Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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In the last legislative session at the Roundhouse, lawmakers took some significant strides toward improving the practical value of a high school diploma in this state by giving greater emphasis to financial literacy, world languages, career technical education and other subjects that will better prepare our graduates for the real world. But I didn’t hear any talk about civics, arguably the most important subject of our time. Civics, defined as “the study of the rights and duties of citizenship,” prepares us to be respo...
Lobbyists get a bum rap, mainly because of the big shots. It’s hard to respect someone who wines and dines and cozies up to lawmakers in order to deflect legislation that might cut into the profits of an oversized industry like the pharmaceuticals or gun manufacturers. Their bottom lines aren’t necessarily in the public interest, which makes it easy to criticize those who lobby to make the rich richer. By a broader sense, however, we are just about all lobbyists — or at least that’s true for those who care enough about s...
Set aside the politics of it all and there’s poetic justice to the fact that Donald Trump is facing his first criminal charges out of New York. After all, that’s where he was created. I’m of the opinion that it would have been better to have first charged him with trying to steal the 2020 election, which appears obvious in a recorded conversation with the Georgia secretary of state in which Trump tried to “find” the votes necessary to turn the election in his favor. Or he could have been indicted first for his role in the Ja...
We’re going to feel this just-ended legislative session in the pocketbook, in our schools and elsewhere. New Mexicans will certainly feel it when those $500 rebates arrive. Last year, lawmakers doled out similar taxpayer payouts, but this one sets no ceiling on your income, so everyone who filed a 2021 tax return, regardless of income, should get one. Expect to receive yours sometime this summer. Most of us will feel at least something in the $1.2 billion capital outlay funding bill approved by lawmakers this year, since t...
It was 2016 and my brother Don called from Tennessee. It was primary election day there and he wanted to talk about it. He started with praise for a renegade candidate running on the Republican ticket, the billionaire businessman Donald Trump. He said he kind of liked his tactless approach to the issues of the day. I went off on him. “He’s a liar and a cheat,” I summarily declared before itemizing all the reasons I felt Trump would make a terrible president. But my brother cut me off. “Hey, I didn’t say I voted for him,” he s...
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely no straight-line comparison, but it’s like good ol’ Mark Twain said: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Let’s start with a look at the birth of cable news. Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld were the first to offer around-the-clock news with the launching of CNN. That was in 1980. CNN dominated its all-news niche for years in a growing cable television industry. Then in 1996, Rupert Murdoch introduced Fox News and put Roger Ailes in charge. It appealed, by design, to...
This year’s Black History Month got me to thinking about Black people who have influenced me personally. On occasion, I write about L.T. Williams, my favorite professor at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. He took a multidimensional approach to America’s history, and his insights into our great American heritage had a profound and expanding impact on my eager young mind. I grew up straddling a segregated and a desegregating South; I went to an all-white elementary school and a fully integrated high school. Well, not...
We’ve passed the midway point in this year’s 60-day legislative session, and the state has yet to crash and burn. At halftime, according to nmlegis.gov, some 1,230 bills, memorials and resolutions had been filed this session, which doesn’t tell us much except that a lot more legislation is filed than will ever be passed — which is fortunate, since too many laws will only cut into our cherished freedoms. What tells us more is comparing this session to the last regular 60-day session, which was in 2021. That session generat...
At the risk of sounding like a numbskull who doesn’t believe in climate change, the moon landing or the roundness of the earth, I must say that I don’t always believe in science. Or, more precisely, scientists. I certainly believe the scientific method as the best way to search for real-world answers, but sometimes I wonder if those who apply such a method to the biggest questions of our time have blinders on. Seems they too easily discount the unknowns. For example, artificial intelligence, something that’s been in the n...
America has an inspiring, disturbing history, and its telling has been incomplete for a long time. Consider our founding fathers. George Washington is known as the “father of our country” for good reasons — he led us to victory in the Revolutionary War, became our first president and, perhaps more importantly, stepped down rather than rule as a king. But he also owned other people, Black people, through the cruelest of America’s original institutions. Same for Thomas Jefferson, the author of this nation’s original “sacred t...
The new year has so far demonstrated just how sick our society has become. In less than a month, we’ve seen seven mass shootings in California alone, leaving 31 dead and 24 injured. We’ve seen video showing Tyre Nichols being beaten so badly by Memphis cops that he died in the hospital. And here in New Mexico, we’re hearing reports about two kids, ages 14 and 15, shot in Albuquerque, leaving one dead and the other critically wounded. The south side of the Duke City is averaging a homicide every three days so far this year....
When I was growing up, from adolescence to young adulthood, I was unabashedly liberal. I remember how older people would tell me that, as I aged, I’d become more conservative, like them. It sorta happened, but not nearly as much as they predicted. Over the years I did move toward the center of the political spectrum, but I never became a bona fide conservative. By the time I hit my mid-50s, I was a registered independent, but that was mostly owed to my years in journalism, when I learned, mainly through experience, that t...
This may be 2023, but 2022 is still hanging around on court dockets. Last year, we saw the biggest fire in New Mexico’s recorded history. We watched as our Legislature reconfigured the state’s congressional districts. We saw the U.S. Supreme Court strike down the nearly half-century-old Roe decision. And while these and other state and national developments left a heavy footprint on the year just ended, they’ll be litigated in the year just begun. The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire burned 341,471 acres in northern New Mexic...
With an upcoming legislative session around the corner, I thought I’d check in with my favorite think tank, Think New Mexico, about its plans for this year’s Roundhouse romp. In case you’re not familiar with this group, Think New Mexico is a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank that examines issues impacting New Mexicans’ lives then pushes for specific legislation to address nagging problems. Samples of its successes through the years abound: taking and keeping the state’s sales tax off food, redirecting state lottery r...
Wow. Another “existential” year. It seems they all are these days. COVID hit in 2020 and we, as a nation, argued over masks. Then 2021 brought vaccines and deeper divisions after an attempted insurrection. And this year is ending with a “tripledemic” and a stage set for a divided Congress and, probably, a more deeply divided nation. It must have been a couple of years ago when “existential crisis” became staple mainstream media language. Now it’s almost cliché, even if it is justified in its use — between a changing climate...
Every year about this time I get to be Santa’s editor helper. I clean up letters that children in Santa Rosa, Vaughn and Anton Chico write to him, for publication in my newspaper’s Letters to Santa special section, which is a big deal around here. Actually, I do very little editing, because a misspelled word here and there is somehow “cute” when a kid does it. More than anything, I format their letters for the purpose of “flow” and “readability,” which is something a paginator understands and readers appreciate even...
Ever wonder how other nations view us? For New Mexicans, the first thing a foreigner might think is that we’re a part of our neighbor to the south. If they knew Billy the Kid became famous as a Wild West outlaw here, then maybe they’d know we’re a bonafide state in the good ol’ USA, but as most traveling New Mexicans already know, U.S. citizens don’t even know that. Personally, I once had a man in Memphis, Tenn., when he saw me wearing a New Mexico T-shirt, engage me in a conversation about illegal immigration until I e...
Every time I go back to my home country, I pine for the good old days of my youth. I was born in Ozark, Ark., where the Arkansas River Valley meets the Ozark Mountains, and graduated high school upstream in Fort Smith. In between, I also grew up in other small Arkansas cities and towns, as the son of an itinerant minister. In the mid-1970s, I left Arkansas, and started bouncing around, mostly between Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas. By the 1980s, I “settled down” in my native state, back to be close to family, and started a...
The other day I heard a program on NPR discussing how children and youth are taking in the threat of climate change. One teenager spoke of how he became keenly aware of the threat when he had to leave his home as he viewed an approaching wildfire just outside his window. He’s an example of someone who recognizes the threat because he’s had a glimpse of it up close and personally. Other children and youth see it from a distance, like a cloud choking off their future. Anger and depression grow from such a dark view of wha...
If you ask me, Thanksgiving is better than Christmas, for a whole host of practical, spiritual and personal reasons. For one thing, it hasn’t been commercialized the way the Yuletide has. Black Friday and Cyber Monday may fall near Thanksgiving, but those shopping-spree days are in preparation for the giving and getting of Christmas. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is a feast for the body and soul. Sure, it may be based on a misleading narrative in American history, but at its core Thanksgiving is about something much b...
Did America’s fever just break? Last week’s general election provided strong evidence that democracy remains strong in our nation, as just about all those who lost their respective elections admitted defeat, with some even graciously conceding to their opponent. If only for a moment, the political rhetoric has cooled. That’s typical of all our post-election cycles. Hyperbole, smears, fearmongering and us-against-them mantras all reach their peak in the height of a campaign season, followed by a more conciliatory mood in th...
Sometimes I feel like an optimist in search of a reason to still feel that way. I want to believe in what’s good about this world, but writing about the issues of our time can be depressing. I’m penning this column in advance of this year’s general election results, so I don’t know who won and who lost. I’ve already written about my frustrations with this election cycle, including all the fears that have been espoused on both sides of the political divide, so even if I were to spin some optimism into the mix, you wouldn’t...
All year long, I’ve had a hard time getting excited about this election year. I’m just not into it this time around. This isn’t normal for me. For decades, I’ve told people that “politics is my favorite sport.” I liked the debates, the give and take, I even loved to hate the campaign commercials. But this time around, there’s just no fun in it for me. Maybe it’s the lack of a newsroom. After decades of newspapering at larger dailies with good-size newsrooms, going through an election cycle at my small weekly is a bit lonely...
As an observer of human nature and the body politick, I’ve reached the conclusion that the meanspirited attacks on both sides are largely due to the extremes. But there’s a more moderate middle that sees a third way, one that’s closer to our collective nature and articulated well by the pundit David Brooks. Longtime journalist Brooks is what I’d describe as a moderate conservative. He writes a column for the New York Times and gives analysis on PBS News Hour, but he’s more of a free thinker than a partisan political...
This is altogether anecdotal, so I won’t pretend it’s based on scientific observation, but I’ve noticed something in my annual trips to Arkansas for a Thanksgiving get-together in the Ozark Mountains. The autumn leaves seem to be peaking earlier. October is the best time to see a brilliant display of colors in the Ozark Plateau. It’s as if God painted the mountains just for our viewing pleasure. But by the end of November, when I take my trip, the fiery splash of the red, orange, yellow and green broadleaf colors have al...
