Good morning. It is Saturday, February the 20th. I'm Ali Velshi. Coming to you live this weekend from Birmingham, Alabama, where I'll bring you some fascinating and important conversations with activists and ordinary citizens on the front line of the battle for racial equality in this country, from a city that is steeped in the civil

rights struggle. But we begin this morning with the slow rolling crisis that continues this

hour in Texas, where millions of our fellow citizens find themselves in a dire situation,

days into a deadly winter storm that's crippled the state's energy sector and brought out

the worst in its

Republican leadership. While power has started coming back for most of the millions of Texans

who'd been struggling through freezing temperatures without it, there are still tens of thousands

without power, and the crisis is now shifting from power to water. About half of the state's

population does not currently have safe drinking water

coming out of its taps.

We shouldn't have had to be without lights.

I know it's freezing, but somebody is responsible for this.

You got people that died out here.

You got hypothermia and died.

You know, people's houses all busted up because of water, the pipes, them busted.

I'm surprised mine then busts.

Lade it behind me, huh?

It's busted.

And if the crisis that Texans are living through right now were not enough to deal with,

their governor, the Republican Greg Abbott, lied about the cause of the catastrophe and tried to use it to score political points.

Abbott went on Fox News at the height of the crisis to try to blame the whole thing on renewable

energy, saying wind and solar had been shut down by the crisis. Quote, this shows how the

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