Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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We live in a time of heedless iconoclasm, and so one of the country’s oldest traditions is under assault. Thanksgiving is increasingly portrayed as, at best, based on falsehoods and, at worst, a whitewash of genocide against Native Americans. The New York Times ran a piece the other day titled, “The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year,” bristling with hostility toward the day of gratitude and noting that “the holiday arrives in the midst of a national struggl...
No one expected Donald Trump to handle a defeat in the 2020 election well. It was predictable he’d deny that he really lost and allege the vote was rigged, that he’d tweet wild and misleading things, and that he’d lash out in absurd and sophomoric ways. All that was inevitable. What’s been more disturbing is how far he and his allies have been willing to push it, not content only to delegitimize the election, but actively seeking to invalidate it. This was the vista opened by...
Ordinarily, it’s not possible for a party to win the presidency and have a bad election night, but the Democrats managed it. Pending the outcome of two Senate runoffs in Georgia, Joe Biden looks set to become a caretaker president who won’t be signing any legislation that doesn’t pass muster in Mitch McConnell’s Senate first. He isn’t riding into the White House on the strength of a Blue Wave, as was so often predicted, but a Blue Trickle that saw Democrats fail to win contr...
Donald Trump may be leaving the White House, but he’s not exiting the room. The fiercest Never Trump critics hoped for — and wishfully predicted — a cleansing landslide that would wipe out every trace of Trump and his enablers from the GOP. That’s not happening. Trump’s poll- and pundit-defying surge toward the cusp of a second term vindicates Trump’s approach enough to give him and his potential successors continued traction, if not a dominant voice, in the party. Trum...
Joe Biden wants to take one of the great American success stories of the past several decades and drive it into the ground. He would turn his back on the stupendous wealth represented by proven reserves of oil and gas in this country. Rather than focusing on producing cheap, abundant energy — a key ingredient to human progress through all of human history — he’d embark on the fool’s errand of trying to adjust the world’s thermostat 80 years from now. After a 50-year effort to...
The Russians haven’t loomed so large as a sinister hand influencing the course of American society since the Red Scares of the 20th century. Then, it was largely the right that warned of Russian infiltration; now it is progressives who see Russians altering the course of American history through dark manipulations. There’s no doubt Russia meddled in our election in 2016 and is attempting to do so again. But the left’s overwhelming focus on Russia has taken on the trapp...
Amy Coney Barrett has accomplished many things in her career. Becoming an authority or a policy maker on healthcare isn’t one of them. At Notre Dame, she was a professor at the law school, not at the Eck Institute for Global Health. She’s written for the Cornell Law Review, not The New England Journal of Medicine. She’s up to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, not Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. No one w...
The Supreme Court fight of the century is, so far, a fizzle. The ratio of progressive outrage over the nomination of federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to supposed reasons that the U.S. Senate shouldn’t confirm her is completely out of whack — there’s a surfeit of the former and almost none of the latter. Barrett has received extraordinary testimonials from her colleagues and students, who say she is brilliant, conscientious and kind. The opposition has countered with a dog’s...
“If you want to make God laugh,” Woody Allen once famously said, paraphrasing a Yiddish proverb, “tell him about your plans.” That’s not an issue for President Donald Trump, at least not on healthcare. He’s been promising a healthcare plan since he started running for president, often with superlative adjectives attached, and yet never produced one. His lack of a proposal was a stumbling block in Tuesday’s debate and plays into a broader, long-standing Republican vu...
Constitutional revolution is going mainstream. After delivering lectures about political norms for the entirety of the Trump era — often with good cause — much of the left is now threatening to kneecap an important institution of American government on a partisan vote in an act of ideological vengeance. If the Republican Senate confirms a Trump appointee to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat right before or after the election, progressives say Democrats, if...
The latest hammer of a book to fall on President Donald Trump is Bob Woodward’s soon-to-be-released “Rage,” and it’s his own words that are the issue. According to the book, the president told the veteran Washington Post journalist in March that he publicly minimized the danger of the coronavirus: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” This was after Trump explained to Woodward about a month earlier that...
Until a few days ago, Democrats were content to pretend the disorder in American cities didn't exist. Now, worried that Joe Biden is on his back foot on the issue, they readily acknowledge the rioting - and blame it on President Donald Trump. One would think that, given the fusillade they unleashed against Trump at the convention, if Democrats truly believed that the president is responsible for Black Lives Matter activists and anarchists attacking cops and burning down...
Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, but it’s still discernibly the Republican Party. The Republican National Convention was obviously very Trumpy. At least one member of the family had a slot every night, and it featured theatrical touches worthy of reality TV. There also are notable differences of substance. Trump’s party has reversed itself on trade and jettisoned concern over deficit spending. The party is much less hawkish than George W. Bush’s GOP and much more...
The number of Republicans speaking at the Democratic National Convention had progressives on edge. They shouldn’t have fretted. Even if a handful of estranged Republicans are along for the ride, the left is steadily moving the Democratic Party in its direction. Would progressives prefer winning the optics at a virtual convention, or the substance over the longer term? The Democratic Convention was, for the most part, bereft of policy, focusing instead on President Donald T...
QAnon is getting its first congresswoman. Marjorie Taylor Greene won a runoff in a Republican primary Tuesday, all but assuring her victory in November in a heavily GOP district. She is thus set to become the highest officeholder in the land who takes seriously the lunatic theories of QAnon, the anonymous internet poster who says, among other ludicrous and poisonous things, that there’s a global network of pedophiles about to be exposed and undone by President Donald Trump. G...
Last year, Sen. Kamala Harris may have become the first presidential candidate in history to laugh derisively at the idea that the Constitution limits what a president can do. When former Vice President Joe Biden said her plan for gun control by executive fiat didn’t pass constitutional muster, she scoffed and deployed one of her canned one-liners, “I would just say, ‘Hey, Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say yes we can!’” Yes, we can — flippantly blow by the con...
“Burn it down” is rarely a wise or prudent sentiment. A cadre of Republican opponents of President Donald Trump is nonetheless calling for a purifying fire to sweep through the GOP in the fall, taking down as many Republican officeholders as possible. Only this willy-nilly bloodletting will teach the party the hard lesson it needs to learn for accommodating Trump over the past four years. As a Soviet commissar once put it: “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of th...
In this summer of Republican discontent, a handful of GOP House members have identified what’s ailing the party: Liz Cheney. The two-term Wyoming congresswoman, chair of the House GOP Conference and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney was called out at a conference meeting for myriad alleged sins, including insufficient loyalty to President Donald Trump. This episode is much more telling about Cheney’s internal GOP critics than Cheney. She rightly refuses to pla...
If only the rest of the country could handle COVID-19 as well as New York. That’s the lament of progressive commentators as coronavirus cases spike in the Sun Belt and the South. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin hailed New York City the other day after it reported no deaths for the first time during the pandemic. This is what competent government can accomplish, she gushed. Valerie Jarrett, former aide to Barack Obama, tweeted, “Short term sacrifice saves liv...
Mark Zuckerberg clearly hasn’t gotten the memo. The founder of Facebook persists in defending free expression, even though free speech has fallen decidedly out of fashion. His reward for adhering to what once would have been a commonsensical, if not banal, view of the value of the free exchange of ideas is to get vilified for running a hate-speech machine and to get boycotted by major American companies. In a speech at Georgetown University last fall, Zuckerberg stated it’s im...
After he’s repeatedly survived the unsurvivable, we are supposed to believe that President Donald Trump might quit the presidential race before it truly begins because of a spate of negative polling. This is the latest chatter among (unnamed) Republicans, according to a widely circulated Fox News report and cable news talking heads. Trump is a volatile figure and things could get weird if he’s far behind in the final weeks. But the idea that he is going to fall on his swo...
They’re coming for Thomas Jefferson. This was always obvious, but now it’s even more plain. Protesters in Portland, Oregon, used axes and ropes to topple a statue of President Thomas Jefferson. The New York City Council is agitating to remove a statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence from its chambers. At this rate, the Sage of Monticello will be lucky if the Jefferson Memorial isn’t bulldozed and if he isn’t effaced from the nickel. Jefferson is, to use the...
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot recently had big news — the city is opening up its iconic Lakefront Trail after months of being closed off as part of a COVID-19 lockdown. That Lightfoot kept the trail closed even after Chicago had experienced large-scale Black Lives Matter marches — thousands during the “Drag March for Change” — is one small instance of the flagrant social distancing hypocrisy across the country in recent weeks. If it’s OK for throngs of people to pack the st...
Confronted by a clear and present fascist threat, the staff of The New York Times rose up early this month to humiliate and punish quislings in its ranks. In a now famous op-ed, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton called for federal troops to quell riots and looting, an idea that the Times staff considered worthy of Oswald Mosley or Benito Mussolini. As the Times was disavowing the Cotton piece and preparing to push out or demote its top opinion staffers for publishing it, columnist Mich...
Breaking things and burning buildings is enjoying a vogue it hasn’t had since the late 1960s or early 1970s. Arson and looting are a perennial feature of urban unrest, but they have been pretty universally condemned for decades now — until the past week or so. Forced to choose between criticizing the George Floyd protests when they get out of hand and defending the indefensible, activists and writers on the left have been tempted into the latter. Their inventive, if com...
