News and Commentary

Daily Beast Contributing Editor Accuses Tucker Of Adding ‘Googly Eyes’ To AOC Photo, Apologizes And Acknowledges It’s Real 

   DailyWire.com
Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Daily Beast contributing editor Justin Baragona accused Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s team of doctoring a photo of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) for a segment on Carlson’s Wednesday night show.

“So it appears that Tucker’s producers added ‘googly eyes’ to AOC in this image,” Baragona posted, captioning the image of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez featured on the show.

The photo, however, was not doctored and appears to be a screenshot of AOC taken in May, 2018 at the latest, the contributing editor acknowledged.

Baragona deleted the post and admitted his error hours later.

Taking down this tweet as the image of AOC has been out there since at least May 2018,” he wrote.

“Anyway, I’ll take the L and the addition to the list [Siraj A. Hashmi],” he added. Hashmi is known for compiling comical lists of people who need their phones taken away after Twitter fails.

In another post, Baragona wrote: “Every day you log onto Twitter, you hope to get through it without being it. Tonight, I was it. And I absolutely deserved to be.”

“Word of advice — if you don’t want to be IT, make sure you don’t send out factually inaccurate tweets that can be easily verified and debunked,” he added.

AOC made waves on Wednesday when she took shots at Texas political leaders over power outages amid a massive winter storm. The Daily Wire reported:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took a swipe at Texas political leaders, propounding that the suffering Texans are experiencing because of the freezing cold and concomitant power outages could have been addressed by her “Green New Deal.”

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal. Weak on sweeping next-gen public infrastructure investments, little focus on equity so communities are left behind, climate deniers in leadership so they don’t long prep for disaster. We need to help people *now.* Long-term we must realize these are the consequences of inaction.”

As highlighted by The Daily Wire, Chuck DeVore from the Texas Public Policy Foundation argued that Texas’ subsidies for green energy may have exacerbated the problem:

Two problems in #Texas, one short-term and exacerbated by the long term issue, and one long term. The short term failure came at about 1 AM Monday when #ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures and arranged for more generation. Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation. This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline.

This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants. In the last 4-5 years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today. We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar which is cheap for two reasons – it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.

Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity (they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity). This subsidized (state and federal) wind and solar have pushed reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market. This reduced the capacity margin – grids must have excess capacity to ensure stability. Texas is experiencing what California has – with California affecting the entire Western Interconnection due to its policies. Blackouts are a feature of the push to have more unreliable renewables on the grid. Must pay $$ for reliable backup w/ renewables.

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