Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Well, as Carol Burnett used to say, I’m so glad we had this time together. I’ve written about 1.6 million words as a columnist. This 600 or so will be the last. I’m retiring for a few reasons. One is that, while I’ve managed to squeeze out four novels between column deadlines, my dream was always to write books full time. I turned 65 in October, so if not now, when? Another reason is that a column, for me, at least, is an act of emotional investment -- and I’m emotional...
On Dec. 3, Donald Trump finally crossed the Rubicon. That is, he took to his social media platform and, for the first time, issued an explicit call to abolish the U.S. Constitution -- the document he once swore to “preserve, protect and defend.” Still fuming over widespread election cheating that exists only in his wounded ego and fragile pride, Trump declared that “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, e...
Joe Engel died last month. It’s unlikely you will know the name, especially if you don’t live in Charleston, S.C., his hometown since 1949. Joe never wrote a great novel or made a scientific breakthrough. His accomplishment was less gaudy, yet no less significant. Joe lived to tell. I met him in 2005 -- the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II -- on an assignment to write about an interfaith pilgrimage to Holocaust sites in Poland. We visited murder factories whose nam...
“Here you come again, just when I’ve begun to get myself together...” — Dolly Parton He’s back. Granted, he never really left. Unlike other former presidents, Donald Trump didn’t disappear from the daily news cycle once he departed the White House. Thanks to his legal troubles, the hearings into the Jan. 6 insurrection and his diarrheic spewing in speeches and online, he has remained a constant presence. In fact, there was a temptation to lead this column not with the above e...
A few words on the silence. As you doubtless recall, many of us regarded the midterm election with existential dread. The path from there to the end of American democracy seemed all too easy to chart, what with election deniers campaigning for offices that would have put them in charge of voting and ballot counting in battleground states. If you give the fox control of the hen house, you ought not expect eggs for breakfast in the morning. Similarly, if you give Donald Trump lo...
Sometimes I wish white people could be Black. Not forever, mind you. Maybe for just a few weeks like John Howard Griffin, the author of “Black Like Me,” who darkened his skin and traveled the South in 1959. Sometimes, I wish white people could have that experience. Not so they could feel the sickly apprehension that can accompany a simple traffic stop. Not so they could feel the indignation of being asked to account for yourself just walking down the street. Not so they could...
An 82-year-old man sustains a skull fracture from a predawn home invasion, and you think it’s funny? Or that it’s fodder for another dumb conspiracy theory? What did you do with your humanity? Where did you mislay your souls? Have you no sense of decency at long last? One is tempted to say that in your response to that Friday morning attack on Paul Pelosi, many of you on the political right have hit rock bottom. But you lot have a knack for excavating depths that would mak...
Honestly, Tony, my first instinct was to ignore you. That’s become my go-to when readers ask me, as you did in a recent email, to prove to their satisfaction that, “Republicans are keeping Black people from voting.” When I didn’t respond promptly enough, you said this strengthened your feeling “that this is a fabricated issue with no real merit.” Lord, where to begin? Tony, I’m not your research assistant. Moreover, there’s this new invention called Google, which, with a f...
Apparently, Craig Ridley somehow ceased to be a human being. That’s the only possible explanation for what he endured in a Florida prison. Five days in his cell, paralyzed, trapped in his own useless body, begging for help and being ignored. You don’t treat a human being that way. Heck, you wouldn’t treat an animal that way. But some of us would, it seems, treat a prisoner that way. This was in 2017. We are indebted to the Miami Herald’s Nicholas Nehamas for bringing to light...
It was the “National Weekend of Bigots.” At least, that’s what Ana Navarro called it Monday on “The View.” It was as good a description as any for the soul-draining drumbeat of hate that dominated weekend headlines. You had the Black rapper Ye, nee Kanye West, on Twitter threatening to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” who, he complained, have “toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone who opposes” their “agenda.” Then there was Marjorie Taylor Greene, a white congr...
We’re all in this thing together. Or so we like to say. But Ron DeSantis’ hypocrisy just punched a hole through that ideal. In 2013, when Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, the then-Florida congressman piously declined to support a bill providing $9.7 billion in aid to those who had seen their homes damaged or destroyed. “I sympathize with the victims of Hurricane Sandy,” he declared, but added that it would not be “fiscally responsible” to increase the debt without a d...
“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” — Maya Angelou Maya Angelou, meet Herschel Walker, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Here he is on the Inflation Reduction Act: “A lot of money, it’s going to trees. ... We’ve got enough trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?” And on school shootings: “What about gettin’ a department that can look at young men that’s lookin’ at women that’s looking at just social media? What about doing that?” A...
Immigration is the last thing this is about. If conservatives really wanted to fix immigration, they could have done so years ago. Certainly, the broad outlines of a workable overhaul have long been obvious: a combination of hardened border security, a guest-worker program, streamlining the process for immigration and creating a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally. In fact, President Bush offered a plan roughly along those lines back in 2006. “I know this i...
President John F. Kennedy committed America to landing on the moon in a speech on Sept. 12, 1962. It was spring. The calendar said otherwise, yes. But, as has been argued before in this space, Kennedy presided over a season of renewal, a season when optimism was birthright, confidence, high and horizons, endless. “We choose to go to the moon ... and do the other things,” he famously declared, “not because they are easy but because they are hard.” And no one doubted for a m...
MAGA Republicans think Joe Biden is being mean to them. You read that right. Followers of Donald Trump, a man who denigrates his rivals as SOBs, sickos, dummies, losers, wackos and scum, a man who has accused Biden of corruption and cognitive decline, say they are affronted at the way Biden has treated them. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy even demanded an apology after Biden said MAGA Republicans embrace “semi-fascism.” Then came a fiery speech from Independence Hall in...
“There’s a choice we’re making. We’re saving our own lives.” — from “We Are The World” Yes, this is early. That ritual where the columnist assigns the year a theme doesn’t usually begin until December. But the view from this pew is that, where 2022 is concerned, said theme is already clear. In recent days, this has begun to feel very much like The Year (Bleep) Got Real. Sixteen years after Al Gore implored us to face “An Inconvenient Truth” and we didn’t, we have seen...
“Dare we hope?” That was the rather plaintive response of a man on Twitter when news broke that Kansas voters had rejected an attempt to remove the right to abortion from their state constitution. We are talking about a fire-engine-red state. It went for Donald Trump in 2016 and repeated the error in 2020. In fact, Kansas has supported only one Democratic presidential candidate -- Lyndon Johnson -- in over 80 years. Yet, that same Kansas just voted to preserve abortion rig...
Back in the day, his FBI file dubbed him “an arrogant Negro.” But then, people often mistook principle for arrogance whenever African Americans insisted on justice. Sometimes, they still do. As recently as 2017, after all, much of white America vilified NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police violence against African Americans. Donald Trump cursed him. Wayne Newton ordered him to “get the hell out” of the country. But Bil...
We’ll get to the Nazi flags in a moment. First, however, let us turn to Merriam-Webster for clarification of a point I recently made in a column that left a few of you vexed. It came in a passage that noted the right wing’s attempted takeover of state voting apparatuses and contended that because of it, 2024 could be the last meaningful election we ever have. “Fascism is on our doorstep,” I wrote. It seemed a self-evident truth, but it didn’t sit well with some on the right...
They called it “massive resistance.” That, some of you may recall, was what Virginia dubbed its campaign of defiance of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed school segregation. The Virginia crusade was just part of a drive by conservatives all over the South to blunt the effect of that decision. It’s a noxious bit of history that, paradoxically, may carry a seed of hope for advocates of reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court...
Our story so far... The Extreme Court just gutted reproductive rights, shredded a New York law that helped keep guns out of public spaces for more than a century, and crippled the Environmental Protection Agency in the face of a global climate crisis. Georgia may soon send to the Senate former football star Herschel Walker, last seen claiming the Green New Deal would make America’s “good air decide to float over to China’s bad air.” Amazingly, he would not be the dumbest Repub...
So what does all this tell us about justice? “All this” meaning the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years and R. Kelly got 30. It was, make no mistake, an indisputably good thing to see those punishments handed down. And it’s hard to blame anyone who found in it a reason to rejoice. It’s also difficult to join them. Understand: you will find no remorse here over the likelihood that the 55-year-old former R&B hit maker and the 60-year-old former socialite will grow old in...
This is not just another setback. Anyone who’s lived long enough has seen the Supreme Court issue a ruling they didn’t like. This is not that. No, what made the ruling that felled Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, more than just another disappointment, what made it the judicial equivalent of a kick in the teeth, is, as Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer noted in a peppery dissent, the fact that this is the first time in history rights granted b...
ABC News thought it was -- in the words of George Stephanopoulos -- “too ugly” and “too dangerous” and declined to show it on air. So Rep. Adam Kinzinger tweeted it Sunday night, letting us all see the threatening letter that recently came to his wife. Sofia, at the home where they live with Christian, their 5-month-old son. It greets her with a profane sexual slur. Then it gets worse: “That pimp you married not only broke his oath, he sold his soul. Yours and Christian...
“Everybody plays the fool.” — The Main Ingredient, 1972 I won’t bother reasoning with you. As I’ve said before in this space, it’s my opinion that you folks who support Donald Trump are, by definition, incapable of that function, so it’s foolish to even try. You may think that’s harsh. I think it’s time-saving. But I do have a question for you: Don’t you feel kind of stupid right now? Doesn’t the revelation that it was all a con leave you feeling like a sucker? Doesn’t simpl...
