There are a lot of hypocrites in politics, people who will say one thing and do another. But none can match Ted Cruz. He’s on a completely different level from everyone else. And there are reasons for his particular noxious brand of sanctimonious piety. For one thing, it pays well. “Ted Cruz has spent years doing big oil’s bidding, gutting climate research, defunding NOAA, and weakening the very systems meant to warn and protect the public,’ said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Fossil Free Media. Ted Cruz will always put the interests of his benefactors ahead of Texans, even when that means death and destruction. It’s just the way he rolls.
Ted Cruz is evil — just pure evil.
Source: The Guardian
Ted Cruz has had quite a week. On Tuesday, the Texas senator ensured the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding, a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting….“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”
The National Weather Service has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and around $20bn in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.
But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.
Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.
No words.