In last week's CNM Chronicle, the staff took time out from worshipping Obama to cover some of the candidate's for CNM's Governing Board. See Q&A with the CNM Governing Board candidates, on the bottom of  page 1, continued on pages 4 and 7.

Google search for "CNM Governing Board"

Here's the Employee Union page covering the election, and a map showing the districts.

One of the candidates' names rang a bell with me -- Jerry Scott ran for Congress as a Constitution Party candidate against Darren White and Martin Heinrich. I first ran across him at the Rio Grande Foundation's public e-square, New Mexico Liberty.  

-- MWB

Tonight I transplanted this blog site from WordPress to Xanga. Nothing against WordPress, but just that Xanga offers an easier platform to work with.

-- Mike Blessing, Site Demon

In this week's Chronicle (13-20 January 2009), the Official Love Affair with The Barack has been Kicked Off.

Article the First -- On the front page of the paper, the article by Managing Editor Robert Casaus is titled Historic Presidential Inauguration gathers millions and inspires all.

I read the article, really a puff piece supporting Our President™, quoting parts of The Barack's inauguration speech with snippets of commentary by Casaus.

The article fails with me at the beginning with the verbiage of the very title -- "inspires all." How Casaus does know that Obama "inspired all" with his speech? Is he a telepath? Has he polled each and every person who heard the speech or read its text? I'm guessing that the answer there is "NO."

Let's take a look at the election results. The percentage of eligible voters that turned out in 2008 was 61-63 percent. Let's split the difference here and make it 62%. Of those people, 52.92 percent voted for Obama. Let's do some fifth-grade math here -- 0.62 x 0.5292 = 0.328104. Therefore, Obama was elected with about 33% of the elgible electorate casting ballots in his favor.

So the "inspires all" title was wishful thinking on Casaus' part, as significant portions of the American electorate couldn't be bothered to support The Barack. In fact, 38 percent weren't inspired to show up at all. (Disclaimer -- I put on the HAZMAT suit and voted for Bob Barr.)

Article the Second -- Editor-in-Chief Scott Tillman follows Casaus' thinly-disguised promotional piece up with the "Consider This..." column titled "President-Elect Barack Obama ushers in a new era." (page 3) Tillman uses more column space complaining about Bush than praising Obama.

Much more useful was the article at the bottom of page 1, Q&A with the CNM Governing Board candidates by Kirsten Crocker, as these politicians can have a direct influence on student affairs.

When talking to Dr. Bennett, he told me that the faculty union is (or maybe was, since his terminaton?) up in arms about the fact that he was put on leave and then terminated over this, as lots of instructors "pad" their class rosters using "audit" students. (An "audit" student signs up for the class, can attend some or all of the classes, as convenient. The only difference between an "audit" student and a regular student is that when you take the class on an "audit" basis, you don't get a grade for it.)

The real reason this action was taken, according to Dr. Bennett, was that Dr. Hall and he had taken note of a large pile of cash donated to the School of Applied Technologies -- specifically the Photonics Department -- by various companies, and that some of the cash had gone missing from the SAT coffers. Two specific donations were mentioned, one from Intel for $60K, and another from Schott Solar to the tune of $500K. The unstated idea was that if he and Dr. Hall had kept quiet about the cash being taken from the Photonics budget, the both of them would still be employed by CNM at present.

Last week, I received the following from Dr. Bennett --