Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Misc

Did the GOP Legislators insistence that NM not have an early Primary election pay off for them?  Bill Richardson had one back when he made his run for President in 2008, but then it reverted to June in NM once again.  After all the real decisions had been made in places like Alabama.  Would a good showing by a non Trump candidate in NM in February have made some sort of difference?  Maybe.  But, I have to say,  the shorter the campaigns the better.   I think in a short campaign people like our newly minted racist GOP banner carrier might not have picked up steam around the country.  This whole thing is a historical happening in America and will be watched closely by the world, and if the reaction of former Mexican Presidents is any indication, we may be in for an end to any global moral leadership.

If you didn't read the Dana Milbank oped in the Journal this morning, do your self a favor and enjoy it here.

State Attorney General Hector Balderas scores a good government gold star for charging former State Senator Phil Griego with nine felony counts arising from his profiting from the sale of a building that he manipulated the state into selling.


3 comments:

Michelle Meaders said...

No, New Mexico didn't have an early primary under Bill Richardson. We had two early Democratic Presidential Caucuses. Richardson had said he would pay for one, but didn't. They were a mess, because the Democratic Party didn't have the resources to do it right.

It wouldn't make sense to move our whole Primary right after the Legislature. They are all running, and wouldn't have a chance to fundraise or campaign. And there are many other offices at stake.

At least some of the early primary states only have the Presidential race then -- the rest is much later, like September for Arizona. Is NM able and willing to pay for a whole new election just to do this?

Anonymous said...

Lets hope Balderas gets indictments on the Schultz Taser pay to play soon. It all happened under Richard Berry. By the way, where is Berry? He hasn't been showing up for his BARF bus meetings. Is he a yellow colored Berry?

Anonymous said...

I appreciate Ms Meaders' point about having the primary after the legislative session, but neither does it make sense to me to see the world from an entirely New Mexico-centric point of view. Other states manage somehow to do their own business and also participate meaningfully in national electoral politics, which do impact New Mexico quite a bit.


Just as a matter of trivia, Dana Milbank in the article Jim links to refers to the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Index. It was designed by Rudolph Flesch, a readability expert, back in the 1950s, and adopted for use in military manuals by Peter Kincaid.

I learned about Rudolph Flesch, and also Robert Gunning, another readability expert who devised the "fog index" -- Flesch and Gunning had been hired by AP and UPI respectively to improve the readability of newspaper articles -- from my first Journalism professor, Paul Gerhard, at Lake Michigan Junior College where I did the first two years of my journalism degree. Gerhard was an old time reporter who drilled the fundamentals into us and was at LMC because someone had given him a new lease on life after he'd sobered up, after he'd wrecked his career and life drinking. Paul had actually begun his reporting career in the army. He referred to his drinking days rather obliquely a couple of times with a reference to "hanging off the side of a street car in Paris singing the Marsellaise."

I was so much into his class that I actually found Flesch's and Gunnings books and read them. Especially Gunning greatly affected my writing and I think would still be valuable to an aspiring writer of any kind. He just gets you to thinking about sentence formation and being more direct in your writing. People have taken issue with both men's indexes for analyzing writing, saying they are perhaps too simplistic -- I don't agree -- but not what they wrote about writing, and Dana Milbank obviously puts some stock in the Flesch-Kincaid score.