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Today's Opinions

  • Leader invites scarce for D-Day celebration

    At this time last year, President Barack Obama was facing severe criticism for showing a lack of patriotism by not attending the commemoration ceremonies at Normandy on D-Day.
    Let’s hope that by now all the people who were howling last year are squared away on how D-Day is commemorated in France.
    If not, the following information may be helpful.
    President Obama was accused of being the first president in 70 years not to attend the D-Day ceremonies. Obama cleared that up by noting that he indeed attended D-Day ceremonies his first year in office and caused quite a stir when French President Nicolas Sarkozy invited only Obama and not Queen Elizabeth.
    The Queen made a big deal out of it because she is the only head of state, who saw service during World War II. She was a mechanic and truck driver.
    The general consensus was that Sarkozy wanted Obama to himself all that day.
    But then the refrain began that Obama did not attend any of the three commemorations since then, and that every other U.S. president had attended them all. That one didn’t hold water either. International protocol holds that heads of state do not enter another country unless invited by that country’s head of state. That’s something I hadn’t realized.

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  • How to safely build a strong credit rating

    One of the pitfalls of Congress passing complicated, sweeping legislation is that sometimes provisions designed to protect one group unexpectedly create hardships for others.
    That’s what happened with 2009’s Credit Card Accountability Responsibility Disclosure Act, which was hailed as legislation that would protect consumers from misleading credit practices.
    Among other things, the CARD Act requires that people under 21 must have an adult co-signer in order to open a credit account unless they can prove their ability to repay their account balance.
    This provision was designed to prevent young adults from assuming more debt than they can afford and then being unable to pay it off, thereby ruining their credit standing.
    So far, so good.
    Then, in 2011 the Federal Reserve finalized rules around the CARD Act’s “ability to pay” provision. It stated that credit card issuers generally could only consider an applicant’s independent income, or assets before issuing a new card or increasing a credit limit, not his or her access to the household’s overall income.

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  • A thanks for Great Conversations

    Earlier this spring, the Board of the Los Alamos Public School Foundation hosted the fourth Annual Great Conversations in A-Wing at Los Alamos High School and more than 30 high school students donated more than 95 hours to aid the Foundation in serving our guests.
    Chip Mielke and Tessa Snyder entertained guests with a beautiful stringed duet.
    Los Alamos National Bank and the LANS Community Programs Office sponsored our event along with Beth Breshears, CPA with Lorraine Hartway’s office, Film Festival/Hot Rocks Java Café and Coca-Cola Distributing of Santa Fe. Without the generosity of these organizations, we could not host such an entertaining and interesting afternoon.
    Alan and Alex Kirk, Terry Wallace, Erin Bouquin, Elizabeth MacDonald, Mike Wismer, Peggy Gautier, Cindy Rooney, Sarah Rochester, Troy Hughes, Michael Ham, Alexandra Hehlen, Steven Thomas, Roger Weins and Sandy Beery lent their time and expertise in a wide variety of subjects to converse with and educate our guests.

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  • Help Posse Lodge stay open

    The Sheriff’s Posse would like to thank everyone who attended Sunday’s Cowboy Pancake Breakfast with a special thank you to Richard Hannemann who donated his musical talent and time towards our cause. Between a record breaking number of breakfast sales and your additional donations we made excellent headway towards our New Mexico state mandated capital improvements.
    Without your support we would not be able to continue. As you may know, if we do not upgrade our septic system and kitchen equipment we may be permanently shut down and the historic Posse Lodge would no longer be available as a community resource.
    Anyone wishing to make donations may do so by making a deposit to the “Sheriff’s Posse of Los Alamos Capital Improvements Account” at Los Alamos National Bank in person, or over the phone or by mailing a check to the Lodge at 650 North Mesa Road, or by visiting our table at a community event. All donations will be used exclusively for capital improvements.
    And by all means, keep coming to our Cowboy Pancake Breakfast on the first Sunday of every month!
    The Sheriff’s Posse of LA 

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  • Lack of education for our kids

    The little boy, age six, had two silver caps where his front teeth should have been. Speculation was he must have been raised on sugary drinks instead of milk.
    He had awful, stale-smelling breath, such as I had never before experienced on a child. He could barely read and didn’t care. His attention span was impossibly short.
    I was participating in a reading program for first-graders in a public school in a disadvantaged neighborhood. The program took place every day, with different volunteers on a rotating basis. We’d get a 10-minute training session and then meet our kids, one on one, two children, half an hour each.
    The trainers asked us to work on specific reading skills each time, but this boy was too easily distracted. He made jokes or fussed.
    I tried to find out if he knew how to brush his teeth. He said yes, but I didn’t believe him. I wondered if he was hungry. He never admitted to it.
    The school had a free breakfast program, but the teachers told me some kids arrived too late and missed it; they implied this was another sign of chaos in the kids’ homes.

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  • Economic development a complex subject

    Economic development is one thing. Developing the economy is another. Conflating the two runs rampant, to the detriment of everyone involved, especially those paying the bill, taxpayers and that small subset of taxpayers, businesses, drawn into supporting economic development.
    Economic development in concept is straightforward. It is a sales task. Developing the economy is social engineering, a far more complex matter.
    At the state level, the sales task goes to the New Mexico Partnership, a small (five-person, two-consultant) private organization.
    The partnership, based in Albuquerque, spun out of the Economic Development Department about 10 years ago. The rationale was that state employees, restricted by necessary government procedures, were unable to “sell” competitively. They couldn’t even buy dinner for a prospect.
    A prospect is a company that might expand its existing facility or move an operation or start something new. Such things do happen. The developer sells geography.
    Conventional elected official-chamber of commerce thinking lays a totally unfair burden on economic developers, that a company will come to town — or to the state and through its presence, solve all problems.

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  • Prosperity means different things to different people

    Mora County is best known for being poor — poorest in the state and often among the poorest in the nation. Less known is the fact that it’s also beautiful, hugging the eastern flanks of the Sangre de Cristos and extending out into the High Plains.
    Now it’s known, thanks to a recent Los Angeles Times story, for saying no to gas drilling. For an impoverished place like Mora, this is crazy, I thought at first. Then I looked again.
    Mora’s decision and the long running controversy over uranium in western New Mexico are tough debates. Blame it on our historic dependence on natural resources. For many decades, logging, mining, oil and gas meant prosperity. In rural New Mexico, the sight of drill rigs — like construction cranes in the city — was reassuring.
    When I showed up in Grants in 1975, uranium assured that everybody had a job, and when the last mine closed, locals hoped to see the day when the mines reopened.
    Economists lectured us for years about our dependence on boom-and-bust industries, but minerals and hydrocarbons were a bird in the hand and everybody remembered hard times.

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  • Nonproliferation goals can’t be met without disarmament

    The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970, is the backbone of the world’s nuclear non-proliferation regime — and the only multilateral, legally-binding treaty requiring nuclear disarmament.
    The NPT divides states into “nuclear weapon states” — Russia, the United States, France, China and the United Kingdom — which commit themselves to complete nuclear disarmament and “non-nuclear weapon states,” which commit themselves not to acquire nuclear weapons, but are allowed to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
    But the permanent division of the world into nuclear “haves” and “have-nots” has never been accepted by most countries nor thought to be practical. Over the years, the NPT has reached near-universality, with only India, Israel and Pakistan remaining outside its regime. North Korea left the treaty in 2003.

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