www.dailycorinthian.com
Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Saturday, September 12, 2015
Corinth, Miss.
Letter to the Editor
One day after election, supervisors raise taxes To the editor: Many of us waited up the evening of Aug. 25th to see how the Democratic runoff election would turn out. Others eagerly waited for the Wednesday newspaper to be delivered to see the results. However, the Democratic controlled Alcorn County Board of Supervisors already had a plan in mind. Meeting the very next morning less than 12 hours after their election, they held a meeting, all the while planing to raise property taxes to cover their unwise spending and management of the county’s business. The newspaper ink was hardly dry announcing their election or re-election bids. They didn’t even have the decency to allow time to pass after being reelected before wanting to raise our property taxes. Do you think if these elected officials told the public of their intent, they would have won the reelection? I am sure they hope you will forget four years from now when some are up for re-election. I believe if we eliminate the waste and corruption, we can find the money needed to cover the real expenses of Alcorn County. Our state auditor, Stacy Pickering, is handling the corruption part. I must say, he is doing a fine job. Now we must start looking into replacing these liberal spending politicians with people who support fiscal conservative policies. The days of tax and spend are over and the people demand more out of our elected officials. We must have transparency in our business dealings along with fiscal responsibility and equal treatment for all. The same games like crony capitalism is played out here just like in Washington D.C. The only difference is the amount of money involved. Mike Stewart Corinth
Keeping in touch State: Sen. Rita Potts Parks Alcorn, Tishomingo, Tippah counties 662-287-6323 (H) 662-415-4793 (cell) rparks@senate.m.s.gov Rep. Nick Bain Alcorn County 662-287-1620 (H) 601-953-2994 (Capitol) nbain@house.ms.gov Rep. Lester “Bubba” Carpenter Alcorn, Tishomingo counties 601-359-3374 (Capitol) 662-427-8281 (H) lcarpenter@huse.ms.gov Rep. William Tracy Arnold Alcorn (Rienzi area), Prentiss counties 662-728-9951 (H) warnold@house.ms.gov All state legislators can be reached via mail: c/o Capitol P.O. Box 1018 Jackson, Miss. 39215
Prayer for today My Father, help me to have lofty thoughts, and may I not be content until they are carried into purpose. Help me to conquer that which will keep me from an act of happiness, and grant that by thinking of that which is pure, and doing that which is good, I may be made helpful and true. Amen.
A verse to share “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.” — 1 John 5:13
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Why should we remember James L. Flanagan? STARKVILLE — James Loton Flanagan died in recent days one day shy of his 90th birthday. Unless you’ve lived in a cave without electronic communications for the last 30 years, Flanagan impacted your life. He was from Greenwood, where he was born on his family’s cotton farm. Flanagan, in great measure, is the genius responsible for making computers “talk.” And that’s a very simplistic description of the work of an absolutely brilliant Mississippi mind. Think about that for a moment. Heard automated, computer-generated “voices” on corporate help lines? Ever had a conversation with your smart phone – “Siri” or otherwise? Wonder where the voice comes from on your GPS device? Every taken part in a teleconference? Delighted in an MP3 music file? Been mesmerized by the digital transmission of your granddaughter’s voice? Thank Jim Flanagan. Flanagan graduated from high school in 1943, then attended Mississippi State College for his freshman year before entering the U.S. Army to serve in World
War II. While in service, he worked at learning signal scrambling and radar. Sid Salter He reto Columnist turned MSU after the war to earn his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1948. Flanagan would later earn his master’s and doctorate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here’s a portion of Flanagan’s outrageously impressive biography, this one from Rutgers, where he served as a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering and a former vice president for research: “Flanagan received the Doctor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then joined the research division of AT&T Bell Laboratories. He served 33 years at Bell Labs, retiring in 1990 as Director, Information Principles Research. His near 200 archival publications, two books, and 50 U.S. patents reflect his technical activi-
ties in this interval. “His work on automatic speech recognition, machine synthesis of speech, and efficient signal coding influenced today’s humanmachine capabilities and mobile technologies. Under his aegis, electro-acoustic devices evolved, notably electret transducers and autodirective arrays for teleconferencing. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences. “Among his awards are the National Medal of Science, presented at the White House, the L. M. Ericsson International Prize in Telecommunications, presented in Stockholm by the King of Sweden, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Medal of Honor in 2005. He won the Marconi Prize in 1992. Flanagan received honorary doctorates from the University of Paris-Sud, from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, and from his alma mater, Mississippi State University. Flanagan also earned a footnote in history regarding the implosion of the presidency of Richard M. Nixon in 1974.
As reported by Sam Roberts in Flanagan’s expanded obituary in The New York Times: “Flanagan was one of six acoustical experts appointed by Chief Judge John J. Sirica of the United States District Court in Washington who concluded that 181⁄2 minutes of a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on June 20, 1972, had been deleted as a result of at least five separate erasures and re-recordings requiring ‘hand operation of keyboard controls.’” Flanagan also consulted as part of acoustic investigations of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Apollo 1 tragedy. But Flanagan’s renown never distanced him from his Mississippi roots or from his alma mater. So why should we all remember and toast Jim Flanagan? My answer was longer than Siri’s, but I bet she might answer: “Because Jim Flanagan was a genius!” (Daily Corinthian columnist Sid Salter is syndicated across the state. Contact him at 601-507-8004 or sidsalter@sidsalter.com.)
Black Lives Matter’s agenda is costing black lives I’ve seen this movie before. And for the last 25 years, I thought I’d never have to watch it again. But now it’s playing, not in theaters, but all over mainstream media, with something like rave reviews from the president and his administration. The theme of the movie is that there is an epidemic of racist white policemen, gunning down innocent black people. The movie’s message, implicit but unambiguous, is that the police must be restrained from vigorous enforcement of the law. That was the message of the Black Power movement half a century ago, and it is the message of the Black Lives Matter movement today. Consider the BLM demands. Some are anodyne. Who is against “better training for police officers”? We already have independent (usually elected) prosecutors. The law already “limit(s) the use of force by police.” But the most important BLM demand is the first: “end ‘broken windows’ policing.” The evidence is that this is already happening — at the cost of black lives. Even The New York Times has noticed. So far this year, murders are up 76 percent in Milwaukee, 60 percent in St. Louis, 56 percent in Baltimore and 44 percent in Washington, D.C. While murders are up, arrests are down. There is,
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
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editor editor@dailycorinthian.com
Willie Walker
Roger Delgado
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as Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald writes, a “reluctance to Michael act (that) is Barone affecting police departColumnist ments across the country, as virtually every tool in an officer’s tool chest – from traffic stops to public-order maintenance – is vilified as racist.” In Baltimore, the death of Freddie Gray after slipping into a coma in a police van in April inspired mass protests and apparently prompted police to abandon active patrolling; arrests suddenly plunged 60 percent below 2014 rates. There were 58 murders in Baltimore up to April 15 this year, up from 49. From April 16 to August 23, there were 157 murders in the city, up from 88 in 2014, with 45 murders in July alone. Almost all of the victims were black. Those insisting that “black lives matter” – and shouting down politicians such as former Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley for saying “all lives matter” – are apparently unfazed by this shocking increase in black deaths. Some BLM activists go farther, calling for murder of police. Some wear shirts with the words “Assata taught me” – a reference to
the woman, now a fugitive in Cuba, convicted in 1977 of murdering a New Jersey state trooper. BLM activists marching outside the Minnesota State Fair chanted, “Pigs in a blanket. Fry ‘em like bacon.” That was a day after the Democratic National Committee, meeting in Minneapolis, approved a resolution “condemning extrajudicial killings and affirming black lives matter” and hailing “a generation of young African-Americans who feel totally dismissed and unheard as they are crushed between unlawful street violence and unjust police violence.” “We need to start killing these officers,” shouted a crowd as police arrested a violent woman in Madison, Wisconsin — an ultraliberal university town where, incidentally, blacks are arrested at ten times the rate of whites. Across the country some people seem to be acting on that advice. Last December, after the protests of the death in custody of a man on Staten Island, two New York Police Department officers were shot and killed in Brooklyn. On Aug. 2, a policeman was killed during a routine traffic stop in Memphis. On Aug. 29, a sheriff’s deputy was gunned down in Houston. On Aug. 31, a police officer was killed in Fox Lake, Illinois. No wonder a Rasmussen
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poll conducted on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 found that 58 percent of Americans think there is a “war on police” today. This violence has evoked little response from Barack Obama, who weighed in unnecessarily on the arrest of scholar Henry Louis Gates in July 2009 and the death of Trayvon Martin in March 2012. In August 2014 he said that the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri – after he robbed a convenience store and charged a policeman – “awakened our nation” to a reality blacks already understood, all of which sounds like the BLM narrative. The tragedy is that the “broken windows” policing BLM decries has saved thousands of black lives. From 1990 to 2014, murders declined from 2,262 to 333 in New York, from 987 to 251 in Los Angeles, from 943 to 413 in Chicago. Now they’re up again. I’ve seen that movie before, when violent crime tripled between 1965 and 1975. I hope its ends differently this time. (Daily Corinthian columnist Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.)
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