Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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“Short words are best,” asserted Winston Churchill, “and the old words when short are best of all.” So, may I suggest three — very short and very old, which, when lined up and strung together are the best three that could possibly be: God is love. These words are chiseled into the rock, woven into the fabric, of the universe. More than that, if anything could be more, they are living and implanted by the Author of life into its every cell, resonating in every breath and heart...
“This isn’t my father’s Secret Service.” That’s what I immediately tweeted in response to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Little did I know. Every day, drip by drip, we get more proof of the incredible incompetence of the agency that is supposed to prevent the kind of shooting that happened in broad daylight near Pittsburgh. While we wait for the inevitable shocking new revelations about the attempt on Trump’s life, he, his family and millions of other people are...
Turns out, Democrats have a mind of their own. You can see it in the fallout from Joe Biden’s weak debate performance, when the president showed his age. And you could see it in last week’s special session of the New Mexico Legislature, when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham attempted to run roughshod over her party with poorly vetted legislation. It should have been a humbling experience from our second-term governor, who has been getting things done her way for nearly six years now. But instead of coming out, hat in hand, to apo...
The political world was shaken by the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Footage from the event showed Trump clutch his right ear and go down after gunshots rang out. Quickly rising to his feet amid a phalanx of U.S. Secret Service agents, Trump pumped a fist at the crowd as blood seeped from the side of his head. The agents responded swiftly to protect the former president and shot the apparent attacker, a registered Republican, to death. From the...
I had to go to Roswell for a fancy eye appointment. I always wanted to be a traveler. It didn’t work out as well as I’d dreamed so I listen to travelers’ tales from other travelers, shoot the breeze with folks lots of times. Talking to some of the staff I learned some commuted from Albuquerque to Roswell to work there, and some of the Roswell folks working there had to go to Albuquerque from time to time. They had something in common: They didn’t like the vast emptiness between Roswell and Vaughn. “There’s nothing out...
Over the five years I’ve been in journalism, I’ve conducted many interviews. Because I graduated from Eastern New Mexico University out of the communication department, you can imagine I spoke to Department Chair Patti Dobson often. And yes, interviewed her multiple times; whether it was for an assignment or even in my professional career if the news related back to ENMU. Learning of Dobson’s passing on Friday really was a heavy weight for me to carry. And undoubtedly so, for all of Dobson’s other students. In a voice m...
Harry Truman reportedly said that the Joe Rosenthal photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima guaranteed the existence of the U.S. Marine Corps for the next 100 years. Truman was right. The photo became an icon throughout the nation and a monument in Washington, D.C. The Trump political rally held in Pennsylvania a week ago has created another such moment in history. The heroic image of a bloodied Donald J. Trump, rising out of a crowd of secret service personnel, Old Glory...
Once again, some evil loser killed a person, but not the specific one he wished to kill. Donald Trump, his presumed primary target, survived with a minor injury. I am no fan of politicians or their institutions, but this isn’t the way to change things for the better. Not even close! If you dislike a politician, vote against him, or better yet, do something productive: Build a life for yourself that doesn’t hinge on politics or depend on government doing things your way. Be...
The horrid attempted assassination against former President Donald Trump amidst a rancorous presidential campaign brings to mind the phrase, “let us have peace.” Those are the words chiseled high over Riverside Drive, right above the portico on Grant’s Tomb. It was the slogan used by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious Union Army commander in the Civil War, in his successful 1868 presidential campaign. Opened in 1897, the granite and marble mausoleum on 122nd St. was once the most visited tourist site in the country, outdr...
Ever on the hunt for adventure - and with blissful ignorance - I signed on to help drive a 26-foot rental truck from Texas to New Jersey this month, a journey of 1,800-plus miles through eight states. Much to my surprise, anyone with a driver's license can waltz into a rental agency and pick up one of these boat-sized vehicles and drive it away with absolutely no instruction whatsoever. Our truck – a gigantic mustard-yellow creation – was theoretically designed for three: the...
One day, almost 60 years ago, when I was just a small lad growing up at 125 N. Goliad Street, in Amarillo, Brock Bronson scared the living daylights out of me. Someday, I’ll get around to describing a “living daylight,” but suffice it to say now that I’m still short of them. Brock’s fault. Brock Bronson. Now there’s a name that means business. Especially if it’s attached to a teenaged bully sort of guy. Especially if you’ve barely broken into double digits age-wise yourself. E...
Being far away from home in Iceland and Britain for the last two weeks was perfect timing. Just as President Biden was proving to the whole country that he’s incapable of being president for another four years, or another week, I left the madness of American politics and flew off to Europe for a vacation cruise. As I often have had the pleasure of doing, I traveled with my travel-agent wife Colleen and a bunch of her clients. This time, though, we also took along my two k...
If you need assistance with your federal benefits, you can speak with staff members for U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan at their district offices. If you have issues with the city or county that need to be resolved, you can reach your representative on the city council and county commission at their offices. Constituent services are a vital part of the job for most elected officials. If, however, your problems are with the state, you can try reaching your state senator and representative, but they don’t have an o...
By now, most New Mexicans are aware of the case against the movie star Alec Baldwin. It was getting plenty of play both here at home and abroad until, poof, it went away. It shouldn’t disappear so easily. There are more than enough questions still left to answer. The case against Baldwin was dismissed Friday after it was discovered that ammunition from the set of “Rust” had been “misfiled” and was not disclosed to the defense. That was enough to compel Santa Fe’s First Judicial District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer to grant a mo...
I saw an old friend in the grocery store the other day. My old pal was on the superette shelf. Spam. But the stuff wasn’t 99 cents a can anymore. Somehow Spam had risen to the ranks of being “high dollar,” about $4 a can. I ate Spam when I was a kid. I had cans of it stacked up in a kitchen cabinet during my groovy bachelor days. I mean the cost was just right. I’d fry up some Spam slices, get them nice and brown, whip up a box of macaroni and cheese, and bada-bing! A meal fit for a king. But when I started hanging around...
The Democrat Party leadership has painted itself into a corner. It did it knowingly and diligently. In February of this year, Special Counsel Robert K. Hur published his report on the possible misuse of classified information by President Joe Biden. After interviewing Biden for five hours over two days, Hur concluded that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur further determined that even if the president were indicted for any offence, he would probably be found un...
This month, Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” commented that “one of the most alarming things” about “Project 2025” is the blatant admission that Donald Trump did not accomplish everything he intended to in his first administration. “They got a slow start […] so their codeword is ‘day one,’” Ben-Ghiat told MSNBC’s Katie Phang of the think-tank’s proposal document, which is assumed to represent a considerable percentage of Trump polic...
Roosevelt County has stepped into a trap. Convening a U.S. Amendments Convention would be a mistake. The Bill of Rights already contains the most important Constitutional amendments and the federal government usually disobeys it. The feds interpret those amendments into nothingness any time one would stand in the way of government doing something it wants to do. The fundamental human right to own and carry weapons? Government illegally decides what kind of weapons it will allo...
Summer is often a season for moving, and this year that includes a significant number of my friends and family members. Some are only relocating to new abodes in their existing communities; others have quite the jaunts ahead of them, with the longest tackling a trek of nearly 2,000 miles. No matter the reason and no matter the length of journey, when someone I know is moving, it inspires me to look with a fresh eye at my own accumulation of “stuff” (this is a family paper but...
Pets and patriotism. Aside from the pleasing (to my ears) alliteration of two words beginning with Ps, I’m not sure what I think of those three words strung together. I’m not aware of any sociological or other studies funded to try to determine if a link exists between pet ownership and a significantly higher level of patriotism than the levels normally measured in pet-less people. But, come to think of it, don’t you think that sounds exactly like the sort of study some gover...
The latest edition of Kids Count provides more devastating news about New Mexico and the condition of our children. The report, created by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (a center/left non-profit that works nationwide) analyzes and ranks all 50 states based on 16 variables relating to childhood outcomes. Surprising absolutely no one, New Mexico was once again at 50th. I analyzed the report and counted seven variables that improved, seven that got worse, and two that stayed the...
For the past five decades or longer, the state Legislature has been planning for what we will do when the oil runs out. We’ve set up permanent funds to ensure we’ll be able to keep our schools open and provide other essential services, tucking away money that is not needed now. We haven’t planned nearly as well for the depletion of an even more precious resource — water. The state didn’t even have a water plan until 1987, and the one drafted that year led more to regional competition than conservation. Many of the plans sub...
About 12 years ago, when I was at the Las Vegas Optic, we worked up a special section on the seven-county region of Northeast New Mexico. Not surprisingly, our lead story was about water. At the time, Las Vegas was facing some serious drought conditions that had slowed the Gallinas River to little more than a trickle, leaving the city — which gets nearly all its water from the Gallinas — with only a couple months of water in reserve. City officials at that time said the reservoirs were only 68% full and sinking. Also aro...
When I get the Coronavirus, I think of my closest encounter with death. It was back when I was about 13 or so in the seventh grade. I was dashing across a side street that intersected with one of the hometown’s main drags. Suddenly a car made a rocketing turn off the main drag right in front of me, maybe only a foot away. “WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING DUMB KID,” the driver yelled. Well, he didn’t say “dumb kid” but that’ll have to do for a family newspaper. On the other side of the street I stood for a bit, thinking about...
Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series about that time in 1978 when Gray and Sara Wilson bought the Roosevelt County community of Pep. There may not be many things more daunting than moving into a new-to-you small community and finding your niche in a place where everyone else seems to have known each other forever. When Gray and Sara Wilson bought the town of Pep in 1978, they didn’t know a soul here, but I can’t remember anyone who ever more joyously embra...
