Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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For just a moment, let’s deviate from modern times and actually be honest about the state of our nation. Remember how, back in the old days before lawyers replaced gunslingers, honesty was actually valued. “A man’s word is his bond,” went the old adage, while a simple handshake could close the deal. Now, that handshake is considered unsanitary and you’d better have some wet wipes and a contract before you go any further. Fact is, as a society we don’t really value honesty anymore. Advertising has always been about super...
Seems to me that Nikki Haley is a bigger problem for Donald Trump than he’s letting on. She’s exposing a rift in Trump World, one that might just get him defeated. I still say she’s the one who can beat Biden, but Trump appears ready to run roughshod over the Republicans’ nomination process to claim the crown. Then he’ll ride herd over another thumping at the polls, up and down the nation’s ballot. It’s almost funny to say, but I think the two biggest issues on 2024 ballots will be Trump and abortion. And on both those is...
As this year’s legislative session gets underway, there’s one wedge issue already getting lots of attention. Rest assured that any and all gun-control proposals, no matter how reasonable, will get plenty of attention by the usual band of Second Amendment reactionaries and their demagoguing leaders. Remember last September when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an executive order limiting the carrying of firearms in Bernalillo County? It was specific to metro Albuquerque, but some of the most aggressive demonstrations cam...
Trump. Climate change. Liberals. Conservatives. Socialists. Capitalists. Bet you don’t think any of these charged-up words are funny, but maybe you should. “All comedy starts with anger,” Jerry Seinfeld once said, explaining that stand-up comedy turns anger into laughter. But of course, it’s not just anger that generates laughs. It’s also pain, insecurity and other human frailties. And as it turns out, one of the most therapeutic approaches we can take in dealing with our problems is by laughing about them. My brother D...
Random thoughts on the political year ahead: • Will Taylor Swift be the Oprah Winfrey of this year’s election? You might remember what Oprah did for Barack Obama back in 2007, giving a pop culture endorsement of great consequence in his winning bid for the White House. Maybe Taylor will do the same for Joe Biden this year. She did throw her support behind Biden four years ago, but then old Joe publicly confused her with Britney Spears. He’d better hope she’s not too sensitive about that. As far as I can tell, very few vot...
When I was a kid, people compared me to Tommy Smothers, who, at age 86, died just as 2023 was winding down. Aside from sharing the same first name, I was also a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white kid with an off-the-wall sense of humor. When I imitated the clueless Tommy Smothers with one of his routines I memorized from a Smothers Brothers album, people would laugh and say I sounded just like him. My brother Don was more like Tommy’s brother, Dickie Smothers, straight man for their comedic schtick. Donnie, as we called my b...
As intense as this year has been, next year promises to be even more so. For one thing, 2024 is a presidential election year, even though 2023 almost felt like one. This year will go down in history as the year when 91 felony charges were leveled against a former president, stemming from four major cases against him — and with each set of indictments making him an even stronger presidential contender, at least in his own party. In next year’s general election, however, he’ll be facing Joe Biden, who contends — perhaps...
Back in the 1990s, as a father of young children and a journalist committed to honest reporting, I became concerned with the whole Santa Claus “lie” that I was perpetuating with my own little girls. So I asked my father how he handled the whole myth about Santa. After all, I don’t remember ever thinking of Dad as a liar when it came to such matters, nor do I remember a day when I went from being a believer to a humbug, so I figured Dad must have done it right. For me while growing up, Christmas was all about Jesus’ birthda...
It’s a political myth, really, but it’s still poignant: that no one could have visited China back in 1972 but then-President Richard Nixon. His anti-communist positions provided him the political cover he needed to improve relations without being attacked by the Cold War “hawks” on the right. “Only Nixon could have gone to China,” historians and even Spock (in the movie Star Trek VI, Wikipedia says) have said. Maybe in the years ahead, they’ll add, “only the fossil fuel industry could take on global warming.” The l...
Could it be that today’s “Deep State” conspiracy theories got their start with 1947’s Roswell Incident? One could say you can draw a straight line from the UFO conspiracy theories that grew from that mystery to today’s belief that the 2020 presidential election was rigged by a massive government conspiracy. Garrett Graff, a seasoned journalist with extensive experience covering national security issues, is now making the rounds to promote his new book, “UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search of Alien Life He...
In my formative years, I worked for a program called the Appalachia Service Project, a home repair project 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. Once we came upon a house with no running water because the pipes had frozen and burst. A small, frail, elderly woman and a confused, friendly old man lived there, and they wanted and needed our help, but...
As you get older, you get more used to death. You become familiar with seeing your elders pass on. Death can be painful; oftentimes more so for the ones left behind. It’s a tragedy when a loved one’s life is cut short; for parents, the loss of a child must be the worst. I haven’t gone through that, but I can imagine how incredibly heart-wrenching it is. I’ve lost a lot of people who meant the world to me — friends, mentors, family members. The loss of my parents, Charles and Lois McDonald, was the most monumental for my li...
It’s the onset of our annual holiday season, when gratefulness, gift-giving and anticipation of a new year come over us. It’s coming during troubled times. Nationally and internationally, the problems seem overwhelming. One war, between Ukraine and Russia, keeps dragging along with no clear victory in sight, while horrors are unfolding in a brand-new Israel-Hamas war. All this while the Earth warms, the climate changes and the weather turns extreme. On our homefront, there’s a pitched battle coming between autho...
This from a Source New Mexico report last week: Virgin Galactic, New Mexico’s anchor tenant for Spaceport America, is pausing its flights to the edge of space and laying off a bunch of its workers. That’s not a good sign for the state’s $212 million spaceport southeast of Truth or Consequences, but I’m glad we built it anyway. You might remember Spaceport America as the creation of then-Gov. Bill Richardson, who saddled up with British billionaire Richard Branson to sell the idea of a commercial spaceport to New Mexico...
Esports is a good example of what’s wrong with our world today and what the schools are doing right about it. In case you haven’t heard of it, at the middle and high school levels, esports is basically video gaming as a competitive team. Some call it a “mind sport” along the lines of a board or card game, taking its place as one of many “cybersports” online. Regardless of how you cast it, esports is growing in popularity in schools around the country. In 2019, the New Mexico Activities Association sanctioned esports as...
Maybe I wrote Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s political obituary too soon. Not so long ago, after the governor issued a public health order restricting the carry and concealment of guns in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County, a firestorm of protests broke out statewide. Some Second Amendment proponents defiantly brandished their firearms in public protests over her order, and even some of her fellow Democrats said she was overreaching her constitutional authority. It made national news and Lujan Grisham was widely criticized. I...
When I was a young man (a college dropout searching for meaning and fun in the 1970s), I made my way to Washington D.C., where I visited the Thomas Jefferson Memorial with a couple of friends. I wasn’t well-versed in history at that age, and they set me straight when I idolized this Founding Father, a fellow Southerner whose words set in motion the ideal of human equality. I’ve since learned that great and wonderful things are often set in motion by seriously flawed people, and now that I know a more complete story of Thomas...
Let’s be honest about the hypocrisy coming out of both political parties when it comes to gerrymandering. Both sides do it when given the opportunity and both sides decry the other side for doing it — all depending only on who’s in power at the moment the maps get redrawn. If you want a definition for “gerrymander,” here’s Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s: “to divide or arrange (a territorial unit) into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage.” And if you want to see an example of gerrymande...
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I grew up on them. They were the first thing I learned to make in the kitchen. That and a glass of milk. Microwaves hadn’t been invented yet. Playing basketball on a dirt patch in our back yard. That’s where I learned to dribble and shoot with one hand. And football in our front yard. When no one else was around, I’d take the hike from an imaginary center, drop back and throw to the trees, believing that I was the star quarterback for the Arkansas Razorbacks, the only college team that...
I’m conflicted. The American in me doesn’t want Donald Trump to ever again come close to the presidency. A second time around would be a move away from democracy and toward an autocracy, which sounds very un-American to me. The partisan side of me, however, sees another Trump nomination as great for the Democrats. First, the odds are Trump will lose again in the general election, dragging other Republicans down with him, maybe even giving all of Congress back to the Dems. With Trump at the top of the ticket in 2024, the Rep...
Seldom is a governor’s second term as bright as their first term; the gubernatorial luster loses its shine for one reason or another. With the late, great Bill Richardson, it was “pay to play.” With Susana Martinez, it was “pizzagate.” And now, with Michelle Lujan Grisham, it’s an overreaching public health order. Don’t get me wrong, Gov. Lujan Grisham is no lame duck. She still has three years left as governor of a state controlled by Democrats, so she still wields considerable power. But her order to temporarily b...
Out here in the Land of Enchantment, we have many trails. We have the Space Trail, which includes more than 50 archeological sites, museums, laboratories, observatories and more scattered around the state — but mostly concentrated in southern New Mexico. We’ve got petroglyphs showing pre-historic stargazers at work and modern-day observatories like the Very Large Array and its ability to look deep into space, both into and beyond our own Milky Way. Meanwhile, New Mexico’s Museum of Space History in Alamogordo provides us with...
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more consequential New Mexican than Bill Richardson. He was a U.S. congressman and New Mexico governor, a cabinet secretary, an ambassador to the United Nations, a diplomat at-large, and for a few months in 2007-08, a candidate for president. Richardson died Sept. 1 at age 75. William Blaine Richardson III was born in Pasadena, Calif., grew up in Mexico City and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Tufts University in Massachusetts, where he met his future wife, Barbara Flavin. In 1978, Bi...
Often I’ve said that my dad wasn’t the “greatest” man I’ve ever known, but he was the “best” man I’ve known. In my book, that puts Dad over Bill Clinton any day. Let’s apply that to nations. The U.S. is the greatest nation on earth, as long as you equate greatness with wealth and power. But “best” we are not. Nearly a year ago, U.S. News & World Report put out its seventh annual “Best Countries Rankings” and we weren’t even in the top three. But at least we moved up from the previous year. Surprisingly (or not), the...
Before I realized it was the FBI, not the Secret Service, that killed an alleged wannabe assassin, I got to thinking about an old movie, “In the Line of Fire,” and fished it out of my DVD collection to watch again. It’s about a Secret Service agent played by Clint Eastwood and a would-be assassin played by John Malkovich — and it’s still well worth watching. Let me say on the front end that I consider Eastwood one of the greatest moviemakers of our time, although he didn’t “make” this one. He starred in it, yes, but Wolfga...
