Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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“He was on our radar.” How many times have we heard that after a mass shooting at a high school or a shopping mall? We heard it for the umpteenth time again last week after a disturbed 14-year-old kid in Georgia took a rifle to school and killed two students, two teachers, and injured nine others. “He was on our watch list,” the local police said to no one’s surprise. A year ago, after the FBI’s radar picked up Colt Gray reportedly making threats online that he was going to “shoot up a middle school tomorrow,” the feds tipped off the county she...
Mark’s Gospel records this teaching: “And Jesus called them to him and said to them, ‘You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’” (Mark 10:42-45) The Greek word translated “great ones” there is megas, fro...
More than 650,000 Americans experienced homelessness on any given night in 2023 -- a 12% increase since 2022. Chronic homelessness is also worsening, with over 143,000 people homeless for at least a year in 2023 -- an all-time high. I’ve been the mayor of Aurora, Colo. for five years. In my first term, I went undercover and lived among people experiencing homelessness in Aurora and Denver for a week. I wanted to understand why Colorado’s homeless community was growing and how my city could best help. The leading policy approach to hom...
My best friend Kelly and I frequently had loud, boisterous arguments over politics that led folks to believe that we disagreed about everything. They were mistaken. His views were influenced by watching Fox News, and mine are influenced by watching CNN, so that’s where the arguments would start. But they didn’t end there. It usually didn’t take long for both of us to call BS on the TV talking points and get to the heart of the matter. That didn’t always lead to an agreement, but it almost always led to a common understanding. Of course,...
Hollywood can’t always be trusted to accurately portray reality or history, to say the least. But I fully enjoyed watching the facts go by in the premier of “Reagan,” which I saw last week at the famous Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. “Reagan,” which stars Dennis Quaid as my father, covers my father’s career from Illinois lifeguard to the American president who set out to bankrupt the Soviet Union – and did it. It took an international team of freedom fighters like Maggie Thatcher and Pope John Paul II to bring down the USSR and end...
On the first day of school last week, we attended the “Meet the Rattlers” event for Tucumcari’s fall athletes, including two of our grandsons. The program included a video promoting good sportsmanship, including by fans. I suspect that was appropriate because the event was likely attended by the most potentially rabid fans — parents and grandparents. While the video was right on about good sportsmanship, it included statements that the main goal shouldn’t be to win. I agree with that philosophy only to an extent because it’s likely that insuff...
In her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris offered a withering indictment of her opponent. Donald J. Trump, she rightly observed, is in many ways “an unserious man,” but the consequences of returning him to the White House “are extremely serious.” She asked her audience to “consider the power he will have, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution. Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails …” She introduced herself to vo...
Donald Trump’s campaign is in a fierce tailspin as his failed attacks on Kamala Harris haven’t been able to slow down her growing popularity. “It’s very clear the former president is unraveling. He’s having a complete meltdown,” Ashley Etienne, a former Joe Biden staffer and political advisor, said during a recent segment on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show. “Kamala Harris has got him a chokehold that is really driving him to the point of insanity, and really driving his campaign to the point of paralysis.” Harris is officially the Democratic presid...
Thank goodness the Democrat Party’s magic act in Chicago is finally over. For four days we had to watch the liberal media drool over Kamala Harris and her unimpressive VP choice, Tim Walz, like they were the greatest team of presidential candidates since JFK picked LBJ in 1960. We’ve had to listen to a parade of angry Democrats bigshots complain about what a broken, unfair and unfree place America has become and how Harris is going to fix everything and restore democracy. We’ve had to hear a string of Democrat nobodies get up on stage and r...
“The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.” (1 Corinthians 2:15) This is the closest thing I’ve found in the Scripture to a definition of a spiritual person. There are two more that are similar. In Philippians we’re urged to develop the ability to distinguish between things that are excellent, versus those that aren’t. Hebrews says that maturity in the faith means having your senses trained to discern good and evil. “Discernment” is the watch-word in all of this. True, mature spirituality is about being a...
Since President Joe Biden ducked out of the presidential race last month, Vice President Kamala Harris has made steady gains against Donald Trump in most polls. If she wants that lead to endure past a honeymoon phase, she’ll need to articulate an agenda that appeals to persuadable but as-yet-undecided voters. The positions that will work most effectively just happen to be exactly those the country needs. No doubt, Harris has reason to hesitate before adopting any such approach. As ever, Trump is his own worst enemy. The vice president might b...
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and his fellow Democrats ratified ample changes during the two years they’ve had control of the Minnesota Legislature -- from expansions of abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights to tax credits and other forward initiatives aimed at making life easier for families. Walz has been an activist governor of Minnesota with a strong progressive agenda. And I’d like to focus on one key element of that agenda: requiring public and charter schools to provide free breakfasts and lunches to all students. Walz was lit...
For Democrats this historic election is about only one issue – Trump. Whoever wins the White House, it won’t be because of issues like high inflation, trillion-dollar annual budget deficits or the humiliation of Afghanistan. It’s going to come down to one simple but big thing: How many Americans love Kamala Harris and how many hate Donald Trump. Democrats know that if they can convince voters to hate Trump more than they hate high interest rates, higher taxes and the open border, Harris will win. It won’t matter if she makes a fool of herself i...
Recently, I participated in a Facebook conversation initiated when someone complained about getting an opened bag of corn chips from the cabinet, only to find that someone else had left only the crumby remnants. I and many others understood the disappointment, but several of us commented about the beneficial use of such leftovers for cooking or as a treat. Shortly after my initial response, I realized the topic was a food-for-thought opportunity. So here’s what came tumbling out of my mind. Crumbs are associated with less-than-desirable t...
Clovis Police Chief Roy Rice is facing harsh criticism for his handling of criminal allegations against a former cop. From here, it looks like Rice is not the only one to blame for justice delayed. The trouble began in February 2023 when a burglary suspect told Clovis police investigators she “knew some information about a cop who was providing her with information and drugs,” court records show. Eighteen months later, that Clovis police officer, Frank Careri, was arrested on charges that include drug trafficking and accessory to res...
Violence and horror continue to haunt Black Americans. Most Americans are likely to be aware of the horrific death of Sonya Massey at the hands of a sadistic police officer. Massey, a 36-year-old Illinois mother, had called 911 because she believed an intruder had entered her home. Two Sangamon County deputies arrived, and one of them, Sean Grayson, began spewing a tirade of profanity-laced threats during an argument over a pot of boiling water she was holding. Grayson shot Massey at close range as she ducked behind a counter saying she was...
You might still have questions about how the Biden Coup of 2024 went down. Or maybe you still want to know who has really been calling the shots in the Biden administration during Joe’s afternoon naps. But it looks like you’ll have to wait for the historians. The liberal journalists who control our mainstream media don’t care how Joe Biden was dethroned by his own party – not now and not when it happened. They don’t care that Vice President Kamala Harris – the reigning laughingstock of American politics until 10 minutes ago – was undemocratica...
Revelation 1:5 calls Jesus Christ “the faithful witness.” If I can get on my preacher’s soapbox for just a moment: Christians have so focused on the Revelation as a map to the end-times, they routinely miss what the stated purpose of the book is. According to its opening words, it is “the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Whatever you think the proper interpretation of the book’s images may be, or what it was meant to predict, it is first and foremost a revelation, a “revealing,” of Jesus. It’s about him, not the antichrist. Revelation’s main...
Homelessness isn’t as far away from home anymore. January “point in time” counts show that New Mexico’s unhoused population has been growing in recent years, while nationally it’s at a 15-year high. Last year’s count found a 48% increase in New Mexico’s homeless population from a year earlier, and this year’s count showed a 62% increase. This is more than a perception; it’s a reality. It’s not just in the cities these days. Where I live, along Interstate 40 in Santa Rosa, we get our share of transients, sometimes hoofing or hitchhiking their wa...
One would be hard-pressed to think of a vice president in recent memory placed under as much of a political microscope as Kamala Harris. She can hardly sneeze without someone, somewhere analyzing or dissecting her every move. And let’s not get started on how some of her critics attack her supposed “strange” laugh. Some on the right have insinuated Harris slept her way to the top. Some, including Donald Trump, falsely claim she’s not really Black because her father is light-skinned and her mother was from India. The founder of Pastors for Trump,...
Last week our lame duck President Joe Biden came out of hiding and called for some major changes in how the U.S. Supreme Court operates. His proposals — another election-time pander to his party’s progressive base – were liberal, pie-in-the-sky ideas that everyone knows will never materialize in the real world. They included getting Congress to impose term limits and a binding code of ethics on justices, neither of which could get the required votes in a divided Congress. Biden’s most foolish idea of the week, however, was his call for a const...
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle should have saved herself from being roasted for 4 hours and 40 minutes last week by justifiably angry members of the House Oversight Committee livid over the failures of the Secret Service to prevent the shooting of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. She should have resigned rather than sit there and make the situation worse. Instead, she quit later. Trump thankfully survived, but rallygoer Corey Comperatore died, as did a lot of the agency’s credibility and Cheatle’s reputation. Cheatle said in her...
After all the speculation about whom he would choose, Donald Trump selected JD Vance, the junior senator of Ohio, as his running mate in the presidential race. A former “public affairs” marine turned venture capitalist, Vance rose to fame in 2016 with the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy,” an engaging narrative that detailed his challenging and adversarial upbringing in poverty-stricken southwestern Ohio and his later experiences at Yale law school. The book became a national bestseller and the subject of the Ron Howard-directed 2020 film starri...
We had two big speeches from Washington last Wednesday. Neither one was very encouraging for those of us who worry about our fragile democracy and the futures of our kids and grandkids. Bibi Netanyahu gave a great speech in the House of Representatives, defending Israel’s war in Gaza and trying to rally support from U.S. politicians – i.e., Republicans, mostly. Many Democrats stayed away from Bibi’s speech or cut out early, including Sen. Chuck Schumer. They were afraid to offend the left-wing Democrats that have fractured their party by suppo...
My last article in the Quay County Sun on July 17 was about the splendors of God’s love for us with an introduction that our appropriate response to that love through obedience to become his child (John 14:15-21; Acts 2:38-39; 5:32; Galatians 3:26-4:7; Romans 8:9-17). We’re to continue in that relationship of love by loving others as he loved us because he loves the whole world and wants them as his children (John 3:16; 13:34-35; Ephesians 5:1-2; Romans 5:6-8; 2 Peter 3:9). Love, therefore, is the basis for the first and second greatest com...