New Mexico Mercury

400 parts per million

As New Mexico becomes the sun’s anvil, and carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million (PPM) in the planet’s atmosphere trapping heat and drying out the American west, the haunting question is: Have we reached the tipping point?

Not five years ago, 350 PPM was said to be the outer limits of CO2 saturation before we’re reached the point of no return. All the warnings, of course, went unheeded. The use of fossil fuels grew enormously all over the planet. Renewable energy was drubbed in the marketplace by its government subsidized opposition...

Seasoned Veteran: Journey of a Winter Soldier

On this Memorial Day, a documentary about Scott Camil, Vietnam Veteran turned anti-war and community activist.

Social Security and the brat named Sequester

One of the greatest and most intractable problems we face these days is what to do about our exploding population of oldsters.  Some Progressive nitwits have suggested things are just fine and Social Security will not run out of money anytime soon. Conservatives know better and they have always raised the cry of alarm striking fear into the hearts of God-fearing people everywhere.

“The trust fund will go bust in the next few months if we don’t make radical program changes in the next fifteen minutes!” They intoned. “God wants us to do the right thing for future generations.  Amen." ...

Who’s surprised by the AP phone records seizure?

The recent seizure of Associated Press reporter’s phone records by the Justice Department has raised a modicum of virility in an agency that covered civil liberty breaches by the last two administrations with a distant gaze.  Gary Pruitt, AP president and CEO, stated in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, “I am writing to object in the strongest possible terms to a massive and unprecedented intrusion by the Department of Justice into the newsgathering activities of The Associated Press.”  Indeed that spirit of objection would have been welcomed by the millions of Americans caught up in dragnet digital surveillance by a national security state run amok for more than a decade...

Insight New Mexico - Paul Robinson

V.B. Price speaks with the Paul Robinson, Research Director at the Southwest Research and Information Center, about the legacy of uranium mining in New Mexico, how the uranium market works and who suffers if there's another boom.

The rape of a five-year-old

Almost lost amidst the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon was the news a few days later of a five-year-old girl raped and left for dead in New Delhi, India. Only four months earlier, a young Indian woman was gang raped on a bus; she died of her injuries. Much of the world’s attention focused on that faraway country, on its startling number of sexualized power crimes against women and girls, and the failure of its authorities to take such crimes seriously.

But this is not an Indian problem. There is really nothing unusual about men raping or otherwise sexually abusing women and young girls...

Governor’s terrible indiscretion revealed

The scandal has gone on almost a year. Gov. Martinez and her super minions in state government were exchanging state business, but doing so in private e-mail apparently to avoid public scrutiny.

Just recently Attorney General Gary King, who will run against Martinez in the upcoming gubernatorial election, seized these communications. And guess what: a hideous breach of trust has been revealed in one of the gov’s communications. Yes, Susana Martinez has been caught red-handed e-mail ordering undergarments from some Internet purveyor...

Better Know a NM Private Contractor: SAIC

SAIC was recently awarded a $228 million IT contract from Sandia National Laboratories. This is the first in an ongoing series examining private contractors doing business in New Mexico.

Corky’s library

El Machete

The stupendous week that was

If you are President Obama surveying the scene from the Oval Office, here is what you might have seen last week:

• A House of Representatives committee finally negotiating a bipartisan deal on immigration, and doing so at the 11th hour just before negotiations would have collapsed.
Although it differs substantially from the bill moving through the Senate, the deal goes a long way toward assuring that some kind of immigration reform will eventually emerge from the congressional sausage factory.

• Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan, authoritative judge of all things budgetary, saying the unexpected strength of the recovery has increased tax receipts and reduced expenditures to a major degree...