Nullius in verba
New Mexico’s impoverished economy received a devastating blow last week when the extremist Republican establishment, fronted by the Trump administration, finally did what it has longed to do – begin the down and dirty process of eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for […]
The budget of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to be cut to around the size it was in the Reagan years. The exact numbers are not available yet, but leaks about the Trump administration’s budget indicate that the agency could lose as much as 25 to 30 percent of its funding this […]
Among the saddest and cruelest acts in the first five weeks of chaos in the Republican controlled U.S. government was directed at one of the most vulnerable and besieged populations in our country – transgender school children. The Trump Whitehouse countermanded guidelines for non-discriminatory bathrooms and locker facilities in public schools issued last year by […]
The President, at a talk recently, exercised his constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech by calling the “media” the “enemy of the people.” Using the word “enemy” to describe a vast, constitutionally protected profession caused many worrying questions. It prompted retired Navy Adm. William McRaven, a former Navy SEAL and head of Special Operations Command, to […]
Federal appeals judge Neil Gorsuch, the current President’s Supreme Court nominee, is apparently a gentleman Coloradoan, cordial, cultured, profoundly conservative, an all around charming guy, a witty writer, a fly fisherman, and a man who espouses a curious judicial philosophy known as originalism. He shares this view with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, in which […]
American political thinking is being infected by a mind-eating form of philosophic sadism sold as something called a rational virtue, the virtue of selfishness. It arises from the writings of a cult author of the 1940s and 1950s with the pen name of Ayn Rand whose ideas were conveyed into popular culture via her two […]
Water, land and respect – those are three imperatives for a life worth living in New Mexico and in the desert Southwest. All three will be under attack from arch-conservative Washington over the next four years. A climate change waffler with no management experience will run the $21 billion budget of the Department of the […]