According to a report for Bloomberg, with temperatures dropping as winter nears, analysts are worried the state will see a repeat of the chaos that ensued last year -- that even saw Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) attempting to flee for the sunny beaches in Cancun.

Bloomberg's Mark Chediak and Naureen Malik report Gov. Greg Abbott (R) made some efforts to prepare for another arctic blast but came up short.

"When Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed in June a series of reforms intended to shore up the electrical grid that catastrophically failed last winter, he pledged that 'everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas,'" they wrote. "But one key segment of Texas's energy system that fell woefully short during February's deep freeze has gone largely unchanged: the natural gas system that seized up, choked power plants of fuel and led to shortages across the region."

According to Michael Webber, a University of Texas at Austin professor who specializes in energy, "Texas has not done enough," before bluntly stating, "We are not ready for another cold winter."

Michigan State Police on Thursday opened a criminal investigation into the disappearance of election equipment in a rural township after the local clerk — who has boosted 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories and QAnon memes online — was stripped of her authority to run next week’s election.

A tablet that is a key part of how the voting machine operates was reported missing from Adams Township earlier this week, Bridge Michigan reported.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had banned Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott earlier from overseeing the municipal election next week after Scott refused run accuracy tests on or allow a vendor to conduct mandatory maintenance of the voting machine.

Hillsdale County Clerk Marney Kast, who the state tasked to replace Scott to run the election, discovered that the tablet was gone on Tuesday when she opened the tabulator case that she had collected from the Adams Township hall. She described the tablet to Bridge Michigan as the “brains” of the machine.

Donald Trump is seeking to prevent Jan. 6 investigators from accessing daily presidential diaries, drafts of election-related speeches, logs of his phone calls, handwritten notes and files of top aides, the National Archives revealed in a Saturday morning court filing.

According to the National Archives, the former president has sought to block about 750 pages out of nearly 1,600 identified by officials as relevant to the Jan. 6 investigation. Among them are hundreds of pages from “multiple binders of the former press secretary [Kayleigh McEnany] which is made up almost entirely of talking points and statements related to the 2020 election,” according to the court filing.

The filing details are the clearest indication yet of what Trump is trying to withhold from congressional investigators seeking information about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his activities on the day that a mob of violent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power.....

“The lengthy public record of Mr. Trump’s statements and actions ... provides an abundant basis to seek the nonpublic records of the person whom the attackers sought to maintain in the White House,” the committee writes. “Any inquiry that did not insist on examining Mr. Trump’s documents and communications would be worse than useless—the equivalent of staging a production of ‘Hamlet’ without the Prince of Denmark.”

As supporters of then-President Donald Trump surrounded and harassed a Joe Biden campaign bus on a Central Texas highway last year, San Marcos police officials and 911 dispatchers fielded multiple requests for assistance from Democratic campaigners and bus passengers who said they feared for their safety from a pack of motorists, known as a “Trump Train,” allegedly driving in dangerously aggressive ways...

Former state Sen. Wendy Davis, who was running for Congress at the time, is among the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The new complaint also expands the number of people and entities being sued to include Daenzer, San Marcos assistant police chief Brandon Winkenwerder and the city itself. A spokesperson for the city did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday. Daenzer and Winkenwerder could not immediately be reached.....

The lawsuit alleges that by refusing the help, law enforcement officers violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 because they were aware of “acts of violent political intimidation” but did not take appropriate steps to prevent the Trump supporters from intimidating eligible voters.

The provision of the Klan Act that the plaintiffs are citing in the lawsuit has laid dormant for years, but saw a resurgence under the Trump administration, according to Project Democracy lawyer John Paredes, who is representing some of the plaintiffs. It was also recently cited in a federal lawsuit against Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The lawsuit alleges that by refusing the help, law enforcement officers violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 because they were aware of “acts of violent political intimidation” but did not take appropriate steps to prevent the Trump supporters from intimidating eligible voters.

The provision of the Klan Act that the plaintiffs are citing in the lawsuit has laid dormant for years, but saw a resurgence under the Trump administration, according to Project Democracy lawyer John Paredes, who is representing some of the plaintiffs. It was also recently cited in a federal lawsuit against Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection.