Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Sorted by date Results 126 - 150 of 223
The right to peaceable assembly is enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Assembly along with petition for redress are two of the five freedoms most often forgotten when citizens are...
We have forgotten John Quincy Adams’ admonition that “Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of democracy.” I first heard that Americans were in charge of the war in Ukraine in an interview conducted last April with Le Figaro senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot. Malbrunot claimed he had accompanied French volunteer fighters, and was surprised to discover that to be able to enter the Ukrainian army it’s the America...
When discussing the state of the world these days, the word oligarch is regularly bandied about in all types of media and is generally preceded by one or more adjectives such as evil or Russian. In many cases it’s evil, Russian oligarch. To establish some form of reference for a conversation about oligarchs, I checked my copy of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Copyright 2010, which provided me the following information: Oligarch; 1. Any of the rul...
News reports indicate that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter for $44 billion and will take the company private. In keeping with my long-standing belief that social media of all types causes cancer in lab rats, I have never visited the site, and do not plan to do so now. Learning what is “trending now” from someone who uses 140 characters or so to comment has never piqued my curiosity. I don’t mean to imply that the subject in question may not be interesting, but that it gener...
The Kennedy/Nixon presidential race was the first one I remember that caused a major uproar about election cheating. The foremost complaint arose about the results from Cook County, Ill., or in other words, Chicago. It hasn’t changed much since then. It’s been said before, but it needs repeating. There are two major political parties in the United States, Republicans and Democrats. After the presidential election in 2016, all of the Democrats screamed that the election was...
From The Associated Press, by John Daniszewski: “While there can be no credible polling in a country now effectively under martial law, the number of Russians informed and courageous enough to protest against the war in Ukraine so far has numbered in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.” After reading this, the notion occurred to me that the number of Americans informed and courageous enough to protest the war in Ukraine so far has numbered not in the thousands, but...
The Christopher Steele dossier began a credibility slip for the mainstream media that has not ended at this time. The dossier, purportedly leaked to the New York Times by former FBI Director James Comey, had allegations of outrageous charges of Russian collusion with many members of the Trump campaign as well as against Trump himself. This document resulted in an FBI lawyer illicitly modifying documents that were presented to the FISA Court as evidence for the court to issue...
Joe Biden has long been a gaffe machine when delivering a speech, answering questions from the press or interacting extemporaneously with the public during campaign events. Consider for example when he responded to a question from a supposed supporter at a campaign event, “You’re a lying, dog-faced, pony soldier.” When I first saw that quote, I parsed it because it made no sense. I know what lying is, the term dog-face or dog-faces was once used to refer to infantry soldi...
Render’s Rubrics: • Every citizen eligible to vote, should be able to vote. • Ballot should be filled out according to applicable law. • All votes, cast by eligible voters, properly filled out, should be tallied, and recorded for canvassing by election authorities. The mid-term election cycle is in full swing with primary elections just completed or just getting up on the front burner. In Texas where I live, our primary was held on March 1; New Mexicans will hold theirs...
I pray that the fighting stops in Ukraine, both sides come to some settlement and no more people have to die to achieve this. Our government has imposed sanctions on Russia and embargoed oil and gas products as well as other goods from that nation. I don’t know what gas costs in Moscow today, but I called a friend of mine in the High Desert of California last Sunday, and he said regular gas was $5.47. I filled up my car here in Texas a week and a half ago for $2.98 and d...
Next month I will turn 80. An octogenarian. In my head, I’m still 30 years old, lean, mean and suntanned. No male member of my immediate family lived to make it to 59 besides me. If I had known that I would last this long, I would have taken a lot better care of myself. I’ve never considered myself an optimist nor a pessimist. More like a realist, or a pragmatist. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. That seemed like a good plan for everyone. In my advanced years I’m afrai...
The headline for an editorial in my local paper last week read, “If they spied on Trump, they might spy on you.” If you replace the word “Trump,” with the words, “the president of the United States,” you would have a more accurate picture of where we find ourselves in our country at this time. Not only did “they” spy on Trump the candidate, “they” spied on Trump the president of the United States. Also, the headline would then read, “If “they” spied on the president of the Uni...
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act was passed by Congress in 1970 to combat organized crime in the U.S. According to any number of sources the law has been used to prosecute members of the mafia, the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, and Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group. I suppose that two out of three organized crime groups can be considered close enough for government work. Among the options that prosecutors have in their pursuit of organized c...
About 14% percent of the U.S. population is Black. Professional sports leagues are made up of the best players and coaches that management can find. The most accurate data I can find shows that in 2020 the National Basketball Association was made up of 74.2% Black players, 16.9% white players, 2.2% Latino players and o.4% Asian players. The other 6.3% were classified as “other.” The National Football League has around 57.5% Black, 24.9% white and 17.6% other. There are no fem...
C.W. McCall once intoned, “I’s thumbin’ through the want ads in the Shelby County Tribune when this classified advertisement caught my eye.” This happens to me a lot with newspapers. Not only with ads, but also with the short stories that layout specialists use to fill blank space around other, bigger items. It’s one of the joys of reading the papers. What caught my eye a few days ago was a story that said President Biden had joined Pope Francis and a leading Sunni imam in c...
Last month at the Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, a gunman held four hostages for more than 10 hours. Fortunately, the hostages managed to escape unharmed. The FBI then entered the synagogue and killed the suspect, a British national who had entered the U.S. just weeks before. Early reports indicate that the man, Malik Faisal Akram, had a history of mental health issues as well as a criminal record. Akram’s brother, Gulbar, noted, “He’s known to police. Got a cri...
Recreational marijuana is a fait accompli in New Mexico. Full disclosure: I am a supporter of medical marijuana and have voted for it in the past. We currently use many more powerful drugs to control pain and distress (oxycodone is one of these) and I believe that if cancer patients and those with PTSD can find relief with medical marijuana, they have my support. I am not now and have never been in favor of recreational marijuana. New Mexico has a state Cannabis Control...
Anyone who listened to oral arguments on the vaccine mandates made in the Supreme Court on Jan. 7 had to have come away with the idea that Supreme Court justices got the information they used to decide landmark cases presented to them from television news programs. While several justices thought the vaccine prevented transmission of COVID-19, the one statement that left most observers astounded came from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her wild assertion that, “We have over 1...
Two news-worthy incidents that occurred this month, while similar in nature, were reported very differently. One item was the first anniversary of what the news media and many others have always referred to as “the deadly Insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.” One specific headline I saw read, “We're lucky more people weren't killed.” While it is a fact that five people died that day, only one person was killed. That person was an unarmed Air Force veteran, shot by a Capitol...
There are people who think I’m a rabid anti-vaxxer, or that I believe COVID-19 is not a real virus or all of the above. None of that is true. I am very concerned with COVID and the available vaccines due to my current position in the space-time continuum. Roughly 800,000 people in the U.S. have died of the virus and 75 percent of those were 65 years of age or older. That’s 600,000 folks in my age group. Vaccines became available about a year ago, and older Americans have bee...
The last time I remember staying up to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve in Times Square was sometime in the 1980s. Since I find myself right on the lower cusp of middle at this point in my life, the turning of the year these days causes my thoughts to turn backward more often than not. Sometime in the middle 1980s, Robert Lee Fulghum, an American author, wrote, “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” In the political, social and mass media envir...
’Twas the night before Christmas, it was just after dark, When I heard a door slam out front, where I park. I stuck out my head to see who to greet, And saw a car backing out into the street. I yelled, “Hey, hold up,” when a voice from afar, Yelled, “I left you a note, on the seat, in the car.” I opened the car, and on the seat, by the door Was a note that was signed by Clement C. Moore. Dear Rube, I know that this year has been hard on you all, But Christmas is here and...
Full disclosure: I’m elderly, have health problems and have taken three shots of the Moderna vaccine. At a time in the distant past, I was required to read, understand and comment on contractual documents. I acquired several hard-earned lessons about language in documentation that have stayed with me to this day. Sentences that contain the words “will” or “shall,” as in, “This product “will” cure migraine headaches” had better be true, provable and reproducible or you “will” b...
Let me begin with the following caveat. I am not a lawyer, nor have I ever played one on TV. Having established that fact, I make the following observations: On Sept. 9, President Biden signed Executive Order 14042. That mandated the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force to provide guidance regarding “adequate COVID-19 safeguards” by Sept. 24 that would apply to all federal contractors and subcontractors. On Nov. 5, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued an Int...
Recently, a shooting on a movie set in New Mexico was described as a gun going off accidently. The story indicated that a well-known actor was involved and that the actor had been practicing a type of fast draw on the set when the following occurred (I paraphrase): the actor drew the gun twice. The first time nothing happened. As he drew the gun a second time, the gun went off. The gun did it. The headline in a Milwaukee newspaper recently read, “A person plowed their SUV t...
