Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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President-elect Donald Trump has hit the ground running, alerting the public to the sort of individuals he intends to appoint to his second presidential cabinet. He continues to advertise his colorful selections, rewarding his most ardent supporters, setting the tone for what his administration will attempt to accomplish, and demonstrating little if any concern for what anyone else thinks. Trump’s most controversial picks so far include former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz to l...
It’s been two weeks since Election Day, and we’ve heard what pundits think cost Vice President Kamala Harris the election. Their hit list of topics included the uneven economy, high inflation, the Israeli-Hamas conflict, rising crime, extreme and excessive wokeness, and out-of-control borders. Yet, there is another reason that hasn’t been discussed nearly as much in most quarters – the intersection of race and gender. Harris would have been the first woman of any race and the...
For some people, Nov. 5, 2024, was one of the greatest days in American history. Others may well remember it as a day that will live in political infamy. Regardless, the 2024 presidential election is over, and Donald Trump has been reelected as the 47th president of the United States. And if people are honest with themselves, they would probably admit that Tuesday’s results shocked but did not totally surprise them. Throughout various periods in our nation’s history, charismat...
Donald Trump’s public appearances follow a typical direction. He has a speech in mind he intends to deliver with the help of a teleprompter, but instead he resorts to rambling and discussing odd, bizarre thoughts about all sorts of topics. To put it bluntly, the former president has increasingly spouted rhetoric that is nonsensical and incoherent. MSNBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem convincingly stated that, “Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for...
Former President Barack Obama stirred up some attention this month when he suggested lackluster support for Kamala Harris among Black men is mostly about her gender. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives or other reasons for that,” Obama said at Harris’ campaign offices in Pittsburgh. “You’re thinking about sitting out, or even supporting somebody who has a history of...
Over the past few months, Donald Trump has stoked the flames of white resentment on the campaign trail. Speaking to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last week, the former president — who once referred to himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines — accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.” It’s the latest in a long line of bigoted and xenophobic statements from Trump, ranging fr...
It still seems so surreal. Sean Combs’s arrest last month on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy represents a stunning reversal of fortune for the hip-hop impresario. As recently as a year ago, Combs was feted as an industry visionary before a sudden series of sexual assault accusations emerged. Prosecutors said in an indictment that, since 2008, Combs (aka Diddy) has been the puppet master of a colossal criminal outfit that included employees and e...
What is old is new again, at least in the world of politics. Recently, Fox News host Jesse Watters made a quip questioning the veracity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate during a live edition of The Five. Regardless of whether he was being intellectually dishonest or not, Watters presented the topic of Obama’s birth certificate as somehow fraught with political intrigue and announced he would be dispatching his producer to find out the truth. “That’s why we’ll be sending J...
One can only wonder about JD Vance’s peculiar and freakish obsession with people who do not have children. The Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential candidate has disturbingly targeted women who are absent of biological offspring as “childless cat ladies” (apparently being an adoptive parent or stepparent does not qualify) and perversely stated child-free Americans are “more sociopathic” than Americans with kids and make the U.S. “less mentally stable.” As Vance sees...
Donald Trump’s campaign is in a fierce tailspin as his failed attacks on Kamala Harris haven’t been able to slow down her growing popularity. “It’s very clear the former president is unraveling. He’s having a complete meltdown,” Ashley Etienne, a former Joe Biden staffer and political advisor, said during a recent segment on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show. “Kamala Harris has got him a chokehold that is really driving him to the point of insanity, and really driving his cam...
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and his fellow Democrats ratified ample changes during the two years they’ve had control of the Minnesota Legislature -- from expansions of abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights to tax credits and other forward initiatives aimed at making life easier for families. Walz has been an activist governor of Minnesota with a strong progressive agenda. And I’d like to focus on one key element of that agenda: requiring public and charter sch...
Violence and horror continue to haunt Black Americans. Most Americans are likely to be aware of the horrific death of Sonya Massey at the hands of a sadistic police officer. Massey, a 36-year-old Illinois mother, had called 911 because she believed an intruder had entered her home. Two Sangamon County deputies arrived, and one of them, Sean Grayson, began spewing a tirade of profanity-laced threats during an argument over a pot of boiling water she was holding. Grayson shot...
One would be hard-pressed to think of a vice president in recent memory placed under as much of a political microscope as Kamala Harris. She can hardly sneeze without someone, somewhere analyzing or dissecting her every move. And let’s not get started on how some of her critics attack her supposed “strange” laugh. Some on the right have insinuated Harris slept her way to the top. Some, including Donald Trump, falsely claim she’s not really Black because her father is light-ski...
After all the speculation about whom he would choose, Donald Trump selected JD Vance, the junior senator of Ohio, as his running mate in the presidential race. A former “public affairs” marine turned venture capitalist, Vance rose to fame in 2016 with the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy,” an engaging narrative that detailed his challenging and adversarial upbringing in poverty-stricken southwestern Ohio and his later experiences at Yale law school. The book became a national b...
The political world was shaken by the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Footage from the event showed Trump clutch his right ear and go down after gunshots rang out. Quickly rising to his feet amid a phalanx of U.S. Secret Service agents, Trump pumped a fist at the crowd as blood seeped from the side of his head. The agents responded swiftly to protect the former president and shot the apparent attacker, a registered Republican, to death. From the...
This month, Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” commented that “one of the most alarming things” about “Project 2025” is the blatant admission that Donald Trump did not accomplish everything he intended to in his first administration. “They got a slow start […] so their codeword is ‘day one,’” Ben-Ghiat told MSNBC’s Katie Phang of the think-tank’s proposal document, which is assumed to represent a considerable percentage of Trump polic...
When it comes to the issue of debates, perception is often just as crucial as reality and substance. There is no way to codify the fact that Joe Biden’s debate performance last month was nothing short of dismal. The ferocity we witnessed at his State of the Union earlier this year was absent, although his performance did incrementally improve as the evening progressed. The debate was an opportunity for Biden to ask the American people about what direction they wanted the n...
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry was brimming with pride and arrogance when he signed into law a requirement that every classroom in his state — from kindergarten to college chemistry labs — will be required to display a copy of the Ten Commandments. “I can’t wait to be sued,” Landry said before signing the bill. While other states have proposed similar bills, no one besides Louisiana has been successful enacting such efforts, especially with the threat of legal battles looming o...
Here we are. Another year, another June and the nation is celebrating another Juneteenth holiday. On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed the bill into law making Juneteenth the 11th holiday recognized by the federal government. At a White House ceremony, Biden singled out Opal Lee, an activist who at the age of 89 walked from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., and called her “a grandmother of the movement to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.” On June 19, 1865, abo...
Earlier this month, during an event in Philadelphia supporting Donald Trump and the Republican Party, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds made the attention-grabbing assertion that Black families were stronger and more conservative under the Jim Crow era. “You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — because Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted con...
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg deserves to take a bow following his undeniable victory. A New York jury delivered a guilty verdict in a trial largely devoid of political theater and intense media upheaval. That’s thanks to a judge who, during the multiple-week trial, managed to maintain civility and order and ensure the rights of all parties were upheld fairly. Former President Trump was convicted on not one, not two, but 34 felony counts. Supporters are outraged. D...
Right-wing politicians have made no secret of their disdain for the rule of law as well as our current state of democracy. One of the more blatant acts of far-right hostility to our current government was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s flying an upside down flag at his Washington, D.C., residence signaling support for the Capitol insurrection in the days after Jan. 6, 2021. Alito said his wife hung the flag in this position after a contentious dispute with a neighbor, w...
To state the 118th Congress is an exercise in debasement, dereliction, and dysfunction would be an understatement. But what happened on the House Oversight Committee this month took things to a new low. House Republicans were advocating for holding Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in contempt of Congress — an action the committee chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, gleefully promoted in a fundraising appeal. They would eventually get “to the business at hand” but not be...
This month, right-wing commentator Ann Coulter told former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to his face she would not have voted for him because he’s Indian. “There is a core national identity that is the identity of the WASP,” Coulter said on Ramaswamy’s “Truth” podcast, using an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. “And that doesn’t mean we can’t take anyone else in ― a Sri Lankan or a Japanese, or an Indian. But the core around which the nation’s...
History on the rerun. Ghosts of Mississippi. Magnolia State maintains its horrendously racist image. Any of the statements could be used to describe the images shown across the nation at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Dozens of students at the university’s flagship campus gathered to protest Israel’s war in Gaza and to call for the school to be transparent in its potential dealings with Israel. These demonstrators were confronted with hundreds of counter-protesters,...
