Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Sorted by date Results 76 - 100 of 200
There was a “scientific consensus,” they told us. According to the media and assorted experts, there couldn’t be any questioning of the idea that the coronavirus (or SARS-CoV-2) emerged naturally, and anyone suspecting it might have come from a Chinese lab was an ignoramus, conspiracy theorist or hater. These enforcers believed in the power of the words “scientific” and “consensus,” when conjoined and used as a weapon, to shun dissenters and stifle debate. During much o...
The charge of apartheid is the new blood libel. As Hamas rains rockets down on Israel, members of the Squad in Congress and other left-wing enemies are using the occasion to amplify their accusation that Israel is an “apartheid state.” This is a transparent attempt to delegitimize — and isolate and ultimately destroy — the Jewish state by associating it with a racist regime that the world united to squeeze out of existence. Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Mi...
Sometime in 2023, Donald Trump will presumably make the most momentous decision by a single person affecting the fate of the Republican Party in decades. He will decide whether to run for president again, and that will determine who’s the frontrunner (Trump, if he’s a go) and the contours of the race. If Trump runs, he will, one assumes, blot out the sun. Everything will be about him — his record, his pronouncements, his animosities. Much of the conservative mass media will...
If Joe Biden wanted to spend massively in response to a nearly unprecedented public health emergency, he was elected too late. The conventional wisdom justifying Biden’s new FDR-sized ambitions is that the country is in crisis, and he has to meet the proverbial moment, which can only be done with 13-digit spending bills. The truth is, though, that there is no crisis, and there is no moment. There’s only an excuse, an occasion, and a procedure. The excuse is the supposed dow...
There’s believing your own press releases. And then, there’s believing your own delusions of grandeur. Joe Biden should look at the mirror every day and see a president elected on the basis of the unpopularity of his predecessor at a time when the country was slammed by a once-in-100-years pandemic. Instead, by every account, he sees a transformative leader with a mandate to change America as rapidly and irreversibly as possible. As the news site Axios noted, Biden wants his...
It’s not 2007 again. But apparently no one has told George W. Bush. To coincide with the release of a book of his paintings of immigrants, “Out of Many, One,” the former Republican president wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post plugging the sort of immigration package that went down to defeat in both his administration and in the administration of his successor, Barack Obama. Bush is an unusually sincere, earnest politician whose views on immigration are deeply felt and h...
If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ever sets up a presidential exploratory committee, it should have to disclose an enormous in-kind contribution from CBS News. The recent “60 Minutes” segment alleging DeSantis distributed the COVID-19 vaccine through pharmacies at the Publix grocery store chain as part of a quid pro quo was so outlandishly wrong that even Democratic officials in the state have objected. It’s not clear that the “60 Minutes” piece can even be called “journali...
Why do the Russians need to bother spreading disinformation when our own domestic sources do a much better job at it? We just went through a four-year national obsession with Kremlin disinformation. It supposedly swayed the 2016 presidential election. It was “sowing divisions” in American society. It accounted for the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election. Social media companies were excoriated for allegedly letting Russian disinfo poison their netwo...
So far, the defining word of the Biden era is “trillion.” The Joe Biden who portrayed himself as a moderate, old school, bipartisan dealmaker during the presidential campaign is now a distant memory. He’s been replaced by the Joe Biden who is dazzling progressives with his willingness to “go big” — in other words, spend jaw-dropping amounts that would have been unimaginable prior to the pandemic and are still shocking even now. Why has Biden embarked on a historic spending sp...
Well, the principled stand Democrats took against Congress trying to overturn duly certified elections lasted all of a month or two. After rightly excoriating their Republican colleagues for challenging on Jan. 6 presidential results certified by the states, House Democrats immediately turned to doing, in effect, the exact same thing in an Iowa congressional district their candidate lost by six votes. Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks won Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District b...
There’s nothing that ails Joe Biden’s agenda, we are supposed to believe, that ending the filibuster wouldn’t fix. President Joe Biden showed a little leg on changing the filibuster in an ABC News interview, while almost every Senate Democrat wants to ditch it. Even Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who still supports the filibuster, said a couple of weeks ago that resorting to it should be more “painful.” Senate Democrats probably remain a few votes shy of really being able to t...
Joe Biden has signed what may well end up being the biggest accomplishment of his presidency, an enormous $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. With his other priorities likely to molder in the Senate, the spending will probably stand as a signature statement of Biden’s approach to governance — and it should be a damning one. The legislation is a misnomer; it is neither a COVID nor a relief bill. Only a tiny portion of the spending in the bill goes toward vaccinations and oth...
A crisis is a terrible thing to create. This, nonetheless, is what President Joe Biden has done at the southern border. His rhetoric during the campaign suggesting an openhanded approach to migrants coming to the U.S., and his early moves to undo Donald Trump’s border policies are creating a migrant surge that risks running out of control. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas says the situation isn’t a crisis, but “a challenge” — an “acute” and “stressful” c...
Well, it’s on. Donald Trump ended his post-presidency silence not with a blast at President Joe Biden, or at the left, or at the House impeachment managers, but at the true enemy — Mitch McConnell. The Trump forces aren’t forming a third party, but they do want to take over — or more accurately — maintain their current grip on the GOP, and McConnell is an obstacle. The Senate minority leader declared his independence from Trump in his lacerating speech at the end of the Senat...
It was only a matter of time before Cicero got canceled. The New York Times the other day profiled Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who wants to destroy the study of classics as a blow for racial justice. The critique of classics as stultifying and privileged isn’t new, but in the woke era this attack is more potent than ever and has a better chance of demolishing a foundation of Western education. At a time when Abraham Lincoln doesn’t pass muster in the progressi...
After losing a national election, it’s natural that a political party goes through a period of soul-searching and internal turmoil. The Republican Party, though, has taken it to another level. President Donald Trump brought most of the GOP along for the ride during his conspiracy-fueled attempt to overturn the election. His loyalists have been scouring the landscape searching for Republicans to censure or primary for insufficient loyalty to him. The most famous Republican H...
Long a stalwart defender of the First Amendment, the American media is now having second thoughts. For decades, it was a commonplace sentiment among journalists that freedom of the press was one of the glories of our system. It helped to make the government accountable and to air diverse points of view -- even unpopular ones -- to be tested in the marketplace of ideas. Media organizations were at the forefront of the fight to vindicate First Amendment rights, with The New...
Inaugural addresses are meant to be aspirational, so President Joe Biden might as well have doubled down on his call for unity in his address. After the events of Jan. 6, there’s much to be said for more unity, or at least less poisonous division, and Biden’s emphasis on the theme was deeply felt and entirely sincere. But by making it his goal and the standard by which he’ll be judged, Biden is setting himself up for failure. When he was walking the final leg of the inaug...
Donald Trump was the president of Twitter. What radio was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and TV was to Ronald Reagan, communicating 280 characters at a time on a social media platform that is a watchword for hyperactive inanity was to President Trump. It is symbolically appropriate that the effective end of his power after the siege of the U.S. Capitol has coincided with the suspension of his Twitter account. He was impeached a second time on Wednesday, but the punishment that r...
There’s a reason we expect presidents of the United States to say that they support the peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump has never committed to it, and we saw the bitter fruit on Wednesday afternoon when, shockingly, pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol and disrupted the counting of Electoral College votes. The breaching of the building during one of the longest-running ceremonies under our system of government is the starkest domestic assault on our democracy i...
It’s been a terrible year for the American worker, with a notable bright spot courtesy of one of the tech firms in the crosshairs of regulators and lawmakers. If someone had said early in 2020, “A company is going to hire hundreds of thousands of non-college-educated workers during the pandemic at well above the minimum wage,” you’d think there’d be huzzahs all around. That’s what the online retailer Amazon has done, but it still gets brickbats for how it pays and treats its...
Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s famous axiom is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It’s an even worse thing to manufacture. Although President-elect Joe Biden obviously disagrees. Creating an unwarranted sense of drama and urgency around climate change is central to his approach, in order to catalyze action unsupported by the facts or common sense. In announcing his climate and energy team the other day, Biden declared climate change a crisis requiring a ...
No one will ever accuse President Donald Trump of being overly careful in his exercise of his pardon power. So, it makes sense that advocates of Edward Snowden, the man responsible for the most damaging classified leak in U.S. history, are mounting a last-minute push to get the president who pardoned Sheriff Joe and Roger Stone to issue his most outrageous and indefensible pardon yet. It’s a transpartisan alliance. Glenn Greenwald, Snowden’s journalistic partner and for...
Just when it seemed some of the most disheartening trends in the U.S. economy were finally beginning to reverse, COVID-19 arrived to entrench them. The pandemic has been a neutron bomb targeted at the prospects of lower income working people. They had finally begun to benefit from the recovery from the Great Recession when the virus ravaged sectors of the economy that disproportionately employ them. The Washington Post has called the resulting economic damage “the most u...
There is no evidence that Lin Wood and Sidney Powell are secretly working for the Democratic National Committee, but no one has definitively disproved it, either. That’s the kind of conspiratorial reasoning that the Wood-Powell duo, with their deep commitment to wild and unfalsifiable charges, might apply to themselves. The two Trump-allied lawyers have made themselves into wrecking balls against the Republican Party of Georgia, whose top elected officials, they allege, are in...
