Obama’s political framing of immigration reform lacks depth
President Obama’s understanding of immigration and border policy is fundamentally political. For Obama, immigration reform makes good sense politically. As such, the president’s vision of immigration reform is framed by political platitudes and slogans – such as the stress on combatting transnational crime, deporting and excluding “criminal aliens,” and fortifying border security.
College ballin’
UNM students got a crash course in American economics and priorities on Tuesday when regents approved a 13.2 percent increase in tuition for students taking under 15 credit hours. The hike included a nearly $1 million increased student subsidy to athletics. That equals $165 per student and $4 million total. In the past two years at UNM, student fees for athletics have doubled. If UNM is going to strong arm the student body into doling out welfare for a system where $2 million a year isn’t enough money to retain a coach, students should be demanding added security for their college athlete peers...
Fairness in America’s poorest state
When you think about the governor signing into law tax breaks for incoming corporations and vetoing a dollar hike in the minimum wage, and add to that the more than 13 % tuition hike passed by the UNM Regents yesterday, you get the feeling that reality has slipped a cog in our poor state, the poorest per capita in the nation according to Census Bureau data released in January...
Brutal and subtle violence
Vice President Biden was right when he said that the issue of violence against women transcends politics. It was Biden, himself the master politician, however,who authored the l994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and who spurred its reauthorization by Congress last month...
Backtracking
The Central New Mexico Community Collage (CNM) administration must have realized that its impulsive and, as its sister publication the Daily Lobo called it, “authoritarian” censorship and closure of its student newspaper, the Chronicle, had caused them a tsunami of negative PR. It backtracked and reversed itself in a day, returning the confiscated “Sex” edition, reopening the paper for business, and waxing on about how student journalists had to be better trained and overseen.
Guns
Those who deny the inherent danger of firearms are in the same category as those who deny human impact on climate change or the link between tobacco and cancer.
U.S. drones come home to roost
The pushback against drone strikes on presumed enemies of the United States is to be encouraged considering the inherent legal, moral, and even strategic questions involved in remote-controlled killing within nation states not officially at war with this country.
Kirtland Spill: Get Serious
With the Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill now estimated at 24 million gallons, it’s time for New Mexico’s U.S. Senators to get serious about cleaning it up. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich need to come to Albuquerque, hold formal hearings with their power of subpoena, and require all associated parties to testify under oath about how such a calamity could happen, and what can be done to make that massive amount of polluted water drinkable again.
Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency
Many of the country's biggest media companies, which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations, are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending.