New Mexico Mercury

Stand Your Ground

El Machete

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...

Weekly Poetry: The Mother and The Daughter

I haven’t written a poem in your likeness for some time.
I tried.  I took the broom and beat the cobwebs.
Lit one hissing cigarette after hissing cigarette,
Let a dish fall to the floor, a porcelain scream.
I let the quiet shattering happen but could not eek it out.

Then I thought of this. You the young mother,
a knotted belt at your waist, slim and attractive
in photos.  Your teeth gleaming and straight
like a string of pearls...

Women’s Rights

Humphrey's World

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...

Behavioral health drama reeks of ALEC (updated)

Does this formula sound familiar: A motley crew of conservative legislators, libertarian philosophers and free-market carnival barkers label a public sector entity as inefficient, wasteful, fraudulent, full of ne’er do wells living high on the hog.  An orchestrated crisis ensues.  Inexplicably, a host of typically for-profit corporations are waiting in the wings with a solution, salivating for the key to those hefty public coffers...

Death comes to The Range

Every journalist in the state must see the death of their profession lurking over their shoulder.  The demise of the Raton Range because of falling revenues, population, and readership was just a matter of time. Small newspapers are going fast around the country.  Unless they are big enough to be bought by rightwing corporations headed by the likes of the Koch brothers, then there are no lifelines for them.

The Albuquerque Journal's ever diminishing content and ever increasing right-wing view of the world cannot be offset by doing their editorial cartoons in color...