From the by M.D. Fletcher |
April 2009 |
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"April is the cruelest month ..." - T. S. Elliot Now's probably as good a time as any to catch you up on a few odds and ends of what's been going on in the world while you've been otherwise preoccupied trying to figure out why the fat rich guy got on Dancing with the Stars to begin with. (For the record, he's 1) willing to make a fool of himself and he's 2) rich. Duh.) The gathering of eagles otherwise known as the New Mexico Legislative Session met for their bi-annual two-month confab. This time it was a particularly contentious powwow because the main ingredient necessary to keep everybody happy (money, and lots of it) was starkly absent. It seems the New Mexico oil and gas industry is currently in the scuppers and the revenues our lawmakers count on to grease the skids for myriad pork-based products simply weren't there. This inconvenient truth hit our elected officials pretty hard in that a great many of them tie their job security directly to their ability to secure funding in sufficient amounts to insure that nobody back home starts looking too seriously at either their voting or DUI records. Our intrepid Governor put on his big boy pants and tried to make the best of it and the media even went out of its way to avoid asking the obvious question of where all the money went in the first place, but in the end it fell to hapless Senator John Arthur Smith who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee to cowboy up and point out to his painfully needy colleagues where the bear went through the buckwheat. This drew the ire of Senator Ben Lujan who memorialized the occasion on the Senate floor by calling Senator Smith a "racist SOB". (Interestingly, it's been my experience that those who bandy about the term "racist" the most are those most likely guilty of the practice.) Senator Smith, who on his worst day has far more class than Senator Lujan on his best, responded by thanking Senator Lujan for his comment and then calmly went about doing the difficult job we sent him up there to do. In the meantime, the College of Santa Fe, otherwise known as Berkley on the Rio Grande and the birthplace of northern New Mexico |
liberalism, staged a massive media event where a number of aggrieved students (that number being two) bemoaned the closing of a treasured institute of higher education and threatened legal action just as soon as they could find a College of Santa Fe alumnus who is also a lawyer that actually passed the bar exam. The whole shebang wrapped up with the Governor promising to call a special session just as soon as either the state revenue picture clears up or he needs to draw attention away from his indictment for campaign fund extortion, whichever comes first. On the national scene, the new administration, with laser-like precision and focus, is concentrating on the economy, energy, health care, education, transportation, climate change, world trade, financial regulation, human rights, foreign policy, homeland security, product safety, the switch to DTV and whether or not Louisville has a shot at making the Final Four. These are all issues vital to the national wellbeing, with the possible exception of Louisville which doesn't stand a snowball's chance of ever getting past Villanova. But I digress. Our friends out west in California have their own set of problems, as I suppose they always have, but as usual those problems are aggravated by the larger than life characters involved. Take their Governor, f'instance. He's a big fan of solar power and had the temerity to suggest that California actually generate some of their own power instead of expecting other, less environmentally worthy places, like say, New Mexico, to generate it for them. He further suggested that the Mohave Desert might be a likely spot for such an endeavor. Arnold fought off a lot of villains in his day but met his match when the senior U. S. Senator from California introduced federal legislation forbidding any such use of the Mohave. It seems even Death Valley is considered more valuable than land inhabited by us poor unenlightened country folk. So there you have it, everything you need to free up your time for more worthwhile pursuits, like say, the Pasa Doble. Arriba! |
