Thumbs up, down
Hoist a mug for Bastille Day, cheer for bayou projects and support bipartisan statutes.
Happy Bastille Day! Our French friends are celebrating their independence day today, so feel free to join in the spirit of egalité, liberté and fraternité — and in cheering while Les Bleus take on Croatia on Sunday in the World Cup final.
Our do-nothing Congress finally did something worthwhile. The first round of post-Harvey infrastructure funding is coming to Houston. Roughly $5 billion from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will help finish projects on Brays Bayou, Hunting Bayou, Clear Creek and White Oak Bayou, as well as fund work on Buffalo Bayou, Addicks and Barker dams and coastal storm surge protection.
That coastal storm surge work still isn’t the Ike Dike. Nor will this funding be enough to implement the sort of resilience that Houston needs to truly survive everything that Mother Nature can throw at us. It is going to flood again, and it will take more than a one-time payment of $5 billion to set things right.
Speaking of cash, Beto O’Rourke has a boatload. The Democratic candidate for Senate raised $10.4 million in second quarter of 2018 — and not a single cent from PACs. Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent, raised $4.6 million. That makes for an interesting headline and heated race but remains a depressing reminder about how much of contemporary politics is about raising green instead of talking about ways to make life better under the red, white and blue.
Cash breeds corruption. Private equity firm EnCap was caught in a pay-to-play scandal in which it gave tens of thousands of dollars to Texas politicians, including Gov. Greg Abbott, while also providing investment services. The Securities and Exchange Commission slapped the firm with a half-milliondollar fine.
How’s this for some bipartisanship? The downtown statue of former President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, soon will be joined by his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Immigration super-lawyer Charles Foster met with the editorial board this week to discuss his plan for a Bagby Street memorial to onetime Houstonian LBJ, following up on his monument to 41. We’re glad to see someone commemorating these Houston greats, but someone is missing from the picture: Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
Self-proclaimed activist Quanell X is in the headlines again after being sued for allegedly falsely presenting himself as an attorney (he isn’t one) and taking money for legal services he didn’t deliver. Here’s the lesson: If you ever need actual legal help, just go to TexasBar.com and check out their Lawyer Referral and Information Service. You can also call 800-252-9690. Those lawyers may not be able to work the local news camera like Quanell X, but they’ll know their way around a courtroom, and they’re held to a professional code of conduct.
Kudos to the World Series champion Astros — don’t you still love seeing that phrase in the morning paper? — for extending their lease on Minute Maid Park until 2050, the distant midcentury year when Justin Verlander will qualify for Social Security benefits. Unlike certain other sports team owners we’ve known, Jim Crane didn’t play hardball with the mayor, didn’t threaten to move the team to another city and didn’t even whine about needing an expensive upgrade to what remains one of the nation’s best major league ballparks. We can’t help but contrast that to what’s happening in Arlington, where taxpayers are being taken to the cleaners to build a $1.1 billion replacement for a miserably hot Texas Rangers park that’s only six years older than Minute Maid.
Ever had a bad experience with TSA: Tossed water bottle? Hourlong line? Uncomfortably close patdown? Well Sylvia Acosta, who heads the YWCA branch in El Paso, just had a run-in with airport security bad enough to merit a congressional hearing. After returning from a European vacation, she had to deal with Customs and Border Protection at DFW accusing her of trying to sexually traffic her own 15-year-old daughter. Apparently the airport goons didn’t believe the two were related because Acosta never took her husband’s last name. For those playing dystopia bingo, yes, this is literally a plot point in “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
What’s faster: A hyperloop or a high-speed rail? Texas soon may find out. Officials with Virgin Hyperloop One and the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Transportation Council announced plans Wednesday to build a hyperloop — an oversized vacuum tube that lets vehicles reach an ultra-fast speed — in a Dallas to Fort Worth link. The next step would go from Fort Worth to Laredo, skipping over Houston.