Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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BERLIN — More than 16 years after the Wall fell, West Berlin and East Berlin have melded together enough that a visitor wandering around the city often can’t tell which was which. But at a dingy gray building surrounded by concrete walls topped with barbed wire, there is no escaping the creepy feel of communism. This was a prison run by the East German secret police, the Stasi, which has been preserved as a memorial to the crimes of the past. Our guide today is a paternal figure with the learned air of a retired college pro...
BERLIN — My apartment here, located in a leafy neighborhood on the outskirts of town, overlooks Wannsee, an idyllic lake that has been frozen over for much of the winter. From my balcony, on a typical day, you can see the ice dotted with people strolling, bicycling, walking dogs, or cruising in ice sailing vessels. If you raise your eyes a bit, you can also see a villa on the opposite shore known locally as the Wannsee House. On a January day in 1942, a group of Nazi officials met there to make plans for what they called “The...
BERLIN — Will the last person in Europe please turn out the lights? That’s the question being asked from Moscow to Madrid, where people are having fewer babies than ever before. The continent is anticipating something hard to imagine 30 years ago: a shrinking population. A generation ago, we were warned that the “population explosion” would lead to famine, war and environmental catastrophe. Today, the alleged danger is a population implosion. No one disputes the basic trend. Here in Germany, the average woman has 1.4 childre...
It’s hard to describe the views of Rev. Fred Phelps without feeling soiled by the association, but I’ll do it anyway. He attests that God is disgusted with America’s tolerance of homosexuality. In his view, the Almighty is punishing the nation by using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to kill American troops in Iraq. God wants our soldiers dead. Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., is not content to deliver this message to his congregation. He also communicates it in the least welcoming venue... Full story
President Bush is a bundle of paradoxes. He thinks the scope of the federal government should be limited but the powers of the president should not. He wants judges to interpret the Constitution as the framers did, but doesn’t think he should be constrained by their intentions. He attacked Al Gore for trusting government instead of the people, but insists that anyone who wants to defeat terrorism must put absolute faith in the man at the helm of government. His conservative allies say Bush is acting to uphold the essential p...
During his long career in politics, Richard Nixon said a lot of things that were not strictly true. But the biggest misstatement of all may have come in 1958, when he went to Wisconsin to campaign against Democratic Sen. William Proxmire. If Proxmire were re-elected, Nixon told voters, “you will be in for a wild spending binge by radical Democrats drunk with visions of votes.” There are worse things than that — Proxmire, after all, had won the seat after the death of red-baiter Joseph McCarthy, whose reckless smears got h...
When the history of the Federal Reserve is written, one of its most important chapters will cover the period from 1979 to 2006, when the Fed was under the stewardship of Paul Volcker and then Alan Greenspan. That chapter will have a simple title: The Conquest of Inflation. For those who have grown up in an era of price stability, this may sound like an achievement on the order of kicking sand in the face of a 98-pound weakling. Those who recall the overheated environment of the 1970s know it was more akin to pinning...
When Florida passed a law in 1987 making it easier for citizens to get licenses to carry concealed firearms, opponents predicted that blood would run in the streets. "When you have 10 times as many people carrying guns as you do now, and they get into an argument and tempers flash, you're going to have people taking out guns and killing people," one gun control activist said. Since the law was passed, it turns out, Florida's murder rate has been cut in half. Instead of becoming more dangerous, the state has become...
With Alan Greenspan due to step down in January as chairman of the Federal Reserve, there is a lot of speculation about who will replace him. Big-name candidates abound, but I’m betting on the accountant who does President Bush’s taxes. The 19th-century writer Henry Adams said the progression of presidents from Washington to Grant refuted the theory of evolution. He could have said the same thing about the Supreme Court appointments made by George W. Bush, who has nominated one of the strongest candidates in the last 50 years... Full story
During the Civil War, President Lincoln, exasperated at Gen. George McClellan’s chronic reluctance to attack the enemy, said if the general wasn’t going to use the Army, he would like to borrow it. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush has the same idea. He doesn’t seem to notice that this time, the American military, far from being idle, is already being overused. Lately, the president has been pushing a change in federal law so the active-duty armed forces could intervene immediately when any sort of disaster str...
For those Americans who hate sending money to the Internal Revenue Service, here’s the good news: President Bush says he is not going to raise taxes to pay for the costs of Hurricane Katrina. And here’s the bad news: He’s already raised them. That happened the day he signed a bill laying out $51.8 billion to help the victims of the storm, on top of the $10.5 billion previously approved. It would be nice if the federal government could spend over $62 billion — not to mention the $200 billion that Katrina may eventua...
Of all the ideas I’ve heard about what to do with New Orleans, the best one came from former Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., who said we should “put somebody like former President Jimmy Carter in charge of rebuilding New Orleans.” As president, Carter distinguished himself by failing to free the hostages in Iran, failing to vanquish inflation and failing to solve the energy crisis. Were he to fail to rebuild New Orleans, he’d be doing the country a great service. If you were looking for a place expressly designed to endange...
“I think about Iraq every day — every single day.” No, those were not the words of peace activist Cindy Sheehan, who is camped out by the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, hoping for a meeting with the president so she can ask what her soldier son died for. Those were the words of the commander in chief back in June. It’s nice to know that President Bush can make time in his schedule to notice the war on a daily basis. But maybe the time to think was before he invaded. Then the nation wouldn’t find itself in the awful predicame...
No one really wants to fault Tony Blair as he strives to address the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism. After one round of deadly bombings and a second round of attempted ones just two weeks apart, everyone knows that his fears are not exactly a hallucination. In this case, most people in the United States as well as Britain would prefer the prime minister went too far rather than not far enough. In a statement last week, he praised his people’s “tolerance and good nature,” but said they feel “a determination that th... Full story
“America’s Most Dangerous Drug,” blares the cover story in Newsweek. If you haven’t been paying attention, you might wonder what drug the magazine has in mind. Tobacco, which kills more than 400,000 people each year? Alcohol, which contributes to thousands of traffic fatalities? Crack, which spawned a wave of violent crime in the 1990s? Heroin, which was supposedly an epidemic a few years ago? Answer: none of the above. America’s most dangerous drug of the week is methamphetamine, better known as crystal meth. It may sound...
NASA’s deliberations about when to resume flights by the space shuttle bring to mind the New Yorker cartoon of an executive on the phone, looking at his calendar and saying, “How about never? Does never work for you?” After spending 2 1/2 years and huge amounts of money to prevent a recurrence of the problem that destroyed the last shuttle, the agency now finds the problem has recurred. If NASA takes appropriate action, though, it won’t happen on the next shuttle flight, because there won’t be a next shuttle flight. W... Full story
When it comes to cell phones in cars, there are two kinds of people: those who make calls behind the wheel and those who hate them. The latter group includes not only me but a large majority of the Chicago City Council, which recently banned motorists from talking on hand-held devices while driving. Before these gadgets became common, the idea of being able to make a call from the comfort of your car was a pleasant prospect. The reality turned out to be pleasant as well — until we discovered all the other people doing the s... Full story
The Kansas City Star, editorializing about the president’s threat to veto the stem cell bill passed by the House, described human embryos as the “excess products of fertility procedures.” The Los Angeles Times, contemptuous of the president’s ethical misgivings, declared: “It’s not a choice between a human life and an embryo’s life. It’s a choice between real human lives and a symbolic statement about the value of an embryo.” The New York Times and others object that majorities in public opinion polls support this rese...
George W. Bush has succeeded through his reputation as a straight talker who doesn’t shrink from a fight, regardless of the political consequences. When he chooses a successor for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, we’ll find out if the reputation is warranted. The central issue hanging over the court for the last 32 years has been abortion. When conservatives talk about the imperial judiciary or judges who legislate social policy from the bench, they’re thinking first and last of the court’s 1973 decision in Roe v.... Full story
The editor in chief of Time Inc. made news the other day by offering to do what most of us take for granted: Obey the law. It’s about time. Reporter Matthew Cooper has declined to testify in the federal probe of the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. But after the Supreme Court spurned his appeal on Monday, his superiors elected to turn over his notes, which apparently will make his refusal irrelevant. “The same Constitution that protects the freedom of the press requires obedience to the final decisions of the...
By now, we all know the crucial question about embryonic stem cell research. Advocates have put it plainly: Should we let unused frozen embryos residing in fertility clinics be dumped down the drain — or should we use them to cure diabetes, Alzheimer's, paralysis and other health scourges? Confronted with that question, the U.S. House of Representatives voted last month to provide federal funding for experimentation on these embryos, despite the threat of a presidential veto. As Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., put it, the only e...
The Kansas City Star, editorializing about the president’s threat to veto the stem cell bill passed by the House, described human embryos as the “excess products of fertility procedures.” The Los Angeles Times, contemptuous of the president’s ethical misgivings, declared: “It’s not a choice between a human life and an embryo’s life. It’s a choice between real human lives and a symbolic statement about the value of an embryo.” The New York Times and others object that majorities in public opinion polls support this rese...
The other day, I was walking past the TV just as someone lamented, in a weary voice, “It was a war out there.” But this was not an American Marine in Baghdad. It was not a Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan. It was not a human rights worker in Darfur. The program was ESPN’s “Sports Center,” and the voice belonged to a basketball player who had just survived the frightful carnage of an NBA playoff game. I don’t know about you, but I have some thoughts about how that guy should spend Memorial Day — and they don’t involve...
Title IX, the 1972 federal law mandating equal opportunity for females in high school and college sports, has helped spur huge changes. But its supporters have trouble believing their eyes. Despite the enormous gains for female athletes, they act as though the gains could be erased overnight. They are currently outraged by a Bush administration guideline that offers colleges a new way to show they are not discriminating — by asking all women students if they are interested in participating in athletics. If the number who s... Full story
Abortion-rights advocates cherish the right of choice. But not all choices are created equal. People who uphold a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions want to deny others the right not to take part in those decisions. The demand for freedom has been turned into a pretext for compulsion. The issue arises because some pharmacists, acting under the protection of state laws, have declined to dispense morning-after pills and oral contraceptives, which they see as a form of abortion. Women with prescriptions for t...
