(Political) Parties Make me Dizzy

The morning headlines celebrated Congress’s bipartisan passing of the big affordable housing bill – and the much narrower win for the War Powers Act resolution seeking to rein in Donald Trump’s costly and useless Iran War.

Political parties – and our sclerotic hyper-partisonship – were already on my mind. Fresh news included the probable end to former Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagashima’s bid to run for governor as an independent and the jockeying for position by folks seeking our state’s Democratic nomination for lieutenant-governor.

We should discuss more often whether our two huge political parties, neither contemplated by our Constitution nor welcomed by George Washington, now do more harm than good; and, if so, what the hell can we do about it?

Mayor Ken, a political moderate, had little chance in a primary against Deb Haaland. He started gathering petitions to run as an Independent. (I signed, because he asked, although with mixed feelings generated by my concern that his candidacy might distract voters from making the best choice between Haaland and Hull.) Now, a state judge has declined to issue an order based on Ken’s lawsuit arguing that it’s unfair to make an Independent gather way more petition signatures to run than a Democrat or Republican would have to. Based on precedent, I thought Ken would lose, but he raised an interesting fairness issue. One argument against change is that we could end up with way too many candidates; but so what? Our two-party system yielded Donald Trump. If we’d had six candidates, and ranked-choice voting, he’d still be bankrupting casinos and stiffing sub-contractors.

Also on my mind was the Democrats’ odd situation regarding a nominee for lieutenant-governor. Days after Maggie Toulouse Oliver’s primary victory over Harold Pope, she announced that a health issue is forcing her to back away. Legally, the Democratic Central Committee will nominate a replacement candidate. Practically, gubernatorial nominee Haaland will interview and vet Democrats interested in the nomination and select someone the Central Committee will nominate.

Internet traffic debated whether Pope should win it because he ran for it. That has a certain appeal – although an opponent could argue that Oliver’s big victory margin undermines that idea. (It’s such an obscure position I was jokingly asking who remembered that nice guy from Silver City [our current lieutenant-governor, Howie Morales]? Haaland will choose. Pope definitely deserves some credit for having run. Since she’ll have to run with and work with [if they win] the nominee, who will be only as prominent as she allows, letting her choose makes some sense. If she doesn’t choose Pope, Republicans will attack her for it.

The two parties unofficially do a lot of work we’d have to figure out some other way to do if we didn’t have them; but they also interfere with government and are now interfering with life in the U.S. Political thought gets reduced to rooting for Ohio State or Michigan, and letting your team’s coach molest all the children he wants, while screaming bloody murder if their coach breaks wind.

Hours later, headlines said Trump had canceled signing ceremony for that great housing bill, passed by huge margins. He won’t sign until Republicans swallow their consciences and judgment and vote in the Save the Republicans Bill, making voting harder for normal people, which Trump [reasonably] thinks is the only chance they have in November. Another stunning win for partisanship over the good of the people.

                                                              – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 28 June 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper’s website and (presently) on KRWG’s website. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / ]

[Further developments: Between my writing this Wednesday and posting it here Sunday, Haaland chose Richard as the candidate for lieutenant-governor, and the central committee will quite certainly follow her lead. Richard is a fine choice, as Pope would also have been. Ironically, Richard had announced for the race, then had to back away because of her husband’s health. He’s apparently better now.

[Meanwhile, in a pretty shocking development. Kim Skaggs, Republican state party treasurer and a third-time candidate for State Representative, District 36, against Nathan Small. That, frankly, saddened me personally. Although I’ve disagreed with Kim about a lot, and although I sympathize above all with the victim, I’m saddened for Kim to see her in this situation. One can reasonably say “She deserves it,” but many of us“deserve” lots of bad things that, mostly through luck, don’t actually hit us. I sure have.  That discourages judging others.

Politically, it'll be interesting to see what the Republicans do.  Nathan has been a strong environmentalist and popular in his district.  However, his involvement in pushing Jupiter, and its sly enabling legislation, down our throats hasn't increased his popularity.  Note that one County Commissioner who rushed to vote Jupiter in decided not to run for re-election, and neither of the candidates seeking to replace him likes Jupiter a whole lot; a second resigned to run for county assessor and came in third; and the Jupiter candidate challenging State Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena got trounced. If Skaggs quits the race, or already has, the Republicans have until 25August, I think, to name a replacement candidate.]

[Also, Republican U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy reversed positions on the War Powers Act, after his shouting match with Trump over not having been briefed quickly netted him a briefing. Whatever he heard, or the respect he was given, changed his vote.]

[Finally, a new disclaimer I should include: I speak (and write) for myself only.  Although the Sun-News publishes these columns, and although I host a radio show on Las Cruces Community Radio, what I say, I say as one very old man, not as part of anything or as anything's spokesman.] 

Let's Never Get Used to This!

What amazes me is the sheer number of things the record clearly confirms Mr. Trump has done which would have been unthinkable in any other president.

Imagine Obama making himself chair of the appropriate committee and slapping the name “Obama-Kennedy Center” on that building. Or demolishing half the White House for a huge ballroom, undoubtedly ornate and tasteless, at great cost.

Inspectors-General in federal departments, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Senate Parliamentarian are all independent for important reasons. Congress created inspectors-general to watch administrative departments for corruption, illegality, and waste, and required presidents who fire them to report reasons to Congress. Trump has fired dozens, Obama none. The Fed exists so independent savvy financial people can make the best financial decisions for our nation, rather than whatever is most convenient politically for passing presidents. Imagine Biden pressuring the bank and starting spurious criminal investigations to extort the Bank to act imprudently to reduce inflation before the 2024 election. The neutral Senate Parliamentarian, an impartial internal referee and rules expert, advises the Senate on what’s lawful. That neutral advice is so important to the Senate’s functioning that the posterior-osculating Republican senators have actually resisted Trump’s demand to fire her, when they resist little else.

Imagine Obama appointing Montel Williams as defense secretary because he’d served in the Navy and Marine Corps.

Imagine Joe Biden sending Hunter to negotiate a Middle East peace agreement while Hunter’s capital investment firm was receiving huge investments from Saudi Arabia. Imagine him making Michael Cohen Attorney-General because he liked Cohen’s testimony against Donald Trump.

Forget the numerous people 47 has had our government try [and fail ludicrously] to jail for doing their jobs or speaking up against the Great Leader. Obviously these discourage dissent. They also waste judicial and legal resources, including wasted of precious dollars when we can’t guarantee folks health and Trump threatens to destroy Social Security.

When did Presidential pardons become a personal profit center? Presidents 43, 44, 45, and 46 pardoned 80 to 212 convicted criminals each. Number 47, in one year, has pardoned 1700 – close to 200 individually, usually with a healthy political donation from the convict’s family, PLUS about 1500 in the mass pardon of the nice folks who attacked cops and defaced Congress, threatening to hang the vice-president, for love of Trump.

President Biden didn’t try to jail David Weiss for investigating his son, or appoint as AG Michael Cohen because he liked that lawyer’s testimony about Trump.

And suppose Obama had removed all reference to the Declaration of Independence from a museum honoring a slave-holding signatory? We’d howl, because both his patriotism and his slave-holding are historically important facts. Like each of us, our historical leaders were inherently imperfect and self-contradictory human beings.

Suppose Obama appointed as HHS Secretary a man with no medical training or health management or administrative leadership experience, and watched quietly while measles and other “extinct” diseases reawakened and spread. Almost all Defense Secretaries have deep experience running large defense institutions or national-security bureaucracies. Pete Hegseth has run nothing except his mouth.

Trump-defenders excused his many personal and political bad acts by saying he’d keep our finances in order and avoid unnecessary foreign wars. Polls show few now trust him fiscally, and an unnecessary and inflationary foreign war is spending vast fortunes and Iranian civilian lives to get us back to where we were under the agreement Mr. Obama had negotiated without war.

– 30 –

 

 

 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 21 June 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website and (presently) on KRWG’s website. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / ]

[Stupidities mount daily. We just spent zillions on paint that’s already cracking from the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, and we did nothing to solve the algae problem. Hegseth made vaccines optional, for ideological reasons, and scores of real-world U.S. soldiers quickly got sick. Wonder if he’s stupid enough to be surprised?

[And at G7, where allied leaders try to treat him especially nicely, he offends Italy by saying it’s leader “begged for a photo with me.” I mean, like, man, WTF? Well, why, anyway. Any of us would know that would offend. Any of us know it would be a small hindrance to maintaining a military alliance. Any of us know that although there could be sane reasons for our nation to cross allies, bolstering one person’s ego wouldn’t be one. Not for the first time, he is showing us his lack of self-control and his desperate need for praise and glory. Yet again, in a small example this time, we see clearly from his own conduct that bolstering his ego is a higher priority than we are. Yet again, a third of us refuse to see it, or say, but he beefed up border protection.

[To put it another way, will someone tell the Narcissist-in-Chief that people have their pictures taken with clowns, dead fish, and monkeys, too?]

[Trump is far more competent in corruption. He claims he can’t be accused of insider trading because his sons manage the family’s investments. But when it comes to monetizing ties to a U.S. President, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. leave Hunter Biden deep in the shade.

Along with the family of Steven Witcoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, they started a cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial. The oil-rich kingdom of the United Arab Emirates, invested $2 million. Two weeks later, the Emirates struck a deal with the Trump administration — the first of its kind — giving them access to advanced U.S. AI chips.   “Watch our dust, Hunter!” ]

[ Meanwhile, Moody’s Analytics estimates that the Iran fiasco has cost U.S. consumers and taxpayers about $132 billion, with the meter still running. That’s a lot of health care, but who’s counting? ]

Citizens Call out Project Jupiter's "Bait-and-Switch" Tactic

Water and truth are each scarce, and highly-valued, out here.

Citizens concerned about water and extreme air pollution) balked last September when our county commission rushed to approve a huge data center that would have a disproportionately bad impact on our climate and air quality.

Recently, citizens pleaded for a town hall where commissioners and developers would answer questions. After the commission finally agreed, the project pulled a bait-and-switch: citizens sought a meaningful open public discussion. The developer now plans a combination job fair and “open house,” at which folks can visit “stations,” and ask questions.

At a town hall, when Jupiter Minion #293 solemnly promises that Jupiter will cool its huge turbines with non-potable water, a hydrologist could ask a cogent follow-up question, everyone could watch #293 look for a hole in the floor. At an open house station, not so.

Living in a desert, even idiots like me understand that when a deep aquifer contains a lot of water too salty or mineral-laden to drink, if my neighbor pumps out a lot of that bad water, that could draw freshwater downward, leaving my shallow well dry. His plea, “But I only took non-potable water,” won’t keep my tomatoes alive. The issue isn't simply whether the water is drinkable. The issue is whether it is part of a limited regional water resource. Non-potable is a current description that doesn’t tell us about the future. As technically true but misleading as a politician saying, “Who cares what that kid thinks? Sixteen-year-olds can’t vote.”

These Jupiter folks say stupid things. Here are three:

, 1. It’s not a problem because this is non-potable water, promised a pro-Jupiter newspaper op-ed by Julia Robin. Living in a desert, even I know that’s pretty meaningless.

At best, it describes a quality of the water at present. A temporary quality. With a bit longer drought, we might want to spend the bucks to make that water drinkable. Or, since in our huge aquifer there’s a thin layer of fresh water above the brackish, if you pump non-potable water below the potable, the potable falls too – and likely mixes.

2. “If you like protecting the air, you like Project Jupiter” read a weekend ad in the Albuquerque Journal. Hunnh? Jupiter, before the switch to fuel cells, which would improve things a little, planned to toss up greenhouse gasses at least equivalent to what Albuquerque and Las Cruces do now. Possibly forever, because they bought exemption from the Energy Transition Act. Reasonable people can argue that the jobs to be created are important enough to warrant screwing up our air that way; but no one would call constructing those huge turbines would “protecting the air.”

3. Our surface wells will pump just 10,000 acre-feet, so no worries. Wait. The US. Supreme Court just decided that to help Texas this region has to reduce ground-water pumping by 18,000 acre feet. That’s will be tough on farms, families, and villages. Well, now it’s 28,000, assuming Jupiter’s wells are hydrologically connected.

Tuesday, many citizens criticized that “bait-and-switch,” in a tense atmosphere. Chairman Manny Sanchez directed security to empty the left half of that audience. People refused. We almost had a few private security folks struggling to remove scores of adults. Hours later – to their credit, – the commissioners decided to re-open discussion and have the factual, expert-aided conversation that should have preceded approval.

Credit commissioners’ resilience. And citizens’ passions.

                                            – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 14 June 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website and (presently) on KRWG’s website. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / ]

[ Jupiter folks are flooding our newsprint and Internet with pretty ads. Even if I didn’t know something about this situation, seeing people spend that heavily to make me like them would tend to create a little distrust. ]

[ So far, it looks likely that four county commissioners' names will live in infamy in our county, as we live with this loud, ugly, air-polluting .data center they did not even seriously try to control the damage from, and as broken promises and failed promises come home to roost.  But who knows? ]                 

It’s been an eventful week here, with a blistering state audit of our county government then a primary election.

Folks should read the audit. It’s not good. Nor is it the end of the world. The only thing I’d add now to what I wrote last week is to applaud County Commissioner Susana Chaparro. She showed up at Progressive Voters Alliance Thursday evening to discuss the audit, saying that it wasn’t good but that she wanted the group to hear it from her, and rather taking ownership – which is right, even though a lot of what the auditors found long pre-dated the terms of any present commissioners. She didn’t dismiss the audit as “all politics,” as one commissioner reportedly did. I’ve read most of the 355 pages; and it’s detailed, factual, and professional. The problems can and should be fixed.

I was glad for many reasons that Deb Haaland whomped Sam Bregman. He didn’t deserve to be our governor. She may. I’m already hearing some feelings (in men) that she could be hurt in the general election by the disastrous governorship of a Republican woman then the highly disappointing eight years of a Democratic woman. Notably, in a primary for state secretary of state, between Santa Fe’s County Clerk, Katherine Clark, and our own Amanda Lopez Askin, who was appointed initially by our county commission to fill a vacancy, then won re-election twice. The last time a Democrats nominated someone from down here for a statewide office, it was Jerry Apodaca for governor. Ironically, as a young reporter I hung out with Jerry and Clara for most of the weekend preceding the primary. He was one of four Democrats vying for the nomination, and was not the favorite. His governorship generated a bit of national conversation about him and Clara being the Hispanic Kennedys.

If our local voting told us anything, other than the low turnout reminding us of voter apathy, it told us that voters here like a lot of the incumbents, and did not respond favorably to bunches of outside cash being spent to attack a respected local incumbent. District 33 Representative Micaela Lara Cadeña won more than handily, despite vicious attacks by Jupiter Project supporters; and Daisy Maldonado, a county commission candidate who had strongly criticized the commission over Jupiter, also one. Meanwhile two incumbents – Dist. 37 Rep. Joanne Ferrary and Sheriff Kim Stewart – strongly influenced our choice of a successor. Ferrary, retiring, strongly endorsed Lori Martinez, who won a fairly close race, while Stewart, term-limited, did the same for former Anthony Police Chief Vanessa Ordoñez, who narrowly beat Jim Frietze, a strong candidate endorsed by the deputies’ union. (Martinez will face former county commissioner Isabella Solis in November, while Ordoñez will face long-time-ago former sheriff Todd Garrison. (Incumbent assessor Gena Montoya Ortega also won.)

This year’s fondness for incumbents may not extend to commissioners. The District 1 incumbent chose not to run, and recently-resigned commissioner Shannon Reynolds lost his challenge to the assessor.

“Apathy is a problem,” officials say of voters. “That county audit confirms my disgust with gov’t bodies,” texted a friend of mine, a cagey card-player. Although Cardeña, Maldonado, and Askin are activists or professionals who didn’t initially imagine seeking public office, and mean what they say, wealth has way too much influence on our politics. While I care passionately who wins some of these elections, voters’ trust and interest aren’t a given. It must be earned.

                             – 30 –

[The above column appeared Sunday, 7 June 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website and (presently) on KRWG’s website. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / ]

[The headline folks at the newspaper chose a headline that is technically accurate but could mislead folks: “Voters back incumbents despite scathing county audit | Opinion.” I do mention voters backing incumbents or the endorsees of incombents, and also the audit. I presume the word “despite” in there refers to the fact that the audit didn’t put voters off politicians so strongly that they’d try to throw all the rascals out; but someone could read the to suggest that the re-elected incumbents were county commissioners responsible for the Project Jupiter problem. None was. Of the four commissioners who so hastily approved the project, Chair Manny Sanchez’s term was not up this year, while incumbent Chris Schialjo-Hernandez [wisely] chose not to run for a second term. (It was his seat to which strongly anti-Jupiter activist Daisy Maldonado was nominated by the Democrats. In November, she’ll face Republican nominee Samantha Barncastle-Salopek, who will likely prove a formidable candidate.) A third, Commissioner Shannon Reynolds, had resigned his seat in order to challenge County Assessor Eugenia Montoya Ortega. He lost. Gloria Gameros, initially elected in 2024, was also not up for re-election yet. Further, one of the incumbents re-elected to the Legislature was Cadeña, who has criticized the rush to genuflect to the Jupiter gods.]

[I was impressed that despite all the money being spent to mislead us, Jupiter’s candidates didn’t win. Today’s Albuquerque Journal contained a huge Jupiter ad that asked a bunch of questions, something like:

Do you support:

Sustainable local water use?

Protecting our air?

More good paying local jobs?

Improving our schools, infrastructure and drinking water?

Then you support Project Jupiter.

The “sustainable water use” is almost surely nonsense, but they are using a “closed-loop” cooling system that should result in less water use; but the “protecting our air” sure sounds like pure fantasy, not pure air. Reasonable people can argue, and do, that the promised benefits of the project justify an extremely bad affect on our air and atmosphere; but I’d love to watch the face of any knowledgeable person who argued that tossing up as much in the way of pollutants as Albuquerque and Las Cruces (combined) do is somehow “protecting our air!” ]