Republicans Trash Municipal Voting Rights
Some time before the recent municipal election the University of New Mexico contacted the city to see if, as usual, there would be a polling place at UNM, something which has happened during the 2007 election, the 2009 election, and the 2012 election. The University never heard back and there was no polling place to serve students and faculty.
A couple of nights ago your non-partisan city council decided to disenfranchise thousands of Albuquerque voters who have regularly polled at the campus. This is the same non-partisan council controlled by Republicans that created the new gerrymandered Council District Two...
What’s Happened to Albuquerque? Part 10: Gary Goodman and the Big Idea
Working to overcome a familiar sense of dejection after the city elections, this month, I was browsing the internet and came across the disappointing September 30th KNME mayoral debate and then, quite by accident, found myself watching a TEDxABQ on YouTube from October 14, 2012 with New Mexico real estate developer Gary Goodman. What a glaring contrast...
Let’s Put God in the Driver’s Seat – The Upcoming Abortion Rights Vote
It’s always super nice when the divinity comes down out of the sky and tells us what to do, especially when we’re trying to think out thorny ethics issues like abortion.
Some folks yell at everybody else saying they are screeching with God’s voice. They want to see us ban late-term abortion. If you disagree, they will hit you with everything they’ve got...
Hanging together—reluctantly
Edgewood is a tranquil rural village of pastures, mountains, cows and blue skies. This Edgewood is in northern California at the base of Mount Shasta, at 14,179 feet the tallest summit in the region and the second tallest anywhere in the Cascade Mountains.
Shasta’s year-round snowfield and five glaciers hang over Edgewood like a living presence, a white ghost exhaling pure, cold air over fields and homes. Rising some 11,000 feet above the village, the massive mountain doesn’t just dominate the skyline; it is the skyline. It is as if Sandia Peak rose 2 miles above Albuquerque instead of 1 mile and was sitting virtually on top of the city...
Weekly Poem: Silence of the Messengers
We hear only hush of wings
these angels who
sweep around us
never a word spoken
never a sword drawn
though their voices be strong, their hearts brave,
knowing we would not remember
if they spoke
would not remember one soft word
nor recall one firey blow...
A Window into the Martinez Administration’s Environmental Policy Decisions
Yesterday, we released a new tool to shine a light onto Governor Susana Martinez and her administration’s decisions that affect our air, land and water.
Our new website, SunshineOnMartinez.org, serves as the public’s window into the decisions of Gov. Susana Martinez and her administration that impact the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land where we live and play. On the site, you can find responses to Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) requests, the original requests to the administration, related news, opinion and multimedia...
It’s Still About Choice
We’ve all been privy to public service announcements and commercial advertisements urging us to spend money we don’t have in order to save an economy being squandered by our elected officials and the corporations that increasingly pull their puppet strings. During the 1960s and ‘70s we often said we wished the military had to hold a bake sale to fund its B-52s and that ordinary people might have access to government funding for projects as worthy as peace and education...
Health Reform Update: Off to a Rocky Start
The Health Insurance Exchange is the only mechanism we have at the moment to extend health care to the uninsured and I was as disappointed as anyone with the Federal Exchange’s inability to handle the high volume of hits to its website and then to fix the problems two weeks into implementation. I hear it is getting better but still not smooth sailing...
Columbus Day, Chiapas Style
Tens of thousands of indigenous protestors and their allies in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas took to the streets on Saturday, October 12. While the date is officially called Dia de La Raza and celebrated as the Latin American equivalent of the Columbus Day holiday in the United States, indigenous Mayans in Chiapas tagged another name on the day: 521 Years of Indigenous, Black, Campesino and Popular Resistance...
Accompanying the Hibakusha to Los Alamos
Last week, I returned to Los Alamos, New Mexico, scene of our greatest crime, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, where preparations continue for bigger and better nuclear weapons. Even as the government is shut down and New Mexico has just been ranked worst in the nation for the well being of children, plutonium bomb making carries on at Los Alamos.
This time, I accompanied a delegation of 13 elderly Japanese peace activists from Hiroshima, Japan. Several of them were survivors and witnesses of the U.S. atomic bombing sixty eight years ago...