New Mexico Mercury

Insight New Mexico - Gary King

V.B. Price talks with New Mexico Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Gary King about the behavioral health audit, New Mexico's water situation, the Kirtland spill, APD and more.

Baby Cruz

El Machete

Mercury Q&A: APS Board Vice President Kathy Korte

We speak with Kathy Korte, Vice President of the Albuquerque Public School Board, about her efforts to rally teachers, parents and the public against the onslaught of standardized testing and a teacher evaluation criteria that has many teachers fuming.

Lobbying in the Land of Enchantment: Special Interests and their Hired Guns

Common Cause New Mexico (CCNM) just released its latest “Connect the Dots” report focusing on lobbyists and lobbying in New Mexico. The research looks at who are the lobbyists; who are their employers; political contributions to legislators by both lobbyists and their employers; and money spent by both lobbyists and their employers to entertain and feed legislators.

In 2013, there were 673 lobbyists registered in New Mexico, outnumbering legislators by over six to one.

The report takes a look at the lobbyist corps in Santa Fe and asks who they are and who they represent...

Nurses and Teachers

We cannot live without them, yet our current society treats them as if their work were not what it is - a noble calling.

Book Review - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

When Michelle Alexander took a job working on racial issues in the criminal justice system, she expected to find the same problems with racial bias that afflict all institutions of our society.  Instead, she found a large scale, intentionally created, ostensibly race-neutral (“colorblind”) system of racialized social control reaching deep into the fabric of African-American life.  What Alexander found shocked her.  As I read her book, it shocked me.  The New Jim Crow (The New Press, $19.95, 261 pages) should shock any reader...

The Anti-abortion Theocrats

Those kind and good people who want to ban abortion after twenty weeks really, behind the masks and shadow-dancing fetuses, are arguing for the establishment of a theocracy where God’s Law determines public policy.

They talk with great conviction about the sanctity of life and they say the aborted child-to-be feels pain. For example, let’s imagine the late-term fetus that has no brain, or no lungs, or no heart. Further, let’s imagine the mother-not-to-be and her doctor. If abortion is no longer an option, is it better to let this woman who bears such a child die in agony? Does this woman and how she wants to decide count for nothing?...

Provincial Matters, 10-28-2013

V.B. Price's weekly collection of appreciations and observations.

Albuquerque Police Oversight Review Concluding

A task force working on police accountability in Albuquerque is on track to wrap up its mission by the end of the year.  Although the city council-appointed Police Oversight Task Force (POTF) held this month the last of three forums designed to gather community input, public comments are still being accepted for a final report.

Andrew Lipman, POTF chair, told FNS that his group should have recommendations for possible changes to the official police oversight commission ready for city councilors to consider by the end of December.  “We need to keep on moving,” Lipman said...

Insight New Mexico - Eleanor Bravo

V.B. Price talks with Eleanor Bravo about the societal and environmental impact of fracking in New Mexico. Eleanor is the Southwest Organizer for Food and Water Watch, an international non-profit working with grassroots organizations around the world to create an economically and environmentally viable future.