Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 146, Ed. 1 Friday, December 26, 2014 Page: 9 of 21
twenty one pages : ill.View a full description of this newspaper.
Extracted Text
The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
10A
Friday, December 26, 2014
OPINION
Denton Record-Chronicle
Denton Record-Chronicle
Published by Denton Publishing Co.,
a subsidiary of A.H. Belo Corporation
Founded from weekly newspapers,
the Denton Chronicle, established in 1882,
and the Denton Record, established in 1897.
Published daily as the Denton
Record-Chronicle since Aug. 3,1903.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Bill Patterson
Publisher and CEO
Scott K. Parks
Managing Editor
Les Cockrell
Region Editor
Mark Finley
City Editor
Mariel Tarn-Ray
News Editor
PAST PUBLISHERS
William C. “Will” Edwards
1903-1927
Robert J. “Bob” Edwards
1927-1945
Riley Cross
1945-1970
Vivian Cross
1970-1986
Fred Patterson
1986-1999
Editorials published in the Denton Record-Chronicle
are determined by the editorial board.
Questions and suggestions should be directed to the:
Denton Record-Chronicle
314 E. Hickory St., Denton, TX 76201
Phone: 940-387-3811
Fax: 940-566-6888
E-mail: drc@dentonrc.com
ahbelo.com NYSE symbol: AHC
Editorial
Vow to improve your
community for 2015
^ ■ ow that we’ve opened the presents and fed the
relatives a big meal, it’s time to turn our attention
I A to the next stage of the holiday season.
No, we’re not talking about gift returns, close-out sales
or college football bowl games.
The holiday event we have in mind is a new beginning,
an opportunity to do more, live better and work harder.
Yes, New Year’s resolutions are on our radar and al-
though the holiday feasting may have left a few extra
pounds around our middles, we’re not necessarily focus-
ing on fitness or weight loss this time around.
As the old year comes to a close and a new one dawns,
we are presented with a dramatic opportunity.
We know what you’re thinking — we turn the last page
of our calendars every year, so what’s up with our enthusi-
astic attitude?
Outside of the opportunity to attend a party or two, to
toast the new year and watch Times Square ball drop on
television, it’s just the start of another year. Right?
That’s the problem. Most of us have come to think of
New Year’s Eve as nothing more than excuse to party and
New Year’s Day as just another holiday, an opportunity to
miss work, sleep late and, yes, watch football.
But when you stop and think about it, the beginning of
a new year should be much more than that. It’s a clean
slate, a fresh start, the chance to do things better.
We realize that approaching the new year with this
attitude may take some getting used to, which is why we
mention it today. There’s still about a week remaining
before we sing ‘Auld Lang Syne,” so you have ample op-
portunity to consider our point of view.
We challenge each of you to consider what you can do
during the new year to help make your neighborhood,
your community, your city and your county a better place
to live.
Look around and think about what opportunities can
be added, what challenges need to be met and what prob-
lems should be solved. Add these to your goals for the
new year.
Now, instead of taking your usual approach by com-
plaining loudly or doing nothing when someone men-
tions a need or a problem, be proactive. Think of possible
solutions for the problems, strategize ways to tackle the
challenges and consider how you may be able to help
provide the needed opportunities.
You might be surprised what one committed and de-
termined person can accomplish, and you may find that
others share your views and are willing to join your im-
provement effort.
There are many ways to contribute — getting involved
in community programs, volunteering for worthwhile
activities, and donating time and money to help charita-
ble organizations get things done. You may discover a
new interest in city government or in helping plan and
develop programs for neighborhood schools. Perhaps a
community church or youth group could use your talents
and energy.
Like we said, it’s time for a new beginning. If we all
work together, we can help solve the problems that con-
front our communities and help make the new year
brighter for everyone.
So, instead of using New Year’s Eve as an excuse to buy a
bottle of bubbly, think of it as the day you throw out your
old habits and stop letting someone else do all the work.
Make a pledge to be more involved in your community
next year. If you’re willing to help, we can guarantee that
there’s a way for you to contribute.
Look around you and see the opportunities. It’s a new
year, so why not make a new start?
This day in history: December 26
Today is Friday, Dec. 26,
the 360th day of 2014. There
are five days left in the year. The
seven-day African-American
holiday Kwanzaa begins today.
This is Boxing Day.
On Dec. 26, 2004, more
than 230,000 people, mostly in
southern Asia, were killed by a
100-foot-high tsunami triggered
by a 9.1-magnitude earthquake
beneath the Indian Ocean.
In 1908, Jack Johnson be-
came the first African-American
boxer to win the world heavy-
weight championship as he de-
feated Canadian Tommy Burns
in Sydney, Australia.
In 1966, Kwanzaa was first
celebrated.
In 2006, former President
Gerald R. Ford died in Rancho
Mirage, California, at age 93.
— The Associated Press
I &1VE
YOUR MOW IE
OWE TR0M&
DWU.
Time to support police,
fight bad policing
■ n an ideal world, there would be no con-
I tradiction between support for police
I and opposition to bad policing. But after
the coldblooded murder of two police offi-
cers in New York, some people find it dan-
gerously easy to confuse one with the other.
In social media, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a men-
tally disturbed career
criminal, declared his
intention to commit
the senseless killings
out of some sense of
revenge for the deaths
of Michael Brown of
Ferguson, Missouri,
and Eric Gamer of
New York. He later
shot and killed himself
on a subway platform
as he was pursued by
police.
With no more of a link to the killings than
his disjointed messages, Brinsley neverthe-
less gave critics of the protests a new excuse
to blame the tragedy on politicians and the
protests and their sympathizers — and ig-
nore the issues that the protests were about.
Patrick Lynch, president of the city’s larg-
est police union, angrily attacked Mayor Bill
de Blasio a day after the killings, saying that
“there’s blood on many hands tonight” and
“that blood on the hands, starts on the steps
of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani later on
Fox News called Lynch’s ‘blood” comments
an “overstatement” but proceeded to criti-
cize de Blasio, President Barack Obama, At-
torney General Eric Holder and the Rev. A1
Sharpton (on whose MSNBC program I
have been an occasional unpaid guest) for
contributing to “an atmosphere of hate for
the police.”
Those startling comments came after
Lynch and a number of other officers phys-
ically turned their backs on the mayor as he
entered the hospital where slain offices
Wenjian Iiu and Rafael Ramos had been
taken. Imagine soldiers visibly turning their
backs on the president and you have an idea
of the stunning gravity in that moment.
What did de Blasio do to upset the police
unions? The answer is part political and
partly traditional. Every mayor in memory
has had sharp conflicts with the city’s police,
as police commissioner William Bratton re-
minded reporters. Even under Giuliani, a
similar funeral-boycott protest was suggest-
ed through fliers in 1997 during tough union
contract negotiations.
It doesn’t help police morale these days
that they have been working without a con-
tract for the past four years.
De Blasio’s rise to office this year followed
his strong opposition to the stop-and-frisk
policies that disproportionately affect black
and Hispanic males. After a federal judge
found the department’s policy to be uncon-
stitutional last year, the number of stop-and-
frisks plummeted in the last quarter of 2013
by more than 80 percent, according to de-
partment records.
Yet the rate of arrests-per-stop increased
to 12 percent from the 6 percent rate of the
same period a year earlier. Crime did not
soar.
De Blasio rankled police again when he
said during a recent discussion of the Gamer
case that he had counseled his biracial son to
be wary and deferential if he was stopped by
police. It is the sort of talk that is delivered by
many parents, but with a special urgency for
kids who are most likely to fit the racial pro-
files that police may use, consciously or un-
consciously.
None of these controversies is new in
New York or, as we have seen recently, other
cities and states. But it doesn’t help matters
to polarize the issues further with hot rheto-
ric. It is possible to support police while op-
posing excessive use of force and other ques-
tionable policies, especially when those pol-
icies damage relations between police and
the communities they are supposed to serve.
Stop-and-frisk, for example, grew out of
Bratton’s “Broken Windows” approach. In
essence, it directs police to attack minor
crimes before they lead to larger disorder.
Broken Windows has mostly worked, but
videotape of Gamer’s death shows how it
can run amok. A chokehold-related death is
a morbidly huge price to pay for Gamer’s al-
leged crime: selling untaxed cigarettes on
the street.
The death of the two police officers in the
nation’s largest city throws a dark cloud over
a generally encouraging development: On-
duty police fatalities have plunged dramat-
ically in recent decades. We can make even
more progress when police and community
residents work together and don’t just shift
blame.
CLARENCE PAGE writes for the Chica-
go Tribune. His column is distributed by
Tribune Content Agency.
Letters to the editor
Unfolding today
Apocalypse now.
This was not only the title of a 1979 mov-
ie, it’s what I see unfolding today.
The liberal left is going to kill us all. What
a coincidence Dianne Feinstein deems it
necessary to rehash events from 12 years ago
prior to leaving this government. This is her
selfish political legacy.
As the radical Islamists wreak havoc
throughout the world, i.e., more than 140
children slaughtered in Pakistan; in Sydney,
Australia, another melee.
Obama wants to deflate our military and
police — the very people who protect us.
“Death to the cops” is the new battle cry of
some.
Don’t leave our future to the rhetoric of
the armchair quarterbacks who drive to
“work” in their limos, make millions and de-
nounce this once great country.
Khrushchev said in the ’50s, “We will
bury you and we won’t have to raise an arm,
SUBMISSIONS
Letters for publication must include the writer’s
signature, address and telephone number.
Authorship must be verified before publication.
The Record-Chronicle reserves the right to edit
letters for length. Letters should be typed or
legibly handwritten and be 250 or fewer words.
We prefer e-mail submissions.
Send to: drc@dentonrc.com.
Otherwise, fax to 940-566-6888, or mail to:
Letters to the editor
P.0. Box 369
Denton, TX 76202
you’ll do it yourselves.” No truer words spo-
ken.
Beware of King Obama’s agenda. If he
had been president during World War II,
we’d all be speaking German and dying in
POW camps.
Jim Murphy,
Denton
Denton Record-Chronicle mission statement
We believe a free society, with all its privileges and opportunities, is partially successful because of
a free press that is supported by the community at large.
Our mission every day is to give you unbiased, wide-ranging news of Denton and the larger Denton
County community. We appreciate your subscription or your purchase of this newspaper. By doing
so, you are supporting an independent look at your community, its leaders, its business people, and
its residents.
Without that, we believe that our communities would suffer from a lack of analysis, a lack of in-
formation, and a lack of oversight of taxpayer money. We want to give you something to think
about every day. We hope those ideas lead you to become involved in your community, both with
your commentary and your actions.
Killing of
‘Interview’
a present
v A WASHINGTON - If I were a car-
toonist, a phrase cartoonists are
W W loath to hear, I’d sketch a chubby
imp donned in a diaper, sporting a chia mo-
hawk and munching the last Big Mac on
earth, while straddling a nuclear-armed mis-
sile that bears a striking resemblance to Den-
nis Rodman.
The imp’s pudgy hands would be caress-
ing a palm-sized computer by which he can
digitally destroy the object of his wrath du
jour. His target, you might have guessed, is
Hollywood.
You may have sur-
mised why I am not a
cartoonist. I have no
talent for drawing, but
you get the point: lit-
tle Kim Jong Un, su-
preme leader of the
Democratic (cough,
cough) People’s Re-
public of Korea, ap-
parently wasn’t able to
tolerate what we nutty
Americans call politi-
cal satire.
Or at least what Hollywood calls satire.
Sony, specifically, considers it “satire” to blow
up the face of the person described in para-
graph one. What the movie lacks in wit is ap-
parently compensated by the sort of antics
that the mood-altered find fantastically fun-
ny. This is what earns the film the label of
“stoner movie,” for those who are not exactly
riveted by the Zeitgeist.
Then again, there is something about that
face....
Thus, the mad tyrant, whose rapacious
curiosity includes wondering how long peo-
ple can survive on a diet of grass, turns his
basilisk gaze to the West where lesser mor-
tals dare to mock him.
Enter a fifth horseman of the apocalypse
— the hacker.
What fun to expose the vanities of all van-
ities — snarky intercompany emails among
the rich and famous about the rich and fa-
mous — and then to contemplate the geno-
cide of moviegoers. How droll.
This is power. This is revenge of the nerd.
This is lunacy — and a foreshadowing of
worse to come? Kim says the U.S. is behind
the film and claims to know nothing of the
hack. President Obama speaks earnestly
about the value of free speech while suggest-
ing some sort of response.
What might this be? You hack us, we’ll
hack you back? A blistering lecture by the
one to The Un? Such hackery only Thacker-
ay could love.
Meanwhile, the maternal mind wanders
to the scene in The Conversation when a
woman observing a homeless man sleeping
on a bench wonders whether he once was
someone’s pride and joy. This leads to the
parallel question: Was Kim Jong Un once a
bundle of love in his mother’s arms, a happy
little toddler whose chief delight was the
endless rereading of Goodnight Moon or its
equivalent?
Or did he first pull himself up from the
floor only to unsheathe his tiny sword and
cleave it through a kitten’s neck? How the
once-beloved child becomes the mass mur-
derer is one of life’s abominable mysteries. It
is especially so to folks whose national man-
date is to try to make life as fair as possible.
That we sometimes fail does not diminish
the aspiration.
Although I’ve not shared the pleasure of
The Un’s company, I’m sure the supreme
leader has his moments of humanity. Don’t
they all? But experience also suggests that
Kim is endowed with a case of “the times.”
Most bullies suffer not only a lack of self-es-
teem and empathy but also, one suspects, a
certain masculine incertitude.
The “times” manifest themselves as fol-
lows: The tiniest infraction earns an abun-
dance of punishment; the tiniest insult is re-
ceived as a mortal affront; the tiniest bit of
humor at one’s expense is absorbed as an as-
sault on one’s honor — and dishonor must
pay a price.
How to deal with North Korea will keep
us busy through the holidays, but it does
seem that Obama is well-suited to the task.
From my own conversations with and obser-
vations of the president, it appears that Oba-
ma is intrigued by the psychological under-
pinnings of human motivation. Thusly at-
tuned, he might find Kim a tantalizing object
for examination.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Dr.
Freud supposedly said. But sometimes, it’s
not.
Whatever strategies are devised, we may
indulge ourselves in one morsel of sweetness
— and I buried the lede.
What we have been unable to do — con-
vince Hollywood to take seriously its role in
shaping culture as well as reward loyal mov-
iegoers with quality over cheap stunts — has
been temporarily accomplished by a smug
and cruel little man with the tiniest sense of
humor.
Even though some theaters are now say-
ing they will screen the film after all, the kill-
ing of The Interview was a holiday gift for all
the wrong reasons.
KATHLEEN PARKER writes for the
Orlando Sentinel. Her column is distrib-
uted by Washington Post Writers Group.
Kathleen
Parker
Upcoming Pages
Here’s what’s next.
Search Inside
This issue can be searched. Note: Results may vary based on the legibility of text within the document.
Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.
Citing and Sharing
Basic information for referencing this web page. We also provide extended guidance on usage rights, references, copying or embedding.
Reference the current page of this Newspaper.
Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 146, Ed. 1 Friday, December 26, 2014, newspaper, December 26, 2014; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1107996/m1/9/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .