Columns

During her campaign, Gov. Susana Martinez said that she would not cut education. Based on revised budget numbers that were released immediately after she was elected, that went out the window. Now, Martinez is proposing very modest cuts of 1.5 percent for K-12.

The pubic is bombarded with news reports saying that young people in the U.S. aren’t learning enough about science, especially compared to kids in Asia.
I’m not sure that’s true, because I work at a large university where I see very able American students starting to excel in their scientific careers, and I hear back from them as they flourish in later years.   
But perhaps we really are falling behind. After all, everyone says so.
How would we start to investigate that possibility?

Oh, dear. Sunset review is back again – another great idea that may not work so well in New Mexico.
Sunset review is legislative code language for kicking the can down the road.      If it worked, we would not today have the proliferation of boards and commissions that some folks consider irrelevant and excessive. They would have been sunsetted — that is, closed — in prior legislative sessions.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, reminding us to celebrate the ones we love. But most of us need more than one day a year to remember to honor and cherish those dear to us.
I was telling my husband off in my head the other day. You know the way you vent your frustration with the virtual argument you can win, rather than with the actual one you probably won’t, when I suddenly realized that, what I was saying to him, equally applied to me.