Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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There are 10 official federal holidays, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. They range from the controversial (Columbus Day) to the benign (Washington’s birthday, a.k.a. Presidents Day), while all but one are essentially of a secular nature. Only Christmas is steeped in organized religion, as a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. And while it’s still a deeply meaningful holiday for millions of Christians, it’s more secular every time it rolls around. You’d think that, in a nation that’s three-fourths C...
A dark chapter in our previous governor’s time in office is finally coming to a close with a recent $10 million settlement. Six years after Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration accused 15 behavioral health providers of overbilling the state’s Medicaid program and freezing them out of their reimbursements, the state Human Services Department announced last week it has reached an agreement with five of the falsely accused agencies. According to an HSD news release, the state has now settled all 10 lawsuits that grew out of Ma...
In my formative years, I worked for the Appalachia Service Project, a home repair ministry affiliated with the United Methodist Church. We went into the poorest areas of Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and used donated money, supplies and volunteers to make homes warmer, safer and drier for their residents. We were directed by the project’s founder, Glenn “Tex” Evans, to “accept people right where they are, and just the way they are.” With that non-judging attitude, we ventured into some challenging and desperate circumsta...
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, in my favorite month, every year. It’s my time to return to my roots, to Arkansas and her Ozark Mountains, where I was born and half-raised, and where the Clintons have been abandoned for Trump. Every year my diversifying family takes over a mountaintop for a three-day reunion, in a tradition that tops my list of things to be thankful for. We’ll come together for the love, a feast and, hopefully, a respite from the political hostilities that have come to envelope Washington, D.C. Let’s for...
A trio of op-ed pieces in Santa Fe’s New Mexican on Nov. 10 captured my attention. One was from the governor, another from an activist, and the third from a naysayer. Let’s start with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s column. Headlined, “Our environment is endangered,” it’s a forceful column that lays out her administration’s intention to wean New Mexico off oil and gas — a tall order for a state that depends so heavily on the extraction industry. The column starts by blasting the Trump administration’s withdrawal from t...
You don’t have to go back 50 years to have lived through three of the four impeachment inquiries that have taken place in all of America’s history. Richard Milhous Nixon was facing three articles of impeachment when he resigned in 1974, then 25 years later William Jefferson Clinton was impeached all the way through a Senate trial, where Republicans couldn’t muster a majority (much less the supermajority that conviction requires) to throw him out of office. And now comes Donald John Trump to this exclusive club of stained pres...
If you’re on the mailing list, you got that old familiar yellow manila folder in the mail last week, from Think New Mexico. I’ve lost track of how many of these reports I’ve received over the years, nor can I remember ever having felt it was a waste of time or resources for our state of New Mexico. This latest mail-out relates to a big issue for a lot of people — in fact, it may have the most far-reaching impact since this nonpartisan, results-oriented think tank got the sales tax off food. Think New Mexico’s latest cr...
In all the noise over impeachment, has anyone pointed out the relationship between the law and majority rule? I think it’s central to the question about whether an impeachment is warranted so close to an election. It seems that some people equate democracy with majority rule, but the law itself is at least as important to self-governance as is the expressed will of the people. The law gives us protections and perimeters to live by, and if someone breaks the law there should be consequences — regardless of popular opi...
One of the things bothering conservative Americans these days is the “socialism” behind the Green New Deal being proposed by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. But I think they’re ignoring a key point: Converting to clean and renewable energy is a golden opportunity for capitalists, if they’ll just seize the moment. After more than a century of burning fossil fuels at an industrial level, we’ve now reached the point in which we must radically change our energy consumption. Science and technology are already b...
I made it a point to watch Ken Burns’ eight-part documentary series titled “Country Music.” I wanted to reconnect with a time in which I transcended rock and folk into the sounds coming out of Nashville, Tenn. In the 1970s, I became what you might call a neo-hippie, wandering around, mainly in the post-war South, in search of love and meaning. I often ended up in Nashville, not as a musician but as a vagabond who could always find a friendly place to stay in the heart of a more progressive Dixie. That’s where I discove...
So the president came to New Mexico. What’s the big deal? He’s so predictably unpredictable these days that it’s starting to get boring. For the casual critic who takes no solace in The Traveling Trump Show, he’s not nearly as outlandish as he used to be. Back when every insensitive, hateful, xenophobic, racist, nasty, fake word he uttered offended America at the core of our values, at least he kept our attention. But last week, when he came to Rio Rancho, I for one barely noticed or cared. The closest to caring, I suppose...
First it was the scientists, issuing dire warnings that the world is warming up because of human activity. But the media watered down their warnings; some media outlets questioned the validity of their claims, others simply downplayed it. And the politicians enthusiastically went along. Then came the children, led and inspired by the words and actions of teenage leaders like Greta Thunberg, who isn’t just calling for action against climate change, she’s demanding it. Thunberg just came across the Atlantic Ocean on a sol...
From 1981 through 2018, the Republican Party controlled the 2nd Congressional District seat in southern New Mexico, with one brief exception. In 2008, when Rep. Steve Pearce opted not to seek a fifth term (running unsuccessfully for the Senate instead), Democrat Harry Teague won the election. But then Pearce returned to re-run and re-take the seat two years later, for what turned out to be four more terms in Congress. Then, last year Pearce chose a run for governor instead of a fifth term and Xochitl Torres Small won the...
Firearms and alcohol have always been a dangerous mix. Nowhere is that more evident than in the life and death of Don Juan Patrón. He was widely considered to be one of New Mexico’s most educated and popular Hispanics of his time. I had never heard of him until Richard Chavez, knower of all things PDL — as in Puerto de Luna, an agricultural community along the Pecos River in Guadalupe County — loaned me a book about Patrón. Chavez was born and raised in Puerto de Luna and knows where all the PDL bodies are buried, so to spea...
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 buttocks with it two, three or more times, depending on the severity of your crime and the teacher’s level of frustration. For the boys,...
I have a dog in the house. He doesn’t live here, he just came to visit. And I have a family of feral cats living in my back yard. The momma cat claimed squatters rights, having lived here before I moved in. She’s always around, living her feral life just outside my reach. And, yes, I fed her, so now she owns me, as do her three almost-grown kittens. I had a plan for the momma cat first. A spay-neuter clinic was coming to town, so I reserved a spot and started planning her capture. I coaxed the kittens with cat food into a b...
Back when you could do it with little or no hassle, I remember casually walking across the bridge (and therefore the border) between downtown El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. As I left the U.S. side, lively Spanish music filled the air, slowly fading into the background as I made my way across the border. But by the time I had reached the south side of the bridge, I could hear music again — only this time, it was American-style rock ’n’ roll filling the streets of Juarez. When I heard people explaining the overlapping nature of th...
Up until recently, it’s been pretty much a seamless takeover. Worn out by Susana Martinez’s can’t-do/won’t do policies as governor toward issues like clean energy, full marijuana legalization and public education, voters made their voices heard in New Mexico with the resounding election of Michelle Lujan Grisham last year. Since then she’s been pushing the state in a far more progressive direction — touting education reform as her top priority. Last month, however, Lujan Grisham took an unexpected turn when she fired her P...
Like a lot of Americans, I got caught up in the 50th anniversary of our first moon landing. My moment was on CSpan3, where I channel-surfed into Reel America’s Moonwalk One, a dated NASA documentary that tells the story of the first U.S. mission to the moon. Now there was a moment when America was great. It encourages me to know that when our nation really applies itself, we can do incredible things. Going to the moon in 1969 — when computers were as big as houses, digital technology was still a baby, and the moon was made of...
We are about a year away from legalizing recreational marijuana in New Mexico. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has already set the wheels in motion for its passage at the Roundhouse next year, and if the state is ready with the regulations, it could conceivably become legal on July 1, when a lot of new laws take effect. That’s my prediction — legal pot will be selling in New Mexico by this time next year. Whether legalized marijuana will hit the streets next year or the year after, it’s coming, and probably sooner rather than...
Recycling has always been a feel-good issue for the casual environmentalist, but it’s turning out to be even less than that. It’s becoming less practical and affordable. Silver City and Taos are just two New Mexico examples of how solid waste authorities are finding it too costly to recycle — and a big part of the problem, it turns out, is China cleaning up its act. Sierra magazine recently ran a cover story about the condition of our recycling efforts, painting a bleak picture of just how ineffective we’ve been. Have yo...
I took advantage of a long holiday weekend to travel up to the Continental Divide, where I camped and explored some of the highest points in Colorado. “Civilization” came to me through the radio, particularly National Public Radio. Like New Mexico, Colorado has NPR-member public radio stations all over the state, so I was never far from reception. I would be bordering on insanity if I had been listening all the time, but there was a lot of drive time between here and the Divide, so I tuned in — in between stops at some of th...
SANTA ROSA — There’s trouble on the horizon, and I’m not talking about city hall across the street. No matter how much I get into my hometown news-gathering operation, I’m still plugged in to the bigger national and international issues out there. And while everyone should know by now that I don’t like Trump, there’s an even more troublesome issue for me: Climate change. Now don’t stop reading, all you deniers out there, just because I bring up a sore topic for you. It must be tough to abandon your long-held contention th...
Healthcare is a right. Raise your hand if you agree. The reality is, America is divided on this question. We’re not talking about emergency care here. I think most people with an ounce of compassion would agree that if someone’s life is in immediate danger, they should be treated before being asked how they’ll pay for their care. No, the debate is over the broader question of whether a person has a right to healthcare if they become sick or disabled, whether they can afford it or not. The irony, of course, is that just about...
Just when you think the Trumpettes have been banished from the Land of Enchantment come candidates who are already tugging on the president’s coattails, hoping to find redemption down south for the state’s beleaguered Republican Party. After the shellacking the GOP took in New Mexico last year — Democrats won every statewide and congressional race on the ballot, and took or held on to 72 of 112 seats in the state Legislature — Republicans are in search of a race they can win. Their greatest hope lies in the 2nd Congres...
