Morning Word
Back to the Word after a very, very hot weekend. And it wasn't just hot here in New Mexico -- in all corners of the country, there are
, which is bad news for those fighting fires in our forests. ---
As we sit in triple-digit temperatures (remember, the temperature is hotter in the heart of the city than at the airport location where the temperature is taken), we can at least know that our misery has company throughout the country. But as it is only the start of July, we can look forward to a few more weeks of this heat. Stay cool, everyone.
Anyway, onto the Word:
- KRQE looks at the
- looming health care battle in New Mexico over expanding Medicaid
- . Gov. Susana Martinez says the expansion to cover those who are at 133 percent of the federal poverty level (in 2012 this would mean an annual income of just $30,657 for a family of four)
- Some state employees
- got paid the wrong amounts because of a computer glitch
- .
- Residents of a northwestern Rio Rancho subdivision
- could see a massive increase in their taxes
- because the developer cannot make its bond payments.
- John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal looked at the
- effects on New Mexico of policy changes on nuclear weapons
- .
- Scientists are looking at what effect bark beetles, which prey on trees and ultimately kill them,
- have on forest fires
- .
- The current state land commissioner and his predecessor are
- blaming each other for the problems at Dixon's Apple Orchard in northern New Mexico
- .
- Lyons said Democrat Ray Powell dismantled the 12-member fire crew that Lyons had established at the land office, leaving the orchard and its environs vulnerable to the wildfire that roared through northern New Mexico in 2011.
"He's a do-nothing land commissioner. He's just an old hippie from Nob Hill that doesn't know anything about agriculture," Lyons said of Powell. For his part, Powell said the fire crew Lyons created had no real training or expertise. With a truck carrying a paltry 300 gallons of water, the crew could have died trying to reach the inferno that started the orchard's decline, Powell said. Powell said the real problem is that Lyons trapped the state with a restrictive lease that diminishes the orchard's prospects of a comeback. - Lyons now sits on the Public Regulations Commission and has already been on the end of some unflattering headlines for his time in the troubled agency.
- SFR looked at the
- looming ad war
- centering on U.S. Senate candidates Martin Heinrich and Heather Wilson. I saw the anti-Wilson ad during the ESPN broadcast of the Dodgers and Mets game, so they are spreading the money on broadcast and cable TV.
- The Clovis News Journal ran a story on
- how the health care reform legislation that was upheld last week
- will affect Roosevelt General Hospital and Plains Regional Medical Center in eastern New Mexico.
- Under the individual mandate of the health care bill, their uninsured patients will be required to have some form of health care.
"(The individual mandate) will increase the number of paying patients, relieving pressure off health care providers and increasing the reimbursements issued to (providers)," [administrator of Plains Regional in Clovis Hoyt] Skabelund said. - A poet who lives in Taos is replacing convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky
- on a mural at Penn State
- .
- Although Taos poet Dora McQuaid says she is “deeply honored” to have an image of herself replace that of now-convicted child sex offender Jerry Sandusky, 68, on a prominent mural opposite Penn State, her voice cracks when recounting the years she spent there as a professor and domestic abuse activist all while the crimes committed by the former assistant football coach apparently were being covered up.
- The Santa Fe New Mexican had
- a great story on the Las Vegas, New Mexico title fight featuring Jack Johnson
- , the first black heavyweight boxing champion, a century ago.
- There was a death threat from the Ku Klux Klan, unfair accusations in the newspapers and attempts by the governor of the newly admitted state of New Mexico to ban Johnson from defending his title against Jim Flynn, a white railroad worker from Colorado.
But Johnson had seen it all before. He had learned to turn the virulent racism of his era to his advantage — to attract more paying customers, mostly white men, to his fights in hopes of seeing a white man recapture the title. - I filled up for gas for just over $3.00 for the first time in what seems like years the other day. The Christian Science Monitor says that the
- gas prices are the lowest since January
- -- but oil is rebounding on good economic news from the eurozone. Yet another example of how
- gas prices don't change because of US drilling
- but depending on the world market.
