05/14/2008

Engineers can run, but they can’t hide
As of this morning, no engineer in the world is safe from the blandishments of the Denton County Commissioners Court. They can lock their doors and hide under their beds, and we will still find them.

05/13/2008

Going straight with Carlos Gracida
We are still not sure after reading Monday’s front-page story if Guyer High School junior Carlos Gracida has ever actually played hooky in his 11-year career as a student, but he admits to being tempted.

05/12/2008

The mayor almost nobody elected
So, there will be a runoff to determine who is to be Denton’s mayor. If the city wants to save money, they can probably have it in a booth at Chili’s. Election officials might have to drag over an extra chair, but we doubt it.

05/11/2008

A battle of titans: Churches vs. IRS
“A conservative legal-advocacy group is enlisting ministers to use their pulpits to preach about election candidates this September, defying a tax law that bars churches from engaging politics.”

— The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2008

That Journal article was tucked away on Page 5A of Friday’s editions, but if a provincial North Texas newspaper may be allowed to hazard a guess, the matter will be on front pages all across the country before the issue is decided.

05/10/2008

The government that affects you most
We once knew a man who assessed his influence at home this way: “My wife handles the little stuff — disciplining the kids, handling the money, making sure all of us are fed and clothed. I make the important decisions, like whether the U.S. should abandon the space shuttle program.”

05/09/2008

Brave new world, that has such money in it
The numbers that were flung around on the front page of Wednesday’s paper concerning campaign spending by area candidates should not have astounded us, but they did.

05/08/2008

Clearing the fog over term limits
Chris Watts, the Denton City Council member from District 4, wants the council to create a committee to clear up any “ambiguities” in the City Charter provision on term limits. It’s a good idea, though Watts’ reasons are a little fuzzy.

05/07/2008

The loneliness of the long-distance runners
As this is being written, voters in Indiana and North Carolina are casting ballots in their states’ Democratic presidential primaries. Everybody agrees that the two primaries are crucial for both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, and just about everybody also agrees that their outcome won’t decide the race for good and all.

05/06/2008

Here comes the sun, but the price is high
We have seen the future, and for the moment, it costs $27,000 a pop. That’s a pretty high price, but it’s also a pretty optimistic future: lower electric bills for Denton residents and a lessening of the city’s dependence on fossil fuels.

05/05/2008

Other Voices: Food politics
WASHINGTON — The whole world is feeling the impact of soaring food and commodity prices. A recent series in The Post reported that poor families in West Africa are selling precious livestock to buy staples, while some consumers in the United States have taken to hoarding cut-rate groceries.

05/04/2008

Military recruiting trend is unsettling
As the conflict in Iraq enters its fifth year with no end in sight, the capability of the country’s armed forces is being challenged by extended combat assignments. At the recruiting office, fewer candidates with high school diplomas are applying. In a disturbing sign that standards are being lowered to fill the ranks, the number of felons granted waivers to serve in the Army more than doubled this year from last, rising to 511 from 249. Even the Marine Corps, whose slogan is “The few, the proud, the Marines,” accepted 350 recruits with felony records last year, a jump from 208 in 2006.

05/03/2008

Use stimulus check for good cause
Starting this week, more than 100 million Americans will receive checks from the federal government as part of a bipartisan initiative to stimulate the economy. Savvy retailers have been promoting special “tax rebate” sales, car discounts, summer trips, and just about everything else that can be pitched, marketed or sold — all hoping to capitalize on the billions the U.S. Treasury is sending out to qualifying taxpayers.

05/02/2008

The unconscious man in the road
That story on the front page of Thursday’s paper, the one that told of an unconscious man lying in a Denton street for 17 minutes after his presence was made known to police by a 911 call, was both disturbing and reassuring. Just which emotion will be the dominant one remains to be seen.

05/01/2008

It's OK; it's only the wrong address
The Commissioners Court isn’t going to admit that the Joseph A Carroll Building is on Mulberry Street. It prefers to cling to the fiction that the building is on West Hickory Street, despite the fact that the building entrance, and its parking lot, face West Mulberry Street, a block to the south.

04/30/2008

Bringing a hammer to a flashlight fight
We had known since childhood that rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper, and had even come to accept the incongruous idea that paper beats rock. We had never known until Tuesday, however, that a flashlight trumps a hammer in a one-on-one confrontation.

04/29/2008

A chance to redeem ourselves
Early voting for municipal elections began Monday, and with it an opportunity for all of us in Denton to reverse our sorry tendency to ignore the political races that affect our lives on a day-to-day basis.

04/28/2008

We think that we saw it on Mulberry Street
Just where is the Joseph A. Carroll Building? The Denton County government, which owns the building and houses several of its courts and offices there, says it’s at 401 W. Hickory St., but Justice of the Peace Judge Joe Holland says it isn’t, and for all practical purposes, he’s right.

04/27/2008

The case of the side-door lawsuit
We’re not sure we’ve seen an appellate court act so quickly before. The state appeals court in Fort Worth had ruled on Thursday that Pete Kamp’s name should stay on the ballot for at-large Position 5 of the Denton City Council, and on Friday the Texas Supreme Court affirmed that decision, removing Kamp’s last obstacle to staying on the ballot and dashing her opponent Mike Sutton’s last hope of having her kicked off.

04/26/2008

Two more potholes in the campaign trail
It was almost a month ago exactly that we took note in this space of the many perils of running for public office. Mayor Perry McNeill had made the mistake of publishing a list of his supporters, apparently without checking to make absolutely sure that everyone on it had agreed to be there. A few hadn’t, and asked that their names be removed. Oops.

04/25/2008

Let the rains come; it’s time for jazz!
If it’s late April and the forecast is for rain, then it’s got to be time for the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival, famous for music in the air, food in the stomach and mildew in the tube socks.

04/24/2008

The $81,000 job that nobody wants
Denton County’s commissioners are having a hard time finding a county engineer. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised; they had a pretty hard time deciding they wanted one in the first place.

04/23/2008

The election’s on; the fight’s not over yet
District Judge David Evans’ decision to let Denton’s city elections proceed while he’s still considering the merits of a lawsuit seeking to toss three candidates off the ballot is a little like a strong dose of salts: hard to swallow, but probably what the patient needed.

04/22/2008

The demonization of Denton High School
Every year at about this time, the Denton school district has to examine its school attendance zones in order to maintain an incredibly delicate balance among a list of factors that includes faculty strength, ethnicity, size of the student body and transportation capabilities. Its initial effort invariably displeases some school patrons, who respond with passion, as concerned parents should.

04/21/2008

An elephant walk on the donkey wild side
An analysis of Denton County’s recent party primaries has revealed that something like 2,000 regular Republican voters skipped their own election to vote in the Democrats’, presumably to have some sort of say-so, no matter how small, in that party’s selection of a presidential candidate.

04/20/2008

Children of God, wards of the state
“We’re a peaceful people, and we love our children dearly.” — Lucille Nelson, 24, the mother of a child taken into state custody from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound in Eldorado One can believe that the young women quoted above is telling the absolute truth and still agree with the state of Texas’ decision to take custody of 416 children housed in a mysterious religious community in West Texas.

04/19/2008

‘The garden guy’ hangs up his hoe
It was a brief editor’s note at the top of one of the Record-Chronicle’s regular columns, and it stunned us to such a degree that we cannot now remember what the column itself was about.

04/18/2008

Constitution rewrite: Yoo joins Gonzales
The most terrifying side effect of the Iraq war has been the ease with which those sworn to safeguard our constitutional freedoms have been persuaded to throw them in the ashcan instead.

04/17/2008

Inching toward a car-phone ban
The Denton City Council seems ready to institute a ban on using handheld cellular telephones while driving in school zones. We guess we’re for it, but its opponents raise some valid points.

04/16/2008

The odds lengthen for Kamp, McNeill
Earlier this month, we tried without much success to dope out the odds on the lawsuit challenging the candidacies of Mark Burroughs, Perry McNeill and Pete Kamp. Now visiting Judge David Evans of Fort Worth has weighed in, and the picture in our Magic 8-Ball is getting clearer. Burroughs seems at this point even money to stay on the ballot. Kamp and McNeill are looking like long shots.

04/15/2008

A camel by any other name would smell
The Sharkarosa Wildlife Ranch in Pilot Point is having a contest to name its new baby camel, and while we applaud the democratic idea behind the enterprise, we have some qualms.