Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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Don’t thank Hollywood for “Sound of Freedom.” The movie, about a former Homeland Security agent who goes to Colombia and rescues more than 50 kids from child sex traffickers, is an action-thriller – a drama. But it is based closely on the true story of Tim Ballard and his personal fight against one of the planet’s most evil and profitable criminal activities – human sex trafficking. “Sound of Freedom” was actually finished in 2018. But because it couldn’t get Netflix or a major studio in Hollywo...
Oil money, oil money. When you have as much of it as Saudi Arabia has, it can buy a lot of things – including a sacred American sports institution like the PGA. As all of us hackers know, the PGA Tour shocked the golf world this week by announcing it will merge with the LIV Tour, the upstart Saudi-backed professional golf tour that the PGA has been in a bitter legal fight with since last year. The details of the nearly $3 billion deal are still unknown. So is the impact it will have on the w...
The IRS is so kind. Our most beloved federal agency has delayed until next year a new income-reporting law it has carefully designed to squeeze the last drops of tax revenue out of many of us. The new IRS rule is aimed at millions of self-employed people and small business people who sell goods or services on places like eBay, drive part-time for Uber or earn income through social media companies like Airbnb. Right now, the requirement for having to report this kind of side-hustle income to the...
The good news is I’m feeling a lot better than I did on Sunday. The bad news is, that despite being vaxxed a year ago and boosted about ten days ago, I’ve come down with COVID. I, my wife Colleen and my son, his wife and one of their young kids have just caught the omicron variant – or it’s caught us. I guess you could say we’re on the COVID family plan. To say the least, it’s been a real kick in the butt. For almost two years my wife and I listened to the “science” and the people in charg...
Facebook decided this week it’s no longer “misinformation” to wonder whether COVID-19 was manmade by Chinese scientists in a biolab in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But it’s not just Facebook. The national media and President Biden have just done a similar 180. On Wednesday, the same guy who had ordered the shutting down of the Trump administration’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 told the U.S. intelligence community to redouble its efforts to find out how the coronavir...
Lots of people in politics and the media out here in California are blaming global warming for the 26 major wildfires that have killed at least 24, burned more than 3 million acres and destroyed thousands of homes. But let’s get real. This state has been plagued by wildfires long before baby left-wingers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided that they’re caused by humans heating up the planet by burning fossil fuels. I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1950s. We didn’t have as many people, cars...
There was even more yelling and screaming than usual in Washington this week. I’m not talking about the “peaceful” demonstrators in Lafayette Park, who were putting ropes and chains on the statue of Andrew Jackson and trying to pull it down. I’m talking about in Congress, where there’s always a lot brave yelling and screaming about “We gotta’ do something about this” and “We gotta’ solve that.” This week it was the police reform bill proposed by Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. Calle...
I feel terribly sorry for the hundred thousand Americans who’ve lost their lives to the coronavirus. I also feel sorry for all the small business owners in the country who have become innocent victims of the government’s mishandled war on COVID-19. They worked long and hard to start up their local restaurants, coffee shops, clothing stores, hair salons, health spas, book stores and pet grooming shops. But in just three months their livelihoods – and the livelihoods of millions of their emplo...
Twelve presidential wannabes standing in a row on stage for three hours. Three friendly liberal journalists under-handing softball questions to them. Tons of BS about free government healthcare and why Trump should be impeached. Until the personal shock I got at the end of the Democrats’ debate on CNN woke me from my stupor, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t watching a rerun of last month’s debate. It was the same uninspiring lineup of leftwing political featherweights, plus a self-made billion...
A Jeb Bush tweet this week got me thinking about some of the ways our nasty partisan politics has been hurting our kids. Paraphrasing Jeb, he asked, "How can parents teach their children that using bad language is wrong when we have a president and members of Congress who constantly use profanity to talk about each other?" Jeb's tweet also reminded me of something a wise Sunday school teacher of mine once said: "There are more things 'caught' than 'taught.' " I often quote that line when I'm...
Making Sense Expectations could not have been lower going into round one of the Democrat Party's ridiculously overcrowded presidential debate in Miami. Maybe that's why it turned out to be a decently watchable debate. It was no "Games of Thrones" finale, but it could have been much, much worse. NBC had that embarrassing audio glitch at the halfway point, which actually turned out to be entertaining. But NBC's all-star moderators - Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie, Jose Diaz-Balart, Chuck Todd and e...
Making Sense Earlier this week I traveled to central Illinois to speak at a memorial service at Eureka College, my dad's alma mater, on the 15th anniversary of his death. As I flew halfway across the country and talked to many of the good people in the heart of America, it struck me how testy or peeved off everyone is about politics. It seems like everyone's got a chip on their shoulder. You can't just sit down at a table or a bar and have a simple conversation with a friend or a stranger...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the looniest lefty I've seen elected to Congress in my lifetime. But Ilhan Omar, her fellow rookie House member from Minnesota, is so radical she scares the pants off me. After watching Omar in action, it's pretty clear to me that the Muslim Democrat hates America almost as much as she hates Israel. Before she got to Washington she had already raised eyebrows for her support of the socialist dictator who's wrecked Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and her call to abolish ICE...
The liberal media are up to their usual dirty immigration tricks. This time, they're exploiting the death of a second Guatemalan child who died while in the custody of the Border Patrol at the southwestern border. As usual, the liberal media didn't blame the parents for irresponsibly dragging their eight-year-old son across Mexico with the hope of illegally sneaking into America. As usual, they didn't blame Democrats in Congress for refusing to help President Trump secure the border properly in...
Earlier this week I was at an event that honored Malala Yousafzai. Malala, in case you don't recall, is the brave young school girl from a village in Pakistan who was nearly killed in 2012 by the Taliban. She was just 15 when she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for publicly speaking out for the right of all girls to receive a free, safe and quality education. Malala, who became world famous while she lay in a coma for 10 days in a British hospital, was lucky to be given asylum in Britai...
The stories of chaos, craziness and betrayal going on inside the Trump White House are nothing to worry much about. White House staffers attempting to influence, question or thwart a president's ideas or goals are as old as George Washington, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. As we've recently seen, it's just a lot easier today for un-named White House insiders to get their criticism or embarrassing stories instantly published. It doesn't matter how dubious the journalism is, or who writes it. If...
I love Lindsay Graham. The witty South Carolina senator, who's usually more entertaining than most comedians, has been one of the highlights of the otherwise depressing televised Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Graham put it perfectly Thursday morning. He said some people had been coming up to him and asking if this week's ugly display of disruptions, rude moronic outbursts from the gallery and Democrat grandstanding had become a circus. "I'm here...
Yes, President Trump screwed up in front of the whole world at the Helsinki Summit. But Democrats and the anti-Trump media have a much more serious long-term problem - they’re still out of their minds. They still actually think the Great Russian Collusion Hoax is going to win them the House and chase President Trump out of the White House. It hasn’t been widely reported, but after last week’s indictment of Russian intelligence officers by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office for trying...
The Trump Haters hate on and on and... The deranged hatred of Donald Trump by the left and the media is so strong it is never going to stop. If they had the chance, I actually think the Democrats would put a crown of thorns on Trump’s head, make him carry his own cross and send him to be crucified. On national TV. With Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd and Jimmy Kimmel doing the play-by-play. Of course, if the Democrat mob was given the choice between letting Barabbas the murderer or Trump the p...
I’m feeling human again, thanks. After three weeks of living in opioid hell - of constantly being sick to my stomach, of throwing up, of having the shakes and feeling depressed and crying - my body and brain are back to normal. I’m no longer high and messed up on pain killers. I’m no longer trying to withdraw from them. And I have a new, up-close-and-personal understanding of the country’s opioid epidemic and how easy it is for a 70-something guy like me to become addicted to potent pain pi...
Donald, Donald, Donald. Your approval ratings could be in the mid-50s if only you and your administration would quit stepping on your own good news. Tuesday was a perfect example- the latest in a sad series. First we got word from the South Korean government that North Korea might be willing to “denuclearize” its weapons program. It sounded too good to be true, and it probably was. But for a few hours this week, the Trump Hate Media were so giddy with hope they stopped beating you up. They had...
You watch Fox News - “We love President Trump.” You watch MSNBC or CNN - “We hate President Trump.” Is there any other news going on in the world that isn’t about Trump? I swear, if the World Trade Center had come down yesterday, the top story today in the mainstream media would be all about Donald Trump. What did he do wrong or not do? Say or not say? While Trump and his daily reality TV show have become a profit center for the media, the rest of us can’t even mention his name. Trump has b...
Donald Trump sure hit it out of the park Tuesday (Jan. 30) night. Like millions of other people in America who tuned in to the president’s first State of the Union Address, I’m still cheering. I wasn’t in Washington, in Soviet California, or anywhere else in Trump’s America. I was actually on a cruise ship with my wife on the other side of the world in the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia. After I watched Trump’s prime-time TV address live in my cabin on the Celebrity Solstice...
Everyone knows something has to be done for America's DACA kids. Everyone with a good heart or a working brain knows it's not their fault their parents sneaked them into the country when they were kids under 16. It's true that by law they are illegal immigrants. But most DACA kids have grown up to become good, law-abiding Americans. They've gone to school here. They've worked and paid taxes here. They've even served in our military. Everyone except a few people on the far fringe knows it'...
