Collaborative prizes treatment over profits but still struggles under debt
By Thomas Gilchrist
Sixteen-year-old Carlos Martinez sits in a bright green examination chair in the Topahkal Family Practice Office with a massive four-inch gash in his right index finger. There is a pool of blood beneath his hand as if someone had spilled Hawaiian Punch over a bed of gauze. A native of Juarez, Mexico, Martinez was visiting family in Albuquerque when he sliced his finger on a refrigerator that slipped as he was helping an uncle lift it out of his pickup truck. The wound required immediate medical care, as one could peel back the skin as if husking an ear of corn.
Amy Goodman, host of the self-described progressive radio show Democracy Now!, is a revered investigative journalist and a media celebrity. Her program, hosted along with Juan Gonzalez, airs on more than 450 public, community, college, public access and satellite radio and television stations. Left-leaning individuals hailing from all walks of life, from Ivy League professors to pot-growing hippies, love her work. And for it she has garnered numerous awards and an impressive cast of intelligentsia friends (what up, Noam Chomsky?). Moreover, Goodman is regarded by many as heroic for her ongoing efforts to go "where the silence is."
1) State Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez got into a minor scuffle last week with the governor's task force on ethics. He isn't wild about holding a special session to consider ethics bills, as the task force suggested. Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino and Alibi columnist says the package doesn't address one huge ethical problem in the state, which is:
APS police take a few hours off to make a point, but why arm someone with a chip on his shoulder?
By Marisa Demarco
If all the celebrities in the world went on strike, few would suffer. If all the waitresses in Albuquerque had a "sick-out," things would be rough but probably OK. But there are some workers who shouldn't call in to work en masse to make a point: police, firemen, ambulance drivers and air-traffic controllers, to name a few. There's a difference between stirring up inconvenience, even serious inconvenience, with your absence and putting people in danger because you didn't get your way.
Homelessness won’t fade away until we look it in the face
By Jerry Ortiz y Pino
Albuquerque (and probably most of the country as well) seems of two minds when it comes to homelessness. I don’t mean there are two schools of thought about its causes and how to resolve them--I mean part of the time we as a community want to pretend it doesn’t exist and part of the time we want to punish the homeless … as if they themselves were the problem and not simply the evidence of deeper concerns.
DATELINE: CHINA—A Chinese couple searching for a distinctive name for their child have proposed naming the kid after the international e-mail symbol for “at.” The unidentified couple were cited last Thursday by a government official as an example of citizens bringing bizarre names into the Chinese language. All Chinese birth names must be approved by the country’s government. According to Chinese law, children are only allowed to take the surname of either their father or their mother. As of last year, only 129 names accounted for 87 percent of all surnames in China, noted Li Yuming, vice director of the State Language Commission. According to the father of @ (last name unknown), the letters “a” and “t” can be pronounced in a way that sounds like the phrase “love him” in Chinese.
