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The Great Shrinksters:  Another wondrous lesson in conservative economics

17. July 2013

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By James Burbank

Welcome to another lesson in conservative economics. You will recall a few months ago we talked about how the Sequester would become the great centerpiece of our inspiring philosophy of smaller government and ever more money for good old us.

As in life, so it is in economics. You can’t change the established order. You can’t mess with the Nature of Things, which has been determined by God.

We would much rather cut social programs that are so darn wasteful and that support all the parasites we have to drag around as dead-weight meat...

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Outrage follows migrant deaths in Arizona

17. July 2013

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By Frontera NorteSur

The deaths of three young men in the Arizona desert last month have prompted Mexican non-governmental organizations to renew demands for actions and changes from the Mexican and U.S. governments. In a statement signed by scores of human rights, migrant, labor, civic, and faith-based organizations, the groups demanded meaningful policy shifts at a time when current U.S. legislative proposals for tighter security amount to a “virtual state of war on the border"...

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A Memorial for a Failed Border Policy

16. July 2013

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By Tom Barry A Memorial for a Failed Border Policy

Tom Barry, author of "Border Wars", explores border policy on the ground and illustrates how the new legislation making its way through Congress mirrors the dysfunction of current U.S. immigration policy.

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Two Hak-Ku*

16. July 2013

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By Hakim Bellamy

This first haiku is for a forthcoming book of haiku, I am publishing. However, current events have recently made this short poem very popular and very potent. Thank you to poet and friend Susana Rinderle and organizer, childhood friend and mother Tangi Lancaster for asking to use this poem as their mantra to grieve and get something that at least resembles justice in the Trayvon Martin case. The haiku that follows Black Poem for America is brand new, and titled Only in America...

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Lock him up.

14. July 2013

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By Rini Price Lock him up.

Lock him up. The dead guy did it. Lock him up.

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Trayvon Martin’s murder

14. July 2013

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By V.B. Price

A 17-year old African American, child of divorce, was walking to his father’s house after taking a half time break in a ballgame to get some candy at a local store.  He was wearing a hoody in a gated community in which his father had a house. He was unarmed. An armed man, a sort of self-styled neighborhood-watch vigilante, confronted the youngster out of the blue, with no plausible provocation and shoots him dead.

All the rest of what happened that night is a tangle of interpretations, justifications, obfuscations., and a lawyer’s bag of tricks...

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Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil

14. July 2013

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By Margaret Randall

I wish I had gotten it together to write this while “Hannah Arendt” was still playing at The Guild, our city’s only remaining and consistently heroic arts theater. Then I could have urged anyone who hadn’t yet seen it to do so. Unfortunately, this brilliant film is no longer being shown. Perhaps popular demand might bring it back. “Hannah Arendt,” even for those who missed its Albuquerque showing, has a profoundly important lesson for us all: heinous crime is not only the province of the Hitler’s, Pinochet’s, and Bashad al-Assad’s of this world. The banality of evil is one of human nature’s least understood components...

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Malala: ‘our hero, our champion’

14. July 2013

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By Wally Gordon

The mission of a columnist is to tell stories as he sees them through his own eyes, but occasionally someone else tells a story so well that there is nothing left for me to add. Such is the case with a story published July 12 in the Guardian. Although it is by far the smallest of the seven national British newspapers, it has become, to my mind, the best newspaper in the world, with the strongest writing and the most fearless reporting.

This story, about the struggle of one teenage girl, is dramatic on a personal level but also of the utmost importance on the grand level of human aspiration. It deserves to be told as well as possible, and so I turn the rest of this column over to Ed Pilkington, the Guardian’s correspondent in New York...

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Provincial Matters, 7-15-2013

14. July 2013

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By V.B. Price Provincial Matters, 7-15-2013

In this inaugural installment, V.B. Price explores a collection of appreciations of Albuquerque and New Mexico.

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Muy calentito for Hanna!

11. July 2013

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By James Burbank

As most of you know, I am muy calentito for Hanna Skandera. In her fervent desire to determine the Final Measure of education, the perfect test that would for all time determine whether a student is edumuhcated to New Mexico standards, Hanna has gone to near super-human lengths in discovering and tracking down the Great Exam written by the finger of God on adobe tablets that exist somewhere south of the seventh sphere...

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