Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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It opens with a woman’s voice and a black screen. “I had no other options,” she says. “I wanted it over with.” Then you see her. White, gray-haired, maybe somewhere in her 70s. And she continues her story. “I didn’t care how it was done. I was that desperate.” Someone gave her a phone number. “And it was the mob.” The gangsters talked in code. Did she want a Chevrolet ($500), a Cadillac ($750) or a Rolls Royce ($1,000)? “That’s what the mob charged for an abortion.” She took t...
So much for the good guy with a gun. That, you will recall, was Wayne LaPierre’s preferred solution to America’s epidemic of firearms violence. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun,” he said, “is a good guy with a gun.” The chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association said this on Dec. 21, 2012 -- one week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that left dead six adults and 20 children ages 6 and 7. Americans were grieving and demanding a...
“Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break? Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake?” — Bruce Springsteen, “Last To Die” And once again: Why? It’s the question we always find ourselves asking in moments like this, the understanding we always seek as bodies lay strewn and the air is rent by shrieks of mourning. But for all that, the answer is no mystery. As is so often the case with America’s miseries, if you seek the origin story, if you follow the twisted roots b...
Come and let us pity white people. They are the real victims here. That, in essence, is the battle cry that’s powered much of American politics for the last 30 years, the last 15 in particular. It has echoed from the halls of government to the set of Fox “News” to the far-flung strands of the worldwide web. Poor white people. They are being overrun by caravans when not murdered by illegals or terrorized by Muslims or tyrannized by masks or oppressed by vaccinations or cance...
To the Honorable Clarence Thomas, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Dear Sir: Have you ever met your wife? Yes, it’s an impudent question, but it seems justified by the speech you gave recently at a judicial conference in Atlanta and a question-and-answer session that followed. In an obvious reference to the bombshell leak of a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, you bemoaned that institutions are being “bullied” and said the judiciary is threaten...
“Maybe we need to blow this s--- up.” Five years ago, that was the considered opinion of comedian Mike Yard, a panelist on Larry Wilmore’s old Comedy Central program, “The Nightly Show.” It came as candidate Bernie Sanders absorbed a crushing primary defeat in New York and it was becoming clear he would not be the Democratic nominee for president. Panelist Rory Albanese had suggested that, faced with a blindingly obvious choice in the fall -- Hillary Clinton against Donald Tr...
I’m probably out of step with many of you. Everywhere I turn, folks are discussing Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. I certainly get it. After all, it was Monday’s biggest domestic story. The sale sparked fears that the petulant billionaire will turn one of the world’s leading social-media platforms into an even greater transmitter of disinformation and hate than it already is. Given his history of petty online bullying, his ownership of a car company described by Black e...
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” -- James Baldwin Here’s what we’re not going to do here. We are not going to indulge the lazy rationalizations, false equivalence, cheap gaslighting and other forms of rhetorical chicanery that have become so common to political discourse in this era. Our country is in crisis, and we owe it better. The warning is for those who claimed offense at my following observation: “What A...
This month, Texas gave us a glimpse of the future. It was not pretty. It seems that on April 7, a 26-year-old woman was arrested and charged with murder. Specifically, according to a statement from the Sheriff’s Department in tiny Starr County on the Mexican border, Lizelle Herrera “intentionally and knowingly” caused “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.” Thankfully, her ordeal was not long-lived. On April 11, the district attorney asked a judge to dismiss t...
Two hundred times, they failed to get it done. They failed after 1899. That was the year an African-American man named Sam Hose was massacred by a white mob near Newnan, Ga., that castrated him, skinned his face, then cooked him alive over a fire and parceled out pieces of his body; his knuckles were offered for sale by a grocer in Atlanta. They failed after 1904, too. That was the year an African-American man named Luther Holbert and a woman who was never identified were put...
Sorry, but there is no excuse. Not that that's stopped some people from trying to find one. And yes, in case you hadn't figured it out, we're talking about the event that has crowded out Ukraine, the pandemic and gas prices as the top topic of public conversation. Meaning, of course, The Slap. And here begins perhaps the most unnecessary recap you'll ever read: Last Sunday night during the Academy Awards telecast, presenter Chris Rock made a crack about actress Jada Pinkett...
I could get fired for what I’m about to say. Mind you, that’s not something I expect. I’m just saying it’s theoretically possible. Somebody could object and complain to my boss. Next time you see me, I’m standing on a median strip holding a sign: “Will Opine For Food.” That would not thrill me, to say the least. But I long ago recognized that the risk is present any time I -- or anybody, for that matter -- ventures an opinion. Freedom of speech is not freedom from conseque...
So, what shall we make of Rep. Kinzinger’s apology? Adam Kinzinger, Republican from Illinois, took to Twitter on March 11 with a remarkable statement of contrition for failing to hold the last president accountable. He wrote that his “biggest regret” was his decision to vote against Donald Trump’s first impeachment. “The bottom line, Donald Trump withheld lethal aid to Ukraine so he could use it as leverage for his campaign. This is a shameful and illegal act, directly...
They drove 64 miles in a circle. That’s the length of the Capital Beltway, the ribbon of asphalt that loops around Washington, D.C. For over four hours last Sunday, the so-called “People’s Convoy,” estimated at about a thousand trucks, RVs and cars drove that circle in protest. In protest of what? Well, take your pick. Many drivers -- nearly all white, nearly all men -- flew flags supporting Donald Trump or opposing Joe Biden. Some displayed Confederate battle flags and pla...
This was going to be a song of praise. Instead, it will be a groan of frustration. In other words, it was going to be a column heralding the titanic courage of Ukraine in the face of Russian attack, the acts of defiance that have endeared that nation to the world. Like the woman who gave a Russian soldier sunflower seeds so that Ukraine’s national flower might bloom from his corpse, or the comedian turned president who has rallied his people like some latter-day Churchill, o...
Oh, Canada. Really? Et tu? It’s been a few years since my last visit: My wife and I spent a weekend in Vancouver, drawn by an article declaring it one of the most livable cities on Earth. The man at the rental car place gave us a map and showed us how to reach the sights. He took pains to point out what he said was a rough neighborhood we should avoid. Naturally, that’s the first place we went. Canada, I grew up in South Los Angeles. I’ve spent time in Miami’s Liberty City, C...
Is America a racist country? As some of you will recall, Sen. Tim Scott answered that question in a speech last year with an emphatic no. He was promptly echoed by Vice President Kamala Harris. Neither explained their reasoning, but one assumes it was based, at least in part, on the fact that the country has no laws explicitly requiring racial mistreatment. Fair enough. America hasn’t had such laws for a whole 50 years, give or take. But that line of argument asks that we acce...
They stormed through police barricades, these “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” They shattered windows and chanted death to the vice president, these “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” They smeared their own feces on the wall, “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” Over the last 13 months, we’ve heard Republicans offer all sorts of rationalizations for the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. We’v...
We don’t even know the woman’s name yet. In fact, we don’t know much of anything about her except that she is Black. That’s not a lot, but it’s more than enough for some people. Ever since Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, and President Biden said he would keep a campaign promise to nominate an African-American woman to the court, Republicans have stumbled all over themselves to decry this terrible thing. Like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who said on h...
It does not exactly break your heart to see Mitch McConnell used as a pinata. He is a man of uniquely pious hypocrisy, able to affect moist-eyed sincerity while ruthlessly chopping the legs out from under democracy. Whether it is stealing Supreme Court seats or defending an indefensible president, his superpower is the uncanny ability to lie, to know that you know he’s lying and yet to keep a straight face through it all. So one does not weep to see him smacked about, as h...
In the Bible, in the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul issues this admonition: "Let us not grow weary in well-doing." Talk about things that are easier said than done. For some of us, after all, this is a weary season, a season of exhausted hope and worn expectation that would have seemed impossible on that victorious November night 14 years ago when a Black senator, just elected president of the United States, stood on a stage in Chicago's Grant Park and proclaimed,...
Dear white conservatives, When you’re right, you’re right. And you are definitely right about that quote from Martin Luther King. When he stood at the temple of Lincoln in 1963 and declared his dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he surely spoke a word for the ages. Your fondness for that word has not gone unnoticed. How could it? You invoke that li...
It was an act of country love. This is what we have repeatedly been told about the insurrection at the Capitol, one year ago. The claim began, as brazen lies so often seem to, with Donald Trump. “These are the things and events that happen,” he said, “when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” That is what he tweeted that evening. After the walls were sc...
So it turns out I’m a friend of Donald Trump’s. In fact, I’m one of his top supporters. Also, my name is Joe. If this surprises you, imagine how I feel. Those revelations come by way of Trump himself in emails that have deluged my inbox for months. From them, I learn that when Trump scans a list of his donors and doesn’t see my name, he’s hurt and surprised, given that I’ve always been so generous in the past. He implores me to keep on giving. And just to sweeten the offer,...
Once again, carnage goes to school. Once again, American students are used for target practice. But conservative leaders are on the case. Recognizing the ongoing threat to our children, they know it’s time for decisive action. It’s time to do something about books. And if you expected that sentence to end differently, you haven’t been paying attention. In red America these days, books are Public Enemy No. 1. As Time magazine recently reported, librarians are seeing a defin...
