Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Anyone hoping Republican voters around the country would use Super Tuesday to slow their party’s careening trajectory toward the Trumpian cliff now must face facts: It’s over. Donald Trump’s near-total sweep of Super Tuesday states, and challenger Nikki Haley’s subsequent campaign suspension last Wednesday, means that, barring some epic surprise, American voters on Nov. 5 will be faced with a presidential rematch that most don’t want. Even among the many Republicans out there who recognize Trump’s obvious unfitness f...
The Biden administration admits to having made some mistakes — some — in its withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the admission doesn’t come close to acknowledging the catastrophe that occurred during the August 2021 retreat. Ex-President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is in full-force denial over his role in that catastrophe. Both are to blame, and to a certain extent, so are Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush for the abysmal deployment, training and ambivalent nation-building decisions that contributed to the Taliban takeo...
It was entirely predictable, but still despicable, that right-wing demagogues like Sen. Josh Hawley are trying to spin the Nashville school shooting into an indictment of transgender Americans generally because the assailant happened to identify as trans. That was the obvious thrust of a Fox News discussion between the Missouri Republican and host Laura Ingraham that was initially about the shooting but morphed seamlessly into the utter non sequitur of transgender medicine. “We’ve got to tell the truth about what hap...
The saga of the comic strip “Dilbert” and the racist rants of its creator, Scott Adams, isn’t the out-of-control cancel culture that Twitter boss Elon Musk and others on the right claim. It’s actually an example of the free market in action — the free market of newspapers responding to readers who are appalled at Adams’ outspoken racism. Adams has the right to those views, but no newspaper or reader has an obligation to support them with attention and money. Adams has promoted Trumpian conspiracy theories for a while now,...
The passing of soccer legend Pelé at the age of 82 triggered a massive outpouring of love and respect for the greatest of all time. The GOAT debate is spirited in soccer, as in every sport. The international expanse of soccer and the nationalist fervor it stirs makes the discourse especially passionate. But Pelé has long remained above that fray, up on a higher plain. Perhaps other greats could rival his skill and his achievements, but nobody could match his far-reaching impact marketing the sport and his decades-long s...
Back in 2001, precious few Americans could have explained what Houston-based Enron did as a company and how it got so spectacularly wealthy. When it filed for a record-breaking bankruptcy, Americans got schooled fast about not putting their trust and money behind swaggering, fast-talking con artists. But fools and their money regrouped over the years, and along came FTX, a $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange that repeated many of Enron’s mistakes and yielded the same abysmal results. We suspect that a lot of investors who l...
It’s unfortunate that the families of Sandy Hook probably won’t actually get anything close to the nearly $1 billion that a Connecticut jury assessed last week against right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones for his monstrous lies about the massacre that killed their children. But the historic verdict nonetheless sends a strong message to those who inhabit the sewers of profitable misinformation out there: Society has had enough. Within hours of the shooting deaths of 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Ele...
As the nation grapples with the very real problem of border enforcement, Sen. Josh Hawley, as usual, offers not viable solutions but a self-serving stunt. The Missouri Republican has filed legislation that would give state and local officials the authority to patrol the border and enforce federal immigration law. The bill has no chance of passage because, among other problems, it is unconstitutional. Hawley surely knows this, but his intent, as always, is the headline. Hesitant as we are to give that to him, it’s important t...
Congressional Democrats are demanding that social media companies do a better job of policing threats against the FBI in the wake of the agency’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence for classified documents that he took from the White House. The issue presents a crucial test of those companies’ ability to weed out dangerous speech without trampling on the First Amendment. If the companies don’t respond transparently to these demands and make a stronger effort than they are currently making to detoxif...
How angry are some Republicans at what they see as betrayal by a centrist Democrat? Angry enough to betray sick military veterans, apparently. That’s the only rational explanation for the sudden about-face by two dozen Senate Republicans, including Missouri’s Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley, who opposed legislation they previously supported to make it easier for cancer-stricken veterans to get help from the government. Facing ferocious public pushback, Blunt, Hawley and the other GOP senators who about-faced quickly about-faced aga...
For the United States to have any hope of restoring itself as a global beacon of democracy, the Biden administration must take a firm and consistent stand when dealing with dictators. If other nations’ leaders can’t embrace the fundamentals of democracy, they don’t deserve to be welcomed on these shores. President Joe Biden faced some precarious choices last week in hosting the Summit of the Americas and scheduling a July trip to Saudi Arabia, a notorious human rights abuser. The easy part was Biden’s refusal to invite...
U.S. gross domestic product shrank 1.4% in the first quarter at the same time inflation continued to soar. For older Americans, that combination conjures memories of 1970s stagflation, a nightmarish combination of double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, soaring gasoline prices and persistently high unemployment. The entire economic mess got dumped on President Jimmy Carter’s lap after the 1976 election, even though it was neither his fault nor the fault of his predecessors, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon. Sometime...
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement announcement offers Republicans a real opportunity. No, not the opportunity to install yet another hard-right conservative on the bench. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell already can claim victory for the kinds of obstructionist and unfair manipulation that yielded the court’s current lopsided split favoring conservatives. Now is the moment for Republicans to make a move to save this badly divided nation from splitting even further. Would it be as...
Normally, the website The Gateway Pundit can and should be laughed off as right-wing, fake-news nonsense. But as Reuters recently reported, the site’s false allegations of election fraud in jurisdictions around the country have stoked harassment and death threats against two dozen election officials. The reason toxic platforms like this exist is because there is a market for them. Only when the news-consuming public learns to be more discerning in where it looks for information will those platforms loosen their damaging g...
Republican politicians once defended a “hands-off” approach to local government and entrepreneurship. Local governmental units like school boards knew how best to educate and protect local kids without meddling from distant capitals, went the thinking, just as private businesses knew best how to make their own workplace policies. That’s apparently out the window with today’s GOP in places like Missouri, where Attorney General Eric Schmitt is suing school districts to prohibit mask mandates, and Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott...
Is America safer after its 20-year war on terrorism in Afghanistan has resulted in the Taliban’s victory? The answer, like the war itself, is muddled. The lack of resolution should cause considerable discomfort to Americans who lived through the trauma of 9/11 and cheered the U.S. military’s quick routing of al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts in 2001. After the World Trade Center’s collapse, Americans had every right to believe President George W. Bush’s declaration from atop the wreckage that the United States would make th...
American healthcare is too expensive. Exhibit A is a new study of Americans’ medical debt published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That debt is twice as large as had previously been estimated — $140 billion in collections as of June 2020, compared to an earlier estimate of $81 billion. And it disproportionately affects the dozen states like Missouri that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Despite a referendum that approved Medicaid expansion, and the fact that the federal gov...
President Donald Trump defines himself by the people who surround him, especially the top advisers he picks to run his administration — people he described in early 2016 as “the best and most serious people” and “top of the line professionals.” When it comes to pronouncing on their ability to abide by the law and remain corruption-free, however, Trump falls eerily silent or resorts to blaming the scandals plaguing his administration on “fake news.” Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute in...
Recall during the 2016 presidential campaign when protesters began heckling and interrupting candidate Donald Trump wherever he spoke. Instead of shutting Trump up, they caused him to double down on insulting public rhetoric. In fact, Trump told his supporters to “go ahead and punch someone in the face, and I’ll pay your legal bills.” That ugly period encapsulated everything that’s wrong with the escalating nastiness of American political discourse today. The concept of civility is getting buried in a new competition of one-...
What is it about “shopping while black” that’s so hard for some store employees to understand? In the past week, two troubling incidents involving African-Americans at retail outlets should prompt employers to offer a refresher course on customer relations. It should be made crystal clear that it’s not just morally wrong but catastrophic for business when people assume that skin color equates with potential criminality. The moral argument should be compelling enough. It is simply racist for anyone to assume that black c...
Pop culture has turned former President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” into the butt of jokes 45 years after the famously ruthless and paranoid president created it, in part, to monitor journalists. A new Trump administration effort to compile a database of journalists and “media influencers” is not the least bit funny and represents a clear threat to First Amendment rights. Congress should intervene to stop the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to monitor 290,000 global news outlets. The department has advertised...
