Voting in the ABQ City Election Requires Your Provide an ID
When you go to vote in the upcoming municipal election, be sure to bring an ID with you. There is a lot of confusion out there about the procedure, but city elections require you bring a form of ID to the poll with you (driver’s license, student ID, credit card.)
Here’s how this came about...
The Mexican Uprising Deepens
Less than one year after taking office, the administration of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto faces serious challenges to its core policies. Leading the opposition are tens of thousands of public school teachers protesting the new No Child Left Behind-like law they contend will cost jobs, aggravate educational inequities and lead to privatization.
The protest, which counts months now, is expanding in both scope and participation and more and more assuming the character of a multi-issue popular movement...
Whitest Emmys Ever (and Michael Douglas’ Gay Jokes)
Modern Family creator Steven Levitan said, “This might be the saddest Emmys of all time” while accepting his award for best comedy. I argue that this may be the whitest Emmys ever. Whiter than other Emmys? Probably not. But it feels that way. And it feels a little homophobic, too.
Every, single winner on the awards show was white. Levitan’s comment was in reference to the many, sad “in memoriam” segments in the show. I think it was sad, too, because I’m saddened by television’s lack of commitment to strong roles for people of color...
Monetize the Rio Grande Now—Gotta Do It!
Our low profile, no controversy mayor has just released new plans for the Richard Berry Bosque Access Center (RBBAC) with the fifty story riverfront Disney Hotel complex and the Aldo Leopold Memorial ten-story parking structure, sculpture park, and miniature golf metroplex.
The project is slated to be built in the next two weeks before anyone has a chance to ask any unpleasant questions. Contractors from Arizona have all been chosen, so don’t worry your pretty little head about all the noisome details...
Keep Big Money out of Publicly Financed Races
Voters in Albuquerque and Santa Fe overwhelmingly voted to establish public financing systems in both cities to eliminate the influence of special-interest money on our elected officials and to permit them to take office beholden to no one but the voters who elected them.
The systems are now facing two challenges, one old and one brand new...
Weekly Poem: FIRST SHA’LA’KO
The men come down
in twos and threes South
to dust-dry Zuni River:
surround and screen
six tall Sha’la’ko of the
snapping beaks and hooting.
Up the hill the small
Zuni girl chops at
stacked juniper with
a sharp, man- sized axe:
smoke comes East swings
around North then West...
Desalinization for Sprawl
I wonder what it would be like to have huge mounds of salt laced with arsenic sitting on the ground west of Albuquerque. Suppose a developer wanted to build a massive subdivision miles from the center of the city and worked a deal with Sandoval County to drill deep into the aquifer around the Rio Puerco and tap into the brackish water known to be there.
Suppose this developer started the project, used a process of desalinization, to clean the water, making promises to clean up the salt and arsenic waste, but then hit a snag in the housing market, abandoned the project, and left Albuquerque and Rio Rancho with its salt waste and poison blowing around in the wind and making its way into populated areas...
A Museum Experience in Farmington
I didn’t know Farmington had an art museum and decided to check it out. In fact, the city of 46,000 in the northwestern corner of our state does not have a museum dedicated exclusively to fine art. But its city museum just finished giving a three-month run to one of the best collections of painting, sculpture, photography, prints and relevant ephemera I have seen in New Mexico—or anywhere else. “An Adventure in the Arts,” a 73-piece collection of 20th Century masterworks on loan from the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York, opened on July 20th and closed on September 21st...
‘For in the end, hate could kill us all’
Twenty-seven years after the end of World War II, two families who had survived that conflict, one of them German Jews and the other German Nazis, fight a different kind of war on a street in Manhattan: the war of the delis. This is the core of a drama penned by a Sandia Park playwright and scheduled for a reading this weekend in Albuquerque.
The story could have been told as a comedy, however it is anything but; rather, it is an explosive tragedy in which old wounds bleed again onto 55th Street. That there is a beacon of hope, even potential salvation, at the end, does not dim the soul-destroying conflict between two families on the same street trying to sell sandwiches, salvage their self-respect and pay back for their history...
Meet the secret Republican infrastructure buying Albuquerque’s elections
What happens when you get caught hiding a Republican political-hack firm inside your non-partisan global public relations firm? Albuquerque's DW Turner/Agenda Communications is about to find out.
Weeks ago we started asking questions about big money donor Jerry Ginsburg who gave $40,000 to start a special interest PAC attacking progressive City Councilor Isaac Benton.
That PAC reported using Ginsburg’s money to hire a shadowy California business to run the campaign. Yesterday, Benton’s campaign shed some light on the shadowy group supporting his Republican opponent...