You all heard abut Ted Cruz’ short trip to Mexico? From the WAPO: Cruz’s media tour

After being the subject of widespread bipartisan criticism, Cruz arrived back in the US — and immediately headed out in front of the cameras. The Texas senator first delivered remarks at the Cancun airport. He then spoke to KTRK’s Tom Abrahams for a sit down interview in which he admitted he had made a mistake by traveling to Mexico. And he capped off his night chatting with Sean Hannity, who strongly came to his defense. As Max Tani tweeted, Hannity treated Cruz as someone who was “dropping the kids off in Cancún like you’d talk about dropping the kids off at soccer.”


Cruz’s story shifted as journalists reported new details

Cruz initially released a statement suggesting he had merely aimed to drop his children off at the Cancun resort and head back. He blamed the whole idea on them. But Skift reporter Edward Russell reported that Cruz’s return flight had originally been scheduled over the weekend, not Thursday. And NYT’s Shane Goldmacher and Nicholas Fandos obtained some texts that Heidi Cruz sent to friends explaining they had planned to get away to escape their “FREEZING” house for a few days. By the end of the night, after all the reporting, Cruz was even fessing up to Hannity that he did plan to stay in Mexico through the weekend…


A crowd-sourced story

“Aside from the whole elected -official-goes-to-Cancun-during-wintry-disaster bit, the camera-phone crowdsourcing involved in every aspect of this story is just amazing,” commented NYT’s Katie Rogers. I couldn’t agree more.

WaPo’s Dan Zak got at this when he wrote about how the political firestorm erupted. Zak explained it commenced “when TV journalist David Shuster tweeted a photo of Cruz headed for his seat, passport apparently in hand, on an airplane Wednesday afternoon.” Then, as Zak reported, “Twitter users started sleuthing immediately, trying to corroborate this reporting with photographic details of gate and flight information. The evidence suggested that Cruz was in an Economy Plus seat, with plenty of legroom, on a United Airlines flight out of Houston.” From there, the story took on a life of its own…
stip

TWEET OF THE DAY: LA City Councilman Kevin De Leόn @KDeLeon on Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) Mexico trip: “When America sends its people, we’re not sending our best… Lo siento Mexico”

HAVE THE TELEMARKETERS grown more craven lately? I got a call from one at EIGHT FIFTEEN IN THE MORNING!!! From the Juvenile Leukemia etc in case you’d like to join me in boycotting them.