Posts by V.B. Price

This has always been among the darkest of brutal secrets in American life and in most of the cultures of the world.

Running the city like a business in the old sense of the cliche, and in this business climate, would mean running the city like a failed business – cutting jobs, scaling back services, tightening and tightening until nothing’s left, but refusing to change the failed products.

What is the difference between a judge who thinks the abstraction of following procedure is more important than stopping the execution of an innocent person—and someone who would go to the ends of the earth, applying every legal skill to not executing someone wrongly and unjustly?
Is it their basic humanity? Has the instinct for the [...]

The 2009 mayoral election lets us know that nobody is really steering the boat. And it puts us at peril. We need a visionary politician brave and smart enough to help us think about how we’re going to cope with the realities of the future hard times ahead. Maybe we’ll see one emerge four years from now. I hope it’s not too late.

I remember hearing people saying after President Obama’s election “There is no racism in America anymore.” But as we’ve seen repeatedly since the beginning of the year, and especially last week in the anti-health care march in Washington, the exact opposite is the case.

If the Supreme Court abandons all campaign finance restrictions without requiring that sponsors take credit for the ads, then the often savage recklessness that anonymity breeds among those who comment on the internet will descend upon local, as well as national, politics, and infect it with the brutal drivel that people spew when they are not held accountable for what they say.

When your neighbors are in trouble, chances are you’re in trouble too. Look around southwest and mountain west America. Everywhere you’ll find major cities from Los Angeles to Denver, and Las Vegas to Phoenix worried sick about their water supply – as well they should be.

If loyal members of the NRA carry loaded guns into public political meetings and town halls, should loyal members of the ACLU carry loaded guns to the same gatherings? Would anyone who values their life stay in such a meeting?

I can’t imagine either Jeff Bingaman or Tom Udall ever running successfully in New Mexico again if their base thinks they chickened out. Even the president’s eloquence won’t let him back off from this unscathed.

The same “me” people and political purists are at it again as they’ve always been, stonewalling health care reform, trying to make it seem like a commie plot from the days of McCarthy witch hunts, or calling Democrats Nazis.

The odd thing about the news coverage of the future closing of General Electric’s South Valley jet engine plant is that it didn’t mention the ground water Superfund site that GE has been cleaning up for more than a decade there.

There’s little doubt in my mind that somewhere down the road, in the not too distant future, we will have water rationing. And we could even see drastic curtailments of use.

Bank, mortgage, and other financial institutions have joined the U.S. Chamber to oppose the Obama Administration’s proposal for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The agency would regulate payday loans, credit card charges, mortgage interest, foreclosures and a host of other practices.

Not long ago, Americans were spending so much that most of us could not stash away even one percent of our incomes. Now the government reports the national savings rate in May reached 6.9 percent, a 15 year high.

I’m always taken aback when I talk to old friends, many of them scholars, who bemoan the lack of good journalism in our town. They just aren’t looking in the right places, even now after almost a decade of the blogosphere.