New Mexico Mercury

Vanishing again

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were descending from the Continental Divide in Colorado when, as my wife observed with a mixture of awe, concern and laughter, “You just vanished.” It wasn’t the first time I had vanished, and it won’t be the last.

We were spending a few days in what Coloradans smilingly call the Banana Belt, the Arkansas River Valley north of the San Luis Valley, where summers are cooler and winters warmer than in most of the rest of Colorado.

It had been a nearly perfect trip, until I vanished...

Weekly Poetry: Wrung in the Wind

Wind waggles the small oriole,
plume-bulged, through the intersection,
and he crosses off to the side:

ragged wing, swoop black –

he nicks the street near the orange jeep,
leans in half-numb, I think,
with all this strew
and whistle. Sky sails to a blue roof...

Background Checks

Humphrey's World

The path to economic salvation

Remember about three weeks ago when the Tea Party and other conservative groupies started screaming about how the IRS was picking on Sasquatch and his friends who were trying to educate the public about Ayn Rand’s secret recipe for fruitcake salad?

They were being singled out, they screamed, picked on and persecuted by Big Brother, who was actually off at a million dollar motivational conference in Hilo.

Well, hold onto your hats, the IRS, it turns out, when it was not partying, was also picking on progressive and liberal groups too...

DOMA, Prop 8, and the Voting Rights Act

If anyone tells you again that voting in a presidential election is a meaningless exercise, remind them of June 2013 when the Supreme Court became once again, as it has off and on throughout its history, the most powerful branch of government, for good or ill.

Lobbyists and their employers spent $488,296 to entertain, influence legislators in 2013

Here's some information I collected from the New Mexico Secretary of State's Office for NM Common Cause.  It's a small piece of the work I'm doing, along with interns Jarrett Hines-Kay and Jonas Armstrong, for a forthcoming Common Cause report on lobbyists.

New Mexico lobbyists and their employers spent $488,296.74 to influence, entertain and feed New Mexico legislators, according to reports filed since January with the Secretary of State’s Office.   The amount does not include campaign contributions, which are banned during the session.

The largest spenders among the lobbyists were...

Youth “Voces” on display this Friday

Every Monday through Friday for the month of June, from 9am to 4pm, a group of teenagers have devoted themselves to the art of being heard. These teen authors have bought into a 12 year-old program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center called Voces. This teen summer writing intensive was facilitated by the multimedia hip hop theater collaborative Urban Verbs, under the direction of Hakim Bellamy, Carlos Contreras and Colin Diles Hazelbaker. Throughout the month these young writers, with interest that vary from poetry to music to politics to comedy to short stories, were given the freedom and form to develop their innate writing talent. Guest presenters were brought in as experts on different styles of writing and performance, as well as visual art, choreography and communications/media training...

Why progressives should welcome independents into Democratic primaries

First of all, can we acknowledge that there is significant disillusionment amongst the voting public with the partisanship and lack of compromise that has Congress virtually paralyzed at the moment? In a similar way, can we admit that the gerrymandering of congressional districts to the point where less than 10% of these same districts are considered "competitive" is largely to blame for the systemic edge that House Republicans will enjoy for the next decade? There is absolutely no incentive for these Republican incumbents to listen to the middle, concerned as they are about their unforgiving right-wing base...

Student exposes austerity’s shaky foundations

A major upheaval took place recently in the world of economic theory. Yet while a sacred cow took a mortal hit, its legacy of social impoverishment and unrest continues unabated.

Why does something presumably as dense and dry as economic theory matter? Because for longer than most of us realize, elected officials have relied on the dominant, though not necessarily correct, school of thought to provide a rationale for the policies they put in place. In the congressional debate over health care, for instance, it was the fundamental argument for a "uniquely American approach" (code for the profit motive) that carried the day and left the U.S. as virtually the only developed nation without universal health care for its citizens (and New Mexicans near the bottom in terms of health care outcomes)...

New Mexico First forum brings Domenici, Bingaman and Sam Donaldson

New Mexico First was created in 1986 by Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici to provide New Mexicans with a public forum in which to discuss issues important to New Mexico.  This year the organization decided to honor the contributions of Jeff Bingaman at a First Forum lecture.  Fortunately Pete Domenici was available to attend and participate in the policy tribute held last Friday evening at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

The agenda placed the two former New Mexico senior senators on the stage together across from one another.  They sat at a small table with ABC reporter Sam Donaldson moderating and posing questions to them which were selected by the NM First board of directors.  The topic areas chosen were education, the economy, energy and Congressional gridlock...