News New Mexico - Once a statewide radio show providing state news aggregation and commentary, we have evolved. On this site we post political/cultural commentary, both domestic and international. At the top of the right hand sidebar there are links to discussions of the fundamental pillars of our world views. Click on these discussions and gain useful insights into our biases and how many of our views are formed.
NewsNM:Swickard - most New Mexico towns do not have escalators so there is a question about how important are they. From KRQE-TV.com - by Alex Tomlin - A temporary wall and temporary doors have been set up at city hall to block people from a major construction project. What's behind that wall and doors will cost you a lot of money but the city says it has no choice. “They are approximately 20-25 years old,” Michael Riordan with the City of Albuquerque said. He’s talking about the dusty, damaged and dangerous set of escalators leading from the street to the basement of city hall where city councilors and county commissioners meet. “We've had other incidents in the past that we could fix,” said Riordan. “These cracks are of a significant nature that’s more structural and it's not something you can just repair, you have to replace them.”
City officials had to shut down the escalators in May after discovering the cracks. They quickly found out replacing these 20 plus year-old, people-movers is going to be very expensive. “You can't buy escalators off the shelf because every depth is different every width is different, they have to be designed,” said Riordan. It's going to cost $350 thousand to replace them. City officials thought about making the whole thing stairs but by the time you rip out the escalators and fill this up with concrete the cost is about the same. “We want to make sure we do what is best for the taxpayer dollar,” said Riordan. Read more
From the Santa Fe New Mexican - by Nico Roesler - The nine-year-old black bear looked down from its perch in an oak tree in south Santa Fe with the warmth of a child waking up from a nap. Santa Fe police think the creature had spent the night in the tree after a night of marauding through Dumpsters around the Kohl’s, Outback Steakhouse and Ranch House off Cerrillos Road early Thursday.
Patrol officers spotted the bear at about 1 a.m. and tried to pursue her through the wee hours of the morning, Capt. Aric Wheeler said. She evaded them until later in the morning when she awoke directly across the street from police headquarters at the Park and Ride stop off Camino Entrada.
A green tag could be seen on one of the animal’s ears while it remained perched among the tree branches. Rael said the bear must have been tagged on another trip into the city, and he wondered if it would be set free again following its capture. Ben Otero of the Española district office of Game and Fish later said the estimated 225-pound bear would be released again into the wild. “We have a three strikes policy when it comes to bears entering the city,” he explained said.
About 20 feet up, she became visibly affected by the 1,000 milligrams of tranquilizing serum in her system, no longer gazing at her gawkers but now confusedly gazing toward the rising sun. A back foot slipped and she spun around a branch, still holding on with her front paws.
Down below, Animal Control officers shifted a three-foot-deep air mattress to where they thought the bear would fall. The bear fell, without hitting any other branches on the way down, to the pillowy landing pad.
The bear was tagged a second time and loaded into its cage. Otero said the bear would be injected with some antibiotics then released into the Jemez Mountains. Read more
Wandering bear captured on Santa Fe's southwest side
Commentary by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. - Ethanol requirements in gasoline are almost a complete disaster. Not quite, but close. Let us count the ways ethanol is good: there is only one. If no conventional fuel is available during a crisis, such as a war in the Middle East, we are glad to have ethanol. Is there anything else good about ethanol? No, the harm is profound.
To be sure gasoline is better, cheaper, less polluting, non-corrosive and ultimately less risky. Ethanol is so very corrosive that it cannot be transported by pipeline; rather, it must be shipped in stainless steel tanks either on the railroad or by truck. And therein is the problem for the consumer. Ethanol is so corrosive that people with older vehicles will see the destruction of gaskets, steel tanks and rubber fittings.
The harm of ethanol is not just to our pocketbooks and our vehicles, the use of food to make fuel when our nation has abundant energy resources causes food prices to increase. This is not just corn products. Wheat and rice products increase as consumers react to corn prices so that all three food prices increase. And, since beef, chicken and pork use these same grains, the price of meat increases dramatically.
In our country this is hard for people who live on subsistence calories. But the real damage of ethanol is that it injures fragile populations throughout the world. This has been seen with the price of corn tortillas in Mexico and food in the Middle East. Each place where food increases in price causes fragile citizens to be devastated by the pressure put on their basic subsistence.
The rise of food prices destabilizes some parts of the world, again, for no real good reason. Yes, there are those people who wave the “Global Warming” banner but day by day it is increasingly obvious to everyone that Global Warming is a political hoax.
In my town there was one vendor who sold gasoline without ethanol but alas, he was forced to only sell ethanol “enhanced” gasoline this last week. He sent me this message by email: “…I have spent my entire thirty two year career in the convenience store business being a leader and not follower. Words cannot explain my frustration and anger concerning being forced back into selling an ethanol blend fuel… I have a great collection of vintage vehicles and know the destruction that is being done by ethanol on my rubber gaskets and engine.”
The problem is Washington D. C. requiring a political solution to a non-political problem. People need energy but using the political solution of ethanol is tragic. This next year let us wrestle the government on the ethanol requirement. It may take all of us to do it. Read full column
Newsbreak New Mexico 5pm Newscast with Vanessa Dabovich
Listen here:
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Albuquerque Journal - British billionaire Richard Branson says he has “stopped counting” days to the official launch of his space tourism business out of Upham, N.M., because it gets delayed “to the next year, to the next year.”
The founder of Virgin Galactic made the comments to reporters as he met with students on his first visit to his young persons business school called Virgin Academy in Warsaw, Poland, on Wednesday.
He says it will be at least another 12 or 18 months before the Virgin Galactic venture can offer paid space travel to adventurers, which is generally within previously announced time frames.
That would put the first launch about as early at October of next year or about four months into 2014.
Just last week, a Virgin Galactic official at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces said the company tentatively planned to launch its first two-stage flight to the edge of space in December 2013, about 14 months away. Read More News New Mexico (subscription)
Newsbreak New Mexico 12pm Newscast with Vanessa Dabovich
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Lovelace and ABQ Health Partners reach agreement ERB shows strong returns Court rules against NM family in brain casket case Aviation and aerospace officials say NM has potential
After weeks of fighting to
be included in the major party election debates, Libertarian candidate Gary
Johnson got the chance to speak on the issues during a third party debate event
this week in Chicago.
Johnson joined presidential
nominees from the Green Party, Constitution Party and the Justice Party. The C-SPAN
debate was moderated by Larry King and Christina Tobin.
The debate covered topics
ranging from the war on drugs and immigration, to the rising cost of college
tuition. When talking about the nations fiscal condition the former New Mexico
Governor gave his take on the term “free.”
Johnson-“Free’ comes with a
cost. ‘Free’ is accumulating more to the $16 trillion in debt than we already
have. ‘Free’ has gotten us to the point where we are going to have a monetary
collapse.”
Johnson sued the Commission
on Presidential Debates last month in federal court to try to force them to
admit him to the debates.The commission only invites
candidates who polling shows have at least 15 percent support among voters.
Johnson expressed his frustration
with major party candidates.
Johnson-“There is only a
couple of voices being heard (in this campaign), and it’s tweedledumb and
tweedledee.”
Johnson has been plagued by
the concept of a ‘wasted vote’ during this close election season. Some republicans
fear he may cost Mitt Romney some some votes on November 6th.
The libertarian White House
hopeful addressed the vote worth during his closing statement.
Johnson-“Wasting your vote is voting for somebody that you
don’t believe in,” an impassioned Johnson said. “That’s wasting your vote. I’m
asking everybody here, I’m asking everybody watching this nationwide to waste
your vote on me.
Tuesday’s
debate won’t be the last third-party face-off of the campaign. Another debate
sponsored by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation is expected next week featuring
the two candidates who receive the most online votes.
For
Newsbreak New Mexico,
I’m Vanessa Dabovich.
Gary Johnson gets his chance to debate at third party event
Townhall - Commentary by Victor Davis Hanson - The president of the United States in the last debate chose to go on the attack against his challenger, Mitt Romney -- and once again largely failed to convince the American people that he was the more presidential alternative.
But how did the once-messianic incumbent find himself in this fix of playing the catch-up role of a bar-room-brawling challenger rather than a calm and confident president? Despite running ahead in the polls for most of the year, Barack Obama has rarely achieved a 50 percent favorability rating, largely because of four years of dismal economic news. Obama himself had warned us four years ago that if he didn't restore prosperity, he would be a one-term president -- and the debates taught us that he was probably right.
Barack Obama
Promises about halving the annual deficit, getting unemployment below 6 percent and increasing middle-class incomes were never met. The recent unrest in the Middle East and the killing of an American ambassador and three other Americans in Libya did not help convince anyone that Obama's foreign policy was so successful that they could afford to overlook an anemic economy.
Yet the American people always wanted a viable alternative before they admitted their mistake and dumped a president whom they had voted in with such adulation in 2008. Obama sensed that hesitancy, and so he spent nearly $1 billion in a largely negative campaign to convince voters that Romney was insensitive to women, callous to the poor and, in general, a heartless, out-of-touch capitalist. Read full column here: News New Mexico
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