Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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According to progressive websites, Thanksgiving is a day devoted to arguing with your right-wing uncle. According to advertisements, it’s the day before Black Friday. In reality, it is a most American holiday. It dates from before the establishment of the American nation-state and harkens back to our original settlers. Although the official holiday was formally established by the government and is marked by U.S. presidents, it has acquired its layers of meaning through r...
On the substance, Democrats have won the first two weeks of the impeachment hearings by TKO. Not that it’s required much exertion. The facts have been in their favor, especially considering the ground that congressional Republicans have tried to defend. At the outset, Republicans created an impossible standard for themselves. Taking their cues from President Donald Trump, they chose to defend the idea that his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was ...
If the impeachment effort isn’t taking the nation by storm, the Democrats have an answer — blame it on Latin. The use of a Latin term, quid pro quo, is now thought to be a damper on the impeachment cause because it sounds complex and technical. Latin is one of the great legacies of the Roman Empire, influencing languages across Europe and giving us scientific, medical and legal terms that heretofore had been thought perfectly fitting. That was before Democrats felt they nee...
If there’s one thing that elite opinion tends to agree about on the left and the right, it’s that nationalism is a very bad thing. If anything, this view has become even more entrenched as nationalism has demonstrated its potency in recent years, from the election of Donald Trump to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. When President Trump first openly embraced the term “nationalist” at a 2018 campaign rally, commentators reacted in horror. Patriotism is about lov...
Republican senators will soon be receiving an invitation to tear apart the GOP ahead of the 2020 elections, and they are going to decline to accept it. It’s a trope of pro-impeachment commentary that it should be simple for Republican senators to swap out President Donald Trump, who puts them in awkward positions every day, for Vice President Mike Pence, an upstanding Reagan conservative who could start with a fresh slate in the runup to the 2020 election. The only flaw in thi...
The Ukraine story hasn’t been good for President Donald Trump, and there’s only one way out — to get impeached, and the sooner, the better. Trump obviously hates the idea of being impeached. He thinks it’s unfair, and is raging against the process with every political and legal argument his team can muster and every insult and countercharge he can make on Twitter. But he doesn’t have any choice in the matter. Impeachment is baked in the cake. There’s no way that Democrats,...
Barack Obama and Donald Trump are diametrically opposed figures, representing the categorical rejection of the other for his supporters, yet they share significant foreign-policy DNA. They both defined themselves in opposition to George W. Bush’s foreign policy. Obama probably wouldn’t have defeated Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic nomination if she hadn’t voted for the Iraq War and if he didn’t speak out against it at the time. Likewise, Trump outpaced all his 2016 GO...
Little did Dr. James Naismith know when he invented the game of basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891 that, more than a century hence, it would become beholden to its Chinese overlords. The NBA disgraced itself kowtowing to Beijing after the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, tweeted his support for Hong Kong protesters. The words he associated himself with — “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” — would seem uncontroversial. Who doesn’t...
Impeachment is about to make everything worse. If our politics seems overheated, our institutions beleaguered and our public debate degraded, just wait until we are in the midst of the impeachment debate. Democrats have had an impeachment itch that they’ve been desperate to scratch ever since Donald Trump took office. For them, Ukraine is equal parts a genuine outrage and an excuse, the release valve for nearly three years of fear and loathing. Rather than conducting himself a...
Greta Thunberg needs to get a grip. The celebrity teen climate activist addressed the United Nations and excoriated the assembled worthies for coming “to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” Someone may have stolen her childhood, but the guilty parties can’t be found at Turtle Bay. A 16-year-old from Sweden, Thunberg thundered, “I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean,” which would hav...
In the “fire and fury” phase of Donald Trump’s presidency, everyone worried that he’d impulsively start a war with North Korea. The worry should have been that he’d, almost on a whim, step across the Korean DMZ in a chummy photo-op with Kim Jong Un. Richard Nixon famously had his “madman” theory of bringing our adversaries to heel by impressing on them his bellicose unpredictability. They’d better talk, otherwise the crazed anti-communist Nixon might nuke somebody. It’s easy t...
At least Bernie Sanders is an equal opportunity misanthrope. He doesn’t like rich people, and it turns out he doesn’t necessarily like poor people, either. At the CNN town hall on climate change, a questioner asked the socialist senator if he’d be “courageous” enough to endorse population control to save the planet. Sanders answered “yes,” and then, after referring to abortion rights, endorsed curtailing population growth, “especially in poor countries around the world where...
Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson has, to his credit, seized the initiative in the battle over whether Britain will truly exit the EU, and on what terms. But no one can know how this high-stakes gamble will turn out. Johnson just lost his slender parliamentary majority, and the prospect of a new election looms. If things break the wrong way, the winner could be opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, a throwback leftist redolent of the bad old days of Britain’s self-imposed s...
The New York Times, an organization devoted to gathering and publishing information, doesn’t want people to gather or publish information inconvenient to it. A group of Trump-supporting operatives has been finding and archiving old social media postings of Times employees and other journalists for use in the ongoing brawl between the president and the press. There’s no indication that this is dumpster diving rather than an effort to scour readily available sources for stu...
Beto O’Rourke has taken the measure of America and found it wanting. “This country, though we would like to think otherwise,” he intoned last weekend, “was founded on racism, has persisted through racism and is racist today.” This is now a mainstream sentiment in the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders said this year that the United States was “created” in large part “on racist principles.” The New York Times has begun the so-called 1619 Project, marking the 400th anniversary...
The Jeffrey Epstein case establishes beyond a doubt that if you’re a sexual predator, it pays to be a rich and connected sexual predator. Epstein, now dead of an apparent suicide before his accusers had their day in court, worked the system and benefited from advantages and breaks unimaginable to anyone who didn’t jet around with influential friends. The multimillionaire financier who lived in Palm Beach, Fla., and Manhattan, N.Y., used his resources to build a network of sex...
At some point in the late 1960s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the FBI was in charge of the KKK. It infiltrated, manipulated and ran the group into the ground. The name of the operation: COINTELPRO-White Hate. With violent white hate again on the rise, we should take some inspiration — even if the methods can’t be replicated — from the FBI’s past grappling with racist extremists. If there were any doubt that the country has a white nationalist problem, the shockin...
There was a time when the left considered McCarthyism the worst of all political tactics. That was before it became useful to question Mitch McConnell’s loyalty to his country. The Senate majority leader’s offense is blocking Democratic-sponsored election security bills, which has occasioned the sort of charges that Democrats have spent the better half of the past 50 years ruling out of bounds. The Washington Post headlined a column, “Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset...
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley used a perfectly good word in its appropriate context, and stands accused of dog-whistle bigotry. At the National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., this month, Hawley gave a keynote address that attacked the coastal elite for being out of touch and out of sympathy with the heartland. He called it “the cosmopolitan elite,” described its beliefs as the “cosmopolitan consensus,” and accused it of building a “cosmopolitan economy.” E...
Beto O’Rourke, the losing Texas senator candidate who bootstrapped his way into becoming a losing presidential candidate, had a message for refugees who had come to America: Your new country is a hellhole. The former congressman told a roundtable of refugees and immigrants in Nashville, Tennessee, last week: “This country was founded on white supremacy. And every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and seg...
The American middle class just got a lot richer. Joe Biden, who invariably and tiresomely refers to himself as “Middle-Class Joe,” made $15 million the first two years after the end of the Obama administration. This hardly qualifies as a rounding error in the portfolio of any billionaire mogul, but for the average American, a million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. According to one estimate, it takes an annual income of $420,000 to be...
We live in an era of public ugliness, of architects who deliberately make their forms unsightly and inhuman, and of public art installations that are invariably ridiculous. The most obvious exception is the ballpark, which has gotten more beautiful rather than less in a great example of renewal through a return to tradition. Paul Goldberger, a former architecture writer for The New York Times, traces this journey in his wonderful new book “Ballpark.” He rightly calls the bal...
News flash: There’s a crisis at the border. This was discovered again over the past week when immigration attorneys talked to reporters about appalling conditions at a Border Patrol facility detaining migrant minors in Clint, Texas. According to the lawyers, many of the kids had to sleep on the concrete floor, failed to get proper adult supervision and didn’t routinely take showers or brush their teeth. The details were hard to read. Assuming the account was accurate, one won...
The worry a few days ago was that the Trump administration was ginning up fake intelligence about Iran blowing up oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz to justify a war against Iran. Then, last week, President Donald Trump said the Iranian attacks weren’t a big deal. The episode is another indication of the underlying modesty — not a very Trumpian word — of the administration. Subtract Trump’s taste for nonstop controversy and rhetorical brinkmanship, and you’re left with an i...
The more the climate debate changes, the more it stays the same. Polls show that the public is worried about climate change, but that doesn’t mean it is any more ready to bear any burden or pay any price to combat it. If President Donald Trump claws his way to victory again in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest, his path will likely go through abortion and climate change, two issues on which the Democrats are most confident in their righteousness and willing to embrace r...
