Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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It’s 2009 again, or feels like it. That was when spontaneous, grassroots protests against overweening government sprang up and were widely derided in the media as dangerous and wrong-headed. The protesters then were inveighing against Obamacare; the protestors now are striking out against the coronavirus lockdowns. The anti-lockdown agitation shows that, despite the revolution in Republican politics wrought by President Donald Trump, opposition to government impositions is d...
Stacey Abrams has another distinction to add to her resume — she’s among the most preposterous potential vice-presidential candidates ever. Her attempt to leverage a failed Georgia gubernatorial bid into a spot on the Democratic ticket is so brazenly absurd that it’s hard to think of precedents. But the 46-year-old African American activist is not one to be constrained by standard political practice, or reality. She refused to concede her narrow, but clear 2018 guber...
New York is the greatest city in the world. It also is uniquely suited to the spread of the coronavirus. As the national debate over re-opening continues and the political blame game intensifies, it’s worth considering the scale of New York’s outbreak. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the country, and almost nothing like it in the rest of the world. The story of coronavirus in America is overwhelmingly the story of coronavirus in New York and its surrounding sub...
We will be in a fight against the coronavirus for months, if not years, and yet it is time to declare mission accomplished on one important goal. The lockdowns of much of the country were undertaken “to flatten the curve” and largely to prevent the hospital system from being overwhelmed. It was a near-run thing in New York and New Jersey, but the dikes held, thanks to the incredible sacrifices of front-line healthcare workers. Now, the rhetoric around the shutdowns has shi...
We had to destroy the hospitals to save them. You could be forgiven for thinking that’s the upshot of the coronavirus lockdowns that have suspended elective surgeries and generally discouraged people from going to hospitals. Many hospitals are getting pushed near, or over, the financial edge. At a time when we feared that hospitals would get overwhelmed by a surge of patients, they have instead been emptied out. At a time when we thought medical personnel would be at a p...
At a coronavirus task force briefing at the beginning of April, White House adviser Jared Kushner explained the approach that would — as events proved — get the country through its ventilator crisis. He was relentlessly pilloried, mocked and distorted in the press for it. Kushner said at one point that states shouldn’t be drawing on the federal stockpile just to hold ventilators in their own reserves (the administration was worried about ventilators sent to New York state...
An irony of the coronavirus debate is that the more successful lockdowns are in squelching the disease, the more vulnerable they will be to attack as unnecessary in the first place. A growing chorus on the right is slamming the shutdowns as an overreaction and agitating to end them. A good example of the genre is an op-ed co-authored by former Education Secretary William Bennett and talk-radio host Seth Leibsohn. It is titled, tendentiously and not very accurately,...
A country learns about itself in a crisis, and one revelation in the coronavirus emergency is that we can’t make our own penicillin. The first patient successfully treated with the antibiotic was a woman suffering from sepsis in a Connecticut hospital in 1942. Her treatment took up half the country’s supply. Yet in short order we figured out how to mass produce the medicine, saving the lives of countless soldiers in World War II. Once, factories throughout the country mad...
On Jan. 20, the United States confirmed its first case of the coronavirus. The nation’s political and media elite obsessed over Mitch McConnell’s just-announced resolution governing the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. On Jan. 23, China locked down the city of Wuhan. Cable news in America lit up with praise for the epic, nay historic, performance by House impeachment manager Adam Schiff in the trial’s opening arguments. On Jan. 30, the World Health Organization decla...
Countries have experienced economic depressions before, but not usually as a matter of choice. The nationwide coronavirus shutdowns over the past few weeks have ground parts of the country to a halt. We have probably never before in our history seen so much economic activity vaporize so quickly — within days or even hours. The Great Depression and the panics of the 19th century are the only possible analogues. Goldman Sachs is forecasting a 24% drop in quarterly GDP. Morgan St...
A specter haunts progressive America — the possibility that a company might make too much money solving the world’s coronavirus problem. At the last Democratic debate Bernie Sanders called the leaders of the pharmaceutical industry “a bunch of crooks,” who are telling themselves in the midst of the epidemic, “Wow, what an opportunity to make a fortune.” Op-eds have sprung up warning, “Drug Companies Will Make a Killing From Coronavirus” (The New York Times) and “How Big Ph...
A foreign threat, emanating from China and requiring border controls and the exercise of government power to protect Americans, has arrived in the United States. Yet President Donald Trump spent the initial weeks minimizing the threat and talking of it magically disappearing, despite being a nationalist who has long emphasized the importance of borders and the danger of China. One might think the coronavirus would activate Trump’s defensive instincts at least as much as s...
Bernie Sanders may be on the verge of gaining an insurmountable lead in the Democratic nomination fight, but he’s not letting that get in the way of his socialist principles. Asked in a “60 Minutes” interview about old statements praising Fidel Castro’s supposed achievements in healthcare and education, Sanders stayed true to himself. “You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did?” he told interviewer Anderson Cooper. “He had a massive literacy prog...
Mike Bloomberg is cool, correct and effective, and all the more worrisome for it. If November were to come down to a Trump-Bloomberg race — despite the former New York City mayor’s woeful debating skills — Americans would get the choice of swapping one president with an a-constitutional view of the office, for another. The two New York City billionaires are studies in contrast, except no one would think to feature either one of them in an episode of “Schoolhouse Rock....
The Democratic Party could soon be taken over by a leftist who has never formally been a member. If it’s any consolation to Democrats, it’s a version of the same wrenching dislocation that has beset the center-left throughout the Western world. One reason Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic nomination is entirely imaginable is that it wouldn’t be a freakish occurrence outside the experience of other advanced democracies, but instead, entirely consistent with the trava...
And so 2016 finally draws to a close. It’s been the longest election year in American history. It ran from Feb. 1, 2016, the date of the Iowa caucuses, to the Senate vote to acquit President Donald Trump last week. It’s true that Nov. 6, 2016, was a signal event in this long election year, but it didn’t really conclude anything, even though the result wasn’t in doubt. Usually, contested elections are ties or near-ties. This is the first time an election has gone into overtim...
The Democratic race is shaping up as most of the candidates expected at the outset, with the campaign appealing to the most fervent progressive wing of the party showing formidable strength. It’s just that Bernie Sanders is the one running that campaign. At the beginning of the race, everyone wanted to hug Bernie in the hopes of replacing him. They’d be younger, more diverse, fresher, more acceptable to the Democratic mainstream, or more electable than the old, white, mal...
It’s easy to forget what the Senate impeachment trial is supposed to be about. It’s not a fight over whether the Senate will call a couple of witnesses that the House couldn’t, or didn’t bother to, obtain on its own. The underlying question is whether the United States Senate will impose the most severe sanction it has ever inflicted on any chief executive, voting to remove a president for the first time in the history of the country and doing it about 10 months from his re-...
The most substantively outrageous presidential campaign in American history has some serious chance of success. Bernie Sanders is leading or near the top of most polls in the first two Democratic nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire. He could plausibly win both, which would instantly transform the race into a desperate effort to Stop Bernie. Sanders doesn’t exactly get good press. A lot of the punditry (understandably) wrote him off when Elizabeth Warren eclipsed him i...
In the torrent of idiotic commentary unleashed by the killing of Qassem Soleimani, Colin Kaepernick’s deserves a place of honor. The NFL washout and Nike persona who makes sure the company doesn’t produce any overly patriotic sneakers tweeted, “There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism.” For Kaepernick, Soleimani is just another dark-skinned man brutalized by the United States. The Iranian...
The reviews of the 1619 Project are in. It is “a very unbalanced, one-sided account.” It is “wrong in so many ways.” It is “not only ahistorical,” but “actually anti-historical.” It is “a tendentious and partial reading of American history.” This is what top historians have said of the splashy New York Times feature on slavery in the U.S. that aspires to fundamentally reorient our understanding of American history and change what students are taught in the schools. Given that...
The great performer Bing Crosby reached the height of his stardom about 80 years ago, but every Christmas season he makes a triumphant return to American radio and malls and other public places. American tastes have drastically changed over the decades, yet our Christmas songbook has remained largely the same. With honorable exceptions — most notably Mariah Carey’s 1994 classic “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — the most-played and most-beloved Christmas songs date from the...
The Supreme Court just ensured that the nation’s homelessness crisis will continue. The court declined to take up an appeal of a ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, covering the western United States, that homeless encampments are a de facto constitutional right. The 9th Circuit has a long history of reading the law as if its judges are actors in an absurdist play; in the encampment case, stemming from a Boise, Idaho, ordinance, it truly lived up to its cracked s...
The Democrats believe the 2020 election is too important to be left to the voters. It’s obvious that President Donald Trump withheld defense aid to Ukraine to pressure its president to commit to the investigations that he wanted, an improper use of his power that should rightly be the focus of congressional investigation and hearings. Where the Democrats have gotten tangled up is trying to find a justification that supports the enormous weight of impeaching and removing a p...
The economy is in robust good health, but our social fabric isn’t. By two basic measures of social vitality, births and deaths, American society is faltering. Both the fertility rate and life expectancy are declining, in a sign that people feel less secure and, in some cases, have no hope at all. We are attuned to headline-grabbing economic statistics — GDP growth, the unemployment rate, wages — as monthly and quarterly metrics of American well-being, but they aren’t as tell...
