I never mentioned Caroline Kennedy (Princess Caroline, as right-wing bloggers like to call her) during all the “Will she or won’t she?” hoopla, in part because I was busy, and in part because I didn’t really care. Nepotism is a fact of life, folks. Is and always has been. Here in New Mexico especially. A [...]
I’ve been on the road the past few days, so haven’t been able to blog or even read until now the raging battle in the comments section of my last post. I’m back in LA, sitting by an open window — an open window! in January! — watching the little savages play under a lemon [...]
As I sat in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi on Christmas eve, listening to my daughters and the rest of the children’s choir singing about the nativity of the Lord, I couldn’t help thinking about an article I’d read in the New Mexican a few days before about secular humanist parents: They [...]
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Posted 29 December 2008
† Brigette Russell
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Parenthood § Religion § Santa Fe § The Culture Wars
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Tagged: agnostics, atheists, Catholic, Charles Darwin, Christmas, G. K. Chesterton, humanist, Karl Marx, Patrick O'Hannigan, ritual, secular, Sigmund Freud, transcendence
Why do I read the Santa Fe New Mexican’s letters to the editor? If my husband and I are both in a good mood and we read them together, we can have a good laugh about them, but reading them alone just depresses me about the state of our poor, pitiful democratic republic when so [...]
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Posted 12 December 2008
† Brigette Russell
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Food § Politics § Santa Fe
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Tagged: 17th Amendment, Al Franken, D. G. Lindberg, direct election of senators, emotionalism, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Paris Hilton, pig, political corruption, political machine, Rachel Lucas, Richard Dawkins, roast pork, Rod Blagojevich, utopianism, voter registration
It looks like Mario Burgos is going to get his wish. In a post titled, “Obama, please take our governor,” my fellow New Mexican opines that we’d be better off without Mr. Richardson in the governor’s mansion. Maybe so, but will “Judas” Richardson be better off having to watch his back serving in a cabinet [...]
Obamanos, for those of you outside the Land of Enchantment, has been the battle cry of New Mexico’s Obamanistas. It’s clever, I’ll grant them that. It’s clever; it’s slick; it’s hip — just like Obama himself. As passionately as I wanted John McCain to win the presidency, I’m feeling remarkably tranquil in the wake of [...]
Tonight was a long time coming. Seems like this election has been going on forever. Sort of like pregnancy; I always feel like that lasts about a decade and a half too. Maybe now that it’s almost over, I can actually blog about something other than politics. I remember sitting glued to the TV news [...]
and check out my guest blog on Swing State of Mind, the campaign blog of the Santa Fe Reporter. For my out-of-town friends, SFR is about as left-leaning as a newspaper can be, but in the interest of diversity, they asked me to be their token representative of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy in their lively [...]
Without a doubt, Jerome Block, Jr., is my favorite Democrat. Two years ago, Jeff Armijo held that title, but now it’s Block, hands down. Of all the races for which the Republicans could neglect to nominate a candidate, they had to pick this one. On the other hand, if there was a Republican in the [...]
Julia Goldberg at Swing State of Mind reported yesterday that Ira Gordon, operations manager of the broadcasting group that includes “Radio Free Santa Fe” (KBAC 98.1 FM) is running editorials immediately after every McCain ad the station airs, editorials that basically tell listeners not to believe what they just heard: His editorial begins by noting [...]
This is the tag line on the commercials Republican Steve Pearce is running in his race against Democrat Tom Udall for the U.S. Senate seat here in New Mexico. My favorite is the one on energy, where Pearce affirms that he is in favor of alternative energy sources (wind, solar, etc.) as well as nuclear [...]
First I laughed, and then I felt depressed when I read in the New Mexican this morning the story of a pair of fifty-something morons from New Mexico who were arrested in New Jersey on Tuesday for possession of three pounds of marijuana. I couldn’t find the story online at the New Mexican, but did [...]
It has become a commonplace in American political discourse to lament the number of people who do not vote, and to see increased voter participation as a panacea for our political problems. I beg to differ. There are already enough ignorant, ill-informed people voting as it is. We need more like we need the proverbial [...]
Swing State of Mind (I love that name) linked to my post endorsing Rick Lass for PRC, with a cute green elephant graphic. Honestly, I am still reeling from the insufferable pomposity of Jerome Block’s refusal to debate Lass. I’ve commented on this before, but re-reading Block’s priggish, elitist response to Lass on Steve Terrell’s [...]
Not one post for over a week, then I finally resurface for a catty two-paragraph fluff piece about a sex scandal. Where is the substantive piece I wanted to write? Maybe something about the always entertaining Jerome Block, whose opponent Rick Lass I met last week. Lass seems like a nice fellow, and though Republicans [...]
Jerome Block, candidate for the Public Regulation Commision, is a Democrat, and Democrats generally claim that theirs is the party that represents the working man, the common man. They cast the GOP as the party of rich fat cats and spoiled second-generation politicians born with silver spoons in their mouths — like George W. Bush [...]
With a new baby in the house, I haven’t been keeping up with the newspaper as well as I usually do, so I missed the Santa Fe New Mexican‘s AP story last Wednesday, July 23, about Tom Udall‘s call for debates in his U.S. Senate race against Steve Pearce. In the print version of the [...]
Last month Jerome Block, Jr., won the Democratic primary election for a seat on the PRC (that’s Public Regulation Commission, not People’s Republic of China; I was a bit perplexed when I first moved to Santa Fe and started seeing PRC referred to without explanation in the newspaper). Since no Republicans even bothered to run, [...]
We’ve driven past the Glorieta, NM, battlefield memorial scores (if not hundreds) of times, but today we finally stopped. It’s a makeshift memorial, on private property and maintained by the owner, who has been kind enough to put in nice, flat trails and even to make little makeshift concrete seats and benches under some of [...]
In a June 29, 2008, piece in the Opinion section of the Santa Fe New Mexican, Michael J. Chávez wrote of how gratified he was to see so many churches represented at the Gay Pride parade in Albuquerque earlier this month. He saw this is a positive step, but only a beginning toward his ultimate [...]
Santa Feans like to call our town “The City Different.” Sometimes I think “The City Deranged” is more like it. I posted the other day about the fake archeological dig that’s supposed to be art. Now Pasatiempo, The New Mexican’s Weekly Magazine of Arts, Entertainment and Culture (June 20-26), brings us still more pretentiousness, Santa [...]
Santa Fe is home to a lot of artists, and while many of those artists are incredibly talented and produce works of great beauty and originality, there is a fair bit of pretentious drivel masquerading as art as well. The local paper ran a story the other day about Australian artist Nick Mangas who has [...]
Remember all those dewey-eyed socialists who went to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and came back gushing about how swell Uncle Joe was? No, you probably don’t, because not that many people my age will even know whom I mean by “Uncle Joe” and the ones 10 or God forbid 20 years younger will [...]
For the first time in my life, my vote for president may actually matter. Until two years ago, I lived in California, as true a blue state as can be. But now I’m a New Mexican, and my state appears as purple on all those red-state-blue-state maps. New Mexico’s electoral votes went to the Democratic [...]
One nice thing about having a blog is that when your local paper opts not to print your letter to the editor, you can self-publish it. So here goes – The Santa Fe New Mexican’s June 10 editorial opens with the sarcastic observation, “Four-dollar-a-gallon gas, the latest manifestation of Republican prosperity, struck Santa Fe during [...]
Today on the Paragraph Farmer, my friend and fellow Catholic Patrick O’Hannigan shares a story about an earnest Protestant woman who stopped him in a parking lot to pray over him because she saw that he walked with a limp. “Do you know the Lord?” the woman asked him before then asking if she could [...]
That’s how Warren Dunn signs himself in a “My View” piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican entitled “Fewer children will leave fewer carbon footprints.” Worried about deforestation, global warming and “the possible demise of our species,” Dunn calls for free vasectomies and tubal ligations, and replacing tax deductions for having children with rewards for [...]
As reported in the Santa Fe New Mexican, Archbishop Michael Sheehan ordained three priests at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi here in Santa Fe yesterday, and one of the three was Jeffrey Whorton, a married father of five. Father Whorton’s ordination does not mean that the Catholic Church has abandoned the celibacy [...]
On Mother’s Day, a story called “Ageless Motherhood” dominated the front page of my local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican. The cover photo featured Joyce Bond, 53, with two of the triplets she recently bore. Births to women over 40 are “soaring” according to the article, with the birth rate to women 40-44 growing [...]
I’ve asked myself that question for several years now, hesitant to join the countless multitudes already offering their unsolicited opinions on everything under the sun. Probably not, but I wanted to start one anyway. After all, what makes my unsolicited opinions any more superfluous than anyone else’s? So why didn’t I? For one thing, I [...]