Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Donald Trump will inherit a solid economy when he assumes the presidency in January. The stock market is at record highs, unemployment is low by historical standards and gross domestic product has been expanding at a healthy pace of around 2.5% so far this year. Yet there’s a reason for voter dissatisfaction with the economy and, beneath the surface, there are several risks for Trump 2.0 as he thinks about enacting his trade and fiscal agenda. Let’s start with jobs. Trump took over a stable labor market in 2017, with the une...
Steve Bannon had been sprung from federal prison only 12 hours earlier, but he had a message to deliver: "MAGA is back." It was a week before Election Day and Bannon, the right-wing podcaster, culture warrior and former chief strategist for Donald Trump, was sitting in a palatial Park Avenue hotel suite, describing how the next Trump presidency would surpass the last one. The entire scene seemed bizarrely improbable. Bannon had just delivered a hardscrabble populist attack to... Full story
When we think about the economic damage of climate change, most of us probably think about the physical destruction wrought by mammoth disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and droughts: Bungalows tumbling into the sea. Houses turned to ash. Acres of dead crops. That sort of thing. But the quieter, longer-term effects of global warming cut even deeper. Consider western North Carolina. It’s just beginning to repair the heavy physical damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure caused by Hurricane Helene nearly a month a...
The war in Ukraine is going badly for the good guys. Ukraine is slowly losing on the eastern front. Its forces are plagued by a dearth of manpower and ammunition. A summer incursion into Russia didn’t change the overall trajectory of the fighting. A deep-strike missile campaign into Russia is potentially promising but has been constrained by Western ambivalence. Ukraine’s much-touted push for North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership hasn’t gotten much U.S. support. As the outlook in Ukraine darkens, there is growi...
Since President Joe Biden ducked out of the presidential race last month, Vice President Kamala Harris has made steady gains against Donald Trump in most polls. If she wants that lead to endure past a honeymoon phase, she’ll need to articulate an agenda that appeals to persuadable but as-yet-undecided voters. The positions that will work most effectively just happen to be exactly those the country needs. No doubt, Harris has reason to hesitate before adopting any such approach. As ever, Trump is his own worst enemy. The v...
Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the biggest corporate tax cut in U.S. history. How did it affect the economy? The question has taken on increased importance now that the former president has said that, if he wins re-election, he’d like to reduce corporate taxes even further. Some background: Most economists have long favored lowering the corporate tax. At its previous rate of 35% — the law reduced it to 21% — the U.S. rate was one of the highest in the world. Under former President Barack Obama, there was a p...
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump said he was shot in the right ear after gunfire erupted at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, a harrowing episode that shook the U.S. presidential campaign and drew bipartisan condemnation of political violence. In addition to Trump’s injury, another attendee at the rally was shot and killed while two other bystanders were in critical condition. The shooter, who fired from an elevated position, was killed by the US Secret Service, t... Full story
The toxic smoke choking swathes of the Midwestern U.S. of late is a helpful reminder to Americans that Canada exists, and its wildfire season has come early. But Americans shouldn’t forget their own season starts much earlier these days, too. In fact, it’s getting to the point that wildfire season is all year long. A new study by the non-profit group Climate Central finds the flame-conducive combination of hot, dry air and strong winds has become more common as the planet gets warmer. In some parts of the Southwestern U.S...
In response to the inordinate amount of time young Americans spend online, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing to curb students’ access to social media sites while at school. The goal of keeping students off TikTok during the school day is undoubtedly worthwhile, but policymakers would be better off taking a simpler and more effective approach: banning mobile phones from schools altogether. It’s by now indisputable that allowing kids to have phones in the classroom harms academic performance — even among those who d...
Regardless of your perspective, Harvard looks bad right now — and that’s good for America. The resignation of Claudine Gay as president has brought the university unwanted attention for lacking both academic standards and moral clarity. She made mistakes, but in many ways Harvard set her up to fail. Like all of America’s top universities, Harvard has taken on an unhealthy role in the U.S. economy and society. America’s best universities need to return to their original mission: producing academic excellence, not just signali...
Wind power may be having a difficult year, but it’s still many times cheaper than oil or gas and remains a core piece of the energy-transition puzzle. A single rotation of a 260-meter-tall offshore turbine — General Electric Co.’s Haliade-X 13 MW, to be precise — can produce enough energy to power a household for more than two days, emitting no carbon or other pollutants. Not everyone is a fan. NIMBYism is one of the biggest barriers to green energy installations, as local residents protest “view-ruining” turbines an...
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s announcement that he won’t seek reelection means the end of years of liberal Democrats blaming him for nearly everything that goes wrong. It will also end years of careful hand-holding and management by Senate Democratic leaders and Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. They’re going to miss him when he’s replaced by a Republican in 2025, worsening Democrats’ odds of maintaining their slim Senate majority. Manchin was once one of many less liberal Democrats but their ranks have thinned,...
Ask any parent about the time their kids spend on mobile devices, and you’ll likely hear the same refrain: It’s too much. Excessive use of smartphones and social media is linked to rising rates of teenage depression and self-harm, while also damaging students’ academic performance and exacerbating achievement gaps. At this point, the question isn’t whether phones should be banned from classrooms, but why more schools haven’t done so already. Evidence about the negative effects of mobile devices on learning is overwhelm...
When the revolution in higher education finally arrives, how will we know? I have a simple metric: When universities change how they measure faculty work time. Using this yardstick, the U.S. system remains far from a fundamental transformation. It is no accident that former college president Brian Rosenberg titled his new book, "‘Whatever It Is, I’m Against It’: Resistance to Change in Higher Education." Some background: Faculty at Tier 1 research universities (which includes my own employer, George Mason University) typic...
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is asking a federal judge in Washington state to explain how the government can comply with his order preserving access to the abortion pill in the face of a conflicting ruling by a federal judge in Texas. In filing Monday in federal court in Spokane, Wash., the Justice Department pointed out to U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice that the Texas ruling, which overturned FDA approval for mifepristone, was set to go into effect on Friday. “The result of that order appears to be in sig...
The average Tesla-driving, iPhone-using suburbanite isn’t spending a lot of time worrying about tractor software payloads. They should, though. Fixing a broken-down farm tractor used to take just a wrench set and some elbow grease. Now repairs might require a mobile-device interface, online diagnostic tools and secure software updates, too. And that stuff isn’t just sitting around in the barn. It’s mostly held at a shrinking number of manufacturer-authorized dealerships. As a result, simple breakdowns that in the past might...
Donald Trump has been indicted by a grand jury in Manhattan on charges related to the payment of hush money to a porn star during his 2016 campaign. The prosecution of a former president is unprecedented and certain to kick off a political firestorm and a fierce courtroom fight — but the case isn’t the only legal challenge facing Trump going forward. The indictment in New York won’t stop federal and state prosecutors in other jurisdictions from bringing their own charg...
No one sells the future more masterfully than the tech industry. According to its proponents, we will all live in the “metaverse,” build our financial infrastructure on “web3” and power our lives with “artificial intelligence.” All three of these terms are mirages that have raked in billions of dollars, despite bite back by reality. Artificial intelligence in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful...
SEOUL, South Korea - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw tests of weapons designed to deliver nuclear strikes against the U.S. and its allies, including one his regime billed as a new underwater drone that can create a "radioactive tsunami." The tests from Tuesday through Thursday also included cruise missiles that were affixed with mock nuclear warheads, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Friday. The underwater drone cruised for nearly 60 hours off its east...
Amazon.com Inc.’s pause of its plans to expand its second headquarters in Northern Virginia reflects some deep underlying trends — not just for metropolitan Washington, where I live, but for regional development more generally. First, with the end of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy, many developments are being canceled or postponed. Long-term projects are less profitable than they used to be, and capital is harder to come by. As the major technology companies lose market value, their urban and subur...
The U.S. military had never shot down an object in American airspace before taking out a Chinese balloon off South Carolina earlier this month. Now it’s becoming a near-daily occurrence. The sudden spate of U.S. jets blasting unidentified objects of mysterious origin from the skies has provoked so much befuddlement — not to mention panic — that Pentagon officials were forced to field questions about the issue Sunday night, just as Americans were tuning into the second quarter of the Super Bowl. One reporter even asked if it w...
The field for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is expanding. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is expected to announce her campaign in mid-February, and more contenders will likely follow. Although Donald Trump was the first to kick off the race by announcing his run just after last year’s midterm elections, he’s not dissuading ambitious Republicans. Here’s the slate as it stands now. Donald Trump Is he running? Yes. Trump announced his third bid for the White House in November, and he remains the front-...
Whether President Joe Biden’s misguided plan to forgive some $400 billion in federal student-loan debt goes forward will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court. For now, there’s more the federal government should be doing to rein in the costs of higher education — and thus reduce how much students borrow in the first place. In particular: It should insist that colleges stop hiding exactly how much students are expected to pay. Federal law requires colleges to list the cost of tuition on their websites and in other promo...
Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell this month, sliding to the lowest level since September and underscoring a strong jobs market where many businesses are reluctant to let go of workers. Initial unemployment claims decreased by 15,000 to 190,000 in the week ended Jan. 14, Labor Department data showed Thursday. The median forecast was for 214,000 applications, but the data can be particularly volatile and difficult to seasonally adjust in the winter...
The Treasury Department is beginning the use of special measures to avoid a U.S. payments default, after the federal debt limit was reached Thursday. The department is tapping the financial resources of two government-run funds for retirees, in a move that will give the Treasury scope to keep making federal payments while it’s unable to boost the overall level of debt. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed congressional leaders of both parties of the step in a letter on Thursday. She had already notified them of the p...
