Thumbs up, down

Some benefited from last week’s winter storm misery, while others skipped town to avoid it.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was buried under an avalanche of bad press last week after his ill-advised trip to Cancun as Texans froze, but he wasn’t the only official who decided to hotfoot it out of here. State Rep. Gary Gates, R-Richmond, flew to Orlando in his private jet, claiming the conditions were perilous for his wife, who is recovering from an illness, and his special needs daughter. It’s hard to begrudge a man taking care of his family, but Gates’ actions got a chilly reception from many of his Fort Bend County constituents, who didn’t have the luxury of drinking water, let alone their own plane to Margaritaville.

At least Gates flew to sunny Florida. Attorney General Ken Paxton was so desperate to hit the road that he absconded … (sorry, that’s the indictment and ongoing FBI investigation talking) — he traded Texas for Utah, along with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney. The AG’s time could have been better served (no prison pun intended) protecting Texans from price gouging during the deep freeze, but instead he met with his counterpart in Salt Lake City. The trip was “previously scheduled” and involved discussion on an antitrust lawsuit against Google, officials said, but the question remains why it couldn’t be rescheduled. “I cannot further share additional details or the specific reasons on the need for the meeting concerning Google as it involves an ongoing investigation,” Paxton’s campaign spokesman told the Dallas Morning News. Right. An ongoing investigation. Well, he certainly has experience with those.

A lot of things were put on hold during the freezing weather last week, but the specter of racism never takes a snow day. A young Black man was arrested in Plano for walking along the street — which, like everything else in North Texas, was covered in icy white. Rodney Reese, 18, was making his way home from his job at Walmart when he was followed by officers responding to a report of a man in a T-shirt stumbling in the cold. Reese repeatedly declined the officers’ help as he kept walking away from them. He was eventually detained and spent the night in jail. Plano Police Chief Ed Drain dropped the charges, saying he should not have been arrested and answering those who would put the blame on Reese for being “uncooperative.” “I can understand why Rodney would have some fear of the police,” Drain, who is Black, noted. “I was born in the 1960s in East Texas.” Fair enough. Speaking of being so snow blind you can’t read the room, the Texas Oil and Gas Association has apparently been wearing frosted-over spectacles all week. It has been advertising on Twitter, touting the reliability of natural gas. “As Texans braved one of the most expansive and extreme storms in our history, natural gas ramped up and powered the vast majority of electricity generation needs in Texas,” a sample tweet says. True, but they forgot to add “once unprotected equipment thawed” or perhaps “too late to keep people from burning furniture for warmth.” Sure, that would put them over their character count, but the group needs to provide context, otherwise it’s too soon and on the nose for TXOGA to be gaslighting anybody.

We didn’t all spend last week coming up with tone deaf PR campaigns. One Houston woman learned that the old Hill Country saying is true: A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met until you get stuck at the bottom of their icy driveway. Chelsea Timmons was delivering groceries in Austin when conditions left her stranded outside the home of Nina Richardson and Doug Condon, who invited her in. “These people let a complete stranger stay the night!” Timmons wrote on Facebook. “Not only that but (they) cooked me a steak dinner! Definitely not how I imagined my Valentine’s Day!” Or the day after that or the day after that. Timmons ended up staying six days with her hosts, who insisted she remain until the weather fully cleared, before returning to Houston. No word yet if she thanked natural gas for that delicious steak.

From the kindness of strangers to the strange kindness of the markets, some people made a ton of cold, hard cash from the drop in temperatures. Australian bank Macquarie Group Ltd. capitalized on high prices for power and natural gas to clear $215 million. Closer to home, Dallas billionaire and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones — a man who is no stranger to making money no matter how badly his team’s fans suffer — reaped a bonanza from his natural gas company, Comstock Resources Inc. Now, we can’t expect folks Down Under to feel too bad about benefiting at our expense, but Jones could at least knock a buck or two off items like the $15 pork-belly burger and brisket mac and cheese sold on game days in Arlington.

Or he could follow the lead of Houston commodities trader Adam Sinn, who donated $400,000 from his energy profits to the local Southern Smoke Foundation, which supplies emergency relief funds to food and beverage workers in crisis. “It’s not right for generators to experience a huge windfall while Texans endured such unnecessary hardship,” Sinn said, according to Paper City magazine. Wow, power and responsibility? We know Sinn is busy, but would he consider doing everyone a favor and running for office and buying the Dallas Cowboys?