New Mexico Mercury

Sex and red herrings

The very discussion of the ability to obtain an abortion in American is a “red herring”.  A topic put out to distract us from real issues.  We are fighting about shutting down abortion clinics when we should be talking about why we need them. 

Approximately 20,000 American girls, under the age of 15, become pregnant each year.  Shouldn’t we be talking about who is having sexual intercourse with our 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 year old girls?...

Provincial Matters, 8-5-2013

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

Harry Truman and the decision to drop the bomb

On the eve of the 68th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historians are still unable to answer the most basic questions: Who decided to drop the bombs, why were they dropped, why were they even built?

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki. In the decades since, the mysteries about the decisions have only multiplied the more researchers have delved into documents and the memories of those involved...

Stand Your Ground

El Machete

Insight New Mexico - Dorinda Moreno

V.B. Price talks with Dorinda Moreno and Sadie Vialpando Williams about their efforts to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the landmark New Mexico film Salt of the Earth.

Extreme weather events are the new normal, are we prepared?

I’m happy to believe that the astounding, 89-mph wind that roared through the city last Friday was a once-in-a-lifetime event. National Weather Service meteorologist Clay Anderson told the Journal: “The storm was so anomalous that the chances are that everyone in Albuquerque that’s alive will not see a wind gust like again in their lifetime in Albuquerque associated with thunderstorms.”

Reassured? Don’t be. Notice that Anderson isn’t excluding winds that don’t come with thunderstorms. “I think we need to be prepared for 79-mile-an-hour and 69-mile-an-hour windstorms,” Anderson told me. “They can do damage too"...

Loving our children means educating them

What does it mean to say we love our children, or that we believe they are our future? What does it mean when our elected officials tell us that education is important, or that the US has the best educational system in the world (a lie we hear frequently, from our president down to the gullible man or woman on the street)?

The country that glibly considers itself to be the most advanced, the most developed, the most powerful in the world, spends just 5.5 percent of its GDP educating its children. According to UN 2011 statistics, the United States is first in the world in military spending, designating 4.7 percent of its GDP to its armed forces...

The other welfare: Oil and gas royalties

It may come as a surprise to some that the royalty rate charged to companies extracting oil and gas from federal lands is the same today as it was in the 1920s, when Woodrow Wilson was president.

Oil and gas found on federal lands belong to the taxpayers, who should be fairly compensated for the extraction of public resources. Updating the federal rate to match state rates would ensure a fair return by closing a gap that costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year...

Anti-women petition on the city ballot

It looks likely that a petition to ban abortions in Albuquerque after 20 weeks will make it on to the ballot this October in the municipal elections.

Chances are this blatantly sexist, sinister, anti-woman initiative will make this city election one of the most hotly contested since the l970s.

Any candidate who thinks they can skirt reality and not take sides on this matter should be banished from politics and never heard from again...

My journey through racism

Race and racism are back on the national agenda due to the furor over the killing of the black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of his killer, the more than 100 demonstrations across the United States recently and President Obama's dramatic declaration that he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago.

These emotional events, producing a roller-coaster of passions, have reopened the temporarily suppressed debate over what it means to be white or black in America.

Against this background, there is, I believe, new relevance to an essay I wrote in 2008 after Obama's election as President, an essay that is a chapter in my anthology published last year, A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People...