Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Breaking news: Some guy posted a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi. But fear not. The website The Daily Beast sprang into action. It tracked down the random, Trump-supporting man who allegedly posted the offending clip, hounded him until he talked, then published his name and other details about his life in a shocking instance of harassment masquerading as journalism. Journalists usually imagine themselves holding the powerful to account, but now they are happy to punch down — a...
In the end, by-the-book Robert Mueller departed wildly from the book. He invented an extraconstitutional legal standard for his obstruction investigation and acted, at best, in violation of the spirit of the special-counsel regulations. His departing act was a public statement meant to influence the public debate in a manner inappropriate for a prosecutor, in part because the long public report he wrote that was also inappropriate for a prosecutor lacked clarity. A hallmark...
Few things offend Bernie Sanders as much as people escaping from command-and-control government systems, even minority students whose parents are desperate to get their kids a decent education. The socialist wants to turn George Wallace on his head and not block black children from attending traditional public schools, but block them from exiting those schools for something better. The New York Times wrote a long, devastating report the other day on the then-Burlington,...
Lysistrata, the character from the Aristophanes play of the same name, declared a sex strike to try to stop a devastating war in ancient Greece. Alyssa Milano, the actress and political activist, declared a sex strike to try to stop Georgia from protecting unborn children in the womb. The state just passed and signed into law a so-called heartbeat bill to outlaw abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detectable. This led Milano to conclude that women can’t risk pregnancy until f...
The last thing the world needs is more of Robert Mueller’s commentary, but Congress is determined to have him hold forth at a public hearing. It’s not as though we don’t already have the special counsel’s version of events. He mustered enormous investigate resources and took two years to write a 400-page report that is available to the public and presumably carefully written (although not necessarily carefully thought through). That should be enough for Mueller to stand o...
An investigation into whether the president of the United States committed treason has devolved into a squabble over Attorney General Bill Barr’s brief letter saying that he didn’t. We’ve gone from Donald Trump allegedly betraying the nation to Bill Barr allegedly betraying the nation, from potential Trump impeachment to potential Barr impeachment. Barr’s offense, of course, is writing a quick letter summarizing the top-line conclusions of the Mueller report. Ever since,...
No one enjoys getting impeached, and if it happens to him, Donald J. Trump will be no exception. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine any potential target of impeachment in Anglo-American history relishing the fight more than Trump. He’d rather be done with the Mueller investigation in all its permutations, but there’s no one better suited to being at the center of a harshly partisan, deeply personal political and legal donnybrook that will ultimately be just for show....
There was Bernie Sanders at a Fox News Channel town hall, not giving an inch in a forum every Democratic presidential candidate has shunned. His reward was a cataract of good reviews, and monster ratings. Sanders had a solid hour to try to reach people not favorably inclined to his worldview, at the very least demonstrating that he’s willing to show up outside his political silo. Why hadn’t any of the other Democrats done it before? Because they lacked the verve and ide...
Attorney General William Barr dared to use the “s-word.” He said in congressional testimony that the Trump campaign had been spied on by the U.S. government. Pressed by incredulous Senate Democrats, he clarified: “I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated.” “Spying” has a negative connotation, so perhaps “surveilling” would be the better way to put it. But a key question is indeed whether there was “improper surveillance” of...
Joe Biden wants us to believe that all his touching speaks to how deeply he cares about other people. It’s really a testament to how much regard he has for himself. As everyone has always known, Biden is prone to weird and wildly overfamiliar interactions with women, which are extensively on the record and have been the subject of jocular commentary over the years. The #MeToo era has put his grabby style in a different light, and now he’s had to tweet out a video saying he...
For the past two years, Rachel Maddow has been a hero of her own spy thriller. She has written, directed and starred in a hit production based on the unlikely premise of a prime-time cable TV show host unraveling the most dastardly plot in American history — one opening monologue at a time. Only the story had a surprise twist at the end — she was completely wrong. Few people invested more in the Russia probe, night after night, monologue after monologue, with an eve...
Elizabeth Warren, the pointy end of the spear of Democratic radicalism, has called for the end of the Electoral College. “My view,” she said at a CNN town hall, “is that every vote matters. And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.” Her statement elicited the support of other 2020 candidates. The same people who complain daily about Donald Trump violating norms are now openly advocating elimina...
The same Democrats outraged by Donald Trump’s alleged offenses against the First Amendment passed, as their first priority, a speech-restricting bill opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Trump shouldn’t call the media “the enemy of the people” or inveigh against Jeff Bezos for owning The Washington Post, but Nancy Pelosi’s HR 1, which passed the House this month, is the true affront to the Constitution. The wide-ranging legislation purports to reform campaign...
We interrupt the talk of the president “manufacturing” a crisis at the border with this hair-raising report about the crisis at the border. Alarming new numbers about border apprehensions from U.S. Customs and Border Protection should puncture the lazy conventional wisdom about the border being under control, except in the lurid imagination of President Donald Trump. More than 76,000 migrants were apprehended crossing the southern border last month, the highest February in...
The race for 2020 is taking shape, although there are still significant unknowns, including whether Donald Trump will get a serious primary challenge. His fiercest Republican critics say, “Yes — please, please, yes.” They are probably wrong, and it’s certainly nothing to root for. Trump’s dominance of the party begins with his lockdown support of the right, forcing any primary challenger to the left. This isn’t fertile territory. Self-identified moderates and liberals ar...
Bernie Sanders catalyzed the Democratic Party’s post-Barack Obama move to the left, and if he were elected president in 2020, it would represent a truly historic swing in the country’s orientation. Yet among the flaws on Bernie’s resume for many progressives is an unalterable one — he is a white male, and an old one without a cute Spanish nickname. The straight, cisgendered Sanders is burdened by his utter lack of intersectionality, unless being a Vermont senator from Brookly...
The day has arrived in the Democratic Party when Sherrod Brown is a kind of moderate. The impeccably progressive Ohio senator who has occupied a spot on the left flank of the Democratic caucus for a very long time is declining to sign up for the fashionable radical causes of the hour. Brown has not endorsed the Bernie Sanders “Medicare-for-all” plan that contemplates the end of private insurance in America, nor for the outlandishly expensive and eminently mockable Ale...
All statewide officials in the Commonwealth of Virginia should resign if Democrats are held to their own standards. Even if Gov. Ralph Northam didn’t appear in blackface in an image in his medical-school yearbook, he confessed to once darkening his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume. Attorney General Mark Herring, who called Northam’s conduct indefensible, also used blackface once. Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has been accused of sexual assault. If ever wea...
The worst thought crime is the one you don’t realize you’re committing. So it was with NBC News legend Tom Brokaw, who — for good reason — didn’t understand that assimilation is now a third rail of American politics. He caused a furor with comments on the venerable Sunday news program “Meet the Press” last weekend, including, most controversially, his statement that he believes “that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation.” The condemnations were swift and sweepin...
The fundamental offense of the Covington Catholic High School kids wasn’t so much allegedly mobbing, mocking or getting in the face of an American Indian drummer at the Lincoln Memorial. It was wearing red Make America Great Again hats. That was the actual, incontestable conduct that created the predicate for the presumption of guilt and all the rest of the grief they’ve been subjected to since. For much of progressive America, if you are wearing the hat, you are suiting up...
The walls supposedly are always closing in on Donald Trump. The end is always beginning. He’s going to quit. He’s going to be impeached and removed. He’s going to decide not to run again. Somehow or other, he’s going to relieve everyone of the responsibility of ever thinking of him again, and especially of the responsibility of defeating him in an election. This is the perpetual backdrop to media commentary about Trump. It rocketed around the internet a couple of months...
President Donald Trump is playing with the idea of declaring a national emergency to build a border fence despite congressional opposition. This would make Trump the second president in a row willing to cut Congress out of the legislative process if it doesn’t agree to his priorities on immigration, and is a very bad idea. It would functionally be an end run around Congress’ power of the purse; create yet another precedent for “pen and phone” governance, which is not how our...
It’s a wonder that Democrats haven’t staked out a negotiating position demanding the destruction of already-existing barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Their opposition to President Donald Trump’s border wall (or, more properly, his so-called wall) is now so total as to be nearly indistinguishable from opposition to any serious infrastructure at the border at all. The partial government shutdown is fueled by a clash of visions over, ultimately, the legitimacy of borde...
Donald Trump may watch the stock market more closely than any day trader. For a president who underlined the increasing importance of working-class whites to the GOP coalition and who trampled so much bipartisan economic orthodoxy during the campaign, to be so overtly obsessed with the stock market is a strange disconnect. In fact, no president in memory has so publicly staked himself to the market. Trump has, in contrast, paid relatively little public attention to wage...
The most legally fraught part of the Russia probe now revolves around payments to an American porn star. As of yet, instead of a dastardly scheme to participate with the Russians in the hacking of Democratic emails to subvert the election, prosecutors have uncovered a scheme to try to keep from the voters — as if they weren’t aware — that Trump is a womanizer. The advantage of the story of the hush payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal is that they actually happe...
