Columnists

As Ruidoso area residents return to their homes — or what’s left of their homes — we’ll be watching FEMA. For the past two years, since the disastrous Hermit’s Peak Calf Canyon Fire, we’ve heard more about what FEMA hasn’t done than what it has done.  This year the agency began changing its New Mexico […]

It was glamour and glitz again as Virgin Galactic sent its last space tourists into the heavens this month. Now the company will fade away for two years to build the next generation ship – not here but in Mesa, Arizona.  What’s next for Spaceport America? Maybe it’s time to go back to Plan A. […]

It’s hard to know who the biggest loser in the Hunter Biden trial might be. Hunter Biden, of course, who was convicted on three felony counts on June 11 by a jury of his Delaware peers, lost the legal case.  Donald Trump lost something bigger; his complaints about two-tiered justice were stopped cold.  During the […]

At 7 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time on June 27, more than four months before Election Day, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will spend 90 minutes on CNN airing rehearsed talking points in front of a moderator in two-minute soundbites in a studio empty but for the production crew and campaign staff. Happily, I will be […]

The President’s son, Hunter Biden, was convicted this week on three federal charges stemming from a 2018 handgun purchase where he was found to have lied on his application to purchase the firearm.  Pretty much what we learned from the trial and speedy verdict is that Hunter Biden is a mess. There was very little […]

I’m haunted by an online post I saw recently. A young woman said she’d been homeless for months and living in her car. She had lost her apartment because she couldn’t afford it. “Yes, I’m working,” she informed readers. A Good Samaritan had given her a camper shell, and she found a place to park […]

In a campaign season filled with distortions, half truths and outright lies, the least I can do is correct my own mistake. I made a factual error in my last column by writing that state House District 31 had three Republican candidates and no Democrat. I missed Vicky Estrada-Bustillo, Democratic candidate for that seat. The […]

Let’s start with the good news: New Mexico is number one on an important ranking. We have the nation’s lowest property taxes, and they’ve been the lowest for a long time. The reason goes back in history to the 1800s when New Mexicans lost land to tax sales because they didn’t understand American taxation imposed […]

Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon, facing three articles of impeachment over the Watergate break-in and wiretapping scandal, resigned from office. Pardoned just a month later, Nixon would spend the rest of his years in quiet retirement, always tainted by Watergate.  Thirty years ago, a special counsel was appointed to review President Bill Clinton’s involvement […]

The U.S. House Committee on Agriculture recently delivered a draft farm bill. It was eight months after the old farm bill, about to expire, had to be extended. This $1.5 trillion, 942-page tome has a lot to like, but it’s missing some key provisions important to New Mexico. And it’s hung up in partisan scrapping. […]