Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Now that the dust has settled over the Sept. 10 presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I’m ready to call the election for Harris. And not just because of the debate. There’s also Taylor Swift, the superstar childless cat lady who cleverly endorsed Harris immediately after Harris wiped the floor with Trump. If you don’t see the significance of the Swifties, you haven’t been paying attention to pop culture. We’re talking hundreds of millions of fans worldwide, millions of whom will be voting right here in t...
As the president of Clovis Community College and the Chancellor of the Eastern New Mexico University System, we want to outline the benefits of General Obligation Bond 3 in the Nov. 5 General Election and why it deserves the support of the citizens of Curry and Roosevelt counties. Our institutions provide access and opportunity for higher education to our region, and the students of both campuses deserve high-quality learning environments. Passage of Bond 3 will allow higher education institutions in Curry and Roosevelt count...
I had so many ideas for this column. But every time I started to write, the sentences would fall flat. Fortunately, as I sat at the keyboard, inspiration came to me in the most natural way. I was sitting at the same desk I’d been at on Sept. 11, 2001, as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. It was the same keyboard I’d used to write an email to my brother Michael in Manhattan after the family couldn’t get through to him on the phone. It was the same chair I’d collaps...
A friend of mine, who has long been retired from her career as an elementary public school educator, was reminiscing recently about her days in the classroom, and the stories she read aloud to her students. Her favorites were the “Little Britches” books by Ralph Moody, autobiographical accounts of Moody moving west with his family in 1906 to a Colorado ranch and the many adventures that followed. She said she found that no matter where she was teaching — and no matter the a...
Some form of the Golden Rule can be found in many ancient writings, including: the New Testament, the Talmud, The Koran and The Analects of Confucius. The Golden Rule states, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Politicos have never grasped this concept. When the New York Times decided during the 2016 presidential campaign that Donald Trump was so beyond the pale that he no longer deserved the equal treatment afforded other candidates, they began to openly cast...
How can you expect people, especially those who believe in politics, to agree on anything when they can’t even agree on the reality of what is happening right in front of them? Add in the opposing way events are framed, depending on the bias of the information source, and I don’t think it’s possible. I saw neighboring yards in town; one had a Trump yard sign and the other had a Harris sign. I’d bet both think they are the reasonable one and their neighbor is nuts. Or maybe t...
Trump or Harris? The pundits and so-called political experts in the liberal and conservative media are still arguing over who won last week’s presidential debate. They’ll never agree. And they’re all so biased and partisan, they can’t be trusted to be honest anyway. But both sides did seem to agree on one thing – ABC News was the biggest loser. By far. Whatever shred of legitimacy ABC’s news-gathering operation had left, which wasn’t much, it was destroyed in full public v...
What is old is new again, at least in the world of politics. Recently, Fox News host Jesse Watters made a quip questioning the veracity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate during a live edition of The Five. Regardless of whether he was being intellectually dishonest or not, Watters presented the topic of Obama’s birth certificate as somehow fraught with political intrigue and announced he would be dispatching his producer to find out the truth. “That’s why we’ll be sending J...
When New Mexico’s rural hospitals called for help, our entire state came together – hospitals statewide, the governor’s office, NM Health Care Authority and legislators from both sides of the aisle -- to pass the 2024 Health Care Delivery and Access Act. New Mexico is at a pivotal moment as we struggle to address healthcare challenges facing our hardworking families especially when it comes to access to healthcare. Almost half of our residents are enrolled in Medicaid and, frankly, the Medicaid reimbursement rates to pay o...
What are you waiting for? The truth is that most of us spend the vast majority of our lives waiting for something. Maybe it’s a birthday. A vacation. A holiday. A graduation. A wedding. An anniversary. A retirement. Maybe it’s when the baby is finally born, or the student loan (good luck waiting that out!) or car or house or business loan is eventually paid off. You waited — even as you were working all the necessary hours and many more — to achieve that hard-to-reach business goal or rank. You waited — even as you trained, p...
I was chatting with someone the other day who had once upon a time moved to our area from Santa Fe, the state capitol, “the City Different.” “Don’t hold it against me,” she said. “Not at all. You were probably there when it was really Santa Fe. You yourself know it’s changed over the years,” I said. My favorite Santa Fe quote emerged around 1990 in some state newspaper. A columnist wrote something to the effect, he so hated seeing “New Mexico’s crown jewel turn into one of California and New York’s cheap rhinestones.” I...
It is said that when Colin Powell was secretary of state, he demanded three things from his briefers; “Tell me what you know;” “Tell me what you don’t know;” “Tell me what you think.” In today’s environment, when U.S. intelligence agencies are asked about an issue, the word “assess” appears in most of their responses. For instance, when asked who Putin supports or favors in our current presidential race, news reports show that the answer was some form of, “Based on our exper...
If you were born in Roosevelt County from 1936 to 1979 (with the exception for part of the 1940s), you may have been delivered by Herman O. Lehman. He was our family doctor and friend for most of those years. We called him Doc Lehman until his son Charles, also a doctor, moved to Portales in later years to practice in the office that had once been his dad’s. At that point, Herman became “old Doc Lehman,” since Charlie was – obviously -- “young Doc Lehman.” Old Doc Lehman came...
Imagine if your neighbors stuck signs in their yards telling everyone about the conditions they suffer from. “We’re proud of our itchy armpit fungus!” Would you be convinced to get infected, too? I’m already seeing political yard signs. If people advertise their support for a political candidate, could they be convinced to put signs in their yards proclaiming their diseases and mental problems? Scratch the part about mental problems; political signs already announce those t...
Last week began the federal antitrust trial against Google for alleged monopolistic practices when it comes to the online advertising space. The Justice Department contends the company has outsize dominion over what is a lifeline for industries including online publishing. Google, of course, doesn’t see it that way. Google seems keen on deploying the arguments that monopolists always do in these scenarios: that its dominance makes things more seamless, integrated and navigable to publishers and ad sellers. That is not r...
America’s free press is in crisis. Local journalism, necessary to maintaining an informed and active citizenry, is struggling to survive as Big Tech companies — namely Meta and Google — have used their power to manipulate news and magazine publishers for their own financial gain. They set the rules for how, where and when we see news content online and how much revenue is made. By not negotiating with local news publishers on usage terms and refusing to pay them fairly — or at all — for their work, Big Tech has driven ma...
I heard a report the other day that the St. James Hotel in Cimarron is closing. Another Wild West landmark goes down. The St. James is where I got the best steak I’ve ever eaten, but that wasn’t so long ago, when its owners’ focus was more on fine dining than cowboy accommodations. Back in the day, it was a rough and rowdy place, to say the least. Lots of shoot-em-ups, dozens of killings — one estimate I read had the total at 26 dead. Traveling lawmen and notorious outlaws frequented the place, and stories have been passed...
“He was on our radar.” How many times have we heard that after a mass shooting at a high school or a shopping mall? We heard it for the umpteenth time again last week after a disturbed 14-year-old kid in Georgia took a rifle to school and killed two students, two teachers, and injured nine others. “He was on our watch list,” the local police said to no one’s surprise. A year ago, after the FBI’s radar picked up Colt Gray reportedly making threats online that he was going to “s...
One can only wonder about JD Vance’s peculiar and freakish obsession with people who do not have children. The Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential candidate has disturbingly targeted women who are absent of biological offspring as “childless cat ladies” (apparently being an adoptive parent or stepparent does not qualify) and perversely stated child-free Americans are “more sociopathic” than Americans with kids and make the U.S. “less mentally stable.” As Vance sees...
Never in my life as a political observer have I ever associated “joy” with a candidacy for any office, much less the presidency. But it’s not the word so much as it is the sentiment the Harris-Walz campaign is trying to tap into — an upbeat view of our future. It’s something that’s been lacking for some time now, although there are still folks out there who see America’s future in a positive light. I recently read a piece by Matthew Yglesias, a “techno-optimist” and blogger/journalist who contends there are many reasons to lo...
As I watched the Kennedy siblings close ranks against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because of his support for Donald Trump, it reminded me of the fragility of human bonds. Over the past eight years, since Trump burst onto the political scene, I’ve witnessed the crumbling of so many relationships, including marriages and childhood friendships, based upon an absolute inability to deal with difference and dissent. I know very few conservatives who have disowned liberal friends. The o...
When a reporter recently asked Presidential Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if she could name a single accomplishment that she could attribute to Vice President Kamala Harris, Jean-Pierre stalled, stuttered and stammered before coming up with the response that Biden-Harris was a “team effort” and should be viewed that way. Shortly after that exchange, Kamala took steps to distance herself from the Biden half of the team. This became blatantly obvious when former First Lad...
Our state is facing a water crisis, and we need our elected officials to act quickly to help solve it. As the executive director of the Ogallala Land & Water Conservancy, I see every day how important water is, especially in eastern New Mexico, which is home to the largest amount of agriculture statewide. Here, we are ground zero for water challenges, but also for local solutions being carried out by community partnerships, collective action and collaboration. We know all too well the dangers of letting our sole finite...
Anyone who is on the side of censorship and punishing people for their speech is not on the right side. It doesn’t matter if they are a government, a corporation, or an individual. It doesn’t matter if they are a crooked Brazilian judge, a U.S. presidential candidate, or a probable android running a “book” of faces. Banning speech, especially for political reasons, is inexcusable. Freedom of speech is non-negotiable, but this matters less when it’s speech you like hearing a...
I learned last week there is an organization called the National Coffee Association. Each spring it releases a “National Coffee Data Trends (NCDT) report,” as it did earlier this year. In skimming the highlights from its press release, I discovered that I’m among the 67% of Americans who drink coffee on a daily basis, which they claim is “more than any other beverage, including tap or bottled water.” Coffee wasn’t a regular part of our family life when I was growing up....
