The Eastern New Mexico News - Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Growing older has many drawbacks and one unalloyed pleasure: passing judgment on the younger generation. Lately, people have been scrutinizing the members of Generation Y and finding them deficient. What’s wrong with the kids? A...

One afternoon in November, Houston Texans lineman Fred Weary was pulled over by Houston police for a traffic violation. The cops say he was belligerent and uncooperative. Weary’s lawyer says he did as he was told. What no one...

Democrats are complaining about a Republican ad that ran in Tennessee making fun of Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. It features mock voters giving dumb reasons to vote for him, such as “Terrorists need their privacy,... Full story

Time travel, long a staple of science fiction, has so far amounted to nothing more than a fantasy. But anyone interested in paying a visit to the past may soon get the chance. On Nov. 7, voters in Michigan will decide on a ballot... Full story

For a prosecutor, DNA analysis can be the best thing in the world. Nothing facilitates a conviction more than biological evidence irrefutably connecting the defendant to the crime through blood, saliva or semen. But DNA analysis... Full story

Once you read the first sentence of this column, its momentum will carry you from paragraph to paragraph until a few minutes from now, you arrive, blissfully enlightened, at the final word. No, you say? You may stop reading right... Full story

If we came up with a sure cure for lung cancer, we wouldn’t withhold it because it might encourage people to smoke. But something about heroin addiction tends to cloud our thinking on public health policy. On this subject,... Full story

We knew we had won World War II when the Japanese signed surrender documents on the USS Missouri. We knew we had won the Cold War when the Berlin Wall fell. But it’s hard to think of any single event that would tell us we have... Full story

Socialism failed because the governments that embraced it couldn’t solve the basic problem of economics: what to produce and how much. In the old Soviet bloc, warehouses filled up with things people wouldn’t buy, while...

In the movie “Love Actually,” a widowed father, played by Liam Neeson, asks his morose grade-school son what’s bothering him. Is it his mother’s death? Problems at school? Bullies? “You really want to know?” answers...

Do you know you need to save more for retirement, but you just can’t make yourself do it? Relax. Soon, you may not have to make yourself do anything — you’ll save more in spite of yourself. It’s a new approach to financing... Full story

President Bush is confident of ultimate success in Iraq, and he is patiently waiting for its achievement. I’m certain that unicorns exist, and I’m willing to hang around till they show up in my yard. We may both be deluded,...

If you take a look at mass media aimed at teenagers, you start to see a pattern. What topic suffuses teenage prime-time dramas? Sex. Movies aimed at high school boys? Violence. Music popular among the SAT-taking crowd? Sex and...

Mel Gibson drove drunk, got arrested and vilified Jews, thus disgracing himself, and possibly forfeiting millions of dollars in future earnings. Man, was he lucky. By getting behind the wheel with a blood-alcohol level 50 percent h... Full story

Huey Long, the fabled Louisiana populist governor and senator, had no special reverence for intellectuals and generally did his best to sound like an unlettered hayseed. But during his time in power, he poured money into Louisiana...

Steve Chapman: syndicated columnist In 1980, a book was published about the failure of liberal policies in New York City. Its title, “The Cost of Good Intentions,” soon became a conservative catchphrase about the limits of...

Predators on the Internet, priests molesting children, Duke lacrosse players accused of rape — judging from the news or TV crime dramas, sexual assault appears to be an endless national epidemic. So powerful is this impression... Full story

The Bush administration has a habit of misreading the Constitution, pushing its powers as far as possible and expecting Congress to meekly go along. But now the House of Representatives has decided to fight back — not by...

Conservatives, almost by definition, have an appreciation of the past: They want to conserve valuable traditions and principles. But one of the paradoxes of many people who go by that name is they are forgetting essential precepts...

The immigration protests held across the country on Monday serve as a perfect Rorschach test: What reaction did you have to the sight of hundreds of thousands of immigrants marching down American streets, calling on Congress to...

Secrecy is one of those virtues, like candor, that can easily be overdone. A strong commitment to safeguarding sensitive national security information is a good thing. A blind insistence on concealing anything and everything is...

If a hospital wanted to advertise that it upholds sanitary standards higher than any required by the government, no one would object. A used car dealer that decided to offer only vehicles with the best crash-test scores would be...

French students and unions have been protesting for weeks now over a law making it easier for companies to get rid of employees. Under the measure recently signed by President Jacques Chirac, they may fire workers younger than 26... Full story

April 1, wrote Mark Twain, “is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364.” But cheer up. No matter how foolish you may sometimes feel, you can always take comfort in knowing that over the past year,...

The other day, the Supreme Court did something surprising. It said that if a man stands at the threshold of his own house and tells the police they may not enter without a warrant, then — get a load of this, willya? — they may...