Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Growing older has many drawbacks and one unalloyed pleasure: passing judgment on the younger generation. Lately, people have been scrutinizing the members of Generation Y and finding them deficient. What’s wrong with the kids? A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reported that because they have been told since infancy that they were special, they believe it and expect to keep hearing it. “Bosses, professors and mates are feeling the need to lavish praise on young adults, particularly twentysomethings, or else see them...
One afternoon in November, Houston Texans lineman Fred Weary was pulled over by Houston police for a traffic violation. The cops say he was belligerent and uncooperative. Weary’s lawyer says he did as he was told. What no one disputes is that the story had an unhappy ending. The officer shot him with a Taser before handcuffing and arresting him. At times like this, wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly what happened? Of course it would. It would also be easy — had the incident been captured by a video camera. But it wasn...
Democrats are complaining about a Republican ad that ran in Tennessee making fun of Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. It features mock voters giving dumb reasons to vote for him, such as “Terrorists need their privacy,” “Harold Ford looks nice — isn’t that enough?” and “So he took money from porn movie producers — I mean, who hasn’t?” It ends with a blonde bimbo, who says she met the congressman at a Playboy party, winking and cooing, “Harold, call me.” Ford’s supporters and other critics say they are appalled at the ad be...
Time travel, long a staple of science fiction, has so far amounted to nothing more than a fantasy. But anyone interested in paying a visit to the past may soon get the chance. On Nov. 7, voters in Michigan will decide on a ballot initiative banning racial preferences in the public sector, and if it passes, opponents say it will put the state back into the Dark Ages. Proposal 2 represents a reaction to the University of Michigan’s use of racial double standards in selecting its students. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled t...
For a prosecutor, DNA analysis can be the best thing in the world. Nothing facilitates a conviction more than biological evidence irrefutably connecting the defendant to the crime through blood, saliva or semen. But DNA analysis can also be the worst thing in the world for prosecutors. It can prove that someone accused of a crime — or even convicted of a crime — could not possibly have done what he’s accused of doing. Wait a minute. How can it be a bad thing for prosecutors to discover the crucial facts about a crime, even...
Once you read the first sentence of this column, its momentum will carry you from paragraph to paragraph until a few minutes from now, you arrive, blissfully enlightened, at the final word. No, you say? You may stop reading right now, or halfway through? Well, that’s a shame. But it does prove something I’ve long believed: Momentum is a crock. This is the opposite of everything we are told. In the political world, we hear that the Democratic Party has powerful momentum going into the Nov. 7 congressional elections. When the...
If we came up with a sure cure for lung cancer, we wouldn’t withhold it because it might encourage people to smoke. But something about heroin addiction tends to cloud our thinking on public health policy. On this subject, though, Los Angeles is currently enjoying a moment of sunny clarity. The federal Centers for Disease Control reported in July that more than 16,000 people died in 2002 from drug overdoses. Philadelphia now loses more lives to heroin than to homicide. Chicago has witnessed nearly 200 deaths in the last 18 m...
We knew we had won World War II when the Japanese signed surrender documents on the USS Missouri. We knew we had won the Cold War when the Berlin Wall fell. But it’s hard to think of any single event that would tell us we have won the war against al-Qaida. Which raises the question: What if we already have? This is not a possibility entertained by either the Bush administration or its critics. The president’s aggressive policies on surveillance, interrogation and war crimes prosecutions rest on the assumption that we are eng...
Socialism failed because the governments that embraced it couldn’t solve the basic problem of economics: what to produce and how much. In the old Soviet bloc, warehouses filled up with things people wouldn’t buy, while consumers stood in long lines in the hope of getting what they wanted. Thanks to that experience, we are smarter than to think the government is better at judging what to sell than, say, Toyota or Target. Well, most of the time we are smarter. But every so often something happens that causes normally rat...
In the movie “Love Actually,” a widowed father, played by Liam Neeson, asks his morose grade-school son what’s bothering him. Is it his mother’s death? Problems at school? Bullies? “You really want to know?” answers the boy. “Well, truth is — actually — I’m in love.” His father is surprised but expresses relief that it’s not “something worse.” The son fixes him with a look of disbelief: “Worse than the total agony of being in love?” Prepubescent boys aren’t supposed to be tormented by romance, and neither are their ad...
Do you know you need to save more for retirement, but you just can’t make yourself do it? Relax. Soon, you may not have to make yourself do anything — you’ll save more in spite of yourself. It’s a new approach to financing retirement, and it’s as easy as falling in love. The new pension bill passed by Congress makes a small but significant change in the administration of the employer-provided tax-deferred accounts known as 401(k)s. Under this bill, employers will be allowed to enroll their workers at their own discretio...
President Bush is confident of ultimate success in Iraq, and he is patiently waiting for its achievement. I’m certain that unicorns exist, and I’m willing to hang around till they show up in my yard. We may both be deluded, but my delusion is a good deal less costly than his. In the 3 1/2 years we have been in Iraq, there have been few months worse than July. As someone said of the economy during the Carter administration, everything that should be going up is going down, and everything that should be going down is going up....
If you take a look at mass media aimed at teenagers, you start to see a pattern. What topic suffuses teenage prime-time dramas? Sex. Movies aimed at high school boys? Violence. Music popular among the SAT-taking crowd? Sex and violence. You’ve noticed, and the scholars at the medical journal Pediatrics have noticed. They have unveiled two new studies that confirm what we all know: The kids most exposed to sex and violence are the ones most likely to participate in sex and violence. One study found that teenagers who listen t...
Mel Gibson drove drunk, got arrested and vilified Jews, thus disgracing himself, and possibly forfeiting millions of dollars in future earnings. Man, was he lucky. By getting behind the wheel with a blood-alcohol level 50 percent higher than the legal limit, he could have killed himself or someone else, as many drunken drivers do. Making amends for being anti-Semitic is hard, but not as hard as apologizing for ending a life. Gibson’s experience is a reminder that drunken driving, like bigotry, is a battle yet to be won. In th...
Huey Long, the fabled Louisiana populist governor and senator, had no special reverence for intellectuals and generally did his best to sound like an unlettered hayseed. But during his time in power, he poured money into Louisiana State University. His inspiration came from 18th-century Prussian ruler Frederick the Great, whom Long was fond of quoting: “My soldiers will take Vienna, and my professors at Heidelberg will explain the reasons why.” For anyone who might question his policies, Huey said, “I’ve got a univers...
Steve Chapman: syndicated columnist In 1980, a book was published about the failure of liberal policies in New York City. Its title, “The Cost of Good Intentions,” soon became a conservative catchphrase about the limits of expansive government. Even the best motives could produce dismal results. Policies had to be judged not by their ostensible purposes, but by their consequences. What many conservatives didn’t recognize then is the lesson learned from Great Society programs also holds for foreign policy and military under...
Predators on the Internet, priests molesting children, Duke lacrosse players accused of rape — judging from the news or TV crime dramas, sexual assault appears to be an endless national epidemic. So powerful is this impression that when evidence emerges to suggest otherwise, Americans may have trouble believing their eyes. But the truth about the incidence of rape and other sex crimes is no mirage: It has declined drastically and is still dropping. The Washington Post recently reported that since the 1970s, rape has d...
The Bush administration has a habit of misreading the Constitution, pushing its powers as far as possible and expecting Congress to meekly go along. But now the House of Representatives has decided to fight back — not by asserting its rightful prerogatives, but by misreading the Constitution, pushing its powers as far as possible and expecting the president to meekly go along. Its sudden attack of institutional pride comes in an exceptionally bad situation. The Justice Department is investigating Rep. William Jefferson, D...
Conservatives, almost by definition, have an appreciation of the past: They want to conserve valuable traditions and principles. But one of the paradoxes of many people who go by that name is they are forgetting essential precepts of their own philosophy. Their current eagerness to amend the U.S. Constitution, not once but twice, stems mainly from impulses that are anything but conservative. On Thursday, Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed through the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would bar weddings...
The immigration protests held across the country on Monday serve as a perfect Rorschach test: What reaction did you have to the sight of hundreds of thousands of immigrants marching down American streets, calling on Congress to accommodate them? Dismay? Ambivalence? Admiration? A lot of political debates turn on facts and arguments. This one is mostly a matter of competing emotions. Among many conservatives, the emotion is outrage. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said the protests “make me mad.” Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., fum...
Secrecy is one of those virtues, like candor, that can easily be overdone. A strong commitment to safeguarding sensitive national security information is a good thing. A blind insistence on concealing anything and everything is not. Whether the CIA had good reason to fire Mary McCarthy depends on what sort of secrets, if any, she revealed. According to CIA Director Porter Goss, the career intelligence officer talked with a Washington Post reporter who revealed secret CIA-run prisons for terrorist suspects in a story last...
If a hospital wanted to advertise that it upholds sanitary standards higher than any required by the government, no one would object. A used car dealer that decided to offer only vehicles with the best crash-test scores would be free to do so. But after a meat packer announced plans to establish the strictest program around to protect consumers from mad cow disease, the United States Department of Agriculture replied: Fat chance. Eating meat from animals afflicted with the illness can cause irreversible, fatal damage to the...
French students and unions have been protesting for weeks now over a law making it easier for companies to get rid of employees. Under the measure recently signed by President Jacques Chirac, they may fire workers younger than 26 during their first two years on the job — for no reason whatsoever. The demonstrators think that’s a bad idea, and they’re right. Here’s a better one: Let companies fire any workers of any age at any time for no reason at all. Sales are off? The job is redundant? Outsourcing beckons? You part yo...
April 1, wrote Mark Twain, “is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364.” But cheer up. No matter how foolish you may sometimes feel, you can always take comfort in knowing that over the past year, there were other people who were even worse. Today, I try to brighten your mood by demonstrating beyond any doubt that you and I are smarter than a lot of people. Some of the more conspicuous examples of folly come from the world of government. Chicago public high schools, it emerged recently, require all...
The other day, the Supreme Court did something surprising. It said that if a man stands at the threshold of his own house and tells the police they may not enter without a warrant, then — get a load of this, willya? — they may not enter without a warrant. That may not sound very remarkable. After all, most of us are familiar with the axiom that a man’s home is his castle, and the Constitution does have that passage assuring the right of all Americans “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreaso...
