michelle Bartlome and the Flagler Rotary’s Bill Butler and Scott Sowers talking about Fantasy Lights. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Flagler County Cultural Council (FC3) meets at 11 a.m. at the Tourism Development Office, 120 Airport Road, Palm Coast, in the 3rd-floor conference room. The meetings are open to the public. Contact [email protected] for additional information.
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ at City Rep Theatre, 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday. Adults, $25, youth, $15. Buckle up for a whirlwind journey with CRT’s revival of Around the World in 80 Days! This high-energy adaptation of the Jules Verne classic follows fearless Phileas Fogg as he races across the globe. With clever staging, quick-changing characters, and nonstop laughs, it’s a theatrical adventure full of heart, hilarity, and wonder. A fast-paced, fantastical adventure for the whole family.
Diary: Last night as I was going to sleep to the words of Montaigne on vanity (“There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly”) I had one of those sightly terrifying moments, as on many nights past when I’d piss in the middle of the night and see my mortality reflected in the porcelained pond before it’s flushed to its purgatorial cleanse at Waste Water Treatment Number 1, thinking of the rapid-fire repetitiveness, of the diminishing number, of these moments after lights out, when we cozy up to our pillows’ and blankets’ familiar folds in comfort so decadent, so guilt-ridden. I try, I try not to think of my fellow billions denied so much as a safe, decent bed, I try harder not to think of the pomposity of the thought, the cheap, putrid arrogance posing as empathy, since I am just as quickly back to the deceptiveness of the comfort wrapped in a night terror wrapped in pretention. It all feels like borrowed time. It can all end in a flash, we tell ourselves. But we are the flash. This is the flash. It doesn’t have to be projected or imagined as an end at some undefined future. It is an end, when even a year, five years, 20 years, are not even the blink of a flash. The last 60 certainly have been. The strobe light keeps getting more frantic. And now to 61 in this November of my vanity. “Here you have, a little more decently,” went Montaigne in the Donald Frame translation my brother Gabriel gifted me to mark my merest of 23rd year in 1987, himself even in 1588 waxing lyrical about that sewer plant in his mind’s Woodlands, “some excrements of an aged mind, now hard, now loose, and always undigested. And when shall I make an end of describing the continual agitation and changes of my thoughts, whatever subject they light on, since Didymus filled six thousand books with the sole subject of grammar?… But there should be some legal restraint aimed against inept and useless writers, as there is against vagabonds and idlers. Both I and a hundred others would be banished from the hands of our people. This is no jest. Scribbling seems to be a sort of symptom of an unruly age.”
—P.T.
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
December 2025
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
The Bronx Wanderers at the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
‘Greetings,’ A Christmas Comedy
Santa in Bunnell
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
For the full calendar, go here.
“I do not say that it is so, but I say that it is not proven that it cannot be.” (“Je ne dis pas que cela soit, mais je dis qu’il n’est point prouve que cela ne puisse pas etre.”)
–From Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopedie (1771).
Brynn Newton says
Happy Birthday to all y’all Great Thinkers
Pogo says
@Voltaire
… a light to all, for all time.
How to ruin anything? Add a harpsichord to its soundtrack.
Ray W. says
The Independent published a story about yet another federal judge criticizing government witnesses for being less than truthful when testifying under oath.
Here are some bullet points from the article:
– This past June, federal agents received a tip from a Texas woman who alleged that a Honduran immigrant married to a U.S. citizen was an undocumented immigrant and that he had “abused” the woman’s daughter.
– Federal agents considered him an “easy target” and, accompanied by Texas troopers, set out to detain him.
– In the reporter’s words, “[d]uring the stop, agents ordered him to open the doors of his truck and soon broke the driver’s side window. In the process, a Homeland Security Investigations officer suffered a cut to his arm.”
– The undocumented immigrant was then accused of “impeding” officers and “harming” the agent. With specificity, he had tried to “assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with the officers.” The government’s charges carried a possible sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
– During a hearing on the criminal charges, which differs from civil immigration proceedings, federal witnesses testified that the immigrant had been a “threat” to them and that the cut had come from a struggle with the immigrant.
– A body camera video of the incident was introduced into evidence, though the story doesn’t establish by which party. During said video, the agent allegedly injured by the immigrant can be heard saying, “I’m going to go get my window break; I ain’t got time for this”, shortly after ordering the immigrant to open his truck’s door. The injury occurred during the process of the agent breaking the truck’s window.
– After viewing the video and considering all of the presented evidence, the judge ruled that the evidence did not show the immigrant resisting the agents in any manner.
– Finding that the evidence in the record established that the agents had not obtained a search warrant, that the agents had not presented an order of removal from the country, and that the agents had not asked the immigrant about his immigration status until after he had been removed from his truck and cuffed, the judge ruled that “the Government’s conduct was — and has been — outrageous”, adding that the government’s testimony had been “largely fictional.” He also stated that the agents had a “break car windows first and ask questions later policy.”
– The judge, a George W. Bush appointee, prepared a written order in which he found that letting the Indictment stand “would grant immigration enforcement officers carte blanche to evade the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”
– The immigrant, while no longer facing criminal prosecution, remains in detention on immigration issues.
– Department of Homeland Security officials had not responded to the reporters request for comment at the time of the writing of the story.
– Per the reporter, “[c]ourts all over the country have expressed deep reservations over the tactics used by immigration agents as they seek to carry out the Trump administration’s goal of a record-breaking deportation campaign.”
– Per the reporter, “[i]mmigration agents have broken car windows nearly 50 times since Trump took office, a July analysis from ProPublica found, compared to just eight instances identified in the previous decade.”
According to The Associated Press, a different federal judge recently chastised a federal prosecutor for “relying on testimony from an officer who has been discredited by other judges.”
In May 2025, a man was stopped outside a laundromat. A gun was seized from his person.
During a pretrial motion, a federal prosecutor called to the stand a Metropolitan Police Department Investigator who had previously been found by two other federal judges of being less than truthful on the stand. His testimony was contradicted by surveillance camera video of the event.
Finding “key portions” of the investigator’s testimony unworthy of belief, the judge supported her finding by stating “He has been dishonest about major issues in the past.”
The trial judge held that, in the reporter’s words “courts can’t tolerate police officers falsely testifying under oath.”
At issue is the idea of exactly how prosecutors should be required to vet their witnesses prior to calling them to the stand.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro issued a statement that disregarded the court’s finding that the video-recording presented evidence contradicting the testimony of the witness:
“[I]t is offensive that this judge finds a credibility problem with a police officer when the crime is on videotape exactly as describe by two officers.”
As an aside, I have repeatedly commented about how prosecutors are supposed to “gatekeepers” of all evidence they present to a judge or to a jury, meaning that prosecutors can’t just blindly present evidence; they have an ethical duty to ensure that it is truthful.
In the law, the government’s burden of proof has two elements. First, the evidence presented must meet a “burden of production”, which is defined as evidence being both competent and reliable. Second, the evidence must meet a burden of persuasion.
Only where the government’s evidence meets both requirements can it meet the burden of proof standard that all prosecutors carry.
In a story published by The Telegraph, a British news outlet, this past September in Arizona, a 24-year-old Native American woman was arrested for DWLS. She eventually was sentenced to serve time, with her release date set for November 11th.
Hours before her release, she was told that an immigration detainer had been filed and that she was to be held in custody for transfer to federal custody for possible deportation.
Family members then talked with county jail officials.
Here is the reporter’s account of a conversation with the Native American woman:
“My sister said: ‘How is she going to get deported if she’s a Native American?’ and “We have proof’,’ … “They said, ‘Well, we don’t know because we’re not immigration and we can’t answer those questions. We’re just holding her for them. So, when they pick her up tonight, they’re going to go ahead and deport her.'”
The woman’s mother provided citizenship documents to corrections officials and stayed “on site” overnight. The next day, jail officials stated that there had been a “silly” mistake and that discussions would be held to prevent this type of event from happening again.
According to a site named Law & Crime, a Spotsylvania, Virginia, 58-year-old man left a home he shared with roommates on the evening of February 28, 2024, while armed with a 9 mm handgun and equipped with a 17-shot magazine.
While driving on I-95, he came upon a “white box truck” driven by “Victim 1” and began honking his horn. Eventually, Victim 1 drove the box truck off the interstate and stopped at a gas station. The driver of the box truck had called a friend, who pulled into the parking lot, too.
The friend, described as “Victim 2”, asked why the Virginia man was following the box truck. The Virginia man responded by asking how long Victim 1 had been in the country. Victim 1 answered he had been here for about a year-and-a-half.
The Virginia man drew his handgun and fired six rounds, striking Victim 1 twice in his stomach and once in his arm and Victim 2 once in his stomach.
The Virginia man then drove home and told his roommates that he had shot two men.
The next day, the Virginia man was arrested. He admitted to shooting the two men and told law enforcement that “my intentions were clear in my brain, at the time.”
From court documents:
“Cornett then described his anger at illegal immigration, telling the detective that he was pissed about undocumented immigrants receiving welfare funds, phones, and health insurance, and that he had ‘driven around before with the same thought,’ … Cornett later asked the detective whether he could be ‘charged for my thoughts,’ and went on to explain that he fantasized about flying an Apache helicopter gunship to the border and firing on undocumented migrants traveling into the United States in order ‘to deter’ other undocumented migrants from attempting to cross the border.”
When investigators talked with his roommates, they talked of Cornet being “kind of obsessed by the news that he viewed regarding the entry of non-citizens into the United States at the southern border” and that Cornet was “a heavy consumer of cable television news.”
Mr. Cornett entered a plea to the charges and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the attempted murder hate crimes and to another 10 years, also to be served consecutively, on the discharge of a firearm count.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
There is a sickness upon the land.
Never in all my years have I seen a prosecutor so stupidly say that she has the political power to decide what the facts are. Never in the history of our nation have prosecutors possessed the political power to determine what the truth is. Prosecutors have the political power to allege what the truth is, but not to decide what the truth is. There is a difference. Only judges and jurors have the political power to decide facts.
I have previously commented about a federal judge telling a federal prosecutor that trust in the words of Department of Justice lawyers, built up slowly and steadily over decades, had been dissipated in mere weeks by recent highly questionable actions taken by prosecutors in court.
Federal witness after federal witness after federal witness takes the stand and testifies. Video-recordings of the events are then introduced into evidence. Judge after judge after judge find that the witness’ testimony is not truthful.
Gullibly stupid people, after steeping themselves in the miasma of lies issued through hate radio and TV speech, are giving themselves permission to seek out the “other” and harm or kill them.
A recent commenter warned the FlaglerLive community that civil war is coming. There is reason to conclude that the commenter had already given himself or herself permission to kill Americans of his or her choosing at the time fingers were put to keyboard.
On several occasions I have commented about a study of people who report to mental health specialists of their hearing voices. A significant portion of Americans report that the voices tell them to harm or kill either themselves or others. A significant portion of Namibians (if I accurately recall the country presented in the study) report that the voices tell them that they either are God or are a prophet of God, and that the voices tell them to help other people. A significant portion of Asian Indians report that the voices tell them to clean their houses.
Sherry says
Well. . . Here’s a little something Voltaire DID say, which most certainly defines many of the Maga hard core members:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
In the full context, Voltaire explained that once a person is conditioned to believe something that defies their intelligence without question, they lose the ability to resist orders to do evil or unjust acts. He was primarily concerned with the fanaticism and religious crimes that historically “flooded the earth” when people stopped applying critical thinking to dogma.
Really “think” about this Maga members. Does this apply to you? If so, please seek help immediately!
Ray W. says
By now, nearly every FlaglerLive reader ought to know that a central plank of President Trump’s 2024 policy platform was the bring manufacturing back to American. “Reshoring”, it is commonly called. But new factories were always in the plan, too. They had to be if Trump was going to claim that his administration created more new factories than Biden’s did.
President Trump has vowed to create “hundreds of thousands” of new manufacturing jobs.
The Washington Post just published a lengthy article about the state of the American manufacturing labor sector.
Here is the start to the story:
“When Viega LLC began hiring for its new factory in northeast Ohio last year, company officials ran traditional ‘help wanted’ ads, retained outside recruiters, created a special website and even posted openings on roadside billboards.
“Nothing worked. Viega used all the customary tools, and yet for months, the maker of plumbing and HVAC systems had little to show for its efforts. With area unemployment low, Viega’s requirement that new hires endure a lengthy training program four states away did not help.
“The company’s struggle reflects a chronic shortage of manufacturing workers that could imperil the domestic factory boom that President Trump has promised will result from his protectionist trade policy. Nationwide, manufacturers report 409,000 job openings, a number that is likely to swell if Trump’s tariffs produce a significant reshoring of factory work in the next few years.”
The reporter wrote the Viega eventually found 68 “capable” workers and opened its factory this past September. But, according to the reporter, since President Trump took office, 49,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared.
And, according to the reporter, annualized spending on new factories is down from 2024’s recent annualized spending peak (yes, the spending peak for building new factories occurred in 2024, when it was significantly higher than it is now and many of the new factories that are opening now began construction during the Biden years), though today’s spending spree is still three times the annualized spending rate from before the onset of the pandemic.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is on record as saying that “the real payoff will come next year, as new factories begin operating and the administration’s tax legislation encourages additional investment.”
Thus far, President Trump have been emphasizing “sophisticated factories” over “traditional workshops producing ‘sneakers and T-shirts.'” In October, he talked of bringing in “high-skilled” immigrants to filled manufacturing labor challenges, something that did not sit well with his “nativist” base. On Air Force One, he recently told reporters that “state of the art” factories should not be expected to rely on people unemployed for years on end, saying:
“You can’t expect them to make unbelievably complex chips and computers and other things and pick people off the unemployment line that haven’t worked in five years.”
But the question remains: How can a base of skilled manufacturing labor be created where one no longer exists?
One hurdle is the fact that unionized factory jobs that once provided a path to the middle class no longer exist. According to a Federal Reserve study, the “wage premium” for production work “disappeared” by 2006.
Another hurdle is that in the past, many factory jobs were open to high school graduates, but today’s factory work requires the capacity to work with automation, something that does not automatically come with a high school degree.
Many of today’s production lines are controlled by “programmable logic controllers”, a type of work that cannot easily be learned. A fast-growing facet of factory work is called “maintenance technician”, a labor sector that has become a “bottleneck” in the “skilled workforce.”
It is no longer enough to attract “bodies”, factory work now requires the attraction of “skills”, said economist Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute to the reporter.
In response to this issue, the Trump administration has consolidated a number of workforce development programs into its “Make America Skilled Again” initiative. The Labor Department just released $86 million to 14 states to fund “industry-led training efforts.”
Industry has not sat on its hands either.
According to Carolyn Lee, executive director of the Manufacturing Institute, an industry-funded non-profit, “employers are pursuing veterans, convicts, and individuals who quit work to become caregivers, as well as recent graduates and immigrants.” Economists, though, say that “tapping Americans who have left the labor force due to illness or incarceration is a high-risk strategy” that might or might not succeed. Atrophied skills and substance abuse problems are poor fits for working alongside “high-powered machinery.”
Arizona-based First Solar decided to “spread its six factories across four states: Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana. A company executive told the reporter:
“We needed to diversify geographically in order to make sure we had access to people.”
The Louisiana factory, based in Iberia, hired 700 residents at a pay level of $90,000 per year in a region where the average pay is around $30,000 per year. Some of the workers came out of “local training colleges and technical institutes.” Others had worked in the oil and gas industry.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I haven’t forgotten the slide in housing starts during the early years of the Great Recession near the end of the George W. Bush presidency.
For some five years prior to the slide, the seasonally adjusted annual number of housing starts had consistently been above the replacement need for homes that had aged out of use, plus the need for new homes for a growing population.
According to a St. Louis-based Federal Reserve Economic Date history of annualized monthly housing starts, in February 2006, the seasonally adjusted annualized monthly rate was 2.119 million homes started. America’s population growth rate was too low to fill that many new homes with people. An existing home glut developed and the nation’s median home prices that had been artificially propped up by two defective residential mortgage products ultimately crashed. By March 2009, the seasonally adjusted annualized number of monthly housing starts had dropped by more than four times, to 505 thousand homes.
Flagler County was hit especially hard by the slide in housing starts.
I spent a significant part of nearly a year handling eleven legally complex criminal charges filed against the CEO of a local construction company that collapsed, not because of skimming of funds, but because people simply stopped buying new houses. The business model was based on continuing sales of new homes.
Numerous economic studies showed that during the crash the housing construction industry lost millions of skilled laborers. A site called prospects.org asserts that private construction employment dropped by 2.3 million worker between April 2006 and January 2011.
Some skilled construction workers retired early. Others found work in other labor sectors.
When the home building sector began to rebound in 2011, there simply no longer existed a labor force of sufficient size that was willing to return to work in home construction. Much of a whole new skilled construction workforce had to be built, one new worker at a time. It didn’t take place overnight.
The new home construction industry has never since regained the heights of annualized housing starts in 2006. The closest the industry has come to that now 18-year-old high occurred in April 2022, when the annualized number of housing starts hit 1,820 million. The latest available figure from the FRED, in August 2025, was an annualized figure of 1,307 million housing starts.
Ray W. says
Do FlaglerLive readers remember the gullible JimboXYZ’s effort to persuade readers that natural gas and coal was an economically viable alternative to the ever-cheaper option of solar and wind power? He actually linked readers to a fictional TV show, as if dialogue written to entertain an audience was sufficient to prove his point.
Here is a story out of the Houston Chronicle. If there is any American news outlet that follows the oil and gas industry it is the Houston Chronicle.
The reporter wrote of a 2023 fund controlled by Texas’ governor, called the Texas Energy Fund. The Texas legislature originally funded it with $10 billion in public money. $7.2 billion of that $10 billion was allocated for taxpayer supported loans to companies seeking to build natural gas power plants.
Earlier this year, wrote the reporter, another $2.2 billion in loan funding was approved by the Texas legislature.
In the reporter’s words:
“In recent years, state leaders have agonized over what they view as a lack of investment in new fossil fuel power plants, as renewable energy has instead proliferated across Texas.
“Wind and solar projects, because they have no fuel costs and low operating costs, have depressed wholesale prices on the Texas electricity market. Renewable energy proponents say this has contributed to savings for consumers, but it’s also made it harder for natural gas power plants to make enough money to be profitable in the long term.
“… But state politicians say more fossil fuel power plants are still needed to ensure electricity is always available, particularly during lengthy cold snaps akin to what happened during the deadly freeze in February 2021.”
As an aside, I just posted a comment about how it was the natural gas-fired power plants that failed during that 2021 freeze, because Texas regulators had not required plant and well owners to winterize their natural gas plants and wells. When temperatures plunged to record lows, natural gas wells stopped working properly, thereby reducing gas flows in the pipelines leading to the power plants. When the natural gas power plants began to shut down, regulators ordered grid zones to be shut down to preserve and already damaged grid. When the grid zones lost power, additional natural gas plants shut down because the pumps pushing natural gas through the pipelines stopped working. Everything cascaded into a fiasco. It wasn’t solar or wind that caused the shutdown, it was natural gas plants shutting down.
Back to the story.
According to the story, more than 17 companies had applied for taxpayer-supported loans so that they could set out to build new natural gas power plants at the time of writing.
The total number of applicants was not listed in the story. I checked. Many more companies appear to have filed plans to build natural gas power plants, perhaps as many as 130. One company made it to “final review” but dropped out after it was accused of fraud. An unstated number of other companies voluntarily dropped out, in the reporter’s words, “citing difficulty securing necessary equipment and other factors for their inability to continue in the program.”
Should a company default on a taxpayer supported loan, according to the reporter, “a court-appointed third party would be empowered to recover the lost funds, including by requiring the defaulting company to sell assets.”
Thus far, per the reporter, two companies have qualified for funds to build a total of four natural gas plants.
In June, the Kerrville Public Utility Board received $105 million from the fund for the Rock Island Generation Project.
NRG, a power company, had already received $216 million to add two natural gas power plants to the TH Wharton complex in northwest Houston, a project expected to reach completion by the summer of 2026. The company just recently received another $562 million in taxpayer supported money to build a third power plant in Baytown, also near Houston. That new project should open by summer 2028.
An NRG executive vice-president, Rob Gaudette, told the Chronicle reporter that, in the reporter’s words, “planning power plants for the grid is more difficult” than selling electricity directly to tech companies that need power for AI endeavors.
Selling electricity to the grid is more uncertain than selling electricity to tech companies. In the reporter’s words, “the [overall] market outlook for the next five years is uncertain, as the Texas market is trying to figure out how much of the predicted electricity demand from artificial intelligence will come true.”
According to Mr. Gaudette, said the reporter:
“[C]ompanies developing natural gas power plants have to be confident that their projects will be economic for decades to come. … The Texas Energy Fund loans help reduce some of a project’s risk by lowering the upfront cost of capital.”
Last year, NRG informed state officials that it would not move forward with its plans to build natural gas power plants unless the company received $925 million in loans from the fund. NRG has a fourth project awaiting fund approval, the Green Bayou natural gas power plant, also near Houston.
Mr. Gaudette said:
“Without loans, we definitely have to sharpen our pencils and think about it some more. … I’m not going to tell you that we wouldn’t build it, but I’m also not going to tell you that we would.”
I did find a Texas Energy Fund natural gas-fired power plant project, this one located in the Permian Basin just west of Odessa, Texas, that the reporter apparently missed. The project is slated to open in 2029. Competitive Power Venture (CPV)’s CEO, Sherman Knight, in a Center Square story, thanked the governor and state and local leaders, “for their continued support of the CPV Basin Ranch Energy Project that will provide critical baseload power to the citizens of Texas.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
This is how the process commonly works.
A company develops a business model for a new project and submits it to potential lenders in hopes money will be made available to build the project.
If the model appears workable over time, lenders will compete to offer loans.
If the business model has gaps and flaws, lenders do not compete to offer loans.
Often, such companies do not have a workable business model that appeals to commercial lenders and they have to go into the private lending market or seek other higher risk sources of funds.
Meanwhile, the company applies for a permit. The actual final lending event normally doesn’t occur until after the permit issues. Many intervening events can scuttle the lending process.
For a power company, ideally, securing long term contracts with buyers willing to pay a set price per kilowatt-hour produced will seal the lending deal, because the lender can reasonably believe that its loan will be repaid over time.
If a natural gas power plant project could land a long-term contract with a data center that needs a set amount of power over decades of operation, just about any lender would loan money for the project.
But in today’s ever-changing electricity marketplace, why would a data center owner enter into a 20- or 25- or 30-year contract to pay today’s price for electricity from a natural gas-fired power plant when solar and wind power is getting ever and ever cheaper and cheaper?
Texas politicians understand the dilemma. Their modus operandi mandates that they be able to maintain the old lie to the more gullibly stupid among us that coal is king and natural gas is the heir-apparent.
What to do?
It seems clear that no power company will apply for a permit to build new Texas-based natural gas plant without government aid. Commercial lenders are not flocking to their business models.
So, in 2023, when it was already obvious that natural gas could no longer compete with wind and solar, the Texas legislature decided to give the executive $10 billion to lend, with $7.2 billion allocated for natural gas power plant projects, at taxpayer risk should any natural gas project fail.
Two years later, the legislature decided to give the executive another $2.2 billion to lend, even though at the time only one natural gas power plant company had qualified for a loan, and that for only $216 million, and that only after the company had threatened to withdraw from the process unless it received a total loan of $925 million.
Apparently, as many as 130 companies have now lined up at the public trough for whatever share they can attract from the more than $8 billion in remaining funds.
Pogo says
@Ray W (and anyone)
Based on available evidence, what would be your estimate of Trump’s consumption of written information? Do you think that in a typical week — he reads the equivalent of this one page, and the comments? I’m skeptical that he reads as much in a month. The official word is that he sees 4 major newspapers and marks them up — an impressive accomplishment for a bathroom break.
Seriously.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+aversion+reading
4!!!
Dividing Donald Trump’s days golfing by his days in office yields a percentage that varies depending on the time frame, but sources indicate it’s roughly between 23% and 28% for his second term, a rate higher than his first term
. For example, one report from September 2025 suggests he golfed 66 days out of 220 in office, which is about 30%. Another tracker from July 2025 indicates he golfed 43 days out of 186 in office, which is about 23%…”
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+golf+divided+by+days+on+job
Only He
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+lost+5+billion+nov+2025
Eat up MAGA…
Ray W. says
Tyson Foods, writes Reuters, intends to close a Lexington, Nebraska, beef packing plant, purportedly because the U.S. cattle head count remains at the lowest figure in nearly 75 years. 3,200 people will lose their jobs:
“Supplies are expected to remain tight for the next two years, forcing meatpackers like Tyson and JBS USA to pay steep prices for cattle to process into steaks and hamburgers.”
Make of this what you will.
Pogo says
@Get ready
… to meet God.
https://www.google.com/search?q=252+mph+wind+gust+melissa