Thumbs up, down
Run as one and prepare for hurricane season, and thanks to Rockets for the memories.
The Rockets didn’t make it to the NBA Finals. We don’t want to talk about it, but let’s just say that from now on, the concept of a third quarter should forever be banished from Houston. Counting change? Jump directly from 74 cents to 76 cents. Sorry, but that’s just how things are now.
Are you ready for hurricane season? FEMA isn’t. We went to the National Hurricane Center website (https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/prepare/ready.php) looking for prep tips and scrolled down to the bottom of the page to find a link to the FEMA’s “Are You Ready?” guide. We put our thumbs to the link (https://www.ready.gov/are-you-ready-guide) only to get the following message: “Access denied. You are not authorized to access this page.” Whoever is hiding the secrets to staying safe during hurricane season, please grant us authorization to read them.
At least somebody’s doing something about floods. State Rep. Garnet Coleman has submitted a draft bill that would require landlords to inform tenants about previous flooding and the flood risk of rented property. Right now apartments and other rental complexes can keep that info secret.
Leira Salene lived out of a plastic box for the first five months of her senior year. The 18-year-old’s Sheldon area home was hit hard by Hurricane Harvey. But she didn’t let that or her family’s seven moves this school year keep her from graduating with honors from her home campus, C.E. King High School in Sheldon ISD. On Wednesday, she was recognized as her school’s National Honor Society member of the year. Congratulations to Leira and so many other graduating seniors in the Houston area who didn’t let the misery and loss of Harvey stop them from achieving success.
It was silly season this week at City Hall, where council members debated a $4.9 billion budget that passed 13-4. The no votes, Jack Christie, Mike Knox, Greg Travis and Michael Kubosh, said they wanted to cut more spending. Their ideas for shrinking the budget? Christie proposed spending $150,000 to study the city’s vehicle fleet, a suggestion he eventually dropped. And Kubosh pushed an amendment to give each council member an additional $100,000 for staff salaries. Funny, those sound like spending hikes.
It is so hot out … (How hot is it?) It is so hot out that Houston had 19 days of 90-plus degree heat in the month of May, breaking the previous record from 2003. And it’s only going to get hotter from here on out.
If we’re lucky, it’ll get hot enough to melt Sid Miller’s computer beyond repair. The agriculture commissioner of “Jesus Shot” infamy shared and then deleted a photoshopped picture purporting to show Whoopi Goldberg wearing a T-shirt depicting Donald Trump shooting himself in the head. It was fake, of course.
In other news of politicians straying from the truth, the Texas General Land Office released an internal audit this week critical of accounting practices at the Alamo. When an identical draft was released back in February, Land Commissioner George P. Bush said it was “doctored” and “fake news.” Turns out the news wasn’t so fake after all.
As President Trump doles out presidential pardons like popcorn, our governor should follow his example and review the cases of Rosa Maria Ortega and Crystal Mason in Tarrant County. Ortega, whose lawyer says she has a sixth-grade education and learning disabilities, thought her green card status gave her the right to vote (for Republicans, by the way). A jury went a little nuts and sentenced her to eight years in prison. Mason was on supervised release after serving her time in an unrelated tax fraud case when a helpful but ill-informed poll worker showed her how to cast what turned out to be an illegal provisional ballot in 2016. She got slapped with a five-year sentence. If the president can contemplate pardoning a bunch of guilty celebrities like Martha Stewart and Rod Blagojevich, surely Gov. Greg Abbott can do the right thing and pardon these two women facing unjustly long sentences for the harrowing crime of exercising what they thought was their civic duty.