New Mexico Mercury

To repair or destroy

The Human Services Division (HSD) which funds Behavioral and Mental Health as well as Medicaid has concluded that 15 New Mexico Mental and Behavioral Health Services that have served their communities for decades have been so fraudulent on her watch that only the nuclear option was possible. She plans to shut them down and bring Arizona agencies to the rescue. HSD has no stomach apparently to fix our system if it’s broken, to build New Mexico capacity and grow New Mexico jobs. New Mexico tax revenues will ship off to Arizona. There should be no surprise that this is seen as part of a purely political agenda to privatize the not-for-profit mental health providers in the state...

Oh! Pelican Bay

El Machete

The Inside Dope on Reinhold Reince Priebus and Hanna Scamdera

Reinhold Reince Priebus is really pissed off. The Grand Poobah of the Republican Party, Priebus doesn’t like it that CBS and CNN plan to air specials on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Reince is very angry because these shows are really advertising for Hillary’s presidential campaign that she hasn’t announced yet. Reince has decided to take his football and go home. He’s been blubbering that the Republicans should refuse to air their scintillating presidential campaign debates on either network unless the media giants drop their plans to fete Hillary...

Seeing the pristine in a tainted Great Plains

As I prepared for my trek to the Northeast across the Great Plains this summer, I quietly resented that I would have to endure the mind-numbing, soul-sucking road trip I was directly and indirectly advised not to take for years, but, in my head, the justification of all the trouble existed in the destinations I would experience and the people I would visit. The road of nothingness was just the medium for time and space travel.

After watching the prairie for hours with predetermined discontent, I saw something beyond the straight roads, dividing fences, and regular telephone poles. I remember it was somewhere in Nebraska where I saw the grass move like the sea’s waves...

Paranoia

I see a plot in the New Mexico Medical Board's rule to make medicinal marijuana prescriptions hard to write for patients.  This is nothing but big pharma applying pressure to the Docs to make it hard to prescribe the low cost and effective herb to patients that qualify.  I mean if a few brownies take the place of outrageously expensive drugs then corporate profits will slide.   How much longer do we need to put up with this corporate manipulation of everything in our lives?   Am I being paranoid?  Or is having the munchies a threat to our way of life?...

Tom Udall’s Campaign Against Global Warming

When I saw videos of two feet of hail in the streets of Santa Rosa in early July, and felt the power 10 days ago of the most intense wind and rain storm Albuquerque has ever seen, I thought of Senator Tom Udall’s line, “If anyone still denies that climate change is real, I invite them to come to New Mexico.”

Having seen the predictions of climate change scientists come to life, it’s heartening to know that New Mexico’s senior senator is among the most outspoken politicians in the country when it comes to confronting the reality of our changing atmosphere...

Right To Lifers on UNM Campus Spark Counter-protest

During the noon hour on Monday right to lifers put up twenty by ten ft. color pictures of mutilated and aborted fetuses along Central to convince students and faculty on UNM’s main campus that abortion is wrong. The protestors, who were mostly teenage girls, got a surprise, however, when ten adamant fetuses bearing their own placards descended on them...

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?...

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...

Weekly Poem: In Hobbs

Monday morning sunrise – Hobbs, New Mexico, October 25, 2010
Already the west winds blow, relentless
Rocking the pickup we huddle inside
The dogs and I
“In Hobbs,” granddaughter Lily shrugs her two-year old
Shoulders and remembers the summer green Ruidoso mountains
I am on the edge of town
Down a gravel road that runs by the ruins of a
World War II Quartermaster’s depot
Abandoned now, only concrete borders and cactus around...