Wednesday Night Update

Thursday, July 19th, from 6 - 7 p.m., Keep Lewisville Beautiful is hosting a free "Garden Secrets" class on composting at Memorial Park Rec Center. RSVP to info@keeplewisvillebeautiful.org.

As of Wednesday Morning, Lewisville Lake was at 519.94 feet - just over 2 feet low.

Camp Durham, at Durham Middle School is a summer learning experience for at-risk youth, created based on the LISD Strategic plan. The strategic design addresses community involvement and connectedness in many ways. One of the specific objectives reads "All students feel connected and engaged to their community and government and community is involved in the education process." Students at Camp Durham spent last week visiting nearby Central Park and Waste Management facilities here in Lewisville. They worked in collaborative groups to identify problems and help come up with solutions. They'll be conducting a cleanup there Thursday in cooperation with Keep Lewisville Beautiful. I love seeing our youth pitch in together to try to solve problems and make things better. It's hard to look at some of the ideas they have without immediately thinking about cost and feasibility, but the point is that to these kids, they've agreed on what they think will work. I'd love to see them work on the financial and logistics part of this, unencumbered by the kinds of political arguments that we adults have.

This Saturday, July 21st, there will be a public debate on the Affordable Care Act hosted by the non-partisan betterthanobamacare.org organization. Dr. Anna Tran, MD of Doctors for America will argue in favor of the act, and Dr. John Goodman, PhD. Of the National Center for Policy Analysis will argue against. The debate will be held at the Sheraton DFW Airport in Irving, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. More information can be found at the organization's website.

This Saturday night, There's a Luau at Tierney's. There will be a ladies coconut and grass skirt contest and men's Hawaiian shirt contest.

Want to help set a world record? Maybe get a pie in the face while doing so?

Well, this stings a little: According to Bloomberg, Canada is now richer than the United States, based on average household net worth. I agree with one of the commenters who wants to know what the median values are, instead of the averages, which are highly skewed by 0.1 percenters.

The Rich Kids of Instagram - just begging to start a class war. Don't be hatin' just because these spoiled little parasites pay a lower tax rate than you do.

And queue the knee-jerk after the domestic terrorist blew himself up trying to bomb a natural gas regulator in Plano: Are natural gas regulator stations safe?

The Lewisville Police Chief's weekly update includes information about the suicide from July 4th, and the department's efforts to help its employees deal with the emotional effects. It also has information about the fatal motorcycle crash on F.M. 3040 on July 5th.

SPAN / Meals on Wheels was named non-profit of the year.

*Greenpeace made a fake website purporting to be Shell Oil Company with the brilliant idea to let the general public pitch an vote on ad ideas for its campaign in favor of arctic drilling. As you can imagine, those opposed to the drilling there had some pretty creative ideas. One of my favorites is "We'd drill a crippled orphan's spine if there was some oil in it. Lets go." *I first thought this was a real website that had been trolled. See the comments below.

Two girls, 12 and 13 have been charged with the felony of cyber-bullying for creating a fake Facebook page for one of their 12 year old classmates, and using posts there to ruin her reputation.

Oops! The previous city management of La Marque, TX made some boo boos last year in their budgeting, and were surprised to find that they will have a $1 million shortfall that was totally unexpected. They are looking at having to raise the city's tax rate to 60 cents, just to take care of half of it. They had budgeted non-recurring revenues against recurring expenses. A big job of elected officials is to pay close attention to budgets and ask tough questions. It's not sexy, and it does get boring, but it is the biggest responsibility.

I didn't much care for her husband, but Laura Bush is a classy lady with a big heart.