Thumbs up, down
Beavers make their mark, Brady’s shirtless in Boston and congressional hypocrisy.
Punxsutawney Phil promised six more weeks of winter. Maybe that was correct for New England. But he lied to us. We’ve just sweated through a week of record-cracking heat; the Thumbsmobile’s thermometer hit 89. If it’s this bad in February, imagine July.
There are new arrivals at Allen’s Landing. The website Swamplot has the evidence: trees gnawed by what a naturalist says are beavers coming up from the pristine (not) waters of Buffalo Bayou. At least it’s not UH-Downtown students adding fiber to the diet without tree removal permits.
Tom Brady had it easy compared to three area men who just completed a Herculean voyage across the Atlantic in a rowboat. Michael Matson, Brian Krauskopf and David Alviar — “their hands chafed and raw, their backsides covered with sores” — needed only 49 days to make the trip from North Africa to Antigua and Barbuda.
The theft of Tom Brady’s jersey had Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick promising to put the Texas Rangers on the case. Good luck cracking that case. Anyone burglarized in the Houston area knows the clearance rate on those crimes is less than 6 percent. Just getting a call back from the cops takes an act of Congress. New HPD chief Art Acevedo put it into perspective in an interview with an Austin radio station: “It might be the highest priority for (the) lieutenant governor; I can tell you we had three homicides the night of the Super Bowl in the city of Houston, and we’d like to find it, but I don’t think we’re burning the midnight oil worrying about a jersey. It’s just not the biggest, greatest importance in the big scheme of things.”
There’s a reason members of Congress are the second-most distrusted profession (source: a Gallup poll). It might have something to do with their constant hypocrisy. Consider Texas’ John Cornyn. A member of Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Cornyn played a key role in stalling the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Fast forward to this week and here’s the headline on a news release from Cornyn’s staff: “Senate Democrats ‘Grasping at Straws’ in Criticism of Gorsuch.”
We have two thumbs, but we also have two ears and we’re hearing that the mayor’s pension plan is hitting turbulence in Austin. The drama last week began with Harris County Republican Precinct chairs voting unanimously to oppose any deal, especially if it involves issuing a $1 billion bond without voter approval. That’s empowering senators like Paul Bettencourt to bring out the long-knives before the deal even gets to a committee.
Also in Austin, three new University of Texas regents were confirmed with record speed after their appointment last month. Two are solid public servants and the third runs a big company, but all appear aligned against Chancellor William McRaven’s plan for another UT campus in Houston. Because everything in these parts has a football connection, this is likely payback for UT stealing the University of Houston football coach. And that’s sad because a blue-ribbon group charged with coming up with blueprints for the land may have been working in vain.
When you defend the indefensible, you make stupid arguments. Just ask anyone who saw Harris County’s James Munisteri in front of U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal on Wednesday. In a litigation brought on behalf of indigent inmates who stay locked up while wealthy arrestees easily make bail, Munisteri offered these pearls of non-wisdom. He claimed there are people who like being in jail and said there may be zero people in the Harris County lockup who can’t afford the money to get out. Rosenthal countered that such logic was “reminiscent of a historical argument that people enjoyed slavery because they were afraid of the alternative.” Commissioner Rodney Ellis and Texas state Sen. John Whitmire immediately asked that Munisteri be fired. Good idea.