New Mexico Mercury

A city with no reporters

When the Albuquerque Tribune closed its doors in February 2008, our city not only lost an afternoon daily with a blue collar, left of center slant, it also lost a pool of reporters and editors, experts in the ways of local politics, society, history, and culture.

When the Trib’s doors closed, it was like having an eye poked out. Our world became harder to see and harder to understand.

As the Albuquerque Journal gets smaller and smaller every morning, as its newsstand price goes up to compensate for falling revenue, the troubling thought crosses one’s mind of living in a city with no daily newspaper, and no pool of print reporters and editors. It would be like flying blind...

Insight New Mexico - Nandini Kuehn

V.B. Price talks with Nandini Kuehn, Board President for New Mexico Health Connections, about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and its impact on New Mexico. She explains the benefits, dispels myths and gives a thorough breakdown of how Obamacare is already operating in the state.

Three NM legislators outed as ALEC members

While the Koch Brothers were wining and dining Governor Martinez and some big name Republicans here in New Mexico last week, one group of New Mexico legislators were high-tailing it out of town for some wining and dining of their own.

The shadowy corporate lobbying group ALEC held a closed-door convention last week in Chicago and this week they sent an expletive filled public letter –supposedly signed by 300 ALEC member legislators who attended the national ALEC conference - to a US Senator trying to investigate their involvement in passing “Stand Your Ground” laws in Florida and pushing them on states like New Mexico...

The buck stops where? 14-year-old dies at New Mexico State Fair rave

A 14-year-old girl dies tragically at a rave at the New Mexico State Fair replete with operational failures including non-existent security that did not check IDs or conduct pat down searches. Hannah Bruch’s father has reported to the Santa Fe New Mexican, that he believes that Hannah’s death may be related to the use of Ecstasy, which can cause the body temperature to escalate to fatal levels.

Ecstasy use is not exactly a secret at raves. It is so widely known that even the US Department of Justice has produced guidelines for ensuring the safety of minors at raves. Too bad New Mexico State Fair Manager Dan Mourning didn’t bother to read the materials. The operational failure that included a lack of security falls squarely on Mourning’s shoulders.

Yet, State Fair Manager Dan Mourning still has a job. He shouldn’t...

Behavioral health witch-hunt: A statewide McCarthyism

Let me start by calling the Governor a liar. A few days ago in an article on the status of mental health services here in Las Cruces, she said that some CEO's of the mental health facilities were getting a salary of 1.5 million dollars a year. At no time have any of these CEO's in New Mexico come close to making that type of salary. The number is deceitful, doesn't apply to any CEO salary and surfaced in reference to multiple individuals at an agency based in Santa Fe -- not any one person. It had nothing to do with any organization in the southern part of the state but the Governor repeats the number because it elicits outrage, as it should. If it were true...

Cruel and Unusual

El Machete

Tijeras: 40 years of speeding slowly into the future

When Tijeras incorporated as a village in 1973, it had about 300 residents, a cement plant next door and a highway to Albuquerque, where most of its residents worked. Preparing to celebrate its 40th birthday Aug. 17, it has 546 residents, a cement plant next door and a highway to Albuquerque, where most of its residents work.

By this perspective, remarkably little has changed over the course of a generation. That continuity, however, represents a notable achievement, according to Mayor Gloria Chavez, the village’s longest-serving chief officer, because the whole purpose of incorporation “was to have a voice.”

The village has not wanted to pursue the Edgewood model of expansive annexation and tumultuous commercial growth...

New Mexico Alcatraz

In the fall of l979, a number of reporters, including myself, toured the New Mexico state prison, Old Main as it was called, a few miles southwest of Santa Fe. We were to meet a new warden and get something of an inside look at the grim surroundings, including an up close inspection of the gas chamber

This was something less than four months before the February riot at the penitentiary, considered by many as the most brutal and sadistic prison uprising in American history, worse even than Attica in l971...

Weekly Poem: Sing no hymns save frog-croaks

Frogs, a sort of mascot for my brother
whose friends called him Hoppy.
One of his tree ornaments,
a frog wearing a Santa hat,
hangs on our tree every Christmas,
near the back.

Flat fields of his youth provided
nowhere to hide, the sky was too close;
so he left muddy rivers, farm ponds
and sloughs to become a frog out of water,
exotic desert amphibian, trying to drown
Vietnam nightly
at the Green Onion Bar...

Provincial Matters, 8-13-2013

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