No, actually it appears that this editor of a progressive website is so steeped in confirmation bias that he made thatabsurd accusation without checking because Carlton is an eeeeevil conservative, and there is nothing he won’t stoop to in order to make the Right’s foes look bad. Literally.
You see, that’s Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s real face. Her eyes bug out all the time; it was one of the first things I noticed about her. Imagine, an editor in the journalism profession tweets out a completely false assertion without doing the minimal amount of verification, which would have been watching the woman in any interview, or perusing the photos on Google. If Baragona had the requisite amount of shame, fairness and decency, he would apologize to Tucker, apologize to AOC for saying she has googly eyes (she does, but it’s not polite to say so), and take a leave of absence without pay for making the Daily Beast look like the hack cyber-rag it is.
Nah, he couldn’t even manage the apology part. He pulled the tweet, and wrote,
And this, gentle reader, is how a website joins Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit, The Smoking Gun, and a couple of others on the Ethics Alarms Untrustworthy Sources List.
At least the Daily Beast gave me a good and hardy laugh on the way to oblivion.
Now the evil Toon played by Christopher Lloyd in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit/” REALLY had googly eyes.…
_____________________
Pointer: Twitchy
Ethics Alarms 
Unrelated, but an interesting story that might be worth a note –
Until recently I was a Texan (got out just in time!) and was a big supporter of Cruz in 2016. The optics of this isn’t good for him, but what are the ethics of his quick trip?
Do senators have powers within their state? Isn’t the Governor responsible for the state? If he was in DC the whole time would the reaction have been different? He still wouldn’t have been in Texas.
“Text messages sent by his wife revealed a hastily planned trip away from their “FREEZING” family home.” How the hell do they get his wife’s texts? This bothers me more than his trip.
They have no constitutional power, but they are symbolic leaders in the state and that means something.
It’s a blunder but I won’t not vote for him because of it.
They have no constitutional power, but they are symbolic leaders in the state and that means something.
It’s a blunder but I won’t not vote for him because of it.
So apparently Texas learned how woefully vulnerable it was to winter weather in 2008. They did exactly jack ziltch to change their readiness in the meantime. There’s some competent leadership for you.
But…but…climate change!!!
There’s one aspect of the media coverage I’d like to bring up here. Many sources have blasted conservatives for blaming the outage on renewable energy sources. And in a sense they’re right – the real problems happened for grid controllers when fossil fuel sources started going offline because of iced-over equipment. But in another sense this a game of burying the lede. Wind power generation was down 60% over the last week; solar power generation was close to zero. The reason those renewables were not the cause of the blackout was because nobody was counting on them. It’s not that they didn’t fail to deliver at capacity, it’s that everybody was expecting they’d fail.
So, while the current blackout most certainly did expose serious problems in the cold-weather tolerance of traditional fossil-fuel generation systems in Texas, we shouldn’t pretend that renewables covered themselves in glory either. They failed too, it just wasn’t an issue because we expected they would.
Rich in CT wrote, “So apparently Texas learned how woefully vulnerable it was to winter weather in 2008. They did exactly jack ziltch to change their readiness in the meantime.“ (Bold emphasis mine)
Actually Rich we don’t know that to be true. What is obviously true is anything they did to try to do to correct the problems they had in 2008 wasn’t effective enough to stop what happened in 2021.
I’ve been through multiple ice storms in my lifetime and ice is very, VERY destructive, I’ve seen it first hand and had to fix things that were wrecked because of it. It’s difficult to justify the huge cost of “trying” to make something virtually invulnerable to ice storms. To upgrade the entire electrical grid of Texas would be a monumental task requiring monumental amounts of money and would probably take over 50 years, but I’m sure the consumers of electricity in Texas won’t mind if their monthly electrical bills increased 10-20 times to cover the cost of making their electrical grid invulnerable to massive ice storms that might hit them every 10-15 years.
In my opinion there are some things in Texas need to change. Texas electrical grid does need to increase its capacity to help prevent rolling blackouts at extremely high usage. Part of the onus belongs on the consumer and the choices they make when building or remodeling. Building standards in Texas should change so structures are insulated better to reduce the extremely high electrical usage in really cold winters due to the wide spread use of low output electrical heating devices as opposed to the use of natural gas in the colder northern states. When compared to electrical heating, wide spread use of natural gas dramatically reduces the electrical requirements of the electrical grid. Generally speaking, electrical heating doesn’t keep up as well as natural gas heating unless you are sucking massive amounts of electrical power from the grid and equipment like that can get really expensive and wide spread use of electrical heating can put a huge strain on the electrical grid. My guess is Texas will resist the changes that are needed.
45 years ago as we speak I left WESconsin for, as fate would have it, Texas (Houston), just before The BIG ONE hit on 03/04/1976.
Then there’s the Chicken Soup Game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Cotton_Bowl_Classic#:~:text=Popularly%20called%20the%20Chicken%20Soup%20Game%2C%20it%20took,half%20after%20eating%20a%20bowl%20of%20chicken%20soup.
Texas has ice storms all the damned time. Ironically, I remember a Holy Cross priest on the faculty of the Notre Dame Law School bitching about the football team (and himself) “having” to go to the Cotton Bowl (rather than, oh, say, the Orange Bowl) for that game because in his experience Dallas was no place to be in January.
Known as The Jewish Penicillin Game in the northern Milwaukee County suburbs of Lox Point & Gefilte Fish Bay…
I assume that the trip had been planned before the weather slammed Texas. (I could be wrong, of course.) Since Ted Cruz has no more ability to function as a senator than anyone else when stranded in a power outage and limited communication, I’m not sure that rushing back to personally experience his state’s ordeal would have served much purpose. He would actually be better able to help people while 500 miles away, armed with a laptop and cell phone and the power to keep them charged.
The unethical part of this story is the fact that Cruz publicly told Texans that the storm was very dangerous and they should stay at home and stay safe and yet he hypocritically took family to Cancun.
It’s the same kind of “rules for thee but not for me” that we’ve regularly seen from other politicians.
Steve
When leaders tell me to stay home and stay safe (suggestions) during a winter weather event because it is dangerous I take that to mean don’t go driving around shopping and other activities of daily life. I really don’t think it means do not escape the storm if you can. I cannot call this a rule for thee and not for me when there is no punishment attached for not following the same advice. Had he said nothing at all in advance would anyone be able to condemn him.
We all seem to be quick on the trigger to criticize yet demand others be more magnanimous. This can’t be good for a healthy society. We need to focus on the really important breaches of ethical behavior.
Chris Marschner wrote, “When leaders tell me to stay home and stay safe (suggestions) during a winter weather event because it is dangerous I take that to mean don’t go driving around shopping and other activities of daily life. I really don’t think it means do not escape the storm if you can. I cannot call this a rule for thee and not for me when there is no punishment attached for not following the same advice. Had he said nothing at all in advance would anyone be able to condemn him.”
It really doesn’t matter what the intent was or what it means, the perception of the public is “rules for thee but not for me” hypocrisy.
We’ve had other discussions here on Ethics Alarms about other unethical and hypocritical “rules for thee but not for me” type of situations that politicians put themselves into, just recently we discussed the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi dodging the metal detector screening that she rammed down the throats of everyone entering the House of Representatives. I have zero sympathy for politicians that knowingly or unknowingly expose their hypocrisies and think it’s full appropriate to bring up these kind of perceived hypocrisies to openly discussion the ethics.
We are all welcome to our opinions on these kinds of topics.
Steve
I am part of the public and I see a vast difference in Pelosi fining Rep. Gomert 5 grand for doing what she did ( jeopardy attached to the rule violations) and an advisory. I live in MD and we are always told to stay home and stay safe when even 1 inch of snow falls. Such statements are generally treated with “thank you for your concern but I will choose whether I travel or not”. Unless the State Police are ordered to stop and detain people outside their homes for not staying home when an elected person says stay home and stay safe I do not treat that as a rule for me and not for thee. So long as I have the liberty to move about as I please I will do so.
If this were an actual rule why was the airport open to any traveler who wished to go elsewhere. This is not a case of Cruz demanding his private plane to be allowed to take off when commercial flights are grounded. I also believe that one’s duty is first to family and then to constituents. You may believe differently that elected leaders must be willing to sacrifice their personal and families health and welfare simply to keep up appearances but I am not sure that is the ethical position.
What the public sees is largely determined by the gotcha crowd who want to create the “rules for thee and not for me perception” – the goal is to create conflict and discord when it would not otherwise occur – when anyone with the resources could purchase a ticket and find a warmer clime. What if he had packed his family up to come to DC and stay in a hotel to stay warm or is it because he chose a cheaper flight to the resort of Cancun? Flights to Cancun out of IAH are like bus service – nearly one every hour and a last minute RT ticket used to cost $99 bucks. A last minute RT ticket to IAD or Reagan would be at least 5 times that amount if not 10 times.
I have come to the conclusion that we would all be better off if we just started cutting people a lot of slack and let them live and let live. I see this more as a case of “its not fair he can go but I can’t” from those who love to engage in class warfare. I don’t care if he has the ability to escape the problem or not if he does not have an obligation or capacity to effect a solution.
He actually made what looks to be a decent apology later. But since it WAS later I’m suggesting 6 on the apology scale. https://www.rt.com/usa/515954-aoc-tucker-googly-eyes/
That Christopher Lloyd gif reminds me of a girlfriend. I swear it was lightning bolts that shot out of those baby blues when I made the wrong joke.
Had Cruz stayed in TX, he would not get any points for doing so, but leaving was a big risk. Retail politics is shitty business. The electorate wants the elected to feel their pain even when it is not realistic. As others have pointed out above, I doubt he has any role to play, other than a symbolic one, in dealing with this issue. I am not fussed about leaders taking breaks when they can. A post-impeachment break is not the worst thing. He has a lot of work ahead of him where it matters.
Anyway, here in lovely, perpetually snowy Canada, we had a number of politicians take southern holidays in Nov/Dec. and pay a heavy price for doing so. One in my province of Ontario recorded a fireside greeting warning everyone to stay at home that was played when he was south in the sun. He was a well-regarded finance minister who became a huge liability and then a casualty. Tone-deaf as they say.
Our version of The Onion, The Beaverton, captured the Cruz dilemma perfectly:
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2021/02/ted-cruz-latest-canadian-politician-caught-fleeing-to-mexico/
Pretty darned funny.
TPDS – Trump Proxy Derangement Syndrome