It's not that they aren't pretty...

President Obama’s 2011 budget eliminates funding for manned lunar expeditions and rolls back tax breaks for fossil-fuel companies and families bringing in more than $250,000 a year—all of which lends credence to what he told the New York Times this morning:

“We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.”

Defense, Medicaid/Medicare, Social Security and education are held harmless from such belt-tightening, though, and the US nuclear weapons program stands out among those agencies slated to get increases—here, to the tune of $5 billion more over the next five years. Los Alamos National Laboratory alone gets a 21.6 percent (from $1.8 to $2.2 billion) budget increase for 2011.

Read about what this means for New Mexico after the jump. Continue reading »

Activists at Copenhagen. (Photo courtesy Joan Brown)

This ain’t no Climategate: SFR’s been getting its own totally legit e-mails from New Mexicans at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15, for short) that began Mon., Dec. 7 and will wrap up with President Obama’s visit this Friday. I’ve posted here what didn’t fit in this week’s paper version: insights, observations, photos and general musings from our friends in Denmark, starting with Ken Hughes, the conservation chair of the Sierra Club’s Rio Grande Chapter. (Minor typos have been corrected for readability).

“This place is more frenetic than Zozobra,” Hughes wrote on Dec. 9, his first day at the conference. After the shock wore off, he passed on some more substantive reflections; read his and others after the jump. Continue reading »

Unhappy with “New Boss” Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan? Or maybe considering a career in the military, since that job search isn’t panning out so well?

You might want to check out this documentary screening at the CCA tomorrow night, hosted by local chapters of Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War. The movie is called “The Good Solider,” and it’s supposed to be a powerful account of several service members’ political awakenings.

After Before the movie, the audience will be able to chat with the peace group members and, via Skype, the filmmakers. Here’s the deets:

The Good Soldier

7:30 pm
Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009

Center for Contemporary Arts
1050 Old Pecos Trail
982-1338

Click the picture to play the trailer.

Valerie Plame Wilson (left) and Cheryl "Charlie" Romney-Brown, founder of Women's Voices in Santa Fe.

Last night, before an intimate group of mostly women, Valerie Plame Wilson—a poised, voluble blonde—relived the political saga that turned her life as an under-the-radar CIA spy into that of a public target. In the space of a few years, Plame became the subject of countless editorials and the scapegoat for the Bush administration’s erroneous involvement in the Iraq war; her family received death threats; her CIA cover was blown. But since relocating from Washington, DC to Santa Fe, Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, say they’ve been welcomed—a fact evidenced by her relaxed demeanor and uncanny ability to laugh at even the darkest times of her life.

Continue reading »

Corporate greed, or top-secret-special meritocracy? Nuclear Watch of New Mexico has uncovered a somewhat astounding little figure: Michael Anastasio, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), earns $800,348 a year—almost twice as much as US President Barack Obama (who makes $400,000, with a $50K cushion for “expenses”). The proof is here, on one of the federal government’s “transparency pages” aimed at helping hungry reporters track down how stimulus money (of which LANL has received over $200 million in government contracts) is spent.

At $800,000, Anastasio is no Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs; $42.9 million last year), no Rex Tillerson (Exxon Mobil; $32 million)—but his salary is nothing to be sniffed at, either. Los Alamos gets its money straight from the US Department of Energy, whose budgets are funded by…well, you and me (provided we pay our taxes).

In a press release today, Nuclear Watch pointed out other problems: that LANL’s business–national security–doesn’t exactly stimulate New Mexico’s economy. Case in point (from the Nuclear Watch release):

According to Census Bureau data, in 2007 Los Alamos County had the 4th highest median household income ($101,098), while New Mexico was the 45th state in median household income ($41,509) with the 3rd highest poverty rate. Politicians and the Department of Energy constantly remind New Mexicans that the nuclear weapons industry is vital to the state’s economy. Despite that, historically New Mexico has slipped to 47th in per capita income in 2007 from 37th in 1959. In contrast, Bechtel has experienced record setting revenues for each of the last six years ($31.4 billion in 2008).

Another fun news tidbit surfaced today: Apparently, the federal government’s claims of “jobs saved” by federal stimulus money is a tiny bit fudged. It even starts to sound like the government is inflating its numbers until a Health and Human Services Department staffer fires back at the Associated Press with this gem:

“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

Right, so…then you have two jobs, at least for government accounting purposes?

I digress. The point is, if the government’s claiming more jobs than actually exist, one might wonder whether certain government contractors are doing the same.

Postscript: Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch informs me that Tom Hunter, the director of Sandia Lab, makes an even prettier penny: $1.7 million.