I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
As President Barack Obama spoke in Rio Rancho earlier today, he tapped into some serious anger at an industry that’s widely seen as greedy and unfair to millions of American consumers.
A lot of the old topics I’ve written about became new again this week. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to convert this week’s missive from a leisurely exploration of one topic into a brisk recap of many.
SAGE Council’s Laurie Weahkee, who is Navajo, Cochiti and Zuni, told me that a number of tribes consider Mt. Taylor one of six sacred mountains that figure largely in their creation stories.
Two incidents in the news lately have gotten me thinking (again) about how our society views people of differing colors, creeds and sexual orientations — and how intolerance can sometimes serve as a cover for real cruelty and hatred.
A raft of changes at the state and federal level seems to indicate that medical use of marijuana is growing closer to consistent government support every day. And that’s good, because it’s never made sense that many New Mexico patients still fear eviction, harassment and even arrest and prosecution when trying to use, grow or otherwise procure their medicine.
Luis Jimenez never shrank from a battle in his life. So I’d love to know what the famed New Mexican sculptor would think about the debate raging now over his monumental “Blue Mustang,” which rears and snorts, some say menacingly, on a knoll outside the Denver International Airport.
The murders of Kevin Shirley, Matthew Hunt, both 17, and Luis Garcia, 16, scared people because they were so violent and seemingly so arbitrary. The mystery surrounding the killing of the boys grew into near legend as the case went unsolved for seven years. And yesterday’s acquittal only adds to the mystery.
A public stung by scandals and betrayals at the national and local level is no longer satisfied with pressing their noses on the glass. They want in — and they want more coverage of their elected officials, not less.
I take absolutely no pleasure in witnessing anyone’s economic troubles. And I’m not particularly anti-development. But I am glad to see that someone is finally asking the questions about TIDDs.
Oh, sweet, sweet sarcasm… how I love you so. Sometimes you make the point so much better than any dry analysis can. I think that’s the case with a local blogger’s recent evisceration of The Albuquerque Journal’s questionable decision to publish test results from every single elementary classroom in the Albuquerque Public Schools.
There’s a graveyard west of town, but it doesn’t have green grass or headstones. The place where at least 11 people were buried on the city’s far West Mesa is a crime scene, perhaps the city’s largest ever.
Somehow, artist Sean Delonas thought it would be trenchant to combine one tragic event with perhaps the most catastrophic situation facing our country along with the most feared possible happening and roll it all up into one odious cartoon.
Kilmer’s peek-a-boo act with journalists and legislators regarding the very serious governor’s race is distracting and annoying and it makes me wonder: Are we in little old New Mexico really so dazzled by celebrity that we’re going to be bamboozled by this guy?
I paid little mind to the school lunch deficit controversy raging at Albuquerque Public schools until I saw a bunch of kids dressed as cheese sandwiches protesting outside a school board meeting.
It was an attention-getting device, to be sure. Those cute little cheese sandwiches were a good visual, I thought, a clever way for “anti-hunger activists” to dramatize their point that some New Mexicans cannot afford to pay for school lunches for their kids.
The costumes were apt because, in an effort to prompt some parents to pay and close a $140,000 deficit, APS had announced it would begin serving a cold cheese sandwich, carton of milk and piece of fruit to students who were behind on their lunch tabs.
But some people, it turned out, said they were there that night to protest the school district’s decision to serve lowly cheese sandwiches, which they thought weren’t nutritious enough and might be humiliating for students to receive.
Then, when I heard how the entire issue was being framed by many in the media, I got mad.
Those cheese sandwiches — the real ones, not the dressed-up kids — somehow managed to get in the way getting in the way of the real debate we should be having.
You know, the one about the growing ranks of families in New Mexico who truly can’t afford the lunch tab.
Instead, the issue became a rage-fest about so-called deadbeat parents who are too lazy to pack their kids a lunch and too cheap to pay for a school-issued one.
And how dare some poor kids and their parents get mad about having to eat a cheese sandwich, I heard one particularly rabid radio host say. They should be lucky they’re getting anything for free!
The debate about cheese sandwiches was an unfortunate distraction from the fact that many parents in this profoundly poor state truly cannot afford to pay. And it’s a diversion from the fact that even when those parents fill out the paperwork to get the free federal lunch assistance for which they qualify, APS policies make it hard for their kids to actually collect a hot meal.
I don’t work with families who can’t afford lunches, but I have a friend who works at a nonprofit advocacy agency and she does it every single day.
I happened to run into her this week, and she shared her anger at how cheese sandwiches managed to hijack the debate about hunger in New Mexico.
She’s a writer herself, and she shared with a me a letter (yes, people do still write those!) that she’d written about her experience with the issue.
“This is not about dueling scapegoats: cheese and deadbeats,” she wrote. “It’s about a short-sighted strategy employed by a beleaguered school administration to solve a long-standing and worsening problem –- poverty as it manifests in the school lunch line.”
APS typically carries a deficit in the school lunch program and has employed many different strategies over the years to increase enrollment in the federal free lunch program, with varying degrees of success, she told me.
“Some of the problems of APS’ administrative approach can be illustrated by just one family’s experiences. A single mother of two applied exactly three times this school year –– at each of the schools her children attended, such transience not at all uncommon in districts and, particularly in the Southeast Heights, where wholly a third half of students change schools with a school year.
“This parent was never notified by schools #2 or #3 about whether she had qualified. She checked a few times, meanwhile believing her children were qualified as they had been at school #1 — only to learn from her children after several days that one was being denied her lunch while the other was not — an inexplicable contradiction/discrepancy.
The one being given the cheese sandwich happened to be the one of her children allergic to cheese — as are many Native Americans, lactose intolerant — a fact alone that should have prompted the district in the nation’s largest Native American population to rethink its alternative food choices. Never mind that this extremely responsible mother had already notified the school of her child’s food allergy.”
My friend said her agency and others who work with the poor have offered many ideas for improving lunch delivery and easing the APS lunch deficit, including cutting costs by centralizing food preparation, or lowering the threshold for designating a school for school-wide free lunch, thereby eliminating the need for a cashier and staff time to collect payments and process collections.
“The board, elected by us, should ask many more questions of its well-paid administration before buying into the idea that squeezing a few thousand dollars from struggling parents will solve this long-standing problem any more than processed cheese will solve the problem of hunger.”
I guess that’s true. But it’s way easier just to talk about cheese sandwiches.
I caught up with (my new hero!) state Rep. Janice Arnold-Jones by phone last night after hours of trying to catch her. She was bursting with energy and excitement, even after a long day of fielding arrows from some of her colleagues.
President Obama’s eagerly-awaited 18-minute address was more of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt-style downer of a speech than an uplifting Martin Luther King-type oratory. Perhaps not exactly what the two million or so jubilant folks who crowded the Washington D.C. Mall to witness. But then again, what does America need right now? What did the millions of people who chose Obama vote for? A hard correction.
The E.W Scripps Company, which owns the Rocky Mountain News, said on Dec. 4 that it was putting the paper for up sale and would close it if no buyer emerged by mid-January. Anyone else feeling deja vu?
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had a fascination with David and Goliath-type battles. So when the news came down Tuesday that the Helena Chemical Company of Collierville, Tennessee, filed suit against community activist Arturo Uribe of Mesquite, New Mexico, for alleged defamation and slander, I took immediate notice.
I took a ride on the Rail Runner Express the other day and came away impressed. It was the day before Christmas Eve, and friends told me there was a whiteout in Santa Fe. Normally, I would count myself lucky to live in nice, dry Albuquerque with no compelling reason to go to anywhere on a day like that.
According to Farhad Manjoo, the rates of so-called “generalized trust” among two American strangers from a given community has dropped from nearly 60 percent in 1960 to a low of 32 percent in 2006. And it’s probably even worse today.
