New Mexico Mercury

Kush and Cornelius

I just can’t understand why people get so worked up over a couple of harmless little old jokes. Of course I’m referring to those good old peckerwood exemplars of uproarious hilarity Steve Kush, now suspended director of Bernalillo County Republicans and Bob Cornelius, former GOP county director.

During Tuesday night’s Bernalillo Country commission meeting as Working America’s director Chelsey Evans was about to testify in favor of raising the minimum wage, Kush was busy tap, tap, tapping away at his Facebook account about Chelsey’s nice boots. Kush had already twittered that a previous Working America representative was a “radical bitch.”

We need a national conversation

The Boston marathon bombing shocked us to our core. With neither the degree of coordination, immense loss of human life and treasure, or national and international impact of 9/11, it held our attention in ways even tragic recent school massacres have not.

If our national response to previous acts of terrorism on our homeland is any indication, what we will not get is a conversation, the conversation we so desperately need, about what prompted this and previous terrorist attacks. A few private discussions may try to frame the real questions, but these will not gain currency in the general consciousness. Extreme patriotism will trump thoughtful insight in every public forum...

We have it all

En Route with Margaret Randall - In spite of ancient hindsight and modern science, we trod a perilous road.

Love dem hogs

Why do we always think someone from somewhere else, some magic someone with money and jobs has the solution for our economic problems?

Perhaps if we can just concoct the right inducements and incentives, even though we’re in a 50,000-year drought cycle, and even though we’re one of the poorest and least educated states in the union, if only we can throw the right tax incentives and benizens at such folk, they will just roll over and begin to smile on us, dispense their largesse, and New Mexico will be a blessed and golden land.

A perilous world comes knocking — again

Bombs at the Boston Marathon, poison letters mailed from Mississippi to President Obama and a U.S. senator, an explosion in a fertilizer plant destroying much of a town in Texas, two wounded by bullets as 80,000 gathered at an annual marijuana festival in the center of Denver: What are we to make of all this happening in a single week?

Against this background of mayhem, the U.S. Senate at the same time killed off all gun reform. What are we to make of that?

It seems to me there are several lessons to be learned from the terrible tragedies and momentous moments of recent days...

Housebreaking fossil fuels

While Heather Wilson was losing her Senate bid to Martin Heinrich last year, her campaign team must have been drunk on PR from the Fossil Fuel lobby. The rhetoric tipped them off the bar stool.

She accused then Rep. Heinrich of being supported by not only “radical environmental groups,” but also by “the radical environmental industry” with their “extremist agenda.”

I wonder what a “radical environmental industry” might be. Does it sell camping gear and sleeping bags or manufacture trail mix? Does it produce energy without polluting ground water and without using taxpayer dollars to clean up its excreta? Does it actually believe in free enterprise without a governmental crutch?

Weekly Poetry: Drought

Fire season and we walk out of the Lensic
into haze, each street light ringed
like van Gogh or when I first wore
contact lenses. All the glare of air
kept me from vision.

Fire season waiting for monsoon
my husband drives into the mountains
with a friend and her daughter, daughter of
the woman I saw in the ground, can’t talk about it
but after these weeks of smoke
rest in peace has a different ring to it.

Did the ‘Iron Lady’ help kill capitalism?

The recent news of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's death affords an opportunity to open the issue of who will be remembered as significant players in the death of capitalism. Mrs. Thatcher's image as a beacon for freedom may seem secure among mainstream media for the moment but to objective observers it is looking increasingly likely that in the long term the blind passion for "free markets" she shared with the global plutocratic class she abetted will be understood as the beginning of the final chapter for the most productive economic arrangement in history...

Latest Alford deal

Steve Alford is getting sick and tired of the little million dollar petty grievance that the University of New Mexico holds against our former wonderful basketball coach for leaving UNM in the lurch, so last night Alford said he’s just going to buy UNM. That should put a halt to University’s futzing around with his lordship...

Life, or death, goes on: More than public will needed for gun control

Although a variety of opinion polls show 90% of Americans favor at least some measure of gun control, and although President Obama has made sincere pleas for changes to our retrograde laws, change proved impossible. When the US Senate voted on expanding background checks for gun sales—the only amendment left standing among the many introduced—neither Democrats nor Republicans were able to provide the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster. US democracy doesn’t mean the will of the people. It means the vast majority of our elected officials consider their jobs first and public opinion a distant second...