Thumbs: Paxton’s ‘sorry, not sorry’
Love means never having to say you’re sorry. Thank goodness the rules are different for deceit and alleged public corruption. On Friday, news broke that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom scandal follows like Pigpen’s dust cloud, will use millions in Texans’ taxpayer dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by his four former handpicked aides who claimed they had been fired in retaliation for reporting him to law enforcement for alleged corruption crimes. Paxton won’t just have to pay $3.3 million to the whistleblowers, according to the settlement obtained by Hearst Newspapers, he’ll have to say sorry to his former aides for referring to them as “rogue employees.” This hardly seems like justice for a man who has evaded trial in a 7-year-old indictment on felony securities fraud but it’s something, right? Yet, Paxton’s statement tried to play off the settlement as a cost-savings for taxpayers and a strategic decision to unburden his office from the distraction of the lawsuit. “I look forward to serving the people of Texas for the next four years free from this unfortunate sideshow,” he said. If only. Paxton has yet to figure out that he’s the sideshow. Which should come first on your Super Bowl party grocery list: the chicken or the deviled egg? The answer isn’t a riddle. It’s a simple math problem. In this inflation-crazed economy, eggs are practically worth their weight in gold, irrespective of whether they come from an actual golden goose. Chicken wings? The price has come down to earth, just in time for the big game. Today, a 40-pound case of wings that once soared to $175 now costs $50, the Chronicle’s Erica Grieder reports, and that’s good news since the National Chicken Council’s annual Chicken Wing Report — which apparently really exists — predicts that Americans will consume 1.45 billion wings this weekend. That’s a record. And an enigma for those of us who still don’t quite understand why any fully grown mouth would put so much effort into consuming a puny animal body part that yields so little sustenance. Talk about riddles.
Maybe somebody got confused about the meaning of the Houston Zoo’s slogan. It’s “See them. Save them.” Not “See them. Save them … Now! Sever their enclosures and bust them out of their artificial hellscapes!” Houston zookeepers this week discovered that someone had cut a 4-inch hole out of the brown pelican habitat, so either someone was trying — and failed — to free the animals. Or someone was just playing copy cat after a spate of vandalism and animal thefts at the Dallas Zoo last month and then another last week at New York’s Central Park Zoo, in which Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl flew the coop, then escaped again mid-rescue, and as of this writing, apparently still remains on the lam, hunkering in trees but evading recapture. Sounds like a real hoot for the park rangers. Here in Houston, no animal escaped and zoo authorities warn any would-be vandals won’t get off either if they try any more monkey business.
Speaking of furry zoo animals, that Marjorie Taylor Greene can hoot, howl and hiss with the best of them, can’t she? The Republican congresswoman from Georgia, frothing from her mouth to her $500 milky white alpaca fur coat, was the foulest foil that President Joe Biden faced at Tuesday’s State of the Union address. She heckled the president relentlessly, shouting out “Liar!” after Biden cited a very real Republican proposal to sunset Medicare and Social Security. The coat, she was later reported to say, was supposed to symbolize China’s plump white spy balloon which she has blamed the Biden administration for not shooting down earlier. She needn’t have spent $500 to invoke the balloon. Her own hot hair would have sufficed. We can't think of a better foil to “MTG” than the reverent Opal Lee, the 96-year-old “grandmother of Juneteenth.” When she saw her portrait unveiled to a standing ovation of lawmakers at the Texas Capitol on Wednesday, she wanted “to do a whole dance.” It’s no surprise that Lee wanted to move her body. She didn’t persuade Congress to establish a new federal holiday by sitting down, as she is depicted in the portrait. At the age of 89, she led walks from Texas to Washington, D.C., raising awareness of a celebration that began when Union soldiers, many of them Black, enforced the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. When one of our board members followed her on a Galveston walk to the sites where Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, he could barely keep up with Lee — even though she was pushing her greatgreat-granddaughter’s stroller! That’s why, with all due respect to Texas artist Jess Coleman who painted Lee beautifully in a blue dress seated in a green chair, we’d have preferred to see an epic canvas hanging in the Capitol showing a historical 1865 scene of Confederates ceding power to Union soldiers while Opal Lee walks into the future where a huge feast with families of every color and creed celebrate freedom.