Planetary Perseverance: NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed  on Mars yesterday for a mission to further explore whether there was ever life on the red planet. 

  Mars is 128 million miles from Earth. The control room in Pasadena broke into high fives and loud celebration when touchdown was confirmed.

  The rover about the size of a small car has lasers to analyze the chemical makeup of Martian rocks, and ground-penetrating radar to possibly find and identify fossilized microbial life that may have lived when Mars had flowing water. Scientists believe Mars was warmer, wetter and a little more like more Earth three and a half billion years ago.

  The plan is to take samples of soil and rock that one day might be brought back to Earth for study. The craft is also equipped with a four-pound helicopter that can make 90-second exploratory flights about 10 to 15 feet off the ground..

  NASA has landed spacecraft on Mars before — always an amazing feat — but the expeditions so far have been unable to answer the vexing question of whether  the planet ever supported life in some form.

The Texas Crisis: The Texas deep freeze and power outage has turned into a water crisis. Pipes have frozen and burst, flooding homes and apartments. Hundreds of water mains have broken. People are lined up at public spigots to get water in buckets and bottles.

  A lot of Texans have electric heat. Now, residents with unfixed rates for power are faced with bills in the multiple thousands because power prices spiked during the shortage. 

  Texas, the Republican anti-government and regulation state, is now asking President Joe Biden for help and a disaster declaration while blaming solar power and green energy for the collapse of their largely unregulated power grid.

  Paul Krugman says in The NY Times, “It’s the energy-policy equivalent of claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a false-flag Antifa operation — raw denial of reality, not just to escape accountability, but to demonize one’s opponents.” 

Limited Government: A Texas mayor who told townspeople complaining about having no heat and power that “no one owes you or your family anything” has resigned and his wife was fired from her job. 

  Tim Boyd, of Colorado City, Texas had posted on Facebook that “No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice!” 

 Missing sympathy and apostrophes, he wrote, “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 hand out!”

  Instead of relying on the power companies or government … which he used to be a part of — Boyd said, “If you were sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the week will perish.”

In a Heartbeat: South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill prohibiting abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detectable. 

  “This is a great day. It’s a happy day,” he said during an event at the state Capitol. “There a lot of happy hearts beating right now.”

  The law says a doctor must perform an ultrasound on a woman seeking abortion to determine if there is a fetal heartbeat. If there’s a heartbeat, abortion would be legal only in a medical emergency, or if the pregnancy is the result of a rape or incest. That’s the exception that tells you the pro-life movement is not entirely pro-life.

  Anti-abortion states and advocates are moving toward legal decisions that could overturn the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal. Forty-three states prohibit abortion after a certain point in pregnancy and a handful have passed heartbeat bills like the new South Carolina law. 

Sick Call: Former US senator, presidential candidate, and World War II veteran Bob Dole announced that he has stage 4 lung cancer and is beginning treatment. He’s 97. Dole was wounded by machine gun fire in the war, limiting use of his right arm. He’s always carried a pen in that hand.

The Bulletin Board: The Biden administration has offered to re-start nuclear talks with Iran that the Trump administration abandoned. — Congressional Democrats unveiled a plan that would allow illegal immigrants to become citizens in a process that would take eight years. — A collaboration between government and private scientists has resulted in the first cloning of an endangered wild species. The product of that effort, a black-footed ferret, is named Elizabeth Ann. Pretty cute, too. 

Vacation Cruz: In the middle of a power and water crisis in his state, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who once trashed California’s “failed energy policies,” flew to Cancun with his family Wednesday to get warm. 

  Cruz returned to Texas yesterday with a suitcase sized for a week saying it was always his plan merely to escort his wife and daughters to the Mexican resort and return. He could have just stayed home and thawed the state’s power grid with hot air.

  Text messages leaked to the press reveal that Cruz’s wife pushed for the trip on short notice because their house was “FREEZING,” as she put it. They made reservations for $309 a night at the Cancun Ritz Carlton. 

  Cruz later admitted after returning that he had planned to stay in Mexico until Sunday. 

  Texas conservative commentator Sonny Bunch tweeted that, “I can’t believe I have to say this, but: if you’re an American pol whose state is enduring a crisis of Katrina-like proportions and instead of going to help your constituents in even a basic, performative sort of way you FLY TO ANOTHER COUNTRY’S BEACH TOWN, you’re doing it wrong.” 

-30-