Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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A while back Bill Cosby made news for chiding black parents for not being responsible enough with their kids’ education. Stop buying them huge speakers, start buying them books, he urged. This made sense because it does appear that when one is surrounded with even a modest library in one’s youth, one is more likely than not to get used to books, even read some, without parents having to badger one about this. It worked in my youth. I was never told to read, unlike I was constantly forced to play sports — but the apart...
The Supreme Court ruled May 23 that to compel people to support its propaganda with which they disagree does not violate the First Amendment to the Constitution. The First Amendment is the one about everyone having the right to freedom of speech. Yes, the court acknowledged, no one may be coerced into funding some private party’s advertisements or related speech. But when the government or some part of it decides it will proselytize for something, it can make us all fund it. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority in the 6...
My friend David L. Norton, whose 1976 book “Personal Destinies, A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism” should have been more famous than any that John Rawls and other celebrities in the discipline of philosophy had written, wrote beautifully and wisely about aging. He gave credit for the germ of his idea to the famous psychologist, Erik Erickson, but Norton developed the idea in far more philosophical terms than Erickson. It had to do with how one’s perspective on one’s life undergoes certain critical though natural and pot...
Suppose I decided to eat at a vegetarian restaurant morning, noon and evening, seven days a week, on and on, without a break. Just lettuce, nothing else. I know it’s dumb — or peculiar — but there is nothing difficult about imagining it. Many people are, indeed, dumb or peculiar, at least in some aspects of their lives. “Supersize Me,” the movie that bashes McDonald’s because there are quite a few such people who go there to eat virtually all the time, day after day, night after night, makes a great deal of this. Of course,... Full story
Earlier this month, the media marked the 60th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inglorious death. He died from ailments largely hidden from the public in a pattern of deception that has now become all too closely associated with America’s political leadership. But that’s nothing compared to the deception perpetrated upon the American people via Roosevelt’s list of phony rights, a list that forever corrupted the ideas of the American Founders. Roosevelt unhesitatingly referred to this list as “a second Bi...
There doesn’t appear to be any room for civil discourse in politics these days. There is no issue about which the disputing parties merely argue. The other side just has to be vicious, lying, deceiving, cheating, wishing simply to hurt some people, moved by mendacity while we are, of course, pure of heart. There isn’t a discussion of the merits, the pros and the cons, only of who is evil and who is not. Take Social Security reform. Bush supporters see their opponents as caring nothing about the upcoming plight of young peo...
No one is more prone to criticize the various levels and branches of the U.S. government than I am. My complaints, however, tend to focus on how our political institutions have departed from the best ideas on which the country was founded. When you read most prominent mainstream newspapers and magazines — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, for example — these too often and sadly aim their criticism exactly at those principles. It is when America is most American, one mig... Full story
No one is more prone to criticize the various levels and branches of the U.S. government than I am. My complaints, however, tend to focus on how our political institutions have departed from the best ideas on which the country was founded. When you read most prominent mainstream newspapers and magazines — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, for example — these too often and sadly aim their criticism exactly at those principles. It is when America is most American, one mig... Full story
I recently went to San Francisco for a conference, parked in a “public parking” place on a busy corner, and my car was broken into and a bunch of stuff stolen. And I am partly to blame. Yes, I wasn’t thinking clearly. Living as I do in a neighborhood where homes and cars may be left unlocked, I got spoiled. And all I had to do was stop to think a minute. Once before, in the 1970s, the same thing happened to me in the same beautiful City by the Bay — then someone broke into my old Volvo and stole a nice leather coat I bought a...
I have read nearly every novel by Robert B. Parker, famous mainly for his Spenser PI books. And I like them. His writing is neat, sharp — no nonsense. His character, Spenser, is tough and teeming with integrity. Spenser’s a great cook, drinks properly and has an ideal love life with Susan, a Harvard-educated shrink who claims Spenser’s a great lover. His close buddy Hawk is a friend in the Aristotelian tradition of friendship, nothing less. One great ingredient of these books for me is the absence of something so often found...
This is something I never thought I’d write — words of appreciation for the last words of a vicious murderer. Yet I believe they are due, even though the man who spoke these words is now dead, executed in Texas for murdering a nurse in the 1980s after being paid $1,500. It was reported that George Anderson Hopper, who received a lethal injection earlier this month for the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas in 1983, was asked by the warden if he had anything to say before he was to die, and here is what this man said: “I have made... Full story
Tibor Machan: CNJ columnist California’s governor wouldn’t give in. Neither would the U.S. Supreme Court, so Donald Beardslee, who killed two women in 1981 over a drug deal — while supposedly suffering from brain damage — was put to death by lethal injection last month. As reported in the media, Beardslee’s defense attorney claimed Beardslee had brain injury stemming from “several accidents during his life,” and, furthermore, in prison “he was diagnosed as having schizophrenia.” A former warden reportedly said “Beardslee s... Full story
Tibor Machan: CNJ columnist Johnny Carson was perhaps the greatest comic craftsman in American popular entertainment. But this is not to say he was in any way parochial. Indeed, being a master comic in America is being a master comic of the modern world. Carson’s genius was, in part, to forge a link with millions of Americans. The first time I wrote about Carson was when “TV Guide” published a piece in which he had been identified as speaking only to Americans. Having come from Europe and yet finding Carson so able to keep me...
I have resisted writing about the tsunami because, well, it is such a horrible catastrophe that it seemed tacky to rush out a column about it. Now, closer to my home, we have a much smaller but no less disastrous event of a killer mudslide caused by recent heavy rains in Southern California. One of my colleagues sent me a post saying, “You might consider doing a column on the recent mudslides in La Conchita (Ventura County, California) ...” The mudslide killed at least 10 people and destroyed at least 15 homes. My colleague p...
California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who led the effort of the Democrats in Congress to hold up confirmation of the Electoral College vote last week, claimed the absolutely core principle of America is democracy. Because, she claimed, the past two presidential elections had threatened the democratic process, it was necessary to call attention to this fact in both the U.S. House and Senate by this delay. Leave aside for a moment that every time Democrats lose an important vote, they complain not that people didn’t vote for them b... Full story
Reuters news service recently reported that a study from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University states: “With current trends of increasing overweight and obesity afflicting all age groups, urgent preventive measures are required not only to lessen the burden of disease and disability associated with excess weight but also to contain future health care costs incurred by the aging population.” According to the report, recent “annual average Medicare charges for severely obese men were $6,192 more than for n...
Having been a fan of courtroom dramas since my early childhood — I read 45 Perry Mason novels before I left Hungary at age 14 — I have a hard time denying myself the pleasures of a good legal squabble. So, I have watched TV’s “Law & Order” since it started and even stuck with “The Practice” until it turned into little more than a soap opera where law was but a sideshow. Now I am giving “Boston Legal” a try, and my patience is being seriously tested. In addition to finding one of the central characters, Alan Shore, played by...
I don’t know how hard it is to be a refuse collector/driver. I imagine driving a truck that picks up the dumpsters is easy, picking up the green dumpsters and dumping them in the truck is hard, as well as doing the alley cleanup. As a consumer, I get tired of waiting a month or longer after the first call and making several more calls before the trash around the dumpster gets picked up. What’s even more annoying, at least in my alley, is they only pick up the dumpster you have called on. They don’t go down the alley to see i...
No, this time I am only indirectly speaking about the terrible legal system that the USA is now sliding toward. Instead, it is the TV show, Law & Order, that comes up for discussion. When the show began, there was a healthy idealism about it. The initial story lines stressed principles not only of law but of justice. Michael Moriarity’s assistant DA was motivated from conviction and the ideas and ideals that guided him were mostly truly valuable. In time others came to the show, left it, and Sam Waterson, while very c...
Whenever I speak up for liberty, there’s bound to be someone who accuses me of favoring the individual over the community, favoring rights over responsibility and obligations. But that isn’t so. Champions of individual liberty often believe even more firmly than critics in doing the right thing, including acting generously, compassionately and helpfully in the spirit of community. What they insist on, however, is that all such responsibilities and obligations be carried out from personal conviction, not from fear of goi... Full story
The bulk of liberals are an inconsistent lot. Take, for example, their support of the pro-choice position in the abortion controversy. These same people are almost uniformly hostile to choice in many other areas. Just ask them if they support choice in developing one’s own property as one likes, or whether one has the authority to decide on what to spend one’s own money (instead of having it taxed by government). The fact is this tiny sphere of authority is all these folks wish to keep out of government’s reach. On most... Full story
Many commentators have said the main reason for President Bush’s victory is that voters in the red states opted to support moral values above all else, and Bush was identified with these more closely than Sen. John Kerry. Judging by the campaign, “moral values” refer to the championing of the causes of the Christian Right — banning of gay marriage, insisting that abortion is always murder, taking a tough stand against Islamic terrorists, having faith in the Christian God, insisting on various absolutes about right and wro...
After finally seeing “Fahrenheit 9/11,” I am convinced those on the Left should all become libertarians. That is the only consistent position for them, given their view of government, namely as a gang of easily bought and paid off thugs. Moore’s movie — and it isn’t a documentary but an unabashed propaganda film — assumes, throughout, that government must succumb to the machinations of the big, powerful and conspiratorial business interests of a country. Libertarians have taught throughout history that unless the law is lega...
When I was a grad student at the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Vietnam crisis was in full force and many of us thought it was wrong for America to be there. No one was attacking us, and it isn’t the task of our military to rescue everyone around the globe. But some of us opposed the war on principled grounds. We found the draft to be a violation of individual rights, to start with. And we also had objections to taxation as a form of extortion that should have gone the way of serfdom once feudalism was abolished... Full story
Many attorneys of notorious defendants have argued that their clients were unable to receive a fair trial because of the publicity associated with the crime of which they were accused. Such arguments are pretty common and similar to those that prompt venue changes. This is also a mantra of people who wish to whitewash the likes of Dan Rather and others who commit journalistic malpractice, all based on a kind of post-modernist account of human understanding. Certainly most of us are appalled at what many defendants are accused...
