New Mexico Mercury

Obama phone

One of the best ideas since sliced bread was the Sequester. This wonderful piece of non-legislation is destroying a whole lot of people who can’t be seen.  We should be thankful for that. These invisibles are mostly drooling kids who just won’t get Headstart and senile elderly people who will just see their benefits slashed or Meals on Wheels taken away. Big deal. So what? I for one am deeply glad I can’t see these subhuman types and I can’t hear their stupid and silent screams...

What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 4: A city of edges

Is it time for a complete revamping of the goals Albuquerque has set for itself as a city?  Are we ready for a genuine city-wide discussion of what the current economic and environmental conditions mean for our future?

The great goals setting exercises of the l970s and l980s took place in an atmosphere of intense public interest and involvement in city issues.  By comparison, 21st century Albuquerque seems asleep at the wheel...

What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 3: Police trust

If there’s anything city residents need to hear about during this mayoral season it’s how the candidates plan to give Albuquerque a police force it can trust and admire, and is no longer afraid of?

How would a mayor accomplish that turnaround? I know many of us would like to learn in detail how that could be done.

Living in a city where one worries about the police going rogue, killing people, beating them up, drawing guns at routine traffic stops, and the like makes doing business and going about one’s daily life even harder than it already is...

Changing perspectives on U.S.-Mexico relations

It’s unfortunate that the two presidents chose to hold their May 2-3 summit in Mexico City. Both nations and Presidents Barack Obama and Enrique Peña Nieto would have been better served by a meeting at the border – where the grim reality of neighborly relations would not be masked by the pomp and circumstance of the grand presidential residence of Los Pinos.

A meeting at the customs building in Ciudad Juárez – the site of the first Mexico-U.S. presidential meeting in 1909 between Porfirio Díaz and William Taft – would have likely resulted in a more memorable and productive summit of the current heads of state, Enrique Peña Nieto and Barack Obama. As it is, this meeting will likely be soon forgotten – lost in protocol, predictable rhetoric about interdependence, and the photogenic smiles of the two presidents...

Aaron’s Death

A young man's death harkens a re-examination of manhood in a society awash in moral conundrums.

Prejudice looks like this

Santa Fe has seen in the last month an act of unique and open-hearted political courage and an example of dumbfounding intolerance when it comes to same-sex marriage and the civil rights of all persons in our state.

Governor Martinez’s vetoing of a bill to help same-sex domestic partners of military personnel expedite acquiring professional licenses to carry on their careers when they return to the poorest state in the union is so blatantly bigoted it’s hard to fathom in the 21st century...

Quality food shouldn’t be an oasis

According to the USDA, over 23 million Americans live in a food desert: an area with a concentration of low-income households and low access to a supermarket.    In an urban environment, a low access area is defined by being at least one mile from a major grocery store.  Imagine the odyssey of walking for blocks or taking public transportation carrying handfuls of plastic bags stretching ever closer to rupture or pulling an overfilled personal shopping cart only to arrive at your building to begin climbing flights of stairs to your kitchen.

Don’t fall behind

Hi, welcome to your new corporate University of New Mexico orientation and advisement. This is your first semester. You should be excited!  Your grade of C+ earned at a certified New Mexico high school has won you the right to pursue a college education. Oh boy.

Because you work thirty hours a week at Chic Fila, and you have to take care of your aging grandfather for twenty hours a week, we want to be sensitive to your schedule needs. This is why we recommend for your first year that you take eighteen hours each semester.

FBI Surveillance Technology

El Machete

Wastewater recycling: How open minds save closed systems

Singapore, Los Angeles, Windhoek (the capital of Namibia in Africa) and the tiny town of Cloudcroft, New Mexico are doing it. Astronauts do it – NASA considers it a high priority – and doing it in the desert can help to diminish the environmental impact of any town whose water needs surpass the sustainable local supply.  This would probably include every community in New Mexico.  And yet this remarkable marriage of space-age technology and Spaceship Earth ethics, which uses chemistry to create alchemy by making something pure and nourishing from something gross and stinky, spends a lot of time languishing in literal and figurative holding tanks.