Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 200
Presumably, Donald Trump will never produce the dark secrets promised about Ron DeSantis’ past. But his team thinks it already has one -- the Florida governor once was a Reagan Republican. “There’s a pre-Trump Ron and there’s a post-Trump Ron,” someone in the Trump camp told Axios. “He used to be a Reagan Republican. That’s where he comes from. He’s now awkwardly trying to square his views up with the populist nationalist feeling of that party.” In his CPAC speech doubling d...
It’s best never to take White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s word for anything, but we can presumably believe her when she says the flying objects shot down by the United States in recent days aren’t from an alien civilization. Although she left herself some wiggle room -- “there is no indication” of extraterrestrial activity, she said, displaying the weasel-word instincts of someone whose job involves dancing around the truth. If she’s wrong, we are having clos...
A recent episode of a Disney+ cartoon has woke kids performing a skit around the theme: “Slaves built this country.” The installment of “The Proud Family” series -- in which the kids find out the founder of their town was a slave owner -- is a cartoon version of “The 1619 Project,” although “The 1619 Project” is cartoonish in its own right. Hulu has just released a documentary (using the word loosely) version of The New York Times production, hosted by “The 1619 Project’s” c...
There’s nothing white supremacy can’t do. It is supposedly so pervasive and powerful that it can cause Black men to sign up to serve as police officers in a majority Black city and severely beat a Black arrestee. It is to the contemporary left what capital was to Marx, sex was to Freud, and gravity was to Newton. It is the King Charles head of American public life, a matter of obsession that comes up in debates and contexts where it has no possible relevance. An opinion pie...
Not all conspiracy theories are created equal. The same people who pride themselves on rigorously insisting on the facts -- ideally, explained in the dulcet tones of an NPR anchor -- are happy to embrace conspiracy theories supportive of their own worldview. This is why the idea that Russian disinformation on social media influenced or even decided the 2016 election has gained such purchase, even though a new study finds, unsurprisingly, no evidence for it. The overwhelming fo...
Long after it has run its course on TV, the show "Yellowstone" will provide fodder for countless Ph.D. candidates in whiteness studies. In certain precincts, the verdict about the smash hit that has spawned a cottage industry of spin-offs is in: The show is about whiteness, and particularly white grievance. In a recent podcast about "Yellowstone," Sam Sanders of New York Magazine said, "Kevin Costner sets up the imagery of conservative white grievance without any of the negati...
China sent 71 aircraft and seven ships toward Taiwan in a 24-hour period, while Russia shelled the Kherson region more than 70 times. These acts of aggression -- occurring 5,000 miles apart, one in a grinding war of attrition, the other as part of an ongoing political and diplomatic struggle that may well result in open hostilities -- are related. It’s no accident that the two most dangerous powers in the world, China and Russia, are aggrieved empires seeking to right what t...
It takes some doing in this country to be more than 25 miles from a production of “The Nutcracker” during the Christmas season. The ballet has become as American as Friday Night Lights, and as much a holiday tradition as Frosty the Snowman or Charlie Brown. It is a reliable revenue generator for ballet academies and companies, and the story and music show up everywhere -- in books, advertisements, and pop culture. Its popularity has even driven a minor industry in toy nut...
The “Twitter Files” released by Elon Musk give us a more fine-grained understanding of how and why the social media company decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. This was a woefully stupid decision. The New York Post’s account was suspended for two weeks for the offense of coming up with a scoop that we are still talking about and that will surely play a large role in upcoming GOP investigations into Biden family corruption. That’s the kind of thing that newspap...
Joe Biden 2024 is a bad idea whose time has come. If Democrats had gotten the shellacking that seemed to be coming their way in the midterms, Biden might have been wounded enough for elements of the Democratic establishment to begin to try to shoulder him into retirement. Instead, the Democratic overperformance has Biden looking revitalized. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California told the president on election night that he’s not running against him (not that Biden was ever likely t...
Donald Trump is in his weakest political state since 2015 or early 2016. During his presidency, when he was at the center of countless intense controversies, he didn’t blink once. He never showed fear or desperation. Both are clearly at work now in his gratuitous attacks on Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, neither of whom has done anything to him, besides presenting a viable alternative to his continued dominance of the GOP. Any Trump political o...
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul delivered one of the most memorable lines of the midterm debates when she said she didn’t know why her Republican opponent, Lee Zeldin, cared so much about locking up criminals. Hochul’s highhandedness encapsulated an attitude toward crime and punishment that has been shaped by the decarceration movement. Progressives have accepted a wholesale critique of the criminal justice system that is deeply flawed, not to say a complete fantasy. Its pre...
Democracy is under threat -- the wrong candidates could win more votes than their opponents in hotly contested free and fair elections. That’s the worry of progressives insisting that “democracy is on the ballot” in the midterms. This trope, repeated endlessly on the center-left, is offered as a reason why voters of conscience should cast aside their other concerns and vote Democrat up and down the ballot. If this argument seems a touch self-serving -- indeed functionally indi...
One of the most significant events in American politics is that Hispanics are, in effect, deciding that they are working-class voters rather than ethnic-grievance voters. This is so momentous because it means that Democrats can’t rely on the monolithic Hispanic voting bloc they imagined would guarantee them an enduring electoral majority, and that the shift to the Republicans may be just beginning (the migration of working-class whites to the GOP has been happening over the c...
The nation is having a contentious debate over whether illegal migrants coming over the Southern border should be transported further inland, and if so, where and by whom. Should they stay in San Antonio or end up in New York City, get bussed to a rural town no one has heard of, or get flown to one of the most desirable summer spots in the country? Although this debate has generated much heat and is of great interest to the local authorities involved, it is really beside the...
Who’s using the culture war to distract from the economy now? Democrats have long believed -- going back at least to the famous 2005 Thomas Frank book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” -- that Republicans cynically deploy cultural issues to divert attention from kitchen-table concerns. If only Democrats, they told themselves, could convince voters that their agenda is the true populism opposed to the GOP’s faux culture-based populism, the spell would be lifted, and the publi...
John Fetterman has been in elected politics for nearly 20 years, and last spring was on the cusp of taking the Democratic nomination in a very winnable Pennsylvania senate race, the political opportunity of a lifetime. Then, he suffered a stroke. He won the nomination anyway -- while in the hospital and on the same day he had a roughly three-hour operation to implant a defibrillator. For Fetterman to have experienced a life-threatening, debilitating health event as he closed...
The Republican Party only had about a half-century to prepare for the end of Roe v. Wade yet is still scared and confused now that the late, unlamented decision is no longer with us. It may be that the media is exaggerating the extent that the Dobbs decision has changed the trajectory of the midterms, but there is no doubt that it has energized Democrats and that pro-lifers suffered a signal defeat in a Kansas referendum in early August. Some Republicans seem to think they...
“It’s a slip, not a fall,” Abraham Lincoln said after his loss in his legendary 1858 Illinois Senate contest against Stephen Douglas. Liz Cheney apparently has the same attitude after her nearly 40-point wipeout in her primary the other night. In lieu of a traditional concession speech, the Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of the former vice president delivered a picturesque, made-for-TV call to arms invoking Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Cheney had a choice after...
Does Attorney General Merrick Garland know that he is investigating the man most likely to be the opponent of the president he serves? Does he realize that the intense political pressure campaign that he’s under to indict that man has been plainly visible to everyone? Does he care? If we can’t know where Garland is ultimately heading in his probe of Jan. 6 and the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, all indications are that he is preparing the ground for an indictment of Don...
Every dog has his day, and apparently so does every miserably inadequate president. Joe Biden, who has been out-of-touch, tone-deaf and disturbingly incompetent from the outset of his presidency, suddenly has the “Big Mojo,” or at least the “Moderate-Sized This-Isn’t-Quite-the Legislative-Debacle-We-Expected Mojo.” The climate and health care spending deal forged by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and longtime Democratic holdout Joe Manchin has revived talk in the media...
Congress has never cared much about truth-in-labeling, but even by its standards, “The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” is laughably absurd. The deal reached by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is getting puffed up by the media as a presidency-revitalizing achievement for President Joe Biden, when in reality it is the detritus of his stymied legislative agenda hastily thrown together in an incoherent muddle, under a deceptive name. A signature o...
Baseball is a game of numbers, and one of the most iconic of them, 61, is now in play. New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge remains on pace to match or eclipse the single-season home-run mark set by Roger Maris in 1961. Technically, a trio of sluggers obliterated the Maris record in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But their gaudy totals are a testament to performance-enhancing drugs and baseball’s willingness to look the other way rather than genuine achievement. The l...
Without a doubt, the climate-obsessed green movement is the most stupidly self-destructive force in the world today, leaving a trail of irrationality and folly wherever it goes. Consider its recent record of destroying the country of Sri Lanka, making Western Europe needlessly vulnerable to Vladimir Putin’s energy blackmail and stoking higher energy prices in the U.S. that have contributed to the fastest decline in real wages in 40 years. The greens are rapidly making up g...
If you thought Donald Trump represented a unique danger to the American system of government, you obviously haven’t been paying attention to the growing menace from Tallahassee. Some of the same commentators whose hair has been on fire about Trump are now warning that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is “more of a threat” and “far more dangerous.” This is an extraordinary level of hysteria over a competent, popular Sunbelt governor who has never schemed to reverse the outcome of an e...
