Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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New Mexico has become the 18th state to legalize recreational cannabis. It’s been a long time coming. Not counting a failed half-century drug war that grossly distorted the damage marijuana does to body and mind, New Mexicans started arguing in earnest over full legalization about 10 years ago — around when our neighbor to the north, Colorado, was preparing to blaze the trail. We had already been a frontrunner in the legalization of medical marijuana, but got cold feet when it came to recreational use. In 2012, when Col...
Today’s topic is sin. I’ll try not to get preachy about it. There’s a long list of habit-forming vices that Americans have enjoyed, condemned, regulated and even outlawed over time, but today we’ll consider four in particular — tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and gambling. Our U.S. government has spent a lot of time and effort trying to control each, with some of the biggest changes having occurred over the last half-century. Used to be, a lot of communities relegated drinking, pot smoking and betting to the shadows, while cig...
Soon after health officials waved a magic wand over the state COVID map and turned us all turquoise, it was announced that New Mexico is fully reopening July 1. It’s so close I can taste it. In fact, just the other day I went to my first sit-down restaurant in months. The least restrictive designation on our color-coded COVID map allowed that to happen — and more is on the way! After about 15 months of restrictions in New Mexico, the old ways are coming back. Now we’re pulling out all the stops. Previous travel restr...
Ford's announcement that it's about to unveil an all-electric F-150 to eventually replace its gas- and diesel-powered pickups is a big pop-culture deal. This is America's most popular vehicle we're talking about. You'll find it on big-city streets and way back in the sticks. Heck, you can even find it as the vehicle of choice for some roughnecks down in the oil patches of the Permian Basin. It's a symbol of our American way of life. Taking such a pickup and turning its wheels toward the future is the kind of thing that needs...
The Cold War propelled the first race into space. Gazillionaires are making this latest space race happen. Three super-wealthy men — Jeff Bezos, who owns half the planet under the Amazon brand; Elon Musk, who owns half the future with his electrified transports; and Sir Richard Branson, builder of the Virgin empire — are each spending fortunes to launch humanity, and themselves, into orbital and outer space. Bezos, who was born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston, made news last week by announcing he and his brother Mar...
“My very first job I said thank you and please, they made me scrub a parking lot down on my knees, and then I got fired for being scared of bees, and they only give me fifty cents an hour.” Those John Prine lyrics, from his song “Fish and Whistle,” are a throwback to the workaday world a bunch of us old-timers grew up in. Work was hard and hazardous to your health — and, hey, my first hourly wage was 50 cents an hour too! Times are changing and so is the workplace. Thanks in part to the pandemic, we now realize a lot of wh...
Depression is something I try not to think about. For some reason, it always brings me down. That’s a joke. My personal remedy against the funk that sometimes hits me is humor. My father used to say that if you can’t laugh at your troubles, then you really are in trouble. So when the world gets me down, I do my damnedest to laugh it off. Of course, that doesn’t work for everyone. It doesn’t even work for me sometimes, and I don’t even suffer from the debilitating chronic depression that I’ve seen manifested in others. I’v...
When you’ve lived a full life, you think back on those who helped shape you into who you are. Parents and spouses immediately come to mind for most folks, but people you meet along the way also make their mark on you. When we’re young, our families shape us, and when we get older it’s the people we live with or marry who influence us the most. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying my mother and father raised me with the values that have remained with me throughout my life. And, even though we split up years ago, my wife of 20-plu...
Every year about this time, young people begin their transition from high school into college, or the military, or the working world. The road ahead is rife with opportunities and dangers, and now they begin to find their way through it all. It’s different this year for the high school graduating classes of 2021. The pandemic stifled most of their senior years, but for most New Mexican grads it opened up toward the end. The New Mexico Activities Association crammed sports seasons into the last several weeks of the school year...
In my little corner of the world, and probably in yours too, a different kind of economy is emerging. For one thing, we’re in the midst of a renewal energy boom, with solar arrays and wind farms being built by small armies of construction workers and technicians running all over eastern New Mexico. The once-booming oil and gas industry down south, in the Permian Basin that includes southeastern New Mexico, is being replaced a hundred or so miles to the north by wind and solar developments and electricity transmission lines s...
As I was driving the other day, I heard some troubling rants as I surfed the AM dial for a little talk. One was from some preacher who was comparing people who don’t pay their rent to demons who occupy free space in our souls. His logic, if you can call it that, was dumbfounding. Who is his audience? Landlords who aren’t getting their rent checks? Hardline capitalists who don’t care about anything but getting paid? Then I landed my dial on a couple of reactionaries talking among themselves. The host was questioning whether th...
This year, Earth Day might actually mean something. For the previous four years, we had a president who denied the climate emergency facing us, but now we have a leader who not only believes the science but is treating the looming catastrophe as the existential crisis it is. President Biden rejoined the Paris climate agreement in his first day in office, and he recently unveiled a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that includes a massive shift from fossil fuels to clean energy sources like solar and wind. And just last week,...
Watching my long-lost Arkansas Razorbacks fall to Baylor in an Elite Eight showdown on television reminded me of the intersection between sports and our American culture. Despite the defeat, the game brought back memories of the days of Nolan Richardson, the first African-American basketball coach at the University of Arkansas who also became the winningest UA basketball coach ever. He led the Hogs to three Final Four berths and one NCAA championship, but he ultimately got fired for mouthing off against famed Athletic...
Another era of big government has arrived. Arguably, it never ended. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated all sorts of programs to create jobs while expanding and investing in the nation’s infrastructure, and the federal government never really shrunk after that. Even during the Reagan years, when the president declared that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” our federal government grew, as did a big, fat deficit to pay for it all. Now w...
We’re facing an epidemic of misinformation. The election was stolen; the pandemic is a hoax; and a secret society of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles are running a child sex-trafficking ring and trying to take over our country — these and other conspiracy theories have taken center stage lately, despite having no basis in fact. They stay alive through opportunists and true believers who prefer their own misconceptions to real truths: Biden really did win the election, COVID-19 truly is a killer, and Q-Anon is a who...
It’s been a year since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 hit New Mexico. Let’s recall a few of the details. This state took a liberal approach to the pandemic — our governor liberally applied health and safety restrictions to stem the tide of infections. Perhaps that’s owed to the fact that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is a former director of the state’s Department of Aging and Long-Term Services and secretary of the New Mexico Department of Health, but from the beginning of this pandemic it appears she’s tried to follow th...
It was right about eight years ago when I first started working on an idea for a news service for the state’s independently owned newspapers, especially the small-town papers whose local owners must work without a net. After the previous eight years running the Las Vegas Optic for its corporate owner, I left that “payroll job” and incorporated as Gazette Media Services. Then I ran around the state soliciting support for a statewide news exchange that, when launched in May 2013, became known as the New Mexico Community News...
Halfway through this year’s legislative session and we’re close to another pandemic relief package for New Mexicans. Senate Bill 1 (SB1) passed its original chamber Feb. 15 with unanimous support. It’s on to the House side now and will likely become law soon. Its primary beneficiaries will be New Mexicans who earn less than $15 per hour and some but not all restaurants and bars. SB1 is intended to help essential workers who earn less than $31,200 a year by giving them a $600 rebate when they file their 2020 state income taxes...
Maybe you heard him saying it on his virtual campaign trail, or maybe you heard the media chatter during his flurry of first-week executive orders: President Biden is focusing his efforts on “four converging crises” — the pandemic, the economy, climate change and racial injustice. Let’s take a quick look at each and where they’re heading. If we weren’t such a divided nation perhaps we could have tackled the pandemic more effectively to this point, but of course we are and we didn’t. After a sluggish rollout of the vaccines,... Full story
Understand first that I did not grow up around violence. My father was basically a pacifist, a Methodist minister all his adult life, though he did have a temper, and six sons. We never got beatings, but we did get our share of spankings. At school, we would get “licks” — you’d be called up to the front of the class, told to bend over and the teacher would pull out a paddle and slap your butt two, three or more times, depending on the severity of your crime and the teacher’s level of frustration. For the boys, the number of...
If you’re wondering how the new Biden administration is going to impact New Mexico, you don’t need to look very far. Already, President Joe Biden has put the brakes on Donald Trump’s border wall, put Space Command’s location back on the table and put a stop to fossil fuel extraction on public lands. Let’s start with Trump’s wall, which Biden has stopped in its tracks. Aside from it being a colossal waste of money — an investment in electronic surveillance along the border is far safer and more practical, and far less expe...
One of the offshoots of social media times is the meme, that clever little snippet of wit and/or wisdom that unknown creatures create and agreeable people share. These little “attention hackers” can be pearls of wisdom or pebbles of propaganda — sometimes serious, occasionally funny and most-of-the-time witty. From what I’ve seen, they are often designed for one political camp or another, and in their own subtle way, they spin us down paths of thinking the way they want us to think. I don’t know if they transfer to print ver...
If there was ever a moment to reflect on the life and times of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this is that moment. There’s a good reason why we created a federal holiday to honor this fallen civil rights leader. He led us to our better selves by taking on an issue older than this nation itself. Racism is deeply, deeply rooted in America and yet King led a movement that permanently disrupted its power over us. Among the changes the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s brought in was a popular acknowledgement that all peo...
Yvette Herrell got more votes than Xochitl Torres Small in the 2nd Congressional District, but since I voted for Torres Small I don’t think I’ll accept the results. That may sound anti-democratic, but hey, I’m just following Herrell’s lead. After all, when Torres Small beat her in 2018, Herrell rejected the results, and now that Joe Biden won the presidency she’s doing it again. Herrell is acting just like Donald Trump, denying reality because it doesn’t give her the power she craves. Damn right that’s anti-democrat...
I’m writing this on the first day of 2021 but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels more like 2020 because, well, I keep watching the news. It’s not going to feel like a fresh new year until Donald Trump is out of the White House. Hopefully he won’t burn the place down on his way out the door. In my previous column I carved out a quick review of the first three months of 2020, when we went from an impeachment to a pandemic. There was enough news by the end of March to have filled a year’s worth of headlines, but as it turned ou...
