03/05/2010

A good start for Frank Phillips
Frank Phillips had big shoes to fill. As the successor to Don Alexander as Denton County’s elections administrator, he was bound to be measured against Alexander’s admirable record of competence and professionalism. Tuesday’s party primaries were the first elections held under Phillips’ supervision, and he and his staff of professionals and volunteers passed their first test.

03/04/2010

Down in the mud with bench and bar
We can remember a time when judicial races were the most polite and cordial of political contests, followed closely by races for prosecuting attorney. Not anymore; not in Denton County. Apparently, Denton County lawyers like to fight, and they like to fight dirty.

03/03/2010

Why there are Aggie jokes
A couple of Texas A&M-Commerce football players have been caught on video stealing copies of the student newspaper that contained an unflattering story about a teammate. Their coach, Guy Morriss, says he’s proud of them.

03/02/2010

Thelma waits for the big one
Like many Denton residents, we usually begin our day with a cup of coffee and a bleary-eyed examination of both the newspaper and the television news. On Saturday, the TV news won out in the battle for our attention as we were snapped from our semi-stupor by the news of the devastating earthquake in Chile.

03/01/2010

An aversion to sunshine
Opponents of the city’s plan to annex 18 parcels of land have arguments aplenty at their disposal; the Denton City Council doesn’t need to be giving them another.

02/27/2010

The man who brings Christmas
To those of us for whom Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without The Nutcracker, Hugh Nini is a very important fellow. Each year for more than 20 years, he has rounded up a cast of 100 dancers whose abilities range from breathtaking to “just tell me where to stand,” and molds them into an enchanting production of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s classic Christmas ballet.

02/26/2010

The Department of Silly Solutions
There are times when we suspect there is an office deep within the headquarters of every public agency in which a dedicated bureaucrat sits all day and reviews proposed solutions to pressing problems, making sure the final solution makes the agency look as bad as possible.

No way to run a university
Public concern about the abrupt resignation of Dr. Gretchen Bataille as president of the University of North Texas has not abated since her surprise announcement two weeks ago, and no one at UNT seems interested in easing it.

02/25/2010

Balance key on bicycle boundaries
As the number of bicyclists in Denton increases, it makes good sense to consider traffic ordinances that would help protect the cyclists on our city streets. But such a law should go hand-in-hand with a concentrated effort to educate cyclists about safety measures they should be taking, and perhaps an ordinance governing their behavior as well as that of motorists.

02/24/2010

Apology accepted; now please shut up
Chris Brown is sorry for belting Rihanna. Akio Toyoda is sorry that your Prius may not stop when you ask it to. David Letterman is sorry for canoodling with the office help, and, incidentally, for dissing Sarah Palin’s daughter. Mark Sanford seems to be sorry about something concerning his adulterous affair with a woman in South America, though it’s hard to tell exactly what.

02/23/2010

The rehabilitation of an evil cliche
The people in charge of tidying up the language have been saying for years that “the banality of evil” is a worn-out cliche — used, overused and misused by hacks like us who are intent on making literary mountains out of rhetorical molehills.

02/22/2010

Honoring the best of small business
The Denton Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business of the Year award has always been our favorite of those the chamber presents, because small businesses are not only the economic backbone of this good town; they are its social backbone, too, and its heart.

02/20/2010

Gov. Perry’s visit was like old times
It was as though Captain Kirk and the Away Team had beamed aboard the bridge of a Klingon battle cruiser: Gov. Rick Perry and an entourage of well-dressed Republican supporters appeared Friday morning at Denton’s Jupiter House, a collegiate hangout with a decidedly un-Republican clientele.

02/19/2010

The vacuum forms around Joe Stack
The smoke had not yet cleared from around the Austin office building where Andrew Joseph Stack III crashed his single-engine airplane Thursday when the usual suspects began to distance themselves from the suicidal malcontent and point fingers at another man behind the curtain.

This little sister is on her own
This newspaper, owned by the Cross and Patterson families of Denton for decades, has for the last several years been the property of the A.H. Belo Corp., which owns newspapers in Texas, California and Rhode Island. Our readers worry about that from time to time, which is not a bad thing in itself, and it behooves us to occasionally clear the air about the relationship between those of us at this little paper and the Belo behemoth up the road.

02/18/2010

Bad news on the doorstep
Denton finally is following the economic trend of the rest of the country, and the result is gloom at City Hall.

02/17/2010

‘We don’t need no stinking facts’
We were happily skipping through a front-page article about the Thin Line Film Fest when we fell into a pothole. We are not completely out of it yet, and the experience has us musing about truth, art and what — if anything — words mean any more.

02/16/2010

Ready! Set! Go! (to the polls)
Early voting begins today all over Texas for Democrats and Republicans, and we urge our friends of both persuasions to avail themselves of this convenient means of exercising the franchise.

02/15/2010

‘Where did I put that crash helmet?’
This has not been a good week for Denton parents. Snow days may be welcomed by schoolchildren, but many parents are less enthusiastic. Even worse than the snow, we’d bet, was the news that the Denton school district would drop driver’s education courses at the end of this semester.

02/13/2010

Medina vs. Beck: When loons collide
We would have thought that a radio conversation between Republican gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina and commentator Glenn Beck would be a love fest — a meeting of two 18th century minds grousing about Marbury v. Madison while extolling the virtues of Alexander H. Stephens and Roger B. Taney. We were mistaken, and we have spent a little time since the dust-up occurred trying to figure out why.

02/12/2010

Gretchen Bataille in the tumbrel
If Gretchen Bataille’s health is good (we hope and assume it is) and the cops aren’t after her (we can’t think of anything more far-fetched), her abrupt resignation as president of the University of North Texas can mean only one thing: There was a serious argument between Bataille and her superiors at UNT, and Bataille lost it.

02/11/2010

Other Voices / U.S. should press for change at OAS
Since its founding in 1948, the Organization of American States (OAS) has defined its two top purposes as “to strengthen peace and security” and “to consolidate and promote representative democracy.” On the second count, it is failing.

02/10/2010

Shami and Medina: Life on the fringe
Except for the fact that they probably do not share a single political belief, Farouk Shami and Debra Medina have a lot in common. Both are new faces, untainted by the hurly-burly of career politics; both are attacking their opponents from the outer fringes of their respective parties’ bases; and both are refreshingly honest and above-board as they answer questions without the usual tiptoeing-through-the-cowpies so popular with their more seasoned foes.

02/09/2010

Tale of the tape: Paying by the inch
The Denton Parks and Recreation Department says the price of admission to the city’s Water Works Park should be based on how tall you are. The idea is not quite as silly as it sounds.

02/08/2010

Other Voices / New model needed for mortgage financing
There is no end in sight to the federal bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget proposal said as much in a few phrases that promised nothing more definitive than continued “monitoring” of the two mortgage giants, which have been operating since mid-2008 in the legal and organizational limbo known as government “conservatorship.”

02/06/2010

It’s time to ride into the sunset
Precinct 5 Constable Ken Jannereth has received a suspended sentence for tearing up a gate put up by his homeowners association. We have heard some people say that wasn’t much of a punishment, but it seems about right to us. Jannereth, after all, didn’t turn out to be much of a constable.

02/05/2010

The strange case of Laura Silsby
The government of Haiti claims that Laura Silsby is a kidnapper who whisked children from their parents in the wake of that country’s catastrophic earthquake with the possible intention of selling them to adoptive parents in the Dominican Republic or America.

02/04/2010

Keeping the delicate downtown balance
Denton’s downtown area — the Square and the concentric city blocks circumscribed by Carroll Boulevard, Parkway, Bell Avenue and Sycamore Street — remains a busy and attractive place, but keeping it that way has always taken a lot of planning, money and cooperation.

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