Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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Here’s a crazy idea: Instead of following the federal government’s lead away from cleaner energy sources, New Mexico could lead the way toward a more sustainable energy future anyway. Last November, Travis Kellerman, a senior policy adviser for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, attended the United Nations’ latest conference on climate change, also known as COP29. When he returned, he recalled the “uncertainty in the air” as questions loom large about future U.S. involvement under our incoming president. “Yet amidst the unease,” Kellerman wro...
While New Orleans and Las Vegas are still attempting to process the New Year’s Day violence that gripped their cities, some are trying to capitalize perversely (and unsuccessfully) on such tragedies. Even before the dust settled, a number of conservatives rushed to social media to blame both events on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Among them was House Majority Leader Steve Scalise who said “some of these agencies have gotten so wrapped up in the DEI movement” that they ignore security altogether. “Call it wokenes...
It’s easy to blame California’s Democrats for the devastating fires that killed at least 16 people and destroyed more than 10,000 homes and businesses in Los Angeles last week. It’s the Democrats in charge of the state of California who have been tearing down dams to protect fish and please environmentalists instead of making sure Los Angeles is sent enough water from the northern part of the state. It’s the Democrats running Los Angeles who have not been clearing the volatile grass and brush that has built up on the mountainsides east of the...
One twenty-fourth of 2025 has passed. President Trump’s second inauguration is next Monday, which for most voters foretells a brighter future for the USA. On that same day, we’ll remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a pioneer in America’s brighter future three generations ago, if 20 years is considered a generation. According to various websites in a Google search for “generations,” four generations have come about since 1963 when King made his “I Have a Dream” speech near the end of the birth years of the baby boomers. Subs...
Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” That’s clever. Yet, here we are, wondering how it got so weird around here. Churchill’s quote, though witty, is inaccurate. The Hebrew Scriptures in the Bible (what we regularly call the Old Testament) present us with a better way. Somewhere in the ballpark of 2000 B.C., God went and pulled a nation for himself out of the midst of another nation, with great power, signs, and wonders. They were a couple million descendants of Abra...
In 1977, when Jimmy Carter took the presidential oath of office, I was there. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a big deal, except to me. Back then, I was wandering from town to town and job to job, so much so that I didn’t even cast a ballot in the 1976 general election that elected Carter. It’s the only presidential election I ever missed, and I’ve always regretted it. A few weeks earlier, I had hastily left a job in West Virginia, leaving behind a few things that I couldn’t carry away with my thumb. I left my things at a “settleme...
Every year is interesting in its own way. This one included the death of a hero, Alexei Navalny; the toppling of a dictator, Bashar Al Assad; the implosion of a president, Joe Biden; two assassination attempts on a former president, Donald Trump; the conviction for hush money payments made by a former president, Donald Trump, and the re-election of a former president, Donald Trump. Any one of the above-mentioned events would have been shocking taken in isolation. Personally, I think the one true thing that has changed in the American psyche is...
His tenure as president was punctuated with unrelenting adversity, tortured from the outset by obscenely high inflation and a post-Vietnam-and-Watergate nation that had a sour disposition. His fragmented administration was disproportionately populated by political cronies from his home state of Georgia. His micromanaging style drew widespread derision and his right of center values resulted in serious conflicts with a much more liberal and progressive Congress. In the eyes of many historical and political observers, Jimmy Carter’s one-term p...
Today is Jan. 1, and I decided to write about historic events taking place on that date. For information, I used several websites based on a Google search. Otherwise, the Bible is cited to support my comments, and you ought to read the passages as cited. Several changes in government took place on New Year’s Day. In 1804, Haiti declared independence from France to become the second country founded in the New World and the first established by slaves to become a slavery-free nation. In 1959, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled a pending r...
The election, crime and the climate. I think those are the three biggest stories to come out of New Mexico in 2024. There weren’t any real surprises in the state’s own elections, with all incumbents winning at the federal level and Democrats easily hanging on to power in Santa Fe. But the impact Donald Trump’s election will have on New Mexico will be unmistakable for a border state such as ours. The president-elect’s promise of mass deportations and tighter border security will hit New Mexico families hard, since many have relations south o...
Brandon Granger, the son of Texas Republican Rep. Kay Granger, informed the Dallas Express his mother has been battling “some dementia issues late in the year” and had been residing in an assisted-care facility for the last half year. The most recent vote she cast on the House floor was in July, and she has been absent for more than 300 votes since then. While this is certainly alarming news to hear, Granger is hardly an anomaly The median age of senators in the incoming 119th Congress will be 64 years old. In the House, the average age is 59....
Will somebody please tell Donald Trump he won? I’m sure he’s seen the official results by now. I’m sure he knows he’ll be moving back into the White House on Jan. 20. But he’s still acting like he’s on the campaign trail. He’s firing off tweets, trolling his opponents and talking about the United States buying Greenland, retaking control of the Panama Canal and making jokes that he wants Canada to become the 51st state. It’s weird, what Trump’s doing. It’s the Christmas holidays. It’s a time for families, not politics. It’s a time for shopping,...
It’s Christmas. My thoughts turn to angels. They’re everywhere in the story of Christ’s advent. An angel announces the birth of the Messiah to Mary. Joseph had angelic visitors guide him. Angels showed up to small groups. A whole host of them appeared to the shepherds in their fields. The group of wise men, also, received an angelic warning that saved their lives. But I’m stuck on the thought of a particular group of angels seen by the prophet Isaiah as part of his vision of heaven in Isaiah 6. This isn’t part of the Christmas story, although,...
This holiday season, whether you raise a toast, or spike the punch or have a drink to take the chill out of your bones, do so thoughtfully. Alcohol may make the seasonal celebrations feel more festive. A drink or two may seem to comfort those whose holidays aren’t particularly joyful. But increasingly, Americans are drinking more than they should, at levels that are likely to cause problems in the long run if not immediately. If alcohol is part of your holiday plans, keep in mind the harm that over-indulgence can do to yourself or others. Be a...
I was feeling lonely one night about 14 years ago when I made a pact with Andres, the kitten I had just adopted from the Mesilla Valley Animal Shelter: Get me to age 65, and I promise to take good care of you. The plan was to get a dog once I was retired and had more time to care for one, and I made sure to tell everyone that. I shared the snarky attitude toward cats that is so prevalent in modern culture. My first cat was named Pogonip. When he died, my next two were named Substitute and Replacement. I said it was in honor of Pogonip, but...
It was in the year 336 when Jesus’ birthday was declared to be Dec. 25. Roman Emperor Constantine had declared Christianity the empire’s official religion and the church in Rome turned the 25th into a celebration of Christ’s birth, and we’ve been celebrating the day ever since. But celebrating Christmas isn’t the only thing that’s happened on Dec. 25, and with help from The Associated Press and its “Today in History” feature along with the website onthisday.com, here are a few Christmas Day events that stand out: • On Dec. 25, 1776, Gen. Ge...
Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is being hailed by many as a hero. There’s something profoundly wrong with that. From the time of Thompson’s murder on a Manhattan street caught in surveillance camera photos, to snippets of Mangione’s alleged movements while on the run, online praise for Mangione has run neck and neck with vitriol for health insurers. Google removed a flood of negative McDonald’s reviews after a fast-food employee in an Altoona, Pa., location reported Mangione to police and he was arr...
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I grew up on them. They were the first thing I learned to make in the kitchen. That and a glass of milk. Microwaves hadn’t been invented yet. Playing basketball on a dirt patch in our back yard. That’s where I learned to dribble and shoot with one hand. And football in our front yard. When no one else was around, I’d take the hike from an imaginary center, drop back and throw to the trees, believing that I was the star quarterback in a universe I could only imagine. Those were simpler times, when telev...
The biggest stories in the national media of late both came from the mad streets of New York. The manslaughter trial of Daniel Penny, the young man who accidentally killed a crazed homeless man on the subway, and the cold-blooded assassination of a healthcare CEO on the sidewalks of Manhattan both deserved the saturation coverage and commentary they received. But the way in which the stories were spun by the left-liberal news media shows what a sick, upside-down mentality exists in the U.S. In the case of Penny, it’s safe to say Fox News and c...
My Dec. 4 column in the Quay County Sun was about how the original “Star Trek” star, William Shatner, had actually gone into “the final frontier” and wrote a Variety magazine article about it. The original idea for my article was the concept of going where no man had gone before, but it didn’t go where I thought it would and became largely based on Shatner’s article. Today’s column will continue my thoughts from the Variety article and conclude with my original concept about Christmas. Space disappointed Shatner because it wasn’t as glo...
L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, “The Go-Between,” opens with these words: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” As we approach the end of another calendar year, our tendency is to gaze backward and analyze the time that was, if only briefly. That’s fine. As another writer has said, the unexamined life is not worth living. There’s benefit in going back and “watching the game film” like an old football coach, seeing what we did well and what we need to work on. But I hear a caution in Hartley’s memorable line: You...
For years, New Mexico has been seriously short of virtually all doctors: primary care, pediatricians, dentists, eye doctors, and other specialists … and all the people who help them take care of patients. It can take months to see a specialist and weeks to see a primary care physician, if you can find one. We are short almost 13,000 healthcare workers to serve our 2.1 million residents. That includes every kind of healthcare worker like EMTs, pharmacists and physical therapists as well as physicians and nurses. This shortage is getting worse a...
If you ask me, the election of 2026 is shaping up to look like 2010, at least at the top of New Mexico’s ticket. In 2010, then-Gov. Bill Richardson was being term limited out after two terms in office. His Democratic Party nominated his lieutenant governor, Diane Denish, who became saddled with Richardson’s growing unpopularity at the time. She lost the election to Republican Susana Martinez, who went on to defeat Denish in the general election with 53% of the vote. Look ahead to 2026 and a similar scenario may be shaping up. Gov. Michelle Luj...
The next four years are going to be especially tough for MSNBC’s Joy Reid. The always angry host of “The ReidOut” has spent the last four years ranting about Donald Trump and the danger he poses to democracy – and he wasn’t even in power. She’s already politically insane. She regularly calls Trump a gangster and a Putin puppet. I can’t imagine how she’ll deal with the next four years as Trump and his salvage team try to get America on the road to being great again. Reid is so blinded by Trump hate that she – like so many humorless Democrats and...
William Shatner, star of the original “Star Trek,” now has actually gone into space and written a book about his experience, which he summarized in a Variety magazine article I found while researching for this column. While I had a good idea for this article based on the concept of boldly going where no man had gone before, the article didn’t go where I thought it would and became largely based on the Variety article. So, here’s what I gleaned from the Variety article that might be of value to Christians and to encourage others to conside...