Editorials
Editorial content. Content posted here may or may not reflect the opinions of the Beat. They reflect the opinions of the author.
Mimbres and Gila Apache Kin
- Category: Editorials Editorials
- Published: 06 July 2024 06 July 2024
By Ruben Leyva
My Ph.D. program research centers on the rhetorics of Apache identity and asks, "What is an Apache?" I can confidently tell you Apache bands were fluid and their interrelationships complex. Bands developed from marriages with other groups and the need for traditional and non-traditional resources. The Apache traveled seasonally for plant foods, wild game, and rations. Nation-state government interference was also responsible for the Apache movement. This story illustrates how the same Apache band was documented in multiple locations and assigned different band identifiers, sometimes according to landmarks.
Kids Count Report Highlights Government Failure
- Category: Editorials Editorials
- Published: 05 July 2024 05 July 2024
By Paul J. Gessing
The latest edition of Kids Count provides more devastating news about New Mexico and the condition of our children. The report, created by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (a center/left non-profit that works nationwide) analyzes and ranks all 50 states based on 16 variables relating to childhood outcomes.
Surprising absolutely no one, New Mexico again was at the very bottom once again at 50th. I analyzed the report and counted 7 variables that improved, 7 that got worse, and 2 that stayed the same relative to last year’s report. Based on this it is hard to point to any trend line pointing towards improvement.
Enabling the Perpetual Political Pendulum (Part Three of Three)
- Category: Editorials Editorials
- Published: 28 June 2024 28 June 2024
Enabling the Perpetual Political Pendulum
(Part Three of Three)
Excerpted from The Unfounding of America, by Michael Russell
TheSecondDeclaration.org
"In order to form a hypothesis about the future of an individual," Ayn Rand wrote in 1971, "one must consider three elements: his present course of action, his conscious convictions, and his sense of life. The same elements must be considered to form a hypothesis about the future of a nation."
Were we to generally diagnose our republic's health by taking her societal temperature, we would find it feverish. Heart and respiratory rate? Fluctuating according to "the news." Blood pressure? Elevated. Vision and hearing? Acute within a predetermined range of acceptability. Body-mass index? Corpulent. Reflexes? Sluggish. Medications? And then some. Vaccinations? Whatever the doctor orders.
Enabling the Perpetual Political Pendulum (Part Two of Three)
- Category: Editorials Editorials
- Published: 28 June 2024 28 June 2024
Enabling the Perpetual Political Pendulum
(Part Two of Three)
Excerpted from The Unfounding of America, by Michael Russell
TheSecondDeclaration.org
I had a friend, now deceased, who for 27 years was a prospector in the Yukon Territory. We met in the Alaska Interior in 1995, where he lived with his wife in a rough log cabin forty minutes by road from the nearest town. I fondly recall conversations about life, philosophy, politics, grizz, gold, and my friend's failing heart, but most poignantly I remember his answer to my question about where to find gold. With the certainty of a man who knows from long experience the conditions required to repeat a previous achievement, he replied, "I can't say where you're gonna find it, but I can say where you're not gonna."
Enabling the Perpetual Political Pendulum (Part One of Three)
- Category: Editorials Editorials
- Published: 27 June 2024 27 June 2024
Enabling the Perpetual Political Pendulum
(Part One of Three)
Excerpted from The Unfounding of America
by Michael Russell
TheSecondDeclaration.org
The principles responsible for the creation of
America are, and have always been, required in equal
measure to sustain America. Only an independent-minded
citizenry can preserve a free independent nation.
While bicycling alone from California to New Hampshire in the summer of 1982, I contemplated and learned at the age of 25 what it meant to be an American and what America was founded to enshrine and protect. Such was not the purpose of my self-propelled expedition, but it was a life-affirming consequence. Two years later, during a university debate between calmly articulate capitalists and rabidly emotional "democratic socialists," I observed via audience response America's likely future and understood that the singular hope for my country was not political, but educational, and that public "education," by producing massive numbers of citizens unable to think conceptually, was ensuring the destruction of America. It would take another 27 years before I grasped with equivalent certainty that the authoritarian-collectivist Left's patient program of indoctrination had all along been bolstered by a perceptual counterpart: corporate-media manipulation of what Americans are "allowed" to see and hear.
Editorial from a NM InDepth writer's perspective on the Bible
- Category: Editorials Editorials
- Published: 19 June 2024 19 June 2024
[Editor's Note: This is posted with permission to place in editorials on the Beat.]
This is from New Mexico In Depth's mid-week newsletter. We think it's crucial to stay in touch and tell you what's on our minds every week. Please let us know what's on your mind as well. Or, got tips? What do we need to know? Contact us: nmindepth@gmail.com
A couple of weeks ago a writer at the Federalist blog faulted Dolly Parton for ascribing her loving attitude toward all her fans, including her LBGTQ+ ones, to her Christian faith.
I am not going to defend Dolly Parton here. She doesn’t need me to. The legendary songwriter and
Leader Rod Montoya Op-Ed on Special Session
- Category: Editorials Editorials
- Published: 18 June 2024 18 June 2024
By: NM House Republican Leader Rod Montoya
On June 10, House Republican leaders sent a letter to Governor Lujan Grisham explaining why her desire to rewrite highly complex behavioral health laws during the upcoming July 18 special session was not possible due to numerous unanswered questions. Instead, Republican leaders called on the governor to set a special session agenda that focuses on fixing our state's violent crime problem, reducing the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs across our southern border, and reforming the problem-plagued Children, Youth and Families Department.
These unanswered questions, which have been raised by both Republican and Democrat legislators, include, how much will the governor's proposals cost, how will these proposals make New Mexicans safer, and how will all these newly required behavioral health services be provided when the state is already facing a critical shortage of mental health professionals? Spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers' dollars to bring legislators back to Santa Fe to pass legislation that is not fully vetted and will have no immediate impact on the state's violent crime and drug trafficking problems is not what special sessions are for.
Rio Grande Foundation Tipping Point interview 061324
- Category: Editorials Editorials
- Published: 17 June 2024 17 June 2024
The link to the full podcast is below this summary.
On this week’s Tipping Point interview Paul talks to independent researcher Leanna Derrick. Derrick has been working to uncover and highlight the outsized influence of “progressive” group Emerge New Mexico which recruits, trains, and funds left wing women in public office throughout New Mexico. They discuss the “Emerge” group which operates in two dozen states. Who funds them? What do they do and what has been happening here in New Mexico with Emerge-recruited and backed candidates?