Heath Haussamen on New Mexico Politics

NMPolitics.net has moved

2009-08-22T17:27:00.001-06:00

As of today, this Web site is no longer the home of Heath Haussamen on New Mexico Politics, which I now more commonly call NMPolitics.net. The site has moved to http://nmpolitics.net.

Click through to the new NMPolitics.net and you’ll find a completely redesigned and upgraded site that I hope you’ll find more user-friendly than this site was. As always, you can e-mail your thoughts or questions to me at heath@haussamen.com.

This site will continue to remain online for archive purposes as long as Blogger, the host, permits, but the archives have also been transferred to the new site.

- Heath Haussamen

Defendant once carried out firing of AG prosecutor

2009-08-21T15:41:00.007-06:00

Attorneys for the defendants are set to argue that AG King’s office has a conflict and should be removed from the case

One of two assistant attorney generals prosecuting the case against former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and three others was once fired by one of the defendants in the case, former AG employee Elizabeth Kupfer.

The fact that a prosecutor on the case is charged with trying to secure a conviction against a woman who carried out his firing is one of the main points defense attorneys plan to cite in arguing that current AG Gary King’s office has no business prosecuting the case.

Kupfer’s attorney, Hank Farrah, confirmed in an interview that Kupfer carried out the firing of Assistant Attorney General Chris Lackmann sometime during the administration of former AG Patricia Madrid, who ordered the firing. Farrah would not reveal other details.

During Madrid’s administration -- and the time of the alleged crimes -- Kupfer was the administrative services director in the AG’s office.

Lackmann was rehired sometime after King took office in 2007, and is now assigned to prosecute the case along with Assistant Attorney General Ann Badway.

Vigil-Giron, Kupfer and the others under indictment -- lobbyist Joseph Kupfer, who is Elizabeth’s husband, and media consultant Armando Gutierrez -- each face 50 counts including money laundering, fraud, soliciting or receiving kickbacks and tax evasion. They’re accused of bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars between 2004 and 2006 by falsifying invoices to the secretary of state’s office.

“My client used to work at the AG’s office and she knows the people involved,” Farrah said when asked to explain why he believes the AG’s office has a conflict. Later, after being asked, he confirmed that Elizabeth Kupfer carried out the firing of Lackmann.

If King’s office is taken off the case, it would likely be taken over by a district attorney’s office.

Defense attorney says AG has ‘numerous conflicts’

Miles Hanisee, Gutierrez’s attorney, said the AG’s office has numerous conflicts that should prevent it from prosecuting the case. Gutierrez, he said, once had a contract with the AG’s office and “worked closely with persons employed at high levels in the AG’s office.” Hanisee also said the contract between the secretary of state’s office and Gutierrez that’s at the center of the AG’s criminal case was “approved by the AG’s office” and “used a template form that is repeatedly used in the AG’s office.”

Those are some of “the number of pervasive conflicts that impair the attorney general’s ability to make prosecuting decisions and, even more troubling, impair our ability to call witnesses to give unbiased testimony, because those witnesses now answer to Attorney General King,” Hanisee said.

Phil Sisneros, the AG’s spokesman, said he could not comment.

“In order to ensure a fair hearing on all of the evidence, we have to remain sure that anything we say won’t prejudice the case in any way, and therefore we prefer to do all of our talking at trial,” Sisneros said.

Madrid could not immediately be reached for comment.

The strategic health-care reform not being debated

2009-08-21T15:01:00.000-06:00

Most Americans in these town-hall meetings are, metaphorically, just waxing deck chairs on the Titanic. They argue health-care tactics while ignoring the profound change in health-care strategy. The unexamined and unchallenged change is from a philosophy of social contract to one of social justice.

When I was born in 1950, health care was predicated on a long-standing social contract we citizens had with our government in which the government’s role was to enhance our lives in both longevity and quality. Government-sponsored medical advances were greeted enthusiastically by Americans.

My cardiologist started in the early 1970s when it was uncommon for heart patients to live robustly past 70. With the advent of new procedures and drugs, patients now live actively past 80. Likewise, there were worldwide celebrations when Polio was defeated and then Smallpox, Measles and Rubella.

Many people are alive today because of that social contract with our government. This increase in longevity, a source of pride, is now at the core of our reform debate.

The social contract also had researchers working on eradicating cancer and heart disease; however, the prospect of the changing health-care strategy brings that into this question: Should society be curing cancer and heart disease, since that results in people living longer? This extends the society’s obligations to these survivors for medical treatments and Social Security. That is the reform strategy not being debated.

Instead, there are long-winded debates about the minutia of what is on page 420 of a bill that has multiple versions. Americans are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.

A radical change in philosophy

The health care reform is not about saving money for consumers of health care, and it is not about whether citizens use the private option or non-profit co-ops. Rather, it is the supposition that the government should change how it uses health-care resources based upon a radical change of philosophy similar to the progressive health-care changes in Europe and Canada.

The new philosophy is social justice which, operationally, never takes from the young to give to the old. Under a social-contract philosophy, our government provides resources so citizens live longer and better. Social-justice philosophy says to oldsters, “You have lived long enough; we cannot expend resources on you that could go to the young.”

Other countries have made that change. It is the core of health-care decisions in England. Their health-care motto is: In with the young, out with the old. It is like some strange New Year’s Eve party where the elderly are shuffled off to the cemetery for the good of the country.

If America adopts a social justice philosophy, that changes who gets government-controlled health care resources. Countries making this switch experience unreasonable delays or outright prohibition of resources for people considered too old or of not enough use to the society as a whole.

Social justice says the collective good of the society trumps individual benefits. As a cancer survivor I regularly see the effect of my having had cancer on the current health-care system that endeavors to hold me at arm’s length. But I see even worse outcomes if our country adopts the new social-justice yardstick, which will reason that keeping me alive is good money after bad, since I could re-acquire cancer at any time, thereby wasting money that might go to the young.

So it will be out to the trash heap for me.

Missing the strategic change

Further, the new social-justice government will view my survival of cancer differently from the government of social contract. Surviving my bout with cancer required quick action on a five-hour operation and follow-up radiation. The government that sponsored the research leading to procedures that were successful in my survival was happy. However, a social-justice society would not be happy and would say, “Shuckins, if he had died we would not owe him any Social Security. Hope he dies before we have to pay him anything, despite his 40 years of paying into Social Security.”

The town-hall debaters do not see the beast in belly. They think this a political rather than ethical issue that is a battle over which political party wins. Like the rest of our country, they will be quite surprised by the extent of the governmental betrayal.

With no scrutiny by the media or citizen debate, the congressional leadership and President Obama are set to install this new philosophy of social justice, which will remake us into a New Order Progressive Nation. They are enabled when citizens and the media miss the strategic change and only debate tactics.

We need not debate private options if our government no longer supports longevity and quality of life for older Americans. Those details do not matter in the least if our leaders, using social-justice reasoning, betray and then discard older citizens.

Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.

Former GOP staffer complains about ideologues

2009-08-21T12:20:00.009-06:00

Sergio Garcia also says state party leaders didn’t understand how to reach Hispanics; Yates disputes Garcia’s claims

This article has been updated.

Sergio Garcia, who quit his job as deputy executive director of the state Republican Party earlier this week, says his abrupt resignation came largely because of widely differing views about where the GOP should be headed.

In an interview, he said he was frustrated with ideologues running the party.

“I am not an ideologue. I never wanted to be one. I have always been one who thought it’s about winning elections,” Garcia said.

Garcia also cited as a frustration a lack of understanding among party leaders about how to reach Hispanics, which he said is critical to making the GOP relevant in New Mexico.

“What bothers me is that most of our party leadership at a state level does not understand what Hispanic outreach means... It does not mean pandering to Hispanics. It does not mean trying to buy their votes,” He said. “It’s about messaging to Hispanics. It’s about trying to bring Hispanics home because this is where Hispanics started, in the Republican Party.”

“They didn’t get it,” he said, adding that the resulting disconnect created a climate of suspicion about him.

Garcia resigned abruptly earlier this week in a strongly worded letter to Party Chairman Harvey Yates.

“In the last three months, I have seen the destructive forces that have plagued the Republican Party of New Mexico for years. In particular, I heard the use of fallacious arguments regarding ‘trust’, ‘confidence’ and ‘loyalty’ used upon me as if I were unable to understand these concepts,” he wrote.

“The Republican Party of New Mexico supposedly hired me as a symbol of a new day for a Party that has been plagued with deep divisions that led to historic political loses on 2008,” he wrote. “I was looking forward to re-building a stronger, broader Party but due to unforeseen circumstances, this will not be the case.”

GOP spokeswoman: Garcia didn’t voice concerns

In an e-mail, state GOP spokeswoman Janel Causey said, “Unfortunately, the position didn’t work out… a fact realized (Tuesday) night when the current executive director happened to stop by the party office --only to find Sergio with a packed U-haul dropping off keys and a letter of resignation.”

“We regret that Sergio did not feel comfortable expressing his concerns to the chairman directly before leaving so abruptly. We wish him the best in his future endeavors,” she said.

Garcia had been with the party for three months. Before that, he worked in Nicaragua as the country director for the International Republican Institute. He was a volunteer with the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2000 and 2004.

In a July news release announcing Garcia’s hiring, Yates said his “extensive political experience will prove invaluable as we head into the 2010 election cycle,” and noted Garcia’s “deep commitment to working within the Hispanic community.”

Asked what’s next for him, Garcia said he’s going to enjoy his family, “and we’ll see,” adding that he has lots of opportunities.

Update, 1:25 p.m.

In an interview, Yates said Garcia never expressed concern about ideologues and said that explanation of Garcia’s departure, in his view, is “simply smoke covering (Garcia’s) failure to do his job.”

Garcia’s job, Yates said, was to raise money, “and he maybe raised $500.”

“That may be the climate,” Yates said, referring to the economic situation, “It may be him. I don’t know but, in any case, he didn’t get it done.”

Yates said there were other problems with Garcia, including “a lack of work ethic… He was the first guy out the door every day” and that Garcia was “rather naïve” and “in need of training politically.”

As to Garcia’s claim that party leaders didn’t understand how to reach Hispanics, Yates said there were very few conversations about that involving Garcia because it wasn’t the initial focus of his job. Garcia was supposed to be getting to know the 3rd Congressional District and raising money there, Yates said.

He also said Garcia presented, about two weeks ago, “a rather poorly drafted and rather naïve Hispanic outreach proposal.” Yates said that Garcia’s statement that the party needs to work to “bring Hispanics home because this is where Hispanics started” is “is almost exactly out of a speech I was making.”

Yates said that’s nearly the same thing he recently said on KKOB-AM radio. He also said he has told Garcia in the past that, early in New Mexico’s history, the majority of Hispanics in the state were registered Republicans.

As to Garcia’s claim of a climate of suspicion, Yates said, “Surely if there is a climate of suspicion in an office, a rational person would go to the boss and talk to him, and he did not do that.”

Update, 4:45 p.m.

Garcia provided a copy of his Hispanic outreach proposal.

Reagan’s great Medicare blunder

2009-08-21T10:00:00.000-06:00

By Carter Bundy

No matter how many ads from corrupt health care executives like Rick Scott (that’s not name-calling: He was the CEO of a company that just settled a $1.7 billion fraud suit) and the Republican Party you see, market forces aren’t going to reduce prices or add more choice in health care.

Why? Because the normal assumptions about markets and the principles that drive market capitalism to success simply don’t apply to health care.

Knowing that market forces don’t provide any realistic solution to our myriad health system flaws, the GOP has succeeded in turning the debate into whether government should be involved in health care. Of course, the little secret they and their tea party friends don’t like to admit is that it already is: It’s called Medicare.

The Medicare example

A lot of people think we’re in unchartered water. We’re not. There was a similar debate about 50 years ago when the closest analogy to public option in America -- Medicare -- was passed.

One of the craziest ironies of the entire health care debate is hearing from conservative seniors who say, all in one sentence: “Get the government out of health care, and don’t touch my Medicare!” Ummm…would you care to clarify?

If any of y’all reading this are over 65, or you have parents or grandparents who use Medicare, ask if it’s been a success. With a few exceptions, people wouldn’t trade Medicare for anything.

My dad, who is an independent but often has leaned towards more conservative candidates for a number of reasons, recently had prostate cancer. Fortunately he’s doing well now, thanks to surgery and treatment under Medicare. He’d had what he thought was good private insurance for most of his life, and continues to have private insurance.

Last Thanksgiving, we were out walking before dinner. He was gushing about how well Medicare worked when the chips were down. At one point, he asked “has anyone ever considered Medicare for everybody?”

Yes, yes they have. In fact, Medicare for all, or some kind of single payer system, is exactly what many Americans have wanted for decades.

But public option isn’t nearly as big a proposal as Medicare was. It’s still just one totally voluntary option -- no one is making private insurance go anywhere. It won’t cover everyone, or even a majority of people in any age group.

Public option won’t be funded with mandatory, dedicated taxes like Medicare. In other words, public option is a more conservative, watered-down version of Medicare.

Democrats have already compromised by only pushing for this weaker, tamer version of Medicare. They’ve agreed to let people have a choice between private and public insurance, which seems pretty generous given the track record of private insurance. But that hasn’t bought them a bit of Republican love.

Now it’s partisan

The Democratic reform plans that have already passed committees in the House and Senate are, for most Dems, watered down versions of what they’d prefer. If Democrats water it down further by eliminating a public option -- it’s just a choice for criminy’s sake! -- they are going to virtually guarantee apathy and defections in the 2010 (and maybe 2012) elections.

Bailing on real health care reform is the surest way to lock down another 1994 revolution for the GOP. Don’t think Republican strategists don’t know that.

Senator Bingaman and others have gamely tried to reach bipartisan consensus on health care, and Senator Bingaman deserves praise for trying to strike a deal. But just a few minutes watching CNN shows that the national GOP is running ads against any health reform.

When you can pass something on a bipartisan basis, terrific. But when the other party is constantly stabbing you in the back?

At this point, why are you even in the room with them? How can Republicans like Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa look Senator Bingaman in the eye and say they truly want reform when Grassley personally bashes reform back home and spreads the bizarre Palin lies about “pulling the plug on grandma?”

Reagan whiffs, history repeats

If there’s one unifying voice for Republicans today, it’s the ghost of Ronald Reagan. Palin quoted Reagan’s famous admonition against “socialism” on the stump last fall.

What she didn’t mention is that Reagan’s rant was in a 1961 American Medical Association ad against, of all things, Medicare. Here’s what he said:

“Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day… we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this, and if I don’t do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

No matter how much you may like Reagan, he whiffed on this one. There are a heck of a lot of freedom-loving, anti-socialist seniors who dig Medicare. It’s amazing how the Palin wing of the GOP is fighting on the wrong side of history again using virtually identical scare tactics to prop up a lucrative, but sick, system.

The only question is whether Democratic elected officials of 2009 will have the same backbone, compassion, courage, and vision that the Democrats of the 1960s had.

I’m betting history repeats itself and Dems get their act together to pass once-in-a-generation, real, important change. I’ll double down that even tea partiers praise the Dems’ work 50 years from now.

Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in New Mexico. The opinions in his column are personal and do not necessarily reflect any official AFSCME position. You can learn more about him by clicking here. Contact him at carterbundy@yahoo.com.

Indictments add to scandal plaguing NM Democrats

2009-08-21T06:00:00.003-06:00

Some Republicans are hitting Dems hard over the charges against Vigil-Giron and others, but at least one potential GOP guv candidate says corruption isn’t a partisan issue

With the 2010 election cycle already in full swing, some Republicans are hitting Democrats hard over this week’s news that a former Democratic secretary of state and others were indicted in another massive corruption scandal.

“The pattern of corrupt behavior and inept management exhibited by prominent Democrat public servants, while becoming routine, has got to stop,” state GOP Chairman Harvey Yates said in a news release. “I congratulate the attorney general for joining the fight against corruption; it is not easy to take on one’s own party.”

The AG is Gary King, a Democrat.

Potential Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Weh had equally strong words for the Democratic Party’s leaders.

“(Gov.) Bill Richardson and (Lt. Gov.) Diane Denish chose to turn their heads in the face of corruption,” Weh said in a statement released by his campaign. “When I’m governor, I will not turn my head; I will take on corruption head on. People can take that to the bank.”

Former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, a Democrat, and others indicted by the attorney general -- lobbyists Joseph Kupfer and Elizabeth Kupfer and contractor Armando Gutierrez -- each face 50 counts including money laundering, fraud, soliciting or receiving kickbacks and tax evasion. They’re accused of bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars between 2004 and 2006 by falsifying invoices to the secretary of state’s office.

The scandal involving the secretary of state’s office is the latest in a long line of corruption cases that been brought forth by prosecutors in the last four years. Many have involved the theft of millions of dollars in taxpayer money. Most have involved high-ranking Democrats, including the two previous state treasurers, the former Senate president, the former deputy insurance superintendent, a current and a former member of the Public Regulation Commission, and a former lawmaker who found himself in trouble while running a state affordable housing program.

While some of those cases are pending, others have led to felony convictions, steep fines and prison sentences.

Adding fuel to the fire

But how will the corruption scandals affect the 2010 election? Republicans were not able to capitalize on the scandal in the treasurer’s office during the 2006 election. They gained no ground in state government, which has been largely controlled by Democrats for decades.

And in 2008, the GOP actually lost ground in the state Legislature -- and lost every seat it held in the state’s congressional delegation.

In an interview, Yates said corruption hasn’t been one of the top issues for voters in recent election cycles, but new polling done by Republicans suggests that is changing. The top three issues cited in a recent poll, listed in order of importance voters placed on them, were the economy, education and public corruption, he said.

Focusing on corruption has already been the GOP’s line of attack to this point in the 2010 election cycle. This week’s indictments only add fuel to that fire.

Susana Martinez, another GOP gubernatorial candidate and Doña Ana County’s district attorney, said the indictments are “a sad reminder that for too long public officials in New Mexico have used elected office to serve themselves as opposed to serving the public who entrusted them to lead our state.”

“As we move forward in examining the records of candidates seeking our state’s highest-elected office, it is critically important voters match rhetoric with action, and support someone who has a track record of identifying fraud and corruption and rooting it out,” she said in a news release.

Corruption is ‘not a partisan issue’

The state Democratic Party’s vice chair, Annadelle Sanchez, declined to talk about the potential political fallout from the corruption scandals, but released this statement:

“The people of New Mexico deserve a government that is open, honest and transparent. Good government is not a partisan issue, so instead of pointing fingers, Democrats and Republicans should work together to bring about the type of reform our system needs. I’m proud of Democrats like Diane Denish and (state Auditor) Hector Balderas that are leading that fight.”

Richardson has not released a statement about the indictments. Denish on Wednesday renewed calls for ethics reform, but her office said the Democrats’ likely 2010 gubernatorial nominee was not available for comment Thursday on the political aspect of the indictments.

Doug Turner, another likely Republican gubernatorial candidate, said he doesn’t see corruption “as a Republican or Democrat issue.”

“I think Republicans are certainly not without mud on them over the years, but the fact that you have these kinds of activities that are coming to light… ought to tell people that they really need to pay attention to the folks they put in office,” he said.

“No one wants a corrupt government except those people who are in government and are corrupt,” he said. “… I hope the beneficiaries (of corruption being brought to light) are all voters of the state, who really pay attention in the next cycle to the candidates who are running and vote for the individual that they think is best suited to lead a clean state government.”

Vigil-Giron isn't being placed on administrative leave

2009-08-20T16:13:00.002-06:00

Former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron isn’t currently being placed on administrative leave from her position with the state Department of Workforce Solutions despite the fact that she was indicted on 50 felony counts related to public corruption on Wednesday.

Deputy Secretary Ken Ortiz stated in a news release that while “the allegations contained in the indictments are serious, they concern actions that are unrelated to (Vigil-Giron’s) work with the department.”

Vigil-Giron is a constituent liaison for the department’s labor and industrial division.

She and others indicted -- lobbyists Joseph Kupfer and Elizabeth Kupfer and contractor Armando Gutierrez -- each face 50 counts including money laundering, fraud, soliciting or receiving kickbacks and tax evasion. They’re accused of bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars between 2004 and 2006 by falsifying invoices to the secretary of state’s office.

The release from Ortiz’s office states that the department will have no further comment on Vigil-Giron’s indictment “until it has had an opportunity to review the matter.”

“Until that time, Ms. Vigil-Giron is expected to continue to fulfill her work duties,” the release states.

Vigil-Giron, other defendants co-hosted event for guv

2009-08-20T15:05:00.003-06:00

Here’s an interesting little side note related to Wednesday’s indictments of former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and others.

Vigil-Giron and the others indicted -- lobbyists Joseph Kupfer and Elizabeth Kupfer and contractor Armando Gutierrez -- co-hosted a fundraiser for Gov. Bill Richardson’s re-election campaign in 2006.

Three years ago, Democracy for New Mexico published an announcement about the Sept. 19, 2006 “Wine Tasting Reception and Fundraiser” in honor of Richardson. The announcement states that the event was hosted by “Rebecca Vigil-Giron and Armando and Dora Gutierrez, Joe and Daisy Kupfer and Patricia L. Chavez and Ray and Deb Baray.”

Daisy is Elizabeth Kupfer’s nickname, and Joseph Kupfer is her husband. Ray Baray worked for Vigil-Giron in the secretary of state’s office.

Vigil-Giron and the other defendants each face 50 counts including money laundering, fraud, soliciting or receiving kickbacks and tax evasion. They’re accused of bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars between 2004 and 2006 by falsifying invoices to the secretary of state’s office.

The fundraiser could indicate a close relationship between the defendants. Perhaps that’s not surprising, but I thought it was noteworthy.

Teague says health-care bill still needs work

2009-08-20T11:00:00.005-06:00

At Las Cruces town hall, congressman expresses concern about bill’s vague wording, pledges to participate in any plan that’s approved

Harvey Baldwin asked nearly every person who walked into U.S. Rep. Harry Teague’s town hall meeting in Las Cruces on Thursday whether he could give them a pocket copy of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

“I want to educate the people about what our country is founded on and what our politicians are doing against us,” he said. “They’re destroying our country with this debt they’re creating.”

Many accepted the booklets Baldwin was handing out on behalf of the group Las Cruces TEA (Taxed Enough Already!) Party. Some engaged him in civil discussion of health care and other issues.

The town hall itself was similarly civil, and proved to be a good opportunity for constituents of the Democrat, who represents the 2nd Congressional District, to learn where Teague stands on the health-care reform proposal being debated by Congress.

“I have some concerns about it myself,” Teague said about the bill. “… I’m not trying to sell you the bill and I’m not trying to kill the bill. I’m trying to learn from you about your concerns.”

Those in attendance at the meeting at the county’s government center were engaged. Applause was frequent and loud. While there was a bit of rowdiness, it didn’t get out of hand.

Teague did a lot of listening as dozens of people -- some opposed to the reform bill Democrats are proposing and some in favor of it -- shared their opinions. Proponents talked about the need for reforms to fix a broken system. Opponents’ concerns included unrestrained spending, losing control over their own health care and the lack of discussion of tort reform.

‘I don’t think there should be any sacred cows’

Teague was specifically asked if he would pledge to fight to have reform that limits liability lawsuits against doctors included in any bill that is approved. Teague said he told House leaders he wants them to consider tort reform, but he won’t promise to support that or any other provision at this point.

“I think that health care is the most important thing to face our country. I don’t think there should be any sacred cows, and that should include tort reform,” he said.

Teague was asked if a reform bill should require members of Congress and government workers to participate in any government-run system that is created.

“Any program that I vote for, that’s where I’ll get my insurance,” he pledged.

The congressman also expressed concern about provisions in the bill he said are vague. He said such poor wording makes intentions behind some provisions unclear and opens the door for fear and misinformation to spread.

Because of that, Teague said he was among a group of House members who asked leadership in July to delay a vote on the proposal until after the current August recess ends.

One of the provisions that is vague, Teague said, has led some to believe Congress intends to ration health care in America and force everyone to participate in a government plan.

“I do want everyone to have a personal choice,” he said. “We’re not trying to ration anything, but, again, there’s some vagueness in the bill. … That’s one of the places where we’re going to have to clear things up.”

‘Proud to be an American’

Several people who spoke complained to Teague about government programs that have been recently approved or are being discussed -- including bailouts, cap-and-trade legislation and health-care reform. Following most questions, Teague told people he thought their concerns were valid.

One woman who raised concerns, Geneva Mitchell of Las Cruces, thanked Teague for hearing the concerns of her and others.

“I appreciate you having this meeting,” she said. “I think it’s great that we can stand up and tell you how we feel.”

At the conclusion of the meeting, Teague thanked those in attendance for their civility.

“It’s meetings like this that make me proud to be an American,” he said.

New corruption indictments bolster calls for reform

2009-08-19T22:59:00.001-06:00

As AG alleges scheme involving former secretary of state to bilk taxpayers out of millions of dollars, officials share ideas to combat such abuses

The indictments of former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and others are a reminder of the need for reforms that might help prevent or deter public corruption in the future.

Officials point to reforms such as the creation of an independent ethics commission, more funding for the state auditor and attorney general and regulatory changes.

Vigil-Giron, lobbyists Joseph Kupfer and Elizabeth Kupfer and contractor Armando Gutierrez are accused of bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars between 2004 and 2006 by falsifying invoices to the secretary of state’s office. State Auditor Hector Balderas said it’s one of several cases in recent years that expose the state’s weak oversight and lack of fraud-detection systems.

“I think we’ve been in a fiscal accountability crisis for many years. The recent indictments and the recent high-profile audits have only exposed a small proportion of a much greater problem,” Balderas said in an interview, citing a recent study that found a significant percentage of any budget is susceptible to fraud.

Among the reforms Balderas is calling for are more stringent audits on lucrative state contracts -- and more staff in his office to conduct them.

He cited several recent cases as examples of a widespread problem:

• Last week a special audit uncovered a $3.3 million embezzlement in the Jemez Mountain School District. The audit says the district’s former business manager, Kathy Borrego, took the money. A criminal investigation is pending.

• Four men are currently under indictment in the housing authority scandal, a case centered on the widespread misuse of $5 million in state-owned bonds on which the Region III Housing Authority defaulted in 2006.

• Former Senate President Manny Aragon and others have been convicted of felony crimes for their roles in stealing $4.2 million in taxpayer money by inflating and falsifying invoices during construction of the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Courthouse.

“These cases are revealing a systemic problem of a lack of oversight of their fiscal management,” Balderas said. “We’ve got poor detection systems that leave us vulnerable to future acts of abuse and fraud.”

State Sen. Dede Feldman, D-Albuquerque and a proponent of ethics reform, agreed.

“There is a crisis in accountability, and we need to take action,” she said.

Structural changes

The National Association of Certified Fraud Examiners recently estimated, following a comprehensive study, that 3-5 percent of any budget is susceptible to fraud, Balderas said. In an annual budget of about $6 billion like New Mexico’s, that’s at least $180 million each year. Balderas said his audits and investigations by the attorney general aren’t coming close to uncovering all the fraud that’s taking place.

“We’re uncovering wrongdoings in the millions of dollars, but I think we’re barely scratching the surface,” he said.

Balderas suggested several changes to ensure the state does a better job of combating government fraud:

• The auditor and attorney general need more employees. Balderas started a special investigations division to tackle fraud when he took office in 2007, but it has only five employees. He said his office, which currently has about 30 employees, should have 150-200.

• Balderas wants a new state law that requires an audit and verification process for how money is spent each time a government agency enters into a construction or service contract for $1 million or greater.

• He said the state lacks qualified finance officers to fill government jobs, which is “a worse crisis than the shortage of teachers and law enforcement agents in New Mexico.” Balderas wants one of the state universities to create a program to train such employees.

• The state currently regulates a number of other professions but not government financial officers. He wants the state to create a regulatory board to ensure people hired for government finance jobs have the proper qualifications and experience.

Others cite need for an ethics commission

The cases listed by Balderas are only some of the public corruption scandals that have plagued state government in recent years. In addition to the cases he cited, two former state treasurers and a former deputy state insurance superintendent have been convicted of corruption-related crimes. A current member of the Public Regulation Commissioner and his father, a former commissioner, are facing charges related to abusing the state’s public financing system.

A former school administrator in Las Vegas has been convicted on fraud charges. A former municipal judge in Sunland Park has been convicted of voter fraud. A government inspector in Bernalillo County is currently facing bribery charges.

Referring to the litany of scandals, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish said the most recent indictments of Vigil-Giron and others are “further evidence of New Mexico’s need for an independent ethics commission and increased transparency in state government.”

“The indictment of a government official erodes public confidence in their government,” she said in a prepared statement. “… On July 9, I announced a plan for establishing an independent ethics commission that has the legal authority to investigate ethics complaints and impose penalties when necessary. I am more committed than ever to working with the Legislature to pass this ethics plan.”

Feldman agreed that an ethics commission is needed, and said it should have broad powers to hold legislators, state officials and local-government officials accountable. She suggested that such a commission might also be able to take on the development of an online campaign finance reporting system -- a project that has been plagued with problems and delays in the hands of the secretary of state’s office.

If it also took on that responsibility, such a body could tap into money already allocated to the secretary of state, so she said it could be created “in a relatively budget-neutral kind of way.”

Prosecutors allege the theft of millions of dollars

2009-08-19T18:50:00.004-06:00

Vigil-Giron and other defendants each face 50 counts in indictments issued today by grand jury

Former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and the others indicted today by a state grand jury each face 50 counts including money laundering, fraud, soliciting or receiving kickbacks and tax evasion in the alleged theft of millions of dollars.

The others indicted are lobbyists Joseph Kupfer and Elizabeth Kupfer and Armando Gutierrez, who headed the company Vigil-Giron hired to help the state implement a federal voter education program.

Joseph Kupfer was a lobbyist for the secretary of state. Elizabeth Kupfer, his wife, was the administrative services director for the Attorney General’s Office at the time in question.

The 50 counts against each include:

• Four counts of fraud over $20,000 or, in the alternative, embezzlement over $20,000.

• 11 counts of money laundering over $100,000.

• Five counts of money laundering over $20,000.

• Eight counts of tax fraud.

• 13 counts of tax evasion.

• Four counts of making or permitting false public vouchers.

• One count of soliciting or receiving an illegal kickback.

• One count of offering or paying an illegal kickback.

• Two counts of tampering with evidence.

• One count of conspiracy.

You can read the indictment against Vigil-Giron by clicking here. The others aren’t yet online, but are similar.

Vigil-Giron has not returned a call seeking comment. Attorneys for Vigil-Giron and Gutierrez had little to say to the New Mexico Independent. Elizabeth Kupfer did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

The details

The AG’s investigation came after a federal audit found severe mismanagement of federal Help America Vote Act funds by Vigil-Giron’s administration during the 2006 election cycle. Vigil-Giron, who left office at the end of 2006 because of term limits, says the audit is flawed and has repeatedly insisted that no wrongdoing occurred on her watch.

Vigil-Giron used federal funds to pay Gutierrez’s firm $6.3 million for advertising and voter education work leading up to the 2006 election. The federal audit found that the company can’t account for how more than $2 million of that money was spent.

The indictments allege a wide-ranging scheme that’s in some ways similar to the metro court scandal. For example, according to the indictments, a $2 million voucher from the state treasury was deposited in the account of Gutierrez between Sept. 29 and Oct. 5, 2004. That voucher was based on a false invoice, the indictment states.

Then, between Oct. 1 and Oct. 7, 2004, a $140,000 check from Gutierrez was deposited in the account of the Kupfers. Similar transactions occurred several times between 2004 and 2006, according to the indictment.

Interestingly, while Vigil-Giron is charged with soliciting or receiving an illegal kickback and offering or paying an illegal kickback just like the others, the indictments don’t state that she profited financially from the scheme. The only bank transactions listed involve Gutierrez and the Kupfers.

Former Secretary of State Vigil-Giron, others indicted

2009-08-19T16:14:00.001-06:00

Former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron was one of four people indicted today by a state grand jury following an investigation into the alleged mishandling of millions of dollars in federal voter education funds by her office.

The AG’s office would not immediately release the names of the other three.

“Today’s indictments are the result of more than two years of investigation by my Government Accountability Division,” King said in a release. “We will now concentrate on proving these allegations in a court of law.”

Check back later for complete coverage.

Vigil-Giron targeted in probe of voter education funds

2009-08-19T12:03:00.003-06:00

Former secretary of state confirms she has received a ‘target letter’ from grand jury, again says she did nothing wrong

Former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron confirmed today that she is a target of an investigation into the spending of millions of dollars in federal funds on voter education by her office -- an investigation that is now in the hands of a state grand jury.

Vigil-Giron said in a brief interview that she has received a “target letter” from the grand jury -- a letter indicating that she’s one of the people the attorney general’s office is targeting for potential indictments in the case.

Vigil-Giron, a Democrat, provided a lengthy statement about receiving the target letter in which she defended her actions as secretary of state and claimed that Attorney General Gary King, also a Democrat, and others are out to destroy her reputation.

“I pray every day that my Lord and my God will forgive those individuals who so willingly, callously and wrongfully accuse me of unsubstantiated wrongdoing for the purpose of furthering their own personal and political ambitions,” Vigil-Giron said in her statement. “This witch-hunt must cease and desist. It has been going on since I left office almost three years ago and no wrong doing on my part has been uncovered.”

King, who Vigil-Giron said is “concentrating this attack on me… keeps claiming that he is not running for Governor and only running for re-election as Attorney General. Why is he intent on destroying the good service that I performed for the State of New Mexico?”

King’s office does not comment on pending investigations or grand jury proceedings, which are secret. AG spokesman Phil Sisneros reiterated that on Tuesday.

Audit: more than $2 million can’t be accounted for

The AG’s investigation comes after a federal audit found severe mismanagement of federal Help America Vote Act funds by Vigil-Giron’s administration during the 2006 election cycle. Vigil-Giron, who left office at the end of 2006 because of term limits, says the audit is flawed and has repeatedly insisted that no wrongdoing occurred on her watch.

Vigil-Giron used federal funds to pay the Albuquerque firm Gutierrez & Associates $6.3 million for advertising and voter education work leading up to the 2006 election. The federal audit found that the company can’t account for how more than $2 million of that money was spent. Last year, an annual, state audit included many of the findings in the federal audit and some new findings.

Vigil-Giron insisted in today’s statement that she “can account for every last nickel that was spent” and said all contracts over $200,000 were reviewed by officials in the attorney general’s office. She said she “relied on the Attorney General to always counsel me in the right direction legally.”

Patricia Madrid, not King, was AG at the time in question, but Vigil-Giron named at least one official who still work in the AG’s office as an employee who helped her.

The Albuquerque Journal reported today that the grand jury is also investigating Armando Gutierrez, the head of the firm Vigil-Giron hired.

A prior version of this posting incorrectly states that an audit found that more than $3 million could not be accounted for.

Madrid again on defense over Fulton controversy

2009-08-19T06:00:00.006-06:00

Former AG says Wilson’s bringing up alleged FBI inquiry now is ‘meant to divert attention away from her extremely precarious legal situation’

A new claim that the FBI probed a controversy surrounding Patricia Madrid three years ago has the former state attorney general once again defending herself against pay-to-play allegations.

Former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., who the Democrat Madrid unsuccessfully challenged in 2006, said last week that the FBI contacted her in June 2006 in an inquiry into ties between Madrid and a political action committee. Whether the inquiry actually existed is unclear.

The controversy centered on a proposed off-reservation Indian casino in southern New Mexico. Not wanting competition for his own racino, Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino owner Stan Fulton had been working to kill a proposal by Santa Fe art dealer Gerald Peters and the Jemez Pueblo to build a casino in nearby Anthony.

Six weeks after Madrid’s office officially objected to the Jemez proposal in June 2005, Fulton gave the Madrid PAC, Justice for America, $100,000. Fulton had also given $25,000 to the PAC several months before Madrid’s office took a position on the Jemez proposal.

In an interview, Madrid defended her office’s stance on the Jemez proposal, saying it “was the legal opinion, I might add, that was taken by the Western Association of Attorneys General, and it was the legal opinion that was in the best interest of the state, and I stand by that opinion.”

Asked if she could state that there was no link between the contributions to the PAC and her office’s stance on the casino proposal, Madrid said this:

“Stan Fulton is an outstanding supporter of New Mexico,” Madrid said.

Madrid added that Fulton once told her he wanted to be the most generous contributor to New Mexico schools, “and as far as I know, he is.” She specifically brought up money he’s given to the Gadsden Independent School District in southern Doña Ana County.

“New Mexico should have more philanthropists of his caliber,” said Madrid, who is thinking about running for land commissioner next year.

Fulton admitted trying to buy opposition to casino

As I’ve written before, Fulton admitted in 2004 to trying to buy opposition to the proposed Jemez casino by giving $1 million to the Gadsden schools and announcing that he would give New Mexico State University half ownership of his racetrack and casino when he died -- an estimated $10 million annually -- only if there were no other casinos built in an area that included the Jemez proposal.

“We play to win,” Fulton told me at the time. “This is a battle, and we’re going to look at it like a battle.”

The relationship between Madrid and Fulton was a hot topic in the 2006 congressional race, which Wilson won by fewer than 1,000 votes out of more than 211,000 cast. Madrid was asked about the contributions from Fulton during a debate with Wilson less than two weeks before Election Day, and she appeared to admit that contributions buy access.

“I do think you have to be careful about taking large sums of money from lobbyists,” Madrid said at the debate. “But even if you do, it is only to give them access to let you know about what their concerns are. Certainly it’s not to have you vote or rule in any certain way or obligate you in any way.”

Wilson responded by expressing shock.

“I’m amazed at what I just heard,” she said. “No one buys access in my office. Any New Mexican that wants to speak to me, it’s not conditional on paying at the door.”

Madrid said in the new interview that she’s shocked that Wilson was shocked by her statement during that debate because, Madrid claimed, Wilson took hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from pharmaceutical companies and military contractors, “and she gave them way more than access. She gave them her vote, time and time again.”

An ‘extremely precarious legal situation’

Madrid did not dispute that there was an FBI inquiry into her relationship to the PAC -- she has said she heard in 2006 from “a number of sources… that the FBI was threatening me.” But the inquiry, if it existed, apparently went nowhere.

And Madrid said Wilson’s bringing it up now “was only meant to divert attention away from her extremely precarious legal situation.”

There is a criminal investigation into the firings of former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico and several others, and some analysts have suggested that if Wilson pressured Iglesias to speed indictments in a criminal case against Democrats to help her re-election chances, she could face obstruction of justice charges.

Wilson, who contends that she did not pressure Iglesias, says she brought up the FBI inquiry into Madrid in 2008 and again last week only to explain the meaning behind an e-mail she sent in 2006 that is getting national attention because it could be interpreted to boost Iglesias’ claim.

Roberta Vigil ordered to repay almost $14K

2009-08-18T19:30:00.001-06:00

Roberta Vigil was sentenced on Monday to three years on probation and ordered to repay the West Las Vegas Schools $13,856 after being convicted in May of fraud, the Albuquerque Journal is reporting.

The money is to pay the district back for more than $16,000 in bilingual education funds she used on parties.

Vigil was convicted of fraud over $2,500, a third-degree felony, and conspiracy to commit fraud over $2,500, a fourth-degree felony. She faced a maximum of 4.5 years in prison.

Vigil was accused of misspending state and federal money on a number of items, including an annual, invitation-only party -- which took place late at night and included an expensive band -- under the guise of a staff training event.

Vigil is the wife of state Rep. Richard Vigil, whose brother, former state Treasurer Robert Vigil, is currently in prison for his role in the scandal that rocked that office.

Guv: Some tax credits, incentives may need to end

2009-08-18T16:29:00.001-06:00

Gov. Bill Richardson said today that, while he doesn’t want to scale back 2003 tax cuts or the film incentive program, he may be willing to put an end to some other tax credits and incentives.

“We need to take a look at them, to look to see if some may have outlived their usefulness,” Richardson was quoted by the New Mexico Independent as saying.

Richardson and lawmakers must agree on a way to plug a $433 million shortfall in the current budget. The governor has said he’ll call lawmakers into special session for that purpose in November.

Richardson has said he wants a deal in place before the session begins, and he wants the session to last one day. To that end, he told the Independent that he has named members of his staff to a negotiating team, and he expects lawmakers to do the same.

There will be some resistance to finalizing a fix before the session begins. Some rank-and-file lawmakers have told me they want to make sure they have a chance to represent their constituents in the process, and that the deliberations are open. That’s exactly what the public legislative process is designed to do.

Concerns elsewhere aren't stopping local town halls

2009-08-18T14:00:00.001-06:00

Members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation are holding a number of town hall meetings on health-care reform despite the unruliness, shouting and occasional scuffles that have characterized similar meetings in some other states.

Rep. Ben Ray Luján held a town hall meeting on health-care reform in Santa Fe on Monday. Sen. Jeff Bingaman is holding one today in Clovis. Rep. Harry Teague will hold a “Harry in Your Hometown” event in Las Cruces on Wednesday that could turn into a town hall or individual meetings with constituents, depending on the desires of those who attend. Rep. Martin Heinrich is holding a town hall in Albuquerque on Saturday.

And Sen. Tom Udall will soon announce details for four town-hall meetings on health care and other topics that he plans to hold in the next few weeks, spokeswoman Marissa Padilla said.

While some health care town halls in other states have been characterized by rowdiness, threats and, in at least one instance in St. Louis, violence, there haven’t been problems at the few that have been held in New Mexico during the current debate about reform. But that isn’t stopping at least one member of the delegation -- which consists entirely of Democrats -- from taking extra steps to be prepared.

“We’ve increased security precautions due to the nature of how some of these have played out,” Padilla said.

Bingaman spokeswoman Jude McCartin, on the other hand, said her office “did not take any special security considerations” for today’s event in Clovis, but added that she assumes the civic center where the event will be held “has its own security for events like that.”

Despite potential security concerns, Padilla said Udall has held hundreds of town hall meetings during his time in the House and Senate and thinks it’s important to continue holding them.

“He likes the format a lot,” she said. “He likes being able to engage directly with New Mexicans in this way.”

‘It’s obviously what’s on everyone’s mind’

Since the current health-care debate began, Teague has held four “Harry in Your Hometown” events, spokeswoman Sara Schreiber said. At those meetings, people can sign up to speak one-on-one with Teague for a few minutes, or Teague can meet with the group as a whole.

Schreiber said the events have gone smoothly so far, adding that there have been “passionate conversations with constituents that are legitimately concerned and have serious questions about health insurance reform and the implications it will have for them and their families.”

Teague’s office specifically asked in a news release that people come to Wednesday’s event -- the fifth since the health-care debate started -- with questions about health care. Teague will be willing to turn the event into a town hall on health care if that’s what people want, Schreiber said.

“It’s obviously what’s on everyone’s mind, and we’re very aware of that,” Schreiber said. “But he also doesn’t want to abandon his practice of what he’s been committed to -- that people can come sit down with him one on one.”

In addition to today’s event in Clovis, McCartin said Bingaman plans several additional town hall meetings throughout the state during the current recess. One will be held Monday in Albuquerque and will be hosted by New Mexico First. Details for the others have not been released.

Bingaman is one of the “Gang of six,” a bipartisan group of members of the Senate Finance Committee working toward a compromise health-care bill.

Heinrich’s Saturday town hall is the only one he has scheduled during the August break. Spokesman John Blair said in a statement released by his office that Heinrich wants to “bring together New Mexicans from across the district to ask questions as he works to address the health care crisis in our country.”

“We are working to ensure that anyone who attends the event is safe and secure and can participate in a productive, open forum,” Blair said.

Lujan doesn’t have any additional town-hall meetings scheduled but plans several “Congress in Your Community” events -- one-on-one meetings with constituents.

‘A positive event’

Luján’s Monday town hall was attended by nearly 200 people, and Luján and other panelists met after the meeting with about 100 people who couldn’t get into the first. The Santa Fe New Mexican described that atmosphere as “relatively sedate.”

In a commentary published today, New Mexico Independent columnist Brigette Russell wrote that Luján’s town hall was held at the same time as a GOP event in Santa Fe, which prevented her from attending.

“It’s a good thing I’m not a conspiracy theorist, or I might suspect that it was more than coincidence,” Russell wrote.

Luján spokesman Mark Nicastre said it was a coincidence.

“We don’t know the Santa Fe GOP’s schedule, and judging by their track record in Santa Fe neither does anyone else. If we did know their schedule, it would have absolutely no bearing on our schedule,” he said.

In a news release following his town hall, Luján said it was “constructive and helpful for me and hopefully for the many New Mexicans who attended the event.”

“It is a point of pride for me that we were able to hold a positive event that focused on the substance of health insurance reform,” he said.

Blacklisting journalists is petty

2009-08-18T10:15:00.000-06:00

On Monday afternoon, a spokeswoman for Gov. Bill Richardson sent the governor’s public schedule for the week to the media -- sans a few journalists who normally get such e-mails from that office.

I didn’t receive the public schedule. Neither did the entire staff of the New Mexico Independent, a site for which I write.

A journalist at another media outlet was kind enough to forward the schedule to me. When I read it, I discovered that the governor plans to be in Las Cruces later this week.

Funny thing is, the last time Richardson was traveling to Las Cruces, the entire staff of NMI was also conveniently left off the distribution list for his weekly schedule.

Upon further investigation, I discovered on Monday that I’ve not been receiving news releases from the governor’s office for at least a week. Meanwhile, my colleagues at NMI have received all of them except the public schedule sent Monday.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been blacklisted by the governor’s office. Since I and others began reporting on a federal grand jury investigation into allegations of pay to play in the Richardson administration, it’s been a fairly constant issue.

No one from the governor’s office has responded to my requests for comment for any story for months -- even those stories that are positive for Richardson.

They don’t have to comment for stories if they don’t want. I have no problem putting into every story that the governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. But refusing to send public information such as the governor’s schedule and other news releases takes things to a whole new level.

There is, of course, a degree of skepticism and, at times, criticism that’s required of any journalist covering politics and government. And communications staffers do and should spend a great deal of time working to sell messages that will advance the policy agendas of their bosses.

It’s possible for journalists and communications staffers to remain professional in spite of the fact that they’re sometimes at odds with each other. Blacklisting journalists, however, is not professional.

In fact, it’s simply petty.

Energy secretary to headline conference at NMSU

2009-08-17T19:28:00.002-06:00

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu will be the keynote speaker later this month at New Mexico State University’s “Re-Energize America” conference on moving toward a clean-energy economy.

Chu’s scheduled Aug. 31 speech was announced in a news release from U.S. Rep. Harry Teague, D-N.M., who is honorary chairman of the conference.

“Having Secretary Chu join us in Las Cruces for this important conference clearly shows that this administration sees New Mexico as a key player in our nation’s energy future,” Teague said in the release. “New Mexico’s unique combination of traditional source reserves and the right climate and geography for capitalizing on emerging renewable technologies has positioned us as a true energy leader.”

The two-day conference is designed to give participants opportunities to discuss how they can start or grow their own energy ventures.

They’ll have opportunities to hear from industry experts in “renewable technologies, markets and policies, the energy water nexus and challenges, energy and agriculture, algal biofuels and biomass, solar and wind research, storage and land use, micro-grid and smart-grid systems, natural gas, nuclear power, and many other possibilities to sustain America’s energy needs,” the release states.

For more information on the conference and to register, go to http://energize.nmsu.edu/ or call Brenda Dunn at (575) 646-2575 or Aggie Saltman at (575) 646-9323.

Richardson coming to Las Cruces on Thursday

2009-08-17T17:38:00.001-06:00

Gov. Bill Richardson will make three public appearances in Las Cruces on Thursday.

The first is a news conference at which Richardson will announce a “new college-readiness program” for students in Doña Ana County, according to a news release from his office. That event will be held at 10 a.m. in the atrium in O’Donnell Hall on the New Mexico State University campus.

While at NMSU, Richardson will deliver a speech on the new G.I. Bill. That event will be held at 11 a.m. at the Foreman Engineering Complex on campus.

At noon, Richardson will speak at a chamber of commerce luncheon. That even will be held in the Columbus Conference Center at the Days Inn & Suites located at 901 Avenida de Mesilla.

Susana Martinez hires 'GOP's Ambassador of Ill Will'

2009-08-17T13:40:00.003-06:00

Republican gubernatorial candidate Susana Martinez has hired one of the most well-known GOP public relations professionals in the business to run her campaign’s communications operation, a source close to the campaign confirmed.

Danny Diaz was communications director for the Republican National Committee last year. Before that, he served as deputy communications director for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Diaz spent a lot of time in New Mexico in 2003 and 2004 as the southwest regional press secretary for the Bush/Cheney 2004 re-election campaign.

He was once dubbed by TIME Magazine as the “GOP’s Ambassador of Ill Will.” In its December 21, 2007 article, the magazine wrote that Diaz described his job as an “ongoing and daily effort to ensure that both sides of the story are told.”

From the article:

“When it’s pointed out that at least 99% of the e-mails he sends to reporters are highlighting stories unflattering to Democrats, he laughs and says, with mock solicitousness: ‘I can certainly package and send you information we put on the web about the President’s speeches.’ It is the job of the RNC communications team, he admits, to ‘provide information to further a story line that is detrimental to our opposition.’ Of course, the Democratic National Committee has someone doing the exact same thing; what distinguishes Diaz is the obvious pleasure he takes in a job that is largely about spreading ill will.

“‘In this job, with the hours and the intensity level, you have to be able to have some fun or else you’re not going to last very long,’ says Diaz...”

Diaz started his own consulting firm in February, according to the Washington Post. The source close to the Martinez campaign said Diaz will direct communications for the campaign from Washington, where his office is located.

Diaz isn’t the only big gun Martinez has hired since she entered the race in July. Handling direct mail and paid media for the campaign will be consultants Jay McClesky and Adam Feldman of Lincoln Strategy Group’s New Mexico office. McClesky was the RNC’s regional political director for four years, overseeing operations in 10 states including New Mexico. Feldman was the state GOP’s director for a time in 2008.

Martinez has also hired Las Cruces native Jamie Estrada as acting campaign manager. Estrada was a deputy assistant secretary of commerce in the George W. Bush administration and, before that, worked for Intel.

Fighting corruption will improve our lives

2009-08-17T09:19:00.003-06:00

By Bill McCamley

“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.” - Bess Myerson

Corruption has become a hot issue in New Mexico. Pay-to-play activities aren’t new, but recent convictions, indictments and investigations have brought what used to be a private phenomenon into the open.

Many believe corruption is bad, but since it is so hidden and hard to measure there is very little analysis of its actual effects. The result? Many citizens don’t comprehend its physical consequences, and ethics policies that could serve to curb this practice (independent ethics commissions, campaign finance reform, etc…) are left out of the public forum in favor of the usual hot-button issues like abortion, health care, gay marriage and energy.

While these are important topics, ethics reform should be considered so as well. Why?

Corruption can kill you

In early 2008, a massive earthquake rocked Western China, leaving 68,000 dead and another 4.8 million homeless. It also collapsed more than 7,000 school buildings, killing and injuring thousands of children.

While this might not seem out of place in a large disaster, buildings near the schools were untouched and studies of the collapsed schools’ construction showed that materials used in them were of substandard quality, leading them to be labeled as “tofu” buildings.

While details have still not been released, there have been accusations that government bribery was a main cause. How? If a company building a school paid off corrupt public officials to look the other way during inspections, they could spend much less on materials (such as steel rebar for earthquake reinforcement) and make a larger profit, since money spent on bribes is a fraction of what they would spend on materials.

Did it happen? We might never know, but the pattern of collapse, lack of reporting from officials and the discouragement of victims’ families from discussing the situation indicate a strong possibility of corruption.

Corruption that kills is not limited to bribery. It can also include patronage, the appointment of one’s supporters to political jobs regardless of qualification. Though this symptom is not exclusive to one party or the other, the biggest recent national example of this is Michael Brown, appointed to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2003.

Brown had no experience in emergency management before working at FEMA. His twelve previous years were spent as a high-level manager at the International Arabian Horse Association.

Joe Allbaugh, however, was his friend. Allbaugh managed George W. Bush’s Texas gubernatorial campaigns and was a senior advisor to Bush during his 2000 presidential run. He was appointed to run FEMA in 2001 (even though he, too, had no emergency experience), hiring Brown to be FEMA’s lawyer, then associate director, and leaving the job to Brown when he resigned.

Brown was directly responsible for the national response to Hurricane Katrina, and the consequences for this patronage appointment are apparent and appalling. He admitted underestimating the effect of rising waters, showed no understanding of the evacuee situation during nationwide TV interviews and ignored offers of help.

His management was so bad that he was criticized by both parties and resigned in disgrace.

Corruption is bad for business

I met a gentleman recently in New York who does compliance work for a large major bank. Though I tend to look at corruption’s effects from the government perspective, he illustrated how corruption can affect business from the local to the international level.

Earlier this year El Paso businessmen Steve Sambrano and Ramiro Guzman pled guilty to corruption charges for their efforts to bribe school officials in the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District to take their bids over other, more competitive companies. Gifts to school board members included clothing and tickets to sporting events, including a trip to the Final Four worth over $14,000.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice fined Baker Hughes, a Texas oilfield services company, more than $44 million for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Between 2001 and 2003, the company paid approximately $5.2 million to two people in Kazakhstan with the knowledge that some or all of that money would be funneled to officials of Kazakhstan's state-owned oil company in order to receive state contracts.

Why should you care? Free market economics is based on the principle that competition allows a consumer to purchase the best product for the least price. Corruption blocks this process by eliminating competition.

If the people in the above examples were successful in their attempts at bribery, many businesses would choose not to compete for the work, taking them out of the free market. Whoever did get the contracts would raise their prices to make up for the loss of the cost of the bribe and to take advantage of the limited competition.

In these cases, the direct effect was a penalty to the taxpayer who did not get the most “bang for their buck.”

Corruption is bad for public trust

Both democracy as a government and capitalism as an economic theory derive their power from the trust of the average person. In democracy, policy is made by elected officials and implemented by regular folks. If individuals don’t believe the system is working for them, and not for limited special interests, then their belief will translate in to inaction, leaving the public sector stagnant.

A similar phenomenon happens when corruption is found in capitalism. People refuse to buy products they do not trust leaving a market with no purchasing power, and destroying the law of supply and demand.

Consider Sub-Saharan Africa. The region is considered the poorest area in the world, lagging behind others in infrastructure, health care, education and other areas necessary for economic growth. According to the World Bank, more than 70 percent of people under the age of 25 live on under $2 per day, while 146 out of every 1,000 children under the age of five die.

While some of this is rightly blamed on the after-effects of colonial practices, even President Obama recently laid much of the responsibility for Africa’s problems on corruption, saying that few or no institutions exist to provide economic transparency, accountability or efficiency.

Studies show that in Kenya 67 percent of people’s dealings with government include a bribe, while 66 percent of people in Ghana reported over 10 percent of their incomes being taken up paying bribes. A group called Transparency International issues a study called the Corruption Perception Index that shows a significant link between poverty and corruption.

Not surprisingly, almost all African nations score high in both.

Conclusion

So why should you care? New Mexico is constantly among the top five states for poverty-related statistics, and we have a long history of corruption at high levels (see Manny Aragon).

These are almost assuredly related, but both can be fixed. Citizens can aggressively advocate for mechanisms that will safeguard us from corrupt officials and bribers alike, bringing ethics reform to the same level as other emotional issues that tend to dominate national discussion.

If we can get policies like ethics commissions and campaign finance reform to the same level of public discourse as health insurance, the war and abortion, and then get them implemented, our society’s ability to make good decisions based purely on the good to the community -- and not on what benefits the few and corrupt -- will be improved, and so will our lives.

McCamley is a former Doña Ana County commissioner and current board member for Common Cause New Mexico.

Favela convicted; is another voter fraud case coming?

2009-08-16T23:42:00.002-06:00

Is there another voter fraud case brewing in Doña Ana County? After a jury found former Sunland Park Municipal Judge Horacio Favela guilty on Friday of fraudulently voting and registering as a candidate for judge, ABC-7 in El Paso quoted District Attorney Susana Martinez as saying her office will “vigorously” investigate allegations that Favela’s wife also committed voter fraud.

After two hours of deliberating, a jury convicted Favela of falsely declaring himself a resident of Sunland Park in 2008 so he could run for judge, falsifying a document that declared him a qualified voter, and voting twice in the 2004 general election -- once in El Paso, Texas and once in Doña Ana County.

Favela faces a maximum of 4.5 years in prison and a $15,000 fine, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News. He will be sentenced at a later date.

But that’s apparently not the end of it. KVIA reported nothing more about Favela’s wife than the statement from Martinez, a Republican who is running for governor next year, so details aren’t known.

Favela, according to KVIA, contended during his trial that records showing he voted in El Paso in 2004 were false. His attorney, Joe Arrieta of Las Cruces, said the conviction will only deter people from voting.

“That’s what I’m disappointed about, is the effect this case is going to have on people who want to exercise their right to vote and directly affecting the southern part of the state which is predominantly Democrat,” KVIA quoted Arrieta as saying.

Prosecutor Nelson Goodin, obviously, was pleased with the verdict.

“One person. One vote. The old adage of vote early, vote often doesn’t work. One vote for each person, so that everybody’s vote counts,” KVIA quoted him as saying.

The situation came to light after Favela was elected a municipal judge in Sunland Park in early 2008. He was suspended by the state’s Supreme Court without pay pending the outcome of the criminal case, but he later agreed to resign and never seek a judgeship in New Mexico again.

Herrera narrowly wins approval in non-scientific poll

2009-08-16T23:16:00.000-06:00

By a narrow margin, more votes cast in last week’s non-scientific poll on this site came from people who approve of the job Secretary of State Mary Herrera is doing than from people who don’t approve.

Of 648 votes, 316, or 49 percent, came from people who approve of the job Herrera is doing, while 308, or 48 percent, came from people who don’t, and 24, or 3 percent, came from people who said they don’t know.

Don’t forget to vote in this week’s poll, located at the top of the right column on this page.

Health-care debate about philosophy, not details

2009-08-14T13:30:00.001-06:00

This is an odd August Congressional Recess. Usually members of Congress bask in the calm and quiet at home while escaping the heat and humidity of Washington.

But this recess from the Washington heat is nothing compared to the local constituent heat. That Congressional deer-in-the-headlights look says it all: “You little people are supposed to adore us who serve you in Congress, not shout at us.”

Citizens are worked up. Some vent their frustrations by shouting. Partisans say the shouters are professional troublemakers, not real citizens, but I am not buying it because some are friends of mine.

I am only talking about the loud, scolding behavior; I do not condone violence or threats of violence, ever. These interactions this month are loud and passionate expressions of citizen concern. This is an American right and treasure.

What seems to be lost is that this is not -- and should not be -- a debate about details. The health-care debate is about changing our government’s philosophy of health care. There is no way to debate any proposed details without first addressing the overarching philosophy change.

Let us reason together in this health-care debate. There are two contentious philosophies that make me consider shouting at my representative even though I am not a shouting sort of person.

False emergencies

First, there was a false emergency dialog coming out of the leadership that led to Congress passing profound legislation without reading it! This is never appropriate in a representative republic.

The process of introduction by the leadership ensured that no one could read the bills carefully before voting. This was explained by leadership this way: Congress must act without thoughtful consideration because it is an emergency. Our representatives went along with not reading the bills and are now sizzling on the political griddle.

I cannot imagine voting for society-changing legislation without reading it. The partisans of each party say that it is the way things are done, but I disagree. There can never be a reason for our representatives to abdicate their legislative role short of a dictatorship.

Imagine at the founding of our country what might be the liabilities of voting on our Constitution without being able to read it first. The people who wrote this spring’s legislation read it and had time to consider possible outcomes. If you wish, go ahead and make your case as to why, in our system of government, the representatives of the people should not know exactly what is in the bills they are passing.

Regardless of party, if they say passing the legislation is so important that no one can be given the time to read it, we must throw them out of office. Start with The Patriot Act a few years ago and include all of the non-read profound legislation this spring.

Debating a fundamental change

The second issue is even more important. The current health-care reform debate cannot be about any of the details being bantered about. It is a fundamental philosophical debate about changing our government’s involvement in health care.

Most of us geezers and geezerettes were promised by this society that if we gave our all while of working age, we were due retirement. Social Security and Medicare were created by our government to provide for us. The core of the health-care reform discards, without compensation, that social contract and requires us to adhere to a social justice societal contract not of our making or in our best interest.

In the imposed social justice contract we geezers are told we got what was due us from our society when we were younger. Now, after our productive days, for social justice reasons, we are being told that we cannot be a burden on society. That is the core of the health-care debate.

The philosophy of social justice is in opposition to health care supporting older Americans after retirement. We have had this philosophy for generations, but our elected leaders may allow it to be destroyed.

That our representatives would consider this is a betrayal of the first magnitude. Either our congressional delegation does not understand, which means they are stupid, or they do understand and are evil.

Yell if you want

One group not being addressed is the health-care professionals. The doctors, nurses, specialists, technicians and support staff are necessary for health care. Congress seems to think these people cannot quit and do something else with their lives. Congress assumes they will obey whatever Congress tells them to do.

A number of my friends work in health care. To a person each has pointed out to me that it is unlikely they will participate in a system of medicine where political rather than medical actions rule.

One health-care professional asked, “So Congress wants us to lower the cost of health care. What have they done to make my medical practice less expensive and what have they done to make it more expensive? Congress made health care much more expensive and will not admit it.”

My friends who are doctors say they will find something else to do since they will not be able to run their practices in a profitable manner. If that happens, we citizen lose.

I hope people yell at the members of Congress every day of their terms in office and then vote them out of office for not representing us who sent them to Washington. While I prefer reasoned discourse where people are able to disagree without being disagreeable, it is not my place to tell Americans betrayed by their elected leaders to hush.

Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.

Krekula says he won't run for guv in 2010 after all

2009-08-14T11:30:00.001-06:00

Nathan Krekula, a faculty member at a Christian university in Hobbs, says he won’t run for governor next year after all, but he plans to run sometime in the future, possibly as soon as 2014.

“I did some soul searching, and I think I’m really wanting to enjoy my family right now,” Krekula, 36, said Thursday in a phone interview.

I first wrote on Monday about his Web site that declares his 2010 candidacy.

Krekula, a Republican, said he plans to spend the next few years building relationships in the Republican Party and becoming more familiar with New Mexico issues. He’s lived in the state for five years.

He said he will run for governor in 2014 unless a Republican wins the race next year and is running for re-election in five years.

Krekula, who is an assistant professor of biology and has worked in the health-care industry for 15 years, said he’s also concerned about the possible health-care reform being debated in Congress, and he wants to see how that plays out.

He was a medic in the U.S. Army and worked as a clinical hematologist for many years. He’s currently completing his doctorate degree in public health. With that in mind, he said he believes the current health-care debate will shape the 2010 election and beyond, and he plans to be involved.

“I want to be there as a resource and support to fellow Republicans and get involved, work with the tea party and other real critical movements,” Krekula said. “This health care issue is a real concern to me.”

Republicans who have already declared their candidacies for governor in next year’s race are Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez and State Rep. Janice Arnold-Jones of Albuquerque. Public relations professional Doug Turner appears to be about to jump into the race, and Former state GOP Chairman Allen Weh has formed an exploratory committee. In addition, former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson says she’s thinking about running.

On the Democratic side, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish is the only declared 2010 gubernatorial candidate, though Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez says he’s formed an exploratory committee.

A microcosm of NM's corrupt political system

2009-08-14T07:45:00.001-06:00

The Public Regulation Commission is just another example of why New Mexico needs an independent ethics commission

In recent weeks, it’s become crystal clear that New Mexico’s Public Regulation Commission is a mess.

Current Commissioner Jerome Block Jr. and his father, a former commissioner, are under indictment on felony charges related to misusing the state’s public financing system that include violating the elections code, tampering with evidence and, in the case of the younger Block, embezzlement.

Commissioner Carol Sloan is facing felony charges of aggravated burglary and criminal damage to property after she allegedly attacked another woman on July 14 and accused the woman of having an affair with her husband.

In 2007, a jury awarded $840,000 to a woman who accused Commissioner David King of sexually harassing her. It was the second time the state had to pay up because of sexual harassment allegations against King. In the early 1990s, the state paid $305,000 to settle harassment allegations made against him by three women when he was state treasurer.

Commissioner Sandy Jones recently placed on paid leave -- and then reinstated -- his office assistant after a complaint that her hiring violates state law because she has twice been convicted of felony crimes. Though I’m not one who believes felons don’t ever deserve another chance, this issue still raises some important questions, and the attorney general is looking into the situation.

And the PRC recently reopened a rate case involving a Las Cruces utility after a staff engineer was fired because of a potential conflict with the utility’s owner. Essentially, the PRC learned that the president of the utility, Stephen Blanco, had written checks adding up to almost $20,000 to Martin De La Garza, who had oversight of the utility’s situation until he was fired by the PRC.

Like the Blocks and Sloan, Blanco and De La Garza maintain they did nothing wrong, saying the payments were for work De La Garza’s father in law did for Blanco’s company. De La Garza has appealed his firing and says the situation is retaliation for his probes into potential misconduct by utilities and state officials. (The situation was reported on by the Albuquerque Journal on July 28, but the article is not online.)

Reflective of a larger problem

Of course, scandal at the PRC is nothing new. Do the names E. Shirley Baca, Eric Serna and Joe Ruiz ring a bell?

The point is this: State government in New Mexico has been plagued by scandal in recent years. The PRC is a microcosm of that scandal.

It makes sense that, in a corrupt political system, the PRC would be reflective of the larger problem. The PRC is one of the most powerful regulatory boards in the nation, governing all sorts of transactions and dealings in the business world. In a state in which pay to play, nepotism and other problems have been the norm for so long, why wouldn’t such an influential agency be plagued by scandal?

There are some good things happening at the PRC. It has cut its budget by $1.5 million a year, or 16 percent, largely by consolidating offices to reduce overhead costs. For the first time, the PRC has hired a private company to audit the way PNM obtains fuel and power as a way to ensure the cost of wasteful spending isn’t being passed on to consumers. The PRC plans to follow the PNM audit with reviews of the other energy companies that do business in New Mexico.

But clearly, there are also lots of issues. To deal with the situation, one blogger has suggested that PRC members be appointed, not elected. The only PRC member not involved in some type of controversy, Jason Marks, says it’s time to review how commissioners are selected and their qualifications, and says making the positions appointed might be a good idea. The Journal suggests forming a task force to consider what’s going on.

But the culture of corruption in New Mexico -- not structural issues at the PRC -- is the real problem.

NM needs an independent ethics commission

I’ve written this before (here and here and here and here and here and here), and I’ll probably write it again, but this is a perfect example of why New Mexico needs an independent ethics commission. The PRC has tried public financing, and it hasn’t yet worked (though prosecution of the Blocks might change that).

And in a state in which pay to play has been the norm, putting such a powerful regulatory board under the control of people appointed by the governor would only consolidate more power in the hands of one person and create more temptation for that one person to engage in pay to play.

We need an independent body with the mission of creating ethical standards and educating public officials on how to follow them, and with the teeth to investigate and publicly slap the wrists of those who violate those ethical standards.

Such a commission would not only put more pressure on public officials to be ethical but, because its findings of wrongdoing would be public, it would also put more pressure on the state’s enforcers -- the attorney general and district attorneys -- to pursue action against wrongdoers whose misdeeds rise to the level of criminal activity.

And it would empower voters by giving them more information about what their elected officials are really doing.

Many of New Mexico’s government leaders don’t want an ethics commission because it would change the way they do business. That is exactly why an ethics commission is necessary.

Republicans, let's learn to respectfully disagree

2009-08-13T16:45:00.000-06:00

By Sarah Lenti

On Saturday, New York Times columnist Charles Blow took the opportunity to make some gross over-generalizations about Republicans. The press has been echoing his sentiment all week long.

Basically, the accusation is that the GOP is composed of a bunch of “hooligans” who are going to highjack health care at America’s expense.

Mr. Blow seems to be a bit perturbed by the fact that Republicans aren’t falling all over the wizardry of the uber-partisan health care reform bill. Further, he is upset because members of his own party are too apathetic to fight for Obamacare as juxtaposed to the “belligerent” Republicans, who are “intellectually bankrupt” and actually showing up at the town halls.

Wow, Mr. Blow must have had a bad week. After all, he reverted to name-calling, which is basically what third graders do when they don’t get their way.

To be fair, there are some informative points that can be drawn from the piece.

Take Away No. 1: On understanding the issue

Mr. Blow notes: “According to a Gallup poll… only 47 percent of Democrats said that they had a good understanding of the issues involved in the current health care debate. 58 percent of the Republicans polled said that they understood.”

Republicans -- assuming that we are more informed -- good for us. But please just stick to the facts (on health care), rather than getting off topic and accusing the president of (for example) not being an American citizen.

I am sorry, but let’s not stoop. President Obama is indeed an American citizen and your president. He is giving you the platform to speak freely -- let’s not waste it.

Take Away No. 2: On showing up and behaving

Mr. Blow notes: “Not only are anti-reformists showing up, they’re terrorizing legislators with their tomfoolery when they do. Blinded by fear and passion, armed with misinformation and misplaced anger, they descend on these meetings and hoot and holler in an attempt to shut down the debate rather than add to it.”

First, kudos to anyone and everyone that is showing up to participate in the public debate. We are a democracy, not a monarchy. This is what America is all about.

Now, assuming that Republicans are better informed on the facts (previous point) -- please stick to the facts. Stop with the rage and relay what you know in a calm and collected manner.

Being composed speaks volumes; yelling and spewing threats screams ignorance. A professor once told me, “Sarah, it’s not so much what you say; it’s how you say it.” (And then, to drive home his point, he gave me a B+ for a perfectly-researched presentation).

Bottom line -- you have the argument, make it wisely and stop with the shrill screaming. It reflects badly.

Redefining our party does not mean we need to redefine our principles. It may mean, however, that we need to think about our behavior and the type of persona we are exhibiting.

Actions speak louder than words. Imagine what the story would be if we were calm and reasoned, rather than extreme.

Take Away No. 3: On being stupid

Mr. Blow notes: “Let’s face it -- (the GOP) is no party of Einsteins… A Pew poll last month found that only 6 % of scientists said that they were Republicans.”

Excuse me, but since when do “scientists” have a corner on political wisdom, or political savvy at that? Scientists get a lot of credit for using their brains in unconventional and, yes, innovative ways. This certainly does not give them a special general wisdom when it comes to public policy.

Republicans are not stupid. Our task over the next 12-36 months is to prove just that.

Conclusion

Back in 2003, then-Senator and now Secretary Clinton and her Democrat-compartiots raged in exactly the same manner for which Republicans are now being reamed. Click here to listen -- it’s quite the scene.

How is it that it is OK for Democrats and Democratic leaders to shout, scream and protest when the Congress and White House are controlled by Republicans, but not vice-versa? Ah, the hilarity and hypocrisy of it all.

That said, I stand by my earlier point. Let’s redefine ourselves by arguing from a position of rationality and truth. Let’s learn to respectfully disagree.

Lenti currently works as a policy consultant and advisor to Republican Party leaders, executives and candidates. She has worked in New Mexico and other states on presidential and congressional races and has a background in national security. Contact her at sarah.lenti@gmail.com.

Rove's testimony contradicts Wilson's claim

2009-08-13T15:08:00.002-06:00

Former White House aide says Wilson complained about ‘the timing of the courthouse construction indictment’ before the election; Wilson says that’s not true

Former White House aide Karl Rove told a House Judiciary Committee investigator that former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson raised concerns with him about “the timing of the courthouse construction indictment” before the 2006 election.

Wilson says that’s not true.

The question of whether Wilson was complaining about the timing of indictments in the metro court case before the 2006 election is important because former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias alleges that Wilson and former Sen. Pete Domenici pressured him to speed indictments in the case involving a high-ranking Democrat in an attempt to help Wilson win re-election in 2006.

It’s a charge both former members of Congress deny, but it’s now under investigation by a special prosecutor because Iglesias is one of several U.S. attorneys who were fired days after the election.

The contradiction between the Rove and Wilson statements is examined today by The Politico:

“Rove says Wilson pushed the White House to fire New Mexico’s then-U.S. attorney, David Iglesias, before the Nov. 2006 election because he wasn’t moving fast enough on a corruption case involving New Mexico Democrats.

“Wilson said she did no such thing, insisting that she only spoke to Rove once about Iglesias, and that was following the 2006 election at a White House breakfast.

“The ex-lawmaker also said she never mentioned a New Mexico courthouse corruption investigation in her discussion with Rove, a statement that is at odds with the testimony Rove provided to the House Judiciary Committee.”

Iglesias says metro court case ‘was not ready’

In his testimony (click here and scroll to Page 109), Rove said Wilson expressed concern to him “that Iglesias had a case that ripened and that, rather than filing it when it was ready, he was making a politically charged decision to not move the indictment until after the election, which was again, 9 months, 10 months, 12 months, 11 months after -- 14 months after it supposedly ripened.”

Iglesias told me earlier this week that the metro court case “was not ready” before the 2006 election, “but even had it been ready I wouldn’t have filed it because (Department of Justice) policy precludes indictments that can be used for political purposes during election season.”

Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, told The Politico that Rove’s “best recollection is that he heard from Wilson before the ‘06 election, during the same time period that Domenici and (Domenici’s former chief of staff) Steve Bell were also complaining about Iglesias’ holding of the courthouse case.”

So Rove is apparently also alleging that Domenici and Bell were complaining about the timing of the courthouse case before the election.

Wilson told The Politico that she “never talked to Mr. Rove about the timing of courthouse cases at any time and had no other communications with him about Mr. Iglesias at any time.” She insisted, according to the article, that the only time she spoke to Rove about Iglesias was at a Nov. 15, 2006, breakfast at the White House.

Regardless, there’s a criminal investigation into Iglesias’ firing that some analysts have said could lead to obstruction of justice charges against Wilson, Domenici, Rove and others. Even if that doesn’t happen, Rove’s testimony could be damaging for Wilson, who has said she may run for governor next year.

Jennings also disputes part of Rove’s testimony

But what if Rove’s testimony isn’t accurate? Wilson isn’t the only one disputing aspects of Rove’s testimony. In an article published yesterday in the Louisville Courier-Journal, a man who was one of Rove’s top aides, Scott Jennings, took issue with Rove’s assertion that Jennings was a driving force behind the firing of Iglesias.

From the article:

“Rove also said the ouster of Iglesias was ‘being provoked by Jennings’ and that the Kentuckian was ‘freelancing’ in pushing for the prosecutor’s removal.

“Jenning’s Washington attorney, Mark Paoletta, said Wednesday that ‘a fair review of the records will show that Scott Jennings’ communications concerning the removal of U.S. attorneys were in reaction to complaints he received and passed along, consistent with his responsibilities in the Office of Political Affairs.’

“‘…The suggestion that Scott may have been ‘freelancing’ to remove particular U.S. attorneys, or did not keep his superiors adequately informed about the nature of the complaints, is pure fantasy,’ Paoletta said.”

You may recall that Jennings is the White House staffer whose Oct. 15, 2006 e-mail questioned why Iglesias was being “shy about doing his job on (Patricia) Madrid,” Wilson’s 2006 opponent. Wilson claims the e-mail chain that includes Jennings’ e-mail, which she started, was about an FBI inquiry into Madrid, not the 2006 election contest between her and Madrid.

Ron Paul's army also marching for Kokesh

2009-08-13T11:21:00.002-06:00

The Washington Independent had an interesting article today about how two Ron Paul-backed GOP candidates -- one of them Paul’s son -- are causing headaches for mainstream Republican operatives who favor other candidates in what promise to be important Senate races next year.

That’s because the Ron Paul army injects energy, cash and support into any campaign Paul backs, creating credible candidates out of people who might otherwise have little ability to gain any traction. Their candidacies mean Republicans are likely to spend a great deal of money on primary battles in those two Senate races next year before they can focus on Democratic opponents.

Left out of the article by the Washington Independent, which is a sister site to the New Mexico Independent (a site I write for), is any mention of the third federal candidate Paul’s army has been mobilized behind -- Republican Adam Kokesh, who is running for the seat held by U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M.

Certainly, Kokesh is running in a less high-profile race. He hasn’t received as much media attention. Unlike the others Paul’s army is supporting, he may not have a primary race. And, perhaps most noteworthy, Kokesh may be less likely to win than the other Paul-backed candidates.

That’s because he is running in a heavily Democratic district for a seat held by a Hispanic whose father is the speaker of the state House. Kokesh certainly has his work cut out for him.

But I thought it was worth mentioning that there is another Paul-backed candidate, and he’s right here in New Mexico. As I’ve written before, Paul’s support of Kokesh promises to make the race interesting.

Public option and the free market (Part III)

2009-08-13T09:09:00.002-06:00

By Carter Bundy

The central argument over health care reform is whether free market solutions can solve American health care’s massive access and cost problems.

Over the last few columns, I’ve tried to make the case that normal free market principles and assumptions simply don’t work in the field of health care. The first four assumptions that fail are:

• Assuming consumers know what products and services they’ll need.

• Assuming consumers know anything about the products and services they buy.

• Assuming that consumers have a choice.

• Assuming that private insurers have a motivation to provide good services.

There are literally dozens of other necessary assumptions for market forces to work in any given market, but in the interest of moving on to discussing what market failure means, I’ll limit my list to only a few more.

Assumption No. 5: lowering costs will result in higher consumption

For the most part, this is as simple a truism as there is in economics, at least with regard to commodities. You lower costs, people will buy more. The flip side of this assumption is that if you raise costs (by taxing health premiums, for example) you’ll reduce consumption.

But health care isn’t a commodity -- it’s a unique, vital, literally life-saving service for which normal rules of economics and markets don’t apply. No matter what the cost, if it will save my life, I’ll ask for it. No matter how cheap, if it’s health care I don’t need, I won’t ask for it.

For example, if the cost of chemotherapy dropped dramatically tomorrow, even if there’s a chance of my getting skin cancer in the future, I’m sure as heck not going to start undergoing chemo.

If the cost of surgery for a torn Achilles tendon is lower, am I going to intentionally snap my Achilles again to use the product? Of course not.

This is an important concept because much of the opposition to a public choice is based on the idea that if a public option is less expensive, use of health care will skyrocket and we’ll all be waiting years for that crucial operation.

My guess is that most people’s experiences fit with friends of mine who are doctors. They say that the uninsured are the ones who often “over-use” the system, using more emergency room care than insured people.

Well, of course they do. They don’t have the less expensive, easier-to-access coverage that most of us do.

Want to end over-use of scarce health resources? The solution has more to do with giving the uninsured and underinsured access to primary care than with “encouraging overconsumption” by making health care affordable.

Finally, who thinks that the insured, sick person is even capable of changing his or her consumption patterns? The vast majority of us, including myself, trust our doctor and will get, or not get, tests based on his or her advice. So how will a less expensive public option result in overutilization of health care again?

Assumption No. 6: parties have bargaining power

In the field of health care, another basic assumption of markets fails: that users of the product or service being purchased have any kind of ability to bargain over the terms of the product or service being offered.

The practical reality is that end users have almost no ability to bargain. First, because most people purchase insurance through their employer, there literally is no point at which they can influence the terms of the deal.

Second, even employers don’t have much clout. As noted previously, in most metro areas of America -- and in many rural areas -- insurance is effectively offered by one or two companies. Monopolies and duopolies give insurers all the power. They have hundreds of lawyers, accountants and clever claims folks who write the policy.

The two or three people at each employer who get to review the options being offered have no realistic chance of changing the terms being offered.

Third, policies are so incredibly complex that only the people who design them -- those hundreds of lawyers and accountants employed using your premium dollars -- really know how many loopholes the insurance company is giving itself. Those loopholes allow them to reject people who have ever been sick, to deny claims, or to shift costs back to the employer, employee or taxpayer.

Conclusion

There is simply no way to say with a straight face that the solution to health care access, cost and quality problems is to put health care in the hands of the free market. There are far too many ways in which the inherent nature of health care guarantees that normal market principles and assumptions don’t work.

Brilliant Albuquerque Journal business and health columnist Win Quigley recently wrote that reform advocates should focus on the moral issue rather than the economics. But understanding that market forces don’t apply to health care is critical not just for a cost analysis, but for understanding why so many people can’t get care at all, even if they have insurance.

The normally beautiful checks and balances of free markets don’t -- and can’t -- work in the world of health care.

Did the FBI probe Madrid pay-to-play controversy?

2009-08-12T17:25:00.002-06:00

Wilson, Iglesias disagree about whether FBI inquiry happened

Former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson says there was an FBI inquiry into ties between her 2006 opponent, Patricia Madrid, and a political action committee as the two duked it out in one of the hottest congressional races in the nation.

David Iglesias, who was U.S. attorney at the time, says no such probe existed.

It’s not clear who’s right, but the answer to that question could help shed light on whether e-mails released Tuesday indicate that Iglesias was fired for improper political reasons, as he claims.

The alleged FBI inquiry into then-Attorney General Madrid’s ties to the political action committee would have come at a time when Madrid was caught up in a pay-to-play controversy surrounding financial contributions to that PAC.

The controversy hinged on a proposed off-reservation Indian casino in southern New Mexico. Not wanting competition for his own racino, Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino owner Stan Fulton had been working in 2004 and 2005 to kill a proposal by Santa Fe art dealer Gerald Peters and the Jemez Pueblo to build a casino in nearby Anthony.

Six weeks after Madrid’s office officially objected to the Jemez proposal in June 2005, Fulton gave the Madrid PAC, Justice for America, $100,000.

Fulton had also given $25,000 to the PAC, which Madrid formed to aid female and minority candidates for political offices in New Mexico, several months before Madrid’s office took a position on the Jemez proposal.

Wilson’s involvement in alleged inquiry

Wilson was familiar with the relationship between Madrid and the PAC because she, former Sen. Pete Domenici and former Rep. Steve Pearce had filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on June 12, 2006, alleging that Madrid had maintained some level of control over the PAC even after she became a candidate for Wilson’s House seat in 2006. Federal candidates are prohibited by law from operating PACs that accept large, unregulated financial contributions.

The FEC dismissed the complaint as baseless on March 23, 2007.

An FBI spokesman has not returned a call today seeking confirmation that there was an inquiry into the situation. All public knowledge about the alleged inquiry has come from Wilson, who says an investigator with the FBI’s public corruption unit in Albuquerque contacted her staff for information about the relationship between Madrid and the PAC in June 2006.

In an interview, Wilson said her office faxed all “research files” it had on the Madrid PAC to the FBI on June 19, 2006. She said she doesn’t know what became of the inquiry after that.

Madrid, who is thinking about running for land commissioner next year, and others tied to the PAC were never charged with any crimes related to its activities.

Iglesias says there was no inquiry

Iglesias, who was U.S. attorney at the time of the alleged inquiry, said he does not believe such a probe ever existed.

“I would have remembered something of that magnitude,” he said.

Iglesias alleges that Domenici and Wilson pressured him to speed indictments against former state Senate President Manny Aragon and others involved in the metro court scandal in an attempt to help Wilson win the 2006 race, a charge both deny. Days after the election, Iglesias was fired.

Whether the FBI inquiry existed is important in the investigation into whether Iglesias was fired for improper political reasons. E-mails released Tuesday by the House Judiciary Committee could be interpreted as indicating that a White House aide had the race between Wilson and Madrid in mind when discussing Iglesias’ job performance in the weeks before he was fired, rather than the alleged Madrid inquiry.

But if Wilson is to be believed, White House staffer Scott Jennings’ Oct. 15, 2006 e-mail about Iglesias being “shy about doing his job on Madrid” had to do with the inquiry into Madrid’s relationship with the PAC, not the 2006 election contest. The e-mail was part of a chain that had been started earlier in the day by Wilson.

Iglesias said the fact that Wilson never brought up the alleged inquiry during her race with Madrid is evidence that it didn’t exist. Wilson was behind in the polls in the final weeks of the race, and Iglesias said she “would have used that in a heartbeat against Patsy (Madrid) since she was so desperate at the very end.”

Wilson, who is considering running for governor in 2010, acknowledged that making the inquiry public during the 2006 election “would almost certainly have benefited me politically,” but she said it “could have interfered with the work of the FBI.”

“I chose to remain silent unless asked,” Wilson said.

Wilson was never asked about the FBI inquiry during the campaign. She didn’t publicly speak about it until last year, when a Department of Justice investigator asked her about the Oct. 15, 2006 e-mail chain.

Madrid says FBI ‘was threatening me’

Madrid could not be reached for comment today about the existence of any inquiry, but said in an interview on Tuesday that she heard in 2006 from “a number of sources… that the FBI was threatening me.”

“If there was an investigation of me, I’m sure that they were put up to it by Karl Rove, Domenici and Heather Wilson. They instigated all of that,” Madrid said, adding that any allegations made against her were baseless.

“I guarantee you, if the FBI and Iglesias and Karl Rove had had anything on me, they would have used it. They didn’t. They had nothing,” she said.

The history of the pay-to-play controversy

Fulton admitted in 2004 to trying to buy opposition to the proposed Jemez casino by giving $1 million to the Gadsden school district and announcing that he would give New Mexico State University half ownership of his racetrack and casino when he died -- an estimated $10 million annually -- but only if there were no other casinos built in an area that included the Jemez proposal.

“We play to win,” Fulton said at the time. “This is a battle, and we’re going to look at it like a battle.”

Wilson responded by expressing shock.

“I’m amazed at what I just heard,” she said. “No one buys access in my office. Any New Mexican that wants to speak to me, it’s not conditional on paying at the door.”

DuBois will once again seek PRC seat in 2010

2009-08-12T16:03:00.001-06:00

Democrat Stephanie DuBois has announced that she will once again run for a seat on the state Public Regulation Commission next year.

DuBois, who ran unsuccessfully against Republican incumbent David King in 2006, wrote in an e-mail that she will once again apply for public financing of her campaign. She said she will formally announce her candidacy for the District 2 PRC seat at the Doña Ana County Democratic Party’s annual Labor Day breakfast on Sept. 7.

King is term-limited from seeking re-election next year. So far, the only other announced candidate is Republican Pat Lyons, who is currently the state land commissioner.

DuBois has been highly critical of King throughout his tenure because of sexual harassment situations that have plagued him. In 2007, a jury awarded $840,000 to a woman who accused King of sexually harassing her.

That was the second time the state had to pay up because of sexual harassment allegations against King. In the early 1990s, the state paid $305,000 to settle harassment allegations made against him by three women when he was state treasurer.

The PRC has also been plagued by other scandalous situations lately, and DuBois referenced them in her e-mail.

“I am a clean candidate with no DWIs, no sexual harassments. No assaults or batteries. I am the clean candidate with clean money,” DuBois wrote in an e-mail. “… I will bring some integrity to the position, which is somewhat lacking at present.”

DuBois, 63, moved to New Mexico in 1978 and lived in Deming, where she managed the local chamber of commerce for three years. She has run a dog training and grooming business for 40 years. She currently lives in Tularosa and has served four terms as the Second Congressional District regional vice chair for the state Democratic Party.

Richardson wants to avoid job losses, keep tax cuts

2009-08-12T08:30:00.001-06:00

Gov. Bill Richardson wants to avoid job losses and keep tax cuts intact when state lawmakers convene in October to address another massive budget shortfall.

Richardson announced plans for the special session on Tuesday, and said he wants to limit it to one day. He wants a bipartisan compromise on a budget fix before lawmakers convene.

“Because our budget deficit is directly related to the national recession, I want to make sure that we don’t take any action that might cost jobs or adversely affect the state economy,” Richardson said in a news release.

Estimates place the budget shortfall at anywhere between $300 million and $500 million. Though the special session was announced on Tuesday, the expectation that lawmakers would have to meet this fall to plug another budget shortfall was known when the Legislature addressed last fiscal year’s shortfall during the regular legislative session that ended in March.

So what’s the solution this time? Richardson referenced the state’s “healthy cash reserves” in his news release but said the state is “definitely facing tough challenges, and we must continue to make sacrifices to balance the budget.” The budget shortfall could be addressed by transferring money from the state’s cash reserves.

Richardson spokesman Gilbert Gallegos also told The Associated Press that, while the governor would prefer that state services aren’t affected, “we may have to go that route now.” Gallegos said Richardson wants to avoid layoffs.

Though other groups are pushing for the elimination of the 2003 tax cuts for personal income, corporate income and capital gains, Richardson said in the news release that he wants to keep them intact “so we don’t hurt efforts to recruit new business.”

Senate Minority Leader Stuart Ingle of Portales was quoted by the AP as saying that lawmakers are “going to have to make some adjustments in every aspect of state government.”

“This is the toughest thing we’ve had to do in my 26 years in the Senate -- but it’s a tough thing nationally,” he said.

Bush staffer asked why Iglesias didn't go after Madrid

2009-08-11T18:03:00.009-06:00

E-mail questioning why Iglesias was ‘shy about doing his job on Madrid’ was about an FBI probe of Madrid, not the 2006 election, Wilson says

E-mails released today may appear to indicate that someone in the White House had the race between former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., and Democratic challenger Patricia Madrid in mind when discussing former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias’ job performance in the weeks before he was fired.

But if Wilson is to be believed, the FBI was investigating Madrid at the time, and a reference to Madrid in the e-mails had to do with that probe, not the election.

The e-mail in question was sent from White House staffer Scott Jennings to White House Political Director Karl Rove on Oct. 15, 2006.

“… The US Attorney in PA has no trouble going after (former Rep. Curt) Weldon, so why should the US Attorney in New Mexico be shy about doing his job on Madrid,” it states.

The e-mail was among thousands of pages of documents released to the public today by the House Judiciary Committee following its investigation into the 2006 firings of Iglesias and several other U.S. attorneys. The committee’s chairman, John Conyers, D-Mich., said the documents, which include e-mails and transcripts of testimony from Rove and Harriet Miers, prove that “Karl Rove and his cohorts at the Bush White House were the driving force behind several of these firings, which were done for improper reasons.”

“When Mr. Iglesias said his firing was a ‘political fragging,’ he was right,” Conyers said in a news release.

In an interview, Iglesias agreed, saying Jennings’ e-mail and others in a chain started by Wilson “confirm my worst fear, that Heather wanted me to disregard my role as a law-enforcement officer and act as a political operative.”

“Heather wanted me to file a politically advantageous prosecution to help her out, but we had to stay out of politics, and they never understood that,” he said.

E-mail came the day before phone call to Iglesias

Wilson and former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R.N.M, separately called Iglesias in October 2006 to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation into the stealing of $4.2 million in taxpayer money in the metro court scandal, which involved a high-ranking Democrat. At the time, Wilson was in a tough re-election battle against Madrid that she won weeks later by fewer than 1,000 votes out of about 211,000 cast.

Iglesias alleges that Domenici and Wilson pressured him to speed indictments against former state Senate President Manny Aragon and others involved in the case in an attempt to sway voters, a charge both deny. Days after the election, Iglesias was fired.

A special prosecutor is currently investigating whether obstruction of justice or other charges should be filed against anyone involved in the U.S. attorney firings and the congressional investigations into the firings.

Wilson’s phone call, Iglesias said in the interview, came a day after she started the e-mail chain that involved Jennings on the morning of Oct. 15. Wilson’s e-mail, sent to two of her staffers and then-Domenici Chief of Staff Steve Bell, included an Associated Press article about an FBI investigation into allegations against Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

“FBI or those close to them are talking about public corruption cases opngoing (sic) in other states,” Wilson wrote in the e-mail.

The e-mail was forwarded to Jennings by Bell, who wrote, “Seems like other USAttorneys can do their work even in election season… And FBI has already admitted they have turned over their evidence to the USA in NM and are merely awaiting his action.”

Jennings forwarded the e-mail to Rove, along with his own message about Madrid. (To read the e-mails, click here and scroll to page 15.)

Madrid under investigation

Wilson, who is considering running for governor next year, did not immediately respond to a message sent via Facebook. But she provided a statement to the Albuquerque Journal indicating that the documents released today “confirm that I did not have any communication with the Administration concerning anything related to Mr. Iglesias’ performance before the final decision was apparently made to dismiss him.”

Wilson pointed to a letter she released in September 2008. The letter, written in response to an inquiry from James Meade in the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), states that her Oct. 15, 2006 e-mail was not related to the U.S. House race but was related to “an FBI inquiry concerning my opponent, Attorney General Patricia Madrid, which occurred while she was running for Congress in 2006.”

The letter states that the FBI asked in June 2006 for information about Madrid’s connection to the political action committee Justice for America. Earlier, Wilson, Domenici and former U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce filed a related complaint with the Federal Election Commission, the letter states.

The letter contains no other details about the probe.

From Wilson’s letter to Meade:

“The AP story on October 15, 2006 caught my eye because the FBI, or someone close to the FBI, had leaked information about an investigation of Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania to the media. I believed it was possible we would see a similar leak from law enforcement concerning Mrs. Madrid and that we could be asked by the media to comment on it.

“My staff had contingency press guidance that, if asked, we would confirm that we had received an inquiry from the FBI about Attorney General Madrid and we were cooperating with law enforcement. The recipients of my (Oct. 15, 2006) e-mail knew about the FBI inquiry and the contingency press guidance. This e-mail was intended to be a ‘heads up’ to them. “

The probe of Madrid was not revealed publicly until Wilson’s 2008 letter to Meade was released to the media, but even then the Meade letter was not widely covered by journalists.

In an interview, Madrid said she heard in 2006 from “a number of sources… that the FBI was threatening me.”

“I guarantee you, if the FBI and Iglesias and Karl Rove had had anything on me, they would have used it. They didn’t. They had nothing,” she said.

A prior version of this posting incorrectly stated that Wilson’s call to Iglesias came 2-3 days before the e-mail.

New documents on U.S. attorney firings released

2009-08-11T13:54:00.001-06:00

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee today released transcripts of its interviews with Karl Rove and Harriet Miers and other documents related to the firings of several U.S. attorneys, including New Mexico’s David Iglesias, in 2006.

It’s been known for some time that Rove was involved in the chain of events that preceded Iglesias’ firing. But I’m told that the transcripts, which add up to some 700 pages, in addition to more than 5,400 pages of other Bush administration documents released today, include information about the firing of Iglesias that has never before been revealed publicly.

According to a news release, one of the most interesting points is that former White House staffer Scott Jennings, in an e-mail sent weeks before Iglesias was fired, complained to Rove that Iglesias had been “shy about doing his job on Madrid.”

You may recall that former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici and former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, both Republicans, called Iglesias in October 2006 to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation involving Democrats weeks before the November 2006 election, in which Wilson was facing a tough re-election battle against Democrat Patricia Madrid that she ended up narrowly winning. Iglesias alleges that Domenici and Wilson pressured him to speed indictments to sway voters, a charge both deny.

You can read the transcripts of the interviews and other documents released today by clicking here. Find anything noteworthy? Share it with the rest of us by submitting a comment at the end of this posting.

Las Cruces may restrict cell phone use while driving

2009-08-11T11:30:00.002-06:00

Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima says the city council will consider banning the use of cell phones without hands-free sets and sending text messages while driving.

The issue will be discussed at the council’s Sept. 14 work session, Miyagishima wrote today in an e-mail to constituents.

Miyagishima wrote that he does not support a complete ban on cell-phone use while driving but believes hands-free sets should be required. He said the meeting comes “in response to public concerns as well as recent reports about the dangers of ‘Texting while Driving.’”

Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Española already require those who talk on cell phones while driving to use hands-free sets. And earlier this year, the state Legislature considered a statewide ban on texting while driving. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Antonio Lujan, D-Las Cruces, passed the House but died in the Senate.

Meet Doña Ana County's new elections supervisor

2009-08-11T06:55:00.003-06:00

After going seven months without one, Doña Ana County has a new elections supervisor.

Bob L. Bartlesmeyer was recently hired for the job, the county announced this morning in a news release. The position has been vacant since County Clerk Lynn Ellins took office in January.

Bartelsmeyer has more than 25 years of experience in elections management, including 22 years as the county clerk in Lawrence County, Missouri -- a position to which he was elected at age 21 and then held for six consecutive terms. Most recently, he served as absentee ballot coordinator in Palm Beach County, Fla., according to a news release from the county.

He has attended Oral Roberts University and Missouri State University.

Bartelsmeyer was introduced to workers in the Doña Ana County Government Center on Tuesday by Ellins, who praised his newest employee as driven, motivated and highly qualified for the position, the release states.

Ellins was elections supervisor when he decided to challenge then-Clerk Rita Torres in the Democratic primary last year. He won the primary and general elections.

Ellins announced in November that Mario Jimenez, who had run the primary and general elections in 2008 because Ellins was a candidate, would be his chief deputy clerk.

A prior version of this posting incorrectly said Bartelsmeyer worked in Lawrence, Kansas.

Christian university professor running for governor

2009-08-10T17:06:00.001-06:00

A faculty member at a Christian university in Hobbs is joining the race for governor.

Republican Nathan Krekula writes on his campaign Web site that he supports the development of new energy technologies and protecting natural resources along with support for the oil and gas industry. He also writes on his Web site about the importance of education, religion and free enterprise.

Krekula is an assistant professor of biology at University of the Southwest, which according to its Web site is a “a Christ-centered educational community dedicated to developing men and women for a lifetime of servant leadership by emphasizing individual faith, responsibility, and initiative.”

He was in the U.S. Army for 12 years and worked in the health-care industry for 15, according to his Web site. He has a doctorate degree in epidemiology from Walden University.

Krekula’s Web site states that he “believes in limited government, personal responsibility and moral values. He is a conservative who agrees with George Washington’s Farewell Address that ‘religion and morality are indispensable supports’ to political prosperity.”

He says he will “support the oil industry that provides jobs and prosperity to the great state of New Mexico… encourage and grow family values as they are the backbone of America and its greatness” and “work to show the importance of education from a personal level as well as reaching out to New Mexico Homeschoolers.”

“Nathan loves New Mexico and he wants to see it become an example to the nation of how free enterprise can restore our nation’s greatness,” he writes on his Web site.

Krekula, a political unknown, will face some stiff opposition in the GOP primary. Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez and State Rep. Janice Arnold-Jones of Albuquerque have already entered the race. Public relations professional Doug Turner appears to be about to jump into the race, and Former state GOP Chairman Allen Weh has formed an exploratory committee.

In addition, former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson says she’s thinking about running.

On the Democratic side, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish is the only declared 2010 gubernatorial candidate, though Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez says he’s formed an exploratory committee.

Town-hall violence isn't helping anything

2009-08-10T14:00:00.005-06:00

Many conservatives are angry about bailouts, tax-increase proposals, cap-and-trade legislation and health-care reform. Fine. But instead of resorting to violence, they need to take a seat at the table.

A libertarian activist in Albuquerque crossed a line on Friday when he advocated physical violence against members of left-leaning groups at town hall meetings on health-care reform.

I’m not giving the guy the publicity of linking to his page or publishing his name, but I will tell you that he posted messages on Twitter stating that people should use “retaliation… be it verbal or physical” against members of ACORN and the Service Employees International Union if they decide to attend or disrupt town-hall meetings and should “hurt them. Badly.”

He even advocated that people take advantage of their “license to carry.”

Of course, the man’s inappropriately dangerous tweets are only the latest disgraceful behavior in the national hijacking of the health-care reform debate that has included raucous town hall meetings, physical violence and at least one death threat against a member of Congress.

Though a violent incident in St. Louis appears to break the mold, in general, most of the potentially dangerous incidents have been caused by angry conservatives.

Fanning the flames

Some of the anger on the right is understandable. Conservatives have watched Republican control of the federal government slip away in recent years. But physical violence is not the answer.

I understand the sentiment of many fiscal conservatives who worry about the nation’s economic policies. I’ve expressed my opposition to the bailouts, and to recent tax-increase proposals that I believe are foolish during a recession.

Many people are also upset about recently approved cap-and-trade legislation. And now they’re worried about the proposal to create a public option to compete with private health insurance companies.

That’s fine. Those are reasonable policy differences between many on the left and right, and I’d be surprised if some Americans weren’t upset about such major policy shifts.

But the flames are being fanned by lies spreading like a virus on the Internet about President Barack Obama’s birthplace and false claims that Democrats are making plans to take away Americans’ guns. It’s all garbage, but some people are buying into it. The resulting fear is creating a climate ripe for the type of violence we’ve already seen, violence that threatens to get worse -- maybe much worse -- in the coming weeks.

Obama is not Hitler

To be fair, Obama has created an opening for conspiracy theorists and liars to spread their messages by acting a bit Big-Brother-ish in his first few months in office. First his administration asked all potential appointees detailed questions about their gun ownership on a personnel form, as if that’s any of the White House’s business. Then, last week, the official White House blog asked supporters of health-care reform to send in “fishy” e-mails or other misinformation that’s being spread about the health-care debate.

So now the White House is collecting e-mails sent by people who oppose its agenda on health care.

That sort of action -- collecting e-mails and information about gun ownership -- is a little creepy to me, no matter who is president. But comparisons between Obama and Adolf Hitler are not fair. They are outlandish at best, outrageous at worst because of the sentiment they’re helping spread across the nation.

America, we’re better than this. How about toning down the rhetoric, stopping to the violence, and instead putting our efforts into attempting to understand each other and come up with real solutions to our problems?

Colón makes his resignation official

2009-08-10T10:08:00.001-06:00

There was no news release, no public announcement, and little fanfare, but Brian Colón resigned from his position as chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico this weekend as expected, apparently with the intention of entering the lieutenant governor’s race.

Colón made his resignation official in a Friday letter to the state party’s vice chair, Annadelle Sanchez, which was posted at Democracy for New Mexico. His resignation took effect Saturday.

“I am proud and humbled by all we have accomplished together. We had clear electoral success at all levels of government. We truly became a ‘Blue State in ‘08’ with victories up and down the ballot,” Colón wrote about his 2.5 years as party chairman. “President Barack Obama carried New Mexico, Tom Udall is our new United States Senator and we have three Democratic Members of Congress. Importantly, we also picked up three seats in the State House and three seats in the State Senate along with terrific judges all over New Mexico.”

Colón made no mention in his letter of running for lieutenant governor, but sources have confirmed that he plans to do just that. He has confirmed that he’s considering entering the race.

Colón will be joining a crowded primary. Already in the race are Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano, state Sens. Linda Lopez and Gerald Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque and State Rep. Jose Campos of Santa Rosa. Matthew Padilla, a law student and former U.S. Navy officer, says he plans to form an exploratory committee this week.

Lawrence Rael, who heads the Mid-Region Council of Governments, is considering running. And Española Mayor Joseph Maestas says he may also run.

Former judge's voter-fraud trial starts today

2009-08-10T08:24:00.002-06:00

Now here’s an actual voter-fraud case being prosecuted by the office of Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez. The trial of a man who’s accused of “fraudulently registering as a candidate for Sunland Park municipal judge and fraudulently voting” starts today, the Las Cruces Sun-News is reporting.

Horacio Favela, 49 and a Democrat, is accused of falsely declaring himself a resident of Sunland Park so he could vote and run for judge there while he was living in El Paso.

He allegedly voted in El Paso County in Texas and in Doña Ana County in 2004. In Doña Ana County, Favela voted using an address for a small trailer located next to a tortilla business in which he is a partner.

From the Sun-News:

“Favela was indicted on two counts of falsely swearing in a municipal election, three counts of falsifying election documents in a municipal election. Also, he faces one count of false voting for not being a qualified elector or, alternatively, one count of false voting more than once in the same election. Each of the charges is a fourth-degree felony.

“If convicted, he could be sentenced for each count up to a maximum of 18 months in prison and possibly up to a $5,000 fine.”

Favela has pleaded not guilty to the charges. The trial is scheduled to last three days.

In case you’re wondering about the first sentence in this posting, I recently raised questions about whether Martinez, a GOP candidate for governor, was correctly labeling as “voter fraud” a separate case her office prosecuted in 2003 against a former Doña Ana County clerk.

Voters in poll say AG not tough enough on corruption

2009-08-10T07:45:00.001-06:00

The majority of those who voted in last week’s non-scientific poll on this site said Attorney General Gary King has not been tough enough on public corruption.

Of 458 voters, 403, or 88 percent, said the AG isn’t doing enough, while 36, or 8 percent, said he is, and 19, or 4 percent, said they don’t know.

Don’t forget to vote in this week’s poll, located at the top of the right column on this page.

A partly personal apology to my father

2009-08-07T13:58:00.000-06:00

In the last month I have been occasionally blue thinking of my father, who passed away in 1993. Many of his formative years were spent fighting for freedom. First he fought World War II on the frontlines in person, and then, I have come to realize, he fought parts of that war again for the rest of his life in his head.

I went walking the other day thinking of how in just one year America changed. I thought, “And the thanks he gets for all of those days on the frontlines protecting our country is that after his death America lurches toward a socialist agenda as bad as any he fought against in the service of his country. If he was not already dead, this would kill him.”

My father was the son of a combat veteran who was wounded in World War I so that his son could live in freedom. In those first, dark days of World War II, my father left high school a semester before graduation to join the military. When his classmates were graduating he was already finishing his advanced training. Then on Nov. 8, 1942, he landed with the first troops in North Africa and the war for him was on until he got back to the states in late 1945.

A few years later there was his time in Korea. He also served a tour of duty in Vietnam. In 1967 he retired. He sometimes was still called, “Sarge,” at the NCO club by friends who also served in combat.

As our country slipped further and further from freedom into a socialistic government he said little, as was his lifelong habit, but he listened on radio and watched on television those people who protested loudly our movement away from the freedoms of our forefathers.

Letting my father’s generation down

Truth be known, most people today are willing jailers of themselves. They rush to give up their freedoms for the illusionary promise that the government will take care of them better than they could take care of themselves. My father would have seen the error of that thinking.

Despite being on the front lines of war for many years of his adult life, my father only had internal wounds of his soul. He did not talk of the horror he had seen, but it seemed as I watched him he would often quietly think back on those days and lost comrades.

My generation has let my father and his generation down in the protection of America’s freedoms. Freedom remains only as long as each of us fights for it. Every second there are the forces of evil trying to enslave all of the people of the world. Many of people of our world live in countries where they have never tasted freedom. Here in our country, the people who really believe in freedom are becoming less and less heard.

Thundering herds of mindless people jump lemming-like over the cliff into socialism with no understanding of or concern that they are giving up their freedoms. They forever destroy their own freedoms while they also destroy the freedom of generations to come.

An America without freedom

I am deeply troubled that my father and millions of other soldiers gave so much -- some gave even their last full measure -- so that future generations could be free. And I sometimes think that I am the last generation to have tasted that freedom.

In countless graves are soldiers who fought for freedom in America’s wars. Even sadder are the many military graves of unknown soldiers with these 13 words: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”

I will visit my father at the Ft. Bliss National Cemetery this week. I hope I can explain to his gravestone and those around it how my generation let their years of fighting totalitarian governments go for naught and inexplicably decided to embrace an America without freedom.

Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.

What about the Region VII Housing Authority records?

2009-08-07T10:30:00.004-06:00

Why were they abandoned in the agency’s former office for almost two years? What information do they contain?

When the Las Cruces-based Region VII Housing Authority shut down in August 2006, board members said the agency’s records would be sent to Region III in Albuquerque.

So why did the government records remain essentially abandoned in a privately owned office building in Las Cruces until almost two years later, when they were finally picked up by Brian Colón, a private attorney working on the State Investment Council’s (SIC) lawsuit that’s attempting to recover money lost when Region III defaulted in 2006 on $5 million in bonds it owed the state?

Good question.

Region III continued to operate after its bond default led to several other housing authorities around the state shutting down in 2006, but only for the purpose of sorting through the mess the housing authorities had created. Gov. Bill Richardson appointed Lawrence Rael, who runs the Mid-Region Council of Governments, to head up that effort.

Rael has not returned a call seeking comment on why his office never picked up the Region VII records.

Edgar Lopez, who owns the Las Cruces office Region VII leased, said a company hired to liquidate Region VII’s assets came at some point to take phones and other equipment, but left behind the paper records and a computer server that contained Region VII e-mails and other documents.

At that point, Lopez said, he made known “to everybody including the attorney general’s office” that documents in a file cabinet and on a computer server had been “abandoned” and were still in his possession, and that they could be obtained with a subpoena.

The AG later took the computer server but left the paper records, Lopez said. Then in May 2008, Colón came for the documents. The SIC’s spokesman, Charles Wollmann, said Colón’s law firm has made the documents available to the AG’s office for its criminal investigation.

Officials mum on content of records

So what do the records say? It’s not clear. Colón’s subpoena sought “documents and items” in Lopez’s possession related to Region III, Region VII, another company tied to the housing authorities and several companies owned by former Region III Director Vincent “Smiley” Gallegos, the man at the center of the scandal.

But no one with knowledge of what was actually contained in the Region VII files who was interviewed for this article, including Colón, would talk about the content of the documents. And it’s not clear how a member of the public who wants to view what are public records would go about doing that.

Officially, the records should be in the possession of Rael and Region III, but they are not. Wollmann said a records request should not be directed to the SIC, which is not the custodian of the records.

And Colón’s law firm, though it is in possession of the records, isn’t a governmental agency to which a public records request can be directed. It’s simply doing work on behalf of the SIC.

Is Colón's work on housing authority lawsuit a conflict?

2009-08-07T08:41:00.004-06:00

Whistleblower says Democratic Party chairman’s dual roles create ‘the perception of conflict of interest;’ Colón says there is no conflict

The chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico traveled to Las Cruces on May 14, 2008 to pick up documents left behind when the Region VII Housing Authority shut down in August 2006.

But Brian Colón wasn’t acting in his role as party chair. Colón is an attorney, and his law firm is suing two defendants on behalf of the State Investment Council (SIC) to try to recover money lost when the Albuquerque-based Region III Housing Authority defaulted in 2006 on $5 million in bonds it owed the state.

With a subpoena in hand, Colón met with Edgar Lopez, who had been Region VII’s landlord, filled his car with boxes of government records and headed north on Interstate 25.

Colón confirmed in an interview that his work on the case includes investigation, research and communicating with the SIC on behalf of his law firm, Robles, Rael & Anaya. And he confirmed that he picked up the Region VII documents in 2008 as part of his investigation.

The housing authority scandal centers on some well-connected Democrats. Four men were recently indicted, including a close ally of House Speaker Ben Lujan and a bond attorney who has been a donor to the campaigns of the governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state.

Because of that, Frances Williams, a former Region VII board member and the whistleblower who first exposed the problems with the housing authorities more than three years ago, says Colón’s involvement in the lawsuit is inappropriate.

“Even if he didn’t do anything wrong, it has the perception of conflict of interest, that there is something wrong,” Williams said. “… This stuff with Brian Colón, it goes to the heart of ethics and how we deal with government and the problems we have.”

Colón says two roles are ‘consistent’

Colón, who is expected to announce his resignation from the party’s chairmanship today so he can run for lieutenant governor, said in an interview that there is no conflict between his position as head of the state Democratic Party and his role in the lawsuit.

“Being a zealous advocate for the State Investment Council and its desire to protect taxpayer’s funds is consistent to me with the Democratic Party’s desire to protect taxpayers,” Colón said when asked if he believes there’s a conflict.

The SIC’s public information officer, Charles Wollmann, said Robles, Rael & Anaya was selected for the job following a competitive bidding process. Three companies bid, but one opted out because it also worked with a bank that had been involved in housing authority business. That left two firms vying for the job.

“We went with what we perceived to be the firm with more firepower. They had more resources,” Wollmann said.

Other conflict-of-interest scandals

The housing authority case has been colored by a number of conflict-of-interest scandals:

• The man at the center of the controversy, former Region III Director Vincent “Smiley” Gallegos, convinced the board of a nonprofit tied to Region III to loan one of his personal companies $300,000 under the guise of purchasing land in Las Cruces that the authority already owned. That loan is the basis for some of the criminal charges against Gallegos, who is one of the four men under indictment.

• Three tenants of homes owned by Region III have been booted because they didn’t qualify for affordable housing. Two were Region III employees and one was a board member.

• A metro court judge in Albuquerque was suspended without pay for two weeks because she was living rent-free in a Region III home -- though she was making $93,000 a year at the time -- and had dismissed traffic tickets and an arrest warrant for Gallegos while she was living in the home.

• One of Lujan’s top aides was living live rent-free in a home owned by Region III even though she was earning more than $71,000 a year. Gallegos, a former House member from Clovis, became a lobbyist after leaving the Legislature in 1996, and he spent a lot of time in Lujan’s office -- where the aide worked -- during legislative sessions.

For years, Williams has cited those situations as evidence that cronyism pervades state government. She said when she first learned of Colón’s involvement in the SIC’s lawsuit she complained to the SIC, to Luis Robles, who is heading up the law firm’s team on the case, and to Colón himself.

“I said (to Colón), even if you don’t do anything wrong there’s the perception of wrongdoing,” Williams said.

Ultimately, she said, her concern fell on deaf ears.

Gore's 'climate protection' campaign comes to NM

2009-08-07T08:32:00.002-06:00

Al Gore’s “climate protection” campaign has opened an office in Albuquerque to help New Mexicans shift to clean energy.

The Alliance for Climate Protection, whose board is chaired by Gore, officially opened its Repower New Mexico office on Thursday. The office will be staffed with five employees.

“New Mexican families need to know a clean energy economy will create millions of well-paying jobs and save Americans money on their energy bills,” New Mexico Director Brandon Pinette said in a news release. “We at Repower New Mexico are extremely excited to open our Albuquerque office; it will be a hub for all New Mexicans who want to see our economy grow into a cleaner, brighter future, instead of being mired in the dirty energy policies of the past.”

The “nonprofit, nonpartisan organization,” according to the release, “is educating New Mexicans about how shifting to a clean energy economy helps solve the climate crisis and address other pressing national problems facing our country today.”

The group has recruited more than 3,000 members in New Mexico in the past few months, according to the release.

Montoya, Huerta back Gonzales for Dem Party chair

2009-08-06T17:50:00.002-06:00

Debate about who should be the next chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico is quickly evaporating as other candidates and potential candidates are announcing their support for New Mexico State University Regent Javier Gonzales.

The only other announced candidate, Sandoval County Democratic Party Chairman David Montoya, dropped his candidacy today and endorsed Gonzales.

“Nothing is more important to me than making sure that we elect Diane Denish Governor. The Lt. Governor and I share a commitment to the core principles of this party -- health care, education, creating good paying jobs, and fighting to protect the civil rights of every New Mexican,” he wrote. “I am therefore withdrawing my candidacy for Chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico and endorsing the candidacy of my good friend, Javier Gonzales.”

Almost immediately, the outgoing chairman, Brian Colón, appointed Montoya as “senior advisor to the chairman and director of party strategy.”

There was also a group urging Michael Ray Huerta of Las Cruces to run for party chair. Huerta put a stop to that moments ago with a posting on his Facebook page.

“In the next 60 days, New Mexico Democrats will gather to elect a new leader of our party. Now, more than ever, we need a leader with vision, experience, and the ability to unite. We need Javier Gonzales,” Huerta wrote. “Javier’s experience as a county commissioner gives him a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities facing New Mexico cities and counties. His work as an NMSU Regent gives him a real understanding of our states true diversity. And his strong, proven commitment to New Mexico gives him the passion and strength to lead our party into the challenging years to come.”

Gonzales released this statement about Montoya’s support:

“David is a real fighter for Democratic values and I am honored by his support. I also applaud Chairman Colón’s appointment today of David to the role of senior advisor and party strategist. If I am successful in my bid to become the next chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, I look forward to working closely with David in that capacity toward our shared goal of electing Diane Denish the next governor of New Mexico and winning races for Democrats from the top to the bottom of the ticket.”

Gonzales announces Dem Party chairman candidacy

2009-08-06T16:14:00.001-06:00

New Mexico State University Regent Javier Gonzales confirmed today that he’s seeking the chairmanship of the Democratic Party of New Mexico.

“In consultation with my family and friends, as well as consultation with Democratic Party leaders, I’ve concluded this is an ideal opportunity for me to join with other good Democrats in New Mexico in pushing our progressive agenda forward,” Gonzales said in a statement released this afternoon.

Gonzales is seeking to replace Brian Colón, who is expected to announce his resignation on Friday and run for lieutenant governor. Gonzales had previously been saying he was considering running for lieutenant governor, but his new statement appears to put an end to any talk of that.

“I’ve long searched for where I can best serve New Mexico, and I believe I’ve found the right place where I can best serve all New Mexicans,” he said of the party chairmanship. “My fundamental belief is that our Democratic Party values are the most aligned with the values of working families in New Mexico.”

Gonzales is a former Santa Fe County commissioner and former president of the National Association of Counties. He has served on a number of boards in New Mexico including the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation board, and was a member of the board of regents at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, N.M. until the governor appointed him to the NMSU board in December.

In the early 1990s, Gonzales cofounded La Voz Broadcasting, New Mexico’s largest privately-owned Spanish language radio station. In 2003, he founded IronStone Consulting to help companies work with local governments. He currently works for Santa Fe Studios.

At least one other man is seeking the party’s chairmanship -- Sandoval County Democratic Party Chairman David Montoya. Michael Ray Huerta of Las Cruces is being urged by some to run but hasn’t said whether he will do that.

The party plans to hold a meeting in September or October to vote on a new chair. The party requires its chair and vice chair to be of different genders, and the vice chair is Annadelle Sanchez, so the new chair must be a man.

Fact over fiction on fishing

2009-08-06T12:55:00.003-06:00

By Marita K. Noon

This commentary has been removed in its entirety because of factual inaccuracies.

Noon is the executive director of CARE (Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy), an Albuquerque-based nonprofit organization that is advocating for citizen rights to energy freedom. Contact her at marita@responsiblenergy.org.

Napolitano to speak at 2009 Domenici conference

2009-08-06T10:50:00.002-06:00

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is one of a number of high-profile speakers who New Mexico State University has lined up for the 2009 Domenici Public Policy Conference it’s holding next month.

Other speakers announced Wednesday by the university include Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright, former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, Nuclear Energy Institute Senior Vice President Alex Flint, and David Walker, former head of the Government Accountability Office and the subject of the documentary “I.O.U.S.A.”

Former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici will also be speaking at the conference, which will be held Sept. 16 and 17.

This is the second year of the conference. Named for New Mexico’s longest-serving senator, who retired last year, NMSU’s Domenici Institute aims to bring together what a news release called “some of the best minds in the country” to focus on significant national issues. This year’s topics will include the U.S. economy and national debt, homeland security and the U.S./Mexico border, national security, and nuclear energy.

“For this conference, we are specifically targeting issues with a real impact on people across the country,” Garrey Carruthers, an NMSU vice president and director of the Domenici Institute, said in the release.

Napolitano will headline the session on homeland security and the U.S./Mexico border the first evening. The following day, Mexico’s perspective on the issue will be covered.

Cartwright and Wilson will speak during the session on national security. Wilson is a former member of the National Security Council.

Walker will speak about the U.S. economy and the national debt. Flint will speak about nuclear energy.

Conference registration costs $25 for most people but is free for students. You can register by clicking here.

For more information, call the Domenici Institute at (575) 646-2066.

Fixing public education is 'a huge priority' for Turner

2009-08-06T06:00:00.004-06:00

The likely GOP gubernatorial candidate also says honest government ‘is a function of leadership’

Doug Turner says there’s been a lot of talk in the Republican gubernatorial primary race about ending corruption, with candidates expressing anger and using buzz phrases like “clean up Santa Fe.”

But the 40-year-old public relations professional, who is likely to officially join the 2010 gubernatorial race in the coming weeks or months, said a focus on ending corruption “only goes so far.”

“To have an honest government is a function of leadership,” Turner said. “… I believe you have to be for something, instead of against things.”

What’s Turner for?

“Figuring out how to fix public education in this state is a huge priority for me,” he said during an interview Tuesday in Las Cruces.

During a week in which the public learned that only 54 percent of high school seniors graduated in New Mexico in 2008, Turner said public schools “should not be paid” for the number of students enrolled at the beginning of the year regardless of whether those students finish the year.

Turner, a member of the New Mexico Charter Schools Association’s board, is a fan of charter schools and vouchers. He said competition “can come in many forms,” including taking failing schools away from failing school districts.

He said school board elections should be held in conjunction with municipal or state elections to increase voter turnout.

And he said the Richardson administration has increased spending on education without producing results, so he finds it “hard to believe that the solution to all of it is more money.”

Education, Turner said, is an issue that “should not even be political.” He said people must “work together” to fix the system or “fail together,” but he recognized that the solutions won’t come easily.

The status of the race

Turner, CEO of the Albuquerque-based public relations firm DW Turner, hasn’t officially declared his candidacy, but he has raised enough money -- more than $2,500 -- to be required to form an exploratory committee, which he said he will soon be doing.

Turner speaks as though he’s fully in the race, using phrases during this interview such as “when I formally announce.” He’s traveling the state campaigning -- he met with local GOP officials, business owners and employees of New Mexico State University during his stop in Las Cruces.

And during Tuesday’s interview Turner was accompanied by Carri Phillis, previously a staffer for former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson. Phillis is listed on her business card as Turner’s “campaign director.”

Two Republicans are already formally running for governor -- Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez and State Rep. Janice Arnold-Jones of Albuquerque. Former state GOP Chairman Allen Weh has formed an exploratory committee and, like Turner, has hired staff and has been traveling the state.

Wilson still says she’s seriously considering entering the race. A number of analysts have said it’s difficult to gauge the chances of other GOP candidates until Wilson, who served in the House for 10 years and built a statewide network last year during her unsuccessful run for Senate, makes a decision.

On the Democratic side, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish is the only declared 2010 gubernatorial candidate, though Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez says he’s formed an exploratory committee.

For ‘extreme transparency,’ not contribution limits

Turner may be talking about government corruption in a different way than some other candidates, but he agreed with them that it is a serious problem. Turner said there’s “something fundamentally wrong” in a state in which former Senate President Manny Aragon, who was convicted for his role in helping steal $4.2 million from taxpayers, was sent off to prison with a farewell party.

Turner said he supports “extreme transparency” such as increased campaign finance reporting requirements and webcasting of legislative proceedings. But he doesn’t believe recently approved campaign contribution limits will help combat corruption. He said similar limits in Washington have only pushed political money into the nonprofit sector, and he believes the same will happen here.

Getting back to his statement about leadership being critical to honest government, Turner said former Republican Gov. Gary Johnson’s administration was not plagued by pay-to-play scandals. Turner was state director for Johnson’s first campaign in 1994 and manager of his re-election campaign in 1998, and he served on the state Judicial Standards Commission during Johnson’s tenure.

As a businessman, Turner said he agrees with Johnson’s vision of making government more effective, efficient and focused on serving people. He said you can’t run a successful business by hiring people you don’t need and without providing services people need.

“I think somewhere along the line over the last seven years we’ve lost track,” Turner said.

In a brief interview, Johnson said he’s glad Turner is running.

“I think he’d do a great job,” Johnson said. “… He’s a very good people person, he communicates well, he’s got all the ingredients, so I think he’s got a good shot.”

A small world

Asked if he expects to draw support from the libertarian wing of the GOP because of his past work with Johnson, Turner said he resists labels and said doesn’t support of all of Johnson’s policy stances, including the former governor’s belief that drugs should be decriminalized.

While people come from varying backgrounds, Turner said he’s more interested in talking about what they have in common -- the desires for economic and physical security, a good education for their children and to be left alone by their government. Turner said he’s seen such desires in varying cultures around the world.

Turner grew up in New Mexico and lives in Albuquerque with his wife and their 2.5-year-old child (they have a second child due next month), but he has lived around the world. His business has taken him to New York, Japan, Singapore and Denver. He lived in Washington, D.C. for a time when he was working for former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici. And when he was working as deputy political director for Steve Forbes’ unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign, he was out of the state for months.

Turner’s firm still has clients in the New York area, and his wife is a tenured professor there -- in addition to being a professor at the University of New Mexico -- so Turner and his family have spent a significant amount of time out east.

Turner said such travel has helped him realize that the world is small. He said others need to realize that “the entire planet is a place for the state to do business.”

Padilla forming Lt. Gov. exploratory committee

2009-08-05T16:33:00.002-06:00

Matthew Padilla, a law student and former U.S. Navy officer, plans to take an official step toward becoming a candidate for lieutenant governor next week by forming an exploratory committee.

Padilla, a Democrat, wrote in a letter to supporters that he will file the paperwork to create the committee with the Secretary of State’s Office sometime next week.

Padilla wrote that he is “even more determined to add a fresh new perspective to New Mexico politics” after learning this week that almost half of high school seniors in New Mexico didn’t graduate in 2008. Padilla had previously called the “education emergency” one of his top three priorities.

“Together we can begin to change the culture of failure in our education system, while taking the steps needed to promote local sustainable (green) development, as we maintain and strengthen our state’s emergency preparedness system,” Padilla wrote in the e-mail to supporters.

In forming the exploratory committee, Padilla is wading into a crowded primary. Already in the lieutenant governor’s race are Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano, state Sens. Linda Lopez and Gerald Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque and State Rep. Jose Campos of Santa Rosa, who announced his candidacy earlier today. Brian Colón will resign from the position of chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico on Saturday and enter the race.

In addition, New Mexico State University Regent Javier Gonzales and Lawrence Rael, who heads the Mid-Region Council of Governments, are considering running.

Padilla addressed the fact that the primary is crowded in his e-mail.

“It will not be easy. There are many candidates in the race who have been in and out of state government or Democratic party politics for many years,” he wrote to his supporters. “They have already begun to form their organizations and have a head start on fundraising.”

“However, I do believe that by getting new individuals like you involved in the process, we can begin to make headway in addressing the challenges that face New Mexicans,” he wrote. “Together we can begin building our future today.”

Padilla, a graduate of Rio Grande High School in Albuquerque, earned his bachelor’s from the University of Notre Dame and is working on his law degree from American University in Washington, D.C. Last year, he worked as an intern in the office of U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and as a fellow in the office of U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.

Colón to resign party chairmanship on Saturday

2009-08-05T14:08:00.002-06:00

This article has been updated.

Brian Colón will resign from the position of chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico on Saturday to launch a bid for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, the party confirmed today on its new blog.

From the party’s blog:

“As many informed Democrats (and those New Mexicans who follow politics) know, our elected party, Chair Brian Colon, is slated to resign as Democratic Party Chair. Although other blogs had stated that this announcement would happen today (Wednesday), Chairman Colon confirmed that he would make his announcement on Friday (August 7) and it would be effective the following day. He is seeking higher elected office with the Party as a candidate for Lieutenant Governor.”

Sources confirmed earlier this week that Colón would resign his position as chairman and join the lieutenant governor’s race.

Already in the lieutenant governor’s race are Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano, state Sens. Linda Lopez and Gerald Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque and State Rep. Jose Campos of Santa Rosa, who announced his candidacy earlier today. New Mexico State University Regent Javier Gonzales; Lawrence Rael, who heads the Mid-Region Council of Governments; and former U.S. Navy officer and current law student Matthew Padilla have said they are also considering entering the race.

Update, 2:50 p.m.

The party has changed its blog posting to state that Colón is “considering seeking” the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, rather than stating with certainty that he is running for the job.

Rep. Campos joins lieutenant governor's race

2009-08-05T12:39:00.002-06:00

The lawmaker and Santa Rosa mayor will formally announce his candidacy next week

State Rep. Jose Campos, D-Santa Rosa, announced today that he’s running for lieutenant governor next year.

Campos, who is also the mayor of Santa Rosa, “will formally announce his candidacy” on Tuesday at 11 a.m. at the Rudolfo Anaya/Bless Me Ultima monument in Santa Rosa, according to a news release. Click here for a map.

Campos’ goals include “job growth, economic stability and improved quality of life through the expansion of renewable energy, innovation in education and vocational training, and the promotion of high quality, accessible, and affordable health care,” the news release states.

Campos has been a lawmaker for six years -- he chairs the House Voters and Elections Committee -- and the town’s mayor for almost 12 years. He briefly entered the 2nd Congressional District race in November 2007, but dropped out two days after he announced, saying a ruptured disc in his back needed immediate surgery that would have prevented him from campaigning.

Already in the lieutenant governor’s race are Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano and state Sens. Linda Lopez and Gerald Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque. New Mexico State University Regent Javier Gonzales; Lawrence Rael, who heads the Mid-Region Council of Governments; and former U.S. Navy officer and current law student Matthew Padilla have said they are also considering entering the race.

And Brian Colón, chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, is expected to resign from the party position later this week to join the race.

There are no declared Republican candidates for lieutenant governor.

Those putrid New Mexico dropout numbers

2009-08-04T23:07:00.003-06:00

It was a case of them holding up a red flag to get a charging bull to stop. I cannot resist commenting on today’s news that the graduation rate from the free education in New Mexico public schools is putrid. By graduation time, the free public education is being discarded by almost half of the students.

To make things worse, putrid politicians are barging around trying to make political hay. Every politician who chortles and grabs for power because of this misfortune needs a swift kick in the keister.

The New Mexico dropout numbers show that, statewide, for every student who graduates from a New Mexico high school another does not. At some high schools the graduation rate for boys hovers around 40 percent.

Relax. I will address what to do about dropouts. But first I have to vent about how most of our politicians are so sorry that we should trade with New Jersey.

Predictably, both political parties want to look at the problem as a political issue. I got a press release today -- “GOP Agrees: 54% Graduation Rate Unacceptable - Time to Hold Richardson & Denish Accountable.”

The error is that neither political party can hit water from a boat about education. Most politicians have not been in a classroom this century. It is not so much what they do not know as what they think they know that is not so.

They puff, “We must treat these students like we were treated when I was in school. Beat them until they learn to enjoy school. They will thank us in their prayers.”

If you are waiting for them to say something sensible, you lose. Many think if we would just make these students more miserable they would stay in school and graduate. We nod our heads and wonder how they get home at night because they are obviously too stupid to drive themselves.

Before worrying about junk food…

Given how bad our dropout numbers have been over the years, I was appalled that Governor Richardson was chosen as “America’s Greatest Education Governor” this year by the National Education Association. Why did he get the award? Because he restored collective bargaining rights for teachers, put in a statewide pre-kindergarten program, supported a tiered-licensing system for teachers and personally was at the forefront in the effort to remove junk food from schools.

Say, before I spent time worried about junk food it seems to me I would try to get the other half of the student body to graduate, eh? A place to start with this problem would be understanding why that half of the students decided that a free education costs too much for them to continue.

Many people believe a student dropping out reflects irrational behavior. Not me. I have been on the frontlines for the last couple of years and have spent a lot of time on just this question. In fact, dropping out may be the most rational thing they do, given the inflexibility of some public schools. Many students cannot read effectively and feel stupid sitting in class without those skills. Many cut up in class to hide how inadequate they feel and have felt for their entire lives in public school.

The core problem is that when these students were in early elementary school they did not learn the skills necessary to become literate. They were taught those skills but they were not able to take that teaching and consolidate it into long-term skills, abilities and knowledge.

They were taught but did not learn.

It is wrong to think that students who are lacking in middle school were never taught literate skills. They were. But the instructional model precluded the method they needed to achieve their own literacy, and the system is not doing what it should to catch them up in literacy. The data is compelling that they are not being helped in a way that is useful to them.

Starting the first day of school

The dropout problem starts the first day of school for many students. The system wants to teach them one way; however, it is not a way by which they learn. George Evans wrote, “Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.”

Even if they have gone years without the proper skills, they can become literate. That is what I do professionally every day. I can provide anyone interested with data supporting this.

Every student comes to school that first day curious, excited and happy. Then the factory model of education descends upon them and they suffer hours and days that for some are just awful.

My friend Janet teaches first grade. She says to anyone who will listen, “Three things we must do with our students: First, we must engage their curiosity. Second, we must give them the literate and numerate tools they need to satisfy their curiosity. Finally, they must enjoy the passage of time while in school.”

“It does not have to be a carnival, but if the institutional need is for them to do work at preparing for standardized tests for which they have no interest, and they spend a great deal of time doing this activity which most despise, the heart and soul of education is lost forever for that child,” Janet says.

I agree completely with Janet. We can do so much to prevent dropouts, but we must change our perspectives. This is an educational problem that can only be solved with an educational solution.

Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.

A new campaign reporting system requires more cash

2009-08-04T20:13:00.001-06:00

By Mary Herrera

This is in regard to the New Mexico Independent article written by Trip Jennings (Lawmakers Mull Withholding Funds to Force Office to Comply With Tech Rules). Please see the attached secretary of state IT plans we submitted in September 2007 for FY 2009 and September 2008 for FY 2010 (Click here for FY 2009 and here for FY 2010).

Executive-branch agencies must submit their budgets and IT plans to several committees before a recommendation is given to the House Appropriations and Finance Committee. As you will see, the Secretary of State’s Office has requested funds for a new campaign finance reporting system.

Several reporters claim I have been funded appropriately. Again, this is untrue.

Thanks to Sen. Dede Feldman, who reinstated her capital outlay money from prior years, we received a $70,000 appropriation. We used that to create an Excel spread sheet and update the forms for that year for candidates to file their campaign reports. This amount only allowed us to do minor enhancements.

The following fiscal year we were appropriated $176,500 for additional enhancements. Rather than spending any more funds on a 14-year-old system that is outdated and that FileOne (the company that makes the software) has advised us they will be doing away with in the next two years, we went to the Legislature to ask for a change in the language that would allow us to use these funds to pursue another option.

The Legislature allowed us to do that effective July 1 of this year.

We are now moving forward on utilizing these funds to purchase the Washington State system. Due to the funds available, we will have an improved system, but not a new system.

I have also attached a copy of the bill passed by Wyoming’s Legislature and related documents (click here to read them). Their Legislature budgeted $2.5 million for their secretary of state to implement a new system. The Colorado secretary of state just received $900,000 for an improved system as well.

I challenge Representative Janice Arnold-Jones to carry a bill for the State of New Mexico during the next legislative session to appropriate the correct amount of funding to install a new campaign financial system that the taxpayers deserve.

Herrera is New Mexico’s secretary of state. You can find the context for her commentary by clicking here.

Guv goes on TV to talk about release of journalists

2009-08-04T13:35:00.005-06:00

This article has been updated.

Gov. Bill Richardson may not have been the one to secure the release of two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea moments ago (that was Bill Clinton), but Richardson is going on national television to talk about it.

Richardson has sent two tweets (messages on Twitter) today about television appearances.

“Tune into MSNBC for my interview on North Korea,” one tweet states.

“Tune into CNN at 2pm MT for my interview on the Situation Room,” the other states.

Meanwhile, Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White posted his own tweet about the Bill-Bill dynamic earlier today.

“Big Bill in North Korea to negotiate release of American journalists. No, not Bill Richardson, Bill Clinton. That’s gonna leave a mark,” White wrote.

Update, 2:40 p.m.

Another Richardson tweet: “Taping an interview for Campbell Brown now. Will be live on Larry King and Rachel Maddow tonight.”

Update, 2:45 p.m.

And this tweet: “New interviews to air on North Korea tonight on NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News and ABC World News Tonight.”

NM legislative staffers win national awards

2009-08-04T12:34:00.002-06:00

The director of New Mexico’s Legislative Finance Committee, David Abbey, has won a national award for his work on budgetary issues.

Abbey was named the 2009 winner of the Legislative Staff Achievement Award by the National Association of Legislative Fiscal Officers, according to a news release.

In addition, Erlinda Campbell, analyst and administrator for the Senate President Pro Tem office, received the leadership staff award for her contributions to the New Mexico Senate and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) leadership staff section.

Abbey, who has been LFC director for 12 years, was recognized “for his work on the solvency plan for the 2009 budget shortfall and for his ongoing work on public policy and the legislative process,” the release states.

New Mexico is one of the few states in which the Legislature proposes a state budget. Abbey, in his role as LFC director, helped legislators develop a package of revenue increases, budget reductions and reversions to help prevent a shortfall, the release states.

In addition, the release states, Abbey and his staff have developed a performance-based budget system that “has become a model for other legislatures,” and a range of materials from post-session reviews to agency report cards that explain the role and status of government and fiscal policies to the public.

Campbell became a member of the NCSL leadership staff section executive committee in 2007 and has served on the outreach, awards and newsletter committees. She was instrumental in planning a national leadership staff professional development seminar that was held in Santa Fe in 2006.

AP: Investment firms gave more than $640K to guv

2009-08-03T22:14:00.002-06:00

Some of this information has been previously reported, but The Associated Press’ Barry Massey is out today with a new article that takes a comprehensive look at donations to Gov. Bill Richardson from firms with state investments.

In all, according to Massey’s analysis, “Money managers, brokers and their marketing agents that secured public investment business in New Mexico in recent years have given more than $640,000 to Gov. Bill Richardson’s campaigns and political organizations since he first ran for governor in 2002.”

That’s of course reported in the context of the investment scandal plaguing New Mexico and other states.

You can read the AP article by clicking here.

Bill Clinton makes 'surprise trip' to North Korea

2009-08-03T22:06:00.001-06:00

There was talk in June about the possibility of sending Gov. Bill Richardson or former Vice President Al Gore to North Korea to negotiate the release of two U.S. journalists who were sentenced to 12 years in labor camps there.

Instead, former President Bill Clinton made what The Associated Press is calling “a surprise trip” to North Korea today “amid an international standoff over the country’s nuclear program and concerns about two U.S. reporters imprisoned in Pyongyang since March.”

Clinton’s visit “comes amid heightened tensions over North Korea’s string of nuclear and missile tests in defiance of U.N. resolutions, and calls from Washington for amnesty for the two reporters,” the article states.

AG disappointed by judge's ruling in nonprofit dispute

2009-08-03T14:39:00.003-06:00

The office of Attorney General Gary King isn’t happy with today’s decision that attempting to force two nonprofits to register as political action committees violates their First Amendment right to free speech.

“We are disappointed in the outcome of today’s ruling and we will take some time to thoroughly review the court’s decision before deciding our next course of action. We are assessing our options and will likely make that public in a few days,” King said in a statement released by his office.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mary Herrera wrote in an e-mail only that her office and the AG “will be reviewing the opinion.”

Earlier today, U.S. District Judge Judith C. Herrera issued a 30-page decision stating that mailers like this one sent out by New Mexico Youth Organized (NMYO) -- which is a project of the Center for Civic Policy (CCP) -- and SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP) two to three months before last year’s June primary don’t meet the narrow definition in federal law of political activity and thus can’t be regulated as such.

King has said the mailers cross the line between issue advocacy and political campaigning as defined by the state’s Campaign Reporting Act, alleging that they were designed to help progressive legislative candidates win elections. In addition to contending that the mailers were about an upcoming special session of the Legislature, not an election, the nonprofits have said all along that federal law trumps state law.

In her decision, the judge agreed with both points made by the nonprofits.

By way of disclosure, I also write for the New Mexico Independent, which is owned by the Center for Independent Media in Washington. When the group was starting up its New Mexico news site last year, CCP helped it locate funding sources. In addition, one of my colleagues at NMI, Marjorie Childress, works for SWOP. Neither organization has tried to use those facts to influence anything I have written.

Court sides with nonprofits in dispute with SOS, AG

2009-08-03T12:29:00.011-06:00

Judge says nonprofits’ mailers are ‘precisely the type of political expression that is constitutionally protected’ by the First Amendment

This article has been updated.

A federal judge sided with two nonprofits today in ruling that an attempt by the Secretary of State’s Office to force them to register as political action committees violates their First Amendment right to free speech.

The 30-page decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Judith C. Herrera, states that mailers like this one sent out by New Mexico Youth Organized (NMYO) -- which is a project of the Center for Civic Policy (CCP) -- and SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP) two to three months before last year’s June primary don’t meet the narrow definition in federal law of political activity and thus can’t be regulated as such.

The mailers, Herrera wrote in her decision, didn’t mention any election in which the legislators might be running. Instead, they focused on an upcoming special legislative session on health care reform, cited positions taken by lawmakers in the regular session that had just ended, warned of influence corporate interests might have been trying to buy with campaign contributions and urged recipients to contact their legislators.

“Rather than being unambiguously campaign-related and the functional equivalent of express advocacy for the defeat of a particular candidate, the ads identify an issue, give the recipients information related to that issue, and urge them to contact their legislator with respect to that issue,” the decision states. “This is precisely the type of political expression that is constitutionally protected.”

Herrera wrote that such mailers can’t be subject to regulation unless they use “express words of advocacy such as ‘vote for’ or ‘defeat’” or there is no other way to interpret the mailers than as “an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.”

Secretary of State Mary Herrera and her spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office -- which has been advising the SOS in the matter -- said he would try to obtain comment from officials in his office.

The ‘chilling of protected First Amendment activity’

Attorney General Gary King has said the mailers cross the line between issue advocacy and political campaigning as defined by the state’s Campaign Reporting Act, alleging that they were designed to help progressive legislative candidates win elections. In addition to contending that the mailers were about the special session, not an election, the nonprofits have said all along -- and the judge agreed today -- that federal law trumps state law.

Under federal law, nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors or provide detailed information about expenses to the public, but registering as state PACs would have required these nonprofits to do just that. The secretary of state has threatened fines if the nonprofits don’t comply.

The judge also took issue with that.

“… because the Secretary of State has unequivocally indicated that Plaintiffs are subject to penalties if they fail to register as political committees, Plaintiffs have ‘suffered the constitutionally sufficient injury of self-censorship through the chilling of protected First Amendment activity,’” the decision states, quoting from a prior federal court ruling upon which today’s decision is based.

Getting back to ‘educating the public’

The fight between the nonprofits and the state agencies has been the primary battleground in a debate over the work of nonprofits in New Mexico. There have also been unsuccessful legislative attempts to force such nonprofits to disclose their donors.

Matt Brix, CCP’s policy director, said in a news release that the ruling “represents one more victory for the nonprofit sector in New Mexico in its battle to defend the First Amendment and fulfill its mission of educating the public about how the legislative process works and how legislators vote.”

The executive director of SWOP, Robby Rodriguez, said in a news release that he’s pleased with the ruling.

“Now we can get back to the business of educating the public about how our legislators vote -- a critical service to keep citizens educated and activated,” he said.

Update, 1:10 p.m.

Southwest Citizens Coalition (SCC), a nonprofit that has been warned by the AG against activity like the NMYO and SWOP mailers, released this statement about today’s ruling:

“We are happy that today’s court ruling concerning nonprofit activity in New Mexico was in support of not only freedom of speech, but the rule of law,” said Mario Sanchez, a consultant for the group. “Upon review of today’s court decision, it is evident that the state has no cause or basis in law to force groups like Southwest Citizens Coalition to register as a PAC.”

“We’ve said all along that SCC will operate under the laws and regulations of which we are organized under IRS statute, which trumps any ‘quack’ opinion handed down by the state,” Sanchez said. “SCC is looking forward to working at educating and engaging the people of New Mexico on those issues that are most important to our state.”

Colón to resign party job, run for lieutenant governor

2009-08-03T08:53:00.002-06:00

News is all over the Internet this morning -- and has been confirmed by my sources -- that Brian Colón will resign his position as chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico later this week and announce that he’s running for lieutenant governor next year.

Colón, 39, enters an already crowded primary field, but many Democrats expect him to compete heavily for the nomination.

770 KKOB-AM reporter Peter St. Cyr reported that the party’s first vice chair, Annadelle Sanchez, will become interim party chair, and a special election to replace Colón will be held within 60 days.

Colón did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But news of his plans immediately put another significant piece in place for Democrats. State Auditor Hector Balderas, who had been considering running for lieutenant governor, instead announced his intention to seek re-election this morning.

“With just 30 brave employees and one of the smallest budgets in the state, we have created an expectation and a reality that New Mexico will have an independent voice to speak on behalf of taxpayers and on the real conditions of our government,” Balderas said in a news release about his first term as auditor. “There is much more important work to be done.”

Sources believe Rael is likely to run.

Colón is a lawyer and works for the Albuquerque firm Robles, Rael & Anaya. The law firm is currently suing two defendants in the housing authority scandal on behalf of the State Investment Council to try to recover millions of dollars in lost bond money.

Colón also chairs Popejoy Hall’s board of directors and serves on the board of trustees for the Albuquerque Community Foundation. He has been the Democratic Party chairman since 2007.

Lt. Gov. Diane Denish is the only declared 2010 gubernatorial candidate, though Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez says he’s formed an exploratory committee.

Women dominate governor's race, at least for now

2009-08-03T06:00:00.002-06:00

Though others are likely to enter the race, right now it’s just three women officially vying for the right to be governor

No woman has ever been governor of New Mexico, but there’s a good chance that will change next year.

Though there will likely be other candidates entering the 2010 gubernatorial race, there are currently only three who have said with certainty they are running. All three are women.

On the Democratic side, there’s the party’s likely nominee, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, who has been running for governor for years and already has about $2 million on hand for her campaign.

On the Republican side, there are two: Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez, who entered the race earlier this month, and state Rep. Janice Arnold-Jones of Albuquerque, who has formed an exploratory committee and said last week that she will make her candidacy official in a few weeks, as soon as she recovers from knee surgery.

“The higher level of office the more difficult it has been for women to capture, so it is really unprecedented and quite positive that we have so many credible women candidates declaring for the governor’s race,” said Christine Sierra, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico.

We’re about 15 months away from the November 2010 election, and lots could change between now and then. There are at least two other candidates who appear headed toward entering the race. Former state GOP Chairman Allen Weh has formed an exploratory committee, hired staff, and has been traveling the state. Public relations professional Doug Turner, a Republican, has also hired staff and is traveling around the state. He says he’s leaning toward running.

But right now, it’s just the three women in the race.

By the numbers

New Mexico is one of 27 states that has never had a woman governor, according to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University. Two of seven statewide elected officials in New Mexico are women -- Denish and Secretary of State Mary Herrera.

And 30.4 percent of state lawmakers are women -- 11 of 42 in the Senate and 23 of 70 in the House. According to CAWP, New Mexico is currently 12th in the nation for percentage of state legislators who are women.

The number of women elected to New Mexico’s Legislature has remained fairly constant since 1997, but there’s been a significant shift since 1979, when, according to CAWP, five of the state’s 112 lawmakers -- 4.5 percent -- were women.

Having to ‘work twice as hard’

Arnold-Jones said in an interview that it’s “interesting that, at this place in history,” the declared gubernatorial candidates are all women. She said all three have “diverse perspectives and expertise” but share at least one thing: As women, they often had to “work twice as hard” to reach their goals in life.

Still, Arnold-Jones said she doesn’t think much about how being a woman relates to her political career. She said she prefers to talk about policy issues.

Martinez went even further, saying in an interview that the fact that all three candidates are women “just is what it is.”

Martinez has made similar remarks in the past when asked about her status as a Hispanic woman. In this interview, she said she has many other credentials, including being a lawyer, that make her qualified to be governor, but that being a woman doesn’t make her more qualified than anyone else.

Denish and her campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Denish, it’s worth noting, is on the advisory board for Emerge New Mexico, a group dedicated to training Democratic women to run for office. And she was endorsed several weeks ago by EMILY’s List, which, according to its Web site, is “dedicated to building a progressive America by electing pro-choice Democratic women to office.”

More layoffs at The Santa Fe New Mexican

2009-08-02T20:48:00.001-06:00

The worst part about having to write about more layoffs at a New Mexico newspaper is that this probably isn’t going to be the last time I have to do it.

Regardless, several people lost their jobs and others saw their hours slashed in half in a round of cuts announced Friday by The Santa Fe New Mexican. In all, the equivalent of 12 full-time jobs were cut.

The cuts come almost exactly a year after the newspaper eliminated the equivalent of 16.5 full-time jobs to cut expenses. The number of pages the newspaper publishes each day has also been cut in the last year.

The newest round of layoffs included at least one reporter and a couple of editors, I’m told. The New Mexican’s article stated that some jobs “were lost through layoff, some through a decision not to fill vacant positions and others through the conversion of some full-time jobs to part time. The company eliminated the equivalent of six positions on the news staff and six more in the advertising and production departments.”

The newspaper blamed the economy for the cuts.

Of course, we all know by now the bad economy has only exacerbated a previously existing problem: Newspapers continue to lose readers to the Internet, and they haven’t yet figured out how to make the transition, though many are trying hard. Several New Mexico newspapers have made significant cuts in recent months.

Tough times. I used to work at The New Mexican and know some of the affected people. My heart goes out to them.

Voters in poll say Bingaman is most ethical

2009-08-02T20:21:00.001-06:00

U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman won last week’s non-scientific poll on this site asking which member of New Mexico’s congressional delegation is the most ethical.

Of 256 voters, 87, or 34 percent, picked Bingaman, while 79, or 31 percent, picked Sen. Tom Udall. Forty-six, or 18 percent, picked Rep. Martin Heinrich; 34, or 13 percent, picked Rep. Harry Teague; and 10, or 4 percent, picked Rep. Ben Ray Luján.

Don’t forget to vote in this week’s poll, located at the top of the right column on this page.

Those political bait-and-switch schemes

2009-07-31T15:30:00.001-06:00

A political phrase being used often these days is “bait and switch.” It refers to political promises to create attractive government programs that then are switched to the detriment of the citizens. The health-care debate smells of bait and switch, just like past government betrayals.

An example is income tax. Our current income tax came from the 16th amendment in 1913. That first year the federal income tax was paid by less than 1 percent of the population.

The bait was that only the “rich” would pay income tax, and almost every American was not going to be bothered by this tax on the rich. The switch came little by little as more and more Americans were required to pay income tax.

If Americans had understood in 1913 that income tax would be applied to them at some point, it would not have passed. Likewise, it would be abolished if all Americans could today vote on whether to allow it.

A Ponzi scheme

In 1913 the people baited by the federal income tax were the 99 percent not paying the tax. In 1935, a new program baited Americans. It was the Old-Age, survivors, and Disability Insurance Program that we now call Social Security.

Initially, 3 percent of a worker’s wage went into a savings fund. Today it is 12.5 percent. But the switch was that in 1969 Congress turned Social Security into a Ponzi scheme by no longer saving any of the money paid into it. Instead, they put all of that money into their current government coffers and wrote an IOU from themselves to themselves.

I started paying Social Security in 1969 and not one cent of the money paid by me into Social Security over my 40 years of work has been saved for me. The Social Security lockbox only has an IOU instructing the future government to tax its citizens if I need any benefits.

Imagine if the citizens of 1935 were told that Social Security was going to take their money and not save it. They may have fallen for it because they did not learn from the bait-and-switch income tax. Will we learn our lesson before approving government health care?

The switch that’s coming

The core bait on health-care reform is the notion that, with the government in charge of health care, it will be available to all citizens and in unlimited abundance.

Our desire for health care in America is unlimited. The resources for healthcare are limited. When unlimited desire meets limited resources, something must give. That is the switch that’s coming.

We all want to live longer and better, but the resources to provide that health care are limited. Someone will have to decide which of our desires are wants and which are needs. An old saying goes, “Needs come in two sizes: yours and mine.”

My problem is that the government and I may not see eye to eye on my needs. Then what? President Herbert Hoover campaigned in 1928 saying everyone would be prosperous with him -- “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” When you see depression-era pictures, there seem to be lots of cars and chickens missing amid the lack of prosperity.

Promises to be broken

Given the track record of our government in bait and switch, all of the promises of national health care are just that -- promises to be broken. Maybe there will be a few years before the full impact of the bait and switch is felt by citizens. But given the past actions of our government when implementing programs, our future is clear.

What is the litmus test for this bait and switch? Will members of Congress drop their own health care and embrace this new plan with the common peons? No, they understand that they do not want that health care.

What they want is control of you.

The saying is, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” Will we ever learn from the past government scams? Evidently it is doubtful.

Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.

Martinez campaigns on 'voter fraud'

2009-07-31T13:20:00.002-06:00

But was it voter fraud or incompetence that the district attorney’s office prosecuted in 2003?

Republican gubernatorial candidate Susana Martinez claims in a news release sent today that, “on her watch” as Doña Ana County district attorney, the county clerk “was successfully prosecuted for voter fraud -- convicted of five felony counts of violating the election code.”

A look at the facts reveals a slightly more complicated situation.

Then-Clerk Ruben Ceballos was removed from office in 2003 after being convicted of five felonies for violating the state elections code -- failing to file voter registrations in a timely manner, failing to notify voters of precinct changes, appointing unregistered voters as poll workers, unlawfully changing a polling place, and failing to destroy unused absentee ballots.

But are those problems proof of voter fraud or incompetence?

In a Nov. 20, 2003 article published in the Las Cruces Sun-News, Martinez’s chief deputy district attorney, Susan Riedel, was quoted as saying this about what led to the charges against Ceballos: “There was no training of employees, no attention to detail. The evidence showed the clerk’s office was in chaos and who was responsible.”

She and the other prosecutor on the case, then-Assistant District Attorney Jeff Lahann, made no mention of “fraud,” which, according to dictionary.com, is an act of “deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.”

Martinez could not immediately be reached for comment. Today’s news release, her first, formally announced her candidacy and notified people that her campaign Web site is online.

A hot topic for some conservatives

Martinez isn’t the first GOP political candidate to refer to the Ceballos case as voter fraud. When then-GOP secretary of state candidate Vicki Perea testified before a congressional committee in 2006 about allegations of widespread voter fraud, she did the same thing. After talking about a 1998 case in which the Rio Arriba county clerk and others were convicted of charges stemming from actual voter fraud, she said this:

“This is not the only county clerk to be convicted of fraud, however. In 2003, Doña Ana County’s clerk, Ruben Ceballos, was convicted of five counts of violating the New Mexico election code,” Perea told members of Congress.

The “voter fraud” meme is sometimes referred to as an example of “dog whistle politics” by people who accuse conservatives of exaggerating its effect on elections. It’s an issue that highly political, conservative voters tend to be more passionate about than any other group in America. A candidate who has actually taken on voter fraud would appeal to that base of GOP voters.

While voter fraud has occurred (as evidenced by the 1998 case in Rio Arriba County), there’s been little evidence presented publicly that it’s widespread. The New York Times reported in 2007 that, “Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections.”

For the GOP, education needs to be a top priority

2009-07-31T09:26:00.002-06:00

By Sarah Lenti

So, let’s start with the assumption that the Republican Party actually wants to take on the responsibility of being the majority party (again). And I mean what I am writing here -- the party is going to have to want, really want, to legislate, even if it means making hard choices and, god-forbid, leaning across the aisle from time to time.

If the Republican Party is serious about rebuilding an effective majority over time, then education needs to be one of the top tier priorities. Why, you ask?

Simple. If you believe that good governance starts with leadership, then education is a critical first step toward both ends. If you agree that leadership is part ingrained and part learned, then you’d also likely agree that America would be wise to err on the side of over-educating as opposed to under-educating.

How can our party expect to lead again if we are not producing a new generation of voters and leaders who are competitive, analytical in their decision-making, intellectually curious and capable of deciphering between and amongst new ideas?

Championing education (if done sagely) will be a way for any new Republican leadership to harness bipartisanship. After all, education is hardly a Republican or Democratic issue -- the line is blurring. And it’s not a state-by-state issue, though there are marked differences with the test scores coming out of Massachusetts and New Jersey vs. Michigan and New Mexico. (Check out this chart comparing National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.)

You would be hard pressed to find a thoughtful person who would disagree with the statement that all children -- regardless of race, ability or socioeconomic status -- deserve quality teachers, higher standards than are currently in play, accountability for schools nationwide and, perhaps most importantly, high expectations in each student’s individual capabilities.

(Parenthetically, to this day I have not forgotten when my guidance counselor told me I was “not qualified” to enroll in my public school’s honors classes (I forced a waiver) and then when a relative told me I was crazy to apply to Ivy Leagues for grad school (I ended up at one on full scholarship!). Point is -- imagine what students could achieve if the bar was set high, rather than being used as a barring hindrance?)

Stop straying from conservative principles

If the Republican Party is serious about becoming the Party of the People, then we ought to get serious about ensuring that next generation of learned people who are rising through the ranks are analytical, not Wikipedia-ites; thoughtful, not lackadaisical; compassionate, not cut-throat; and internationally aware and competitive, not America-only focused and continuously being outperformed by countries like Singapore, Japan, England and Russia, to name a few (see 2007 TIMSS Report).

How do we, the Republican Party, grow the next generation of leaders (and thereby help ourselves)?

Easy. Stop straying from our basic, core conservative principles. These principles reward hard work and actual achievement. They demand excellence through competition. They champion individuality, not conformity. They dare the individual to say “Yes I can,” not “How, America, can you help me?”

Let’s take these core principles and reapply them to our party, and our schools -- and then watch and see.

Colón is considering running for lieutenant governor

2009-07-31T07:09:00.003-06:00

Brian Colón, chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, is seriously considering running for lieutenant governor next year and plans to make a decision in “less than two weeks,” according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

Colón did not respond to a request for comment.

He would be joining a crowded field of Democrats seeking the party’s No. 2 spot on the ballot in 2010. Already in the race are Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano and state Sens. Linda Lopez and Gerald Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque.

Others have been considering entering the race for awhile, including state Auditor Hector Balderas, New Mexico State University Regent Javier Gonzales and Lawrence Rael, who heads the Mid-Region Council of Governments. This week, former U.S. Navy officer and current law student Matthew Padilla announced that he’s also seriously considering entering the race.

Colón also chairs Popejoy Hall’s board of directors and serves on the board of trustees for the Albuquerque Community Foundation.

Lt. Gov. Diane Denish is the only declared 2010 gubernatorial candidate, though Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez says he’s formed an exploratory committee.

Controversial developer Philippou's problems grow

2009-07-30T18:22:00.002-06:00

The problems for controversial Las Cruces developer Philip Philippou are growing.

A new lawsuit accuses Philippou of fraud in promising a company he hired to help build a golf course in Las Cruces that water would be available for construction, when in fact it was not, the Las Cruces Sun-News reported today.

You can read the lawsuit, filed by Golf Works, Inc., by clicking here.

In addition, the Albuquerque Journal published an article about the City of Las Cruces taking steps to force Philippou to pay outstanding utility bills and deal with an exposed sewer line in one of his developments.

The new issues come weeks after the city filed a lawsuit alleging that Philippou has failed to comply with building requirements in several of his subdivisions and asking a district court judge to force Philippou to complete the work he started. In addition, last month, Philippou had to pay the city more than $200,000 for an outstanding water bill after the city placed liens on his properties.

The Golf Works lawsuit accuses Philippou of one count of fraud in the inducement and one count of loss of economic opportunities for falsely leading the company to believe water would be available, the Sun-News reported. The lawsuit also states that Philippou refused to pay the company for work it had completed, which has reduced the company’s bonding capacity by $5 million.

The lawsuit seeks $1.2 million in damages. A Philippou representative could not be reached for comment by the Sun-News.

The Journal reported that the city has obtained a court order requiring Philippou to deal with the sewer line and has cut off utility service to undeveloped lots owned by Philippou until he pays more than $63,000 in overdue bills, most for street lights.

Philippou’s attorney, Kyle Moberly, was quoted by the Journal as saying he did not want to comment.

“He (Philippou) does not want to jeopardize the progress he has made by discussing these matters publicly,” the newspaper quoted Moberly as saying. “However, if these matters are not settled, then I expect that Mr. Philippou will want to tell the public his side of the story.”

Assistant City Manager Rober Garza told the Journal the city is not trying to make Philippou “go under.”

“We don’t want to ruin a businessman,” the newspaper quoted Garza as saying. “We want to resolve these matters so that our citizens can go on about their happy lives.”

A long history

Philippou has a long history of controversy. In 2007, it was revealed that then-District 1 City Councilor José Frietze had failed to disclose land donations Philippou made to a non-profit Frietze runs. But Philippou’s most visible controversy relates to his dealings with the State Land Office.

Pat Lyons, the state land commissioner, bypassed his own bidding process and agreed to lease thousands of acres of public land in Las Cruces to Philippou in 2006. Around the same time, Lyons received approximately $30,000 in campaign contributions from Philippou and a political committee and lobbyists tied to the developer.

It’s a land deal Attorney General Gary King has said is flawed. The AG’s formal opinion states that the lease agreement’s method of compensating Philippou’s company for developing the land is “not comprehended by and in conflict with” a statute that allows developers who improve land for the state to be compensated only for the appraised value of the improvements.

The controversies surrounding the land office and Frietze helped fuel public outcry over the city’s growth policies and helped lead to the overthrowing of the city council in two elections held in late 2007 and early 2008.

Arnold-Jones says she is running for governor

2009-07-30T15:41:00.003-06:00

In a letter to supporters, Arnold-Jones talks about increasing transparency, says New Mexico ‘can be so much more’

State Rep. Janice Arnold-Jones, R-Albuquerque, said today that she is running for governor next year and plans a formal announcement sometime in August.

“I am running,” Arnold-Jones said today in an interview.

She made her candidacy official in a letter sent to supporters on Sunday.

“If you have not heard, I am running for Governor of the State of New Mexico,” Arnold-Jones wrote. “Why? Because New Mexico can be so much more! Because it is time for New Mexico to lead the Nation -- in energy, transmission, technology, agriculture, connectivity, education and prosperity.”

“To engage that potential, we must inject sunlight into the way New Mexico governs and does business,” Arnold-Jones wrote. “Corruption costs in wasted resources, increased cost of doing business, increased taxes, ineffective or reduced government services, and repeated loss of opportunity.”

The field of actual and potential GOP gubernatorial candidates is crowded. Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez has declared her candidacy. Former state GOP Chairman Allen Weh has formed an exploratory committee. Former U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson and public relations professional Doug Turner say they are seriously considering running, and Turner has hired staff.

Arnold-Jones said she’s talking a “very practical” view of the race, adding, “you run until you can’t run.”

“I am running, but I am cognizant that there may come a point, if you can’t raise money, there’s no point in running. If you can’t get traction in the polls, there’s no point,” Arnold-Jones said.

The lawmaker announced in mid-June that she was forming an exploratory committee, but her campaign’s progress has been hampered by a necessary surgery to repair torn muscles in her leg. Arnold-Jones said her formal announcement is “pending me getting on my feet.” She added that she expects to make the announcement sometime in the second half of August.

‘We can do this’

Arnold-Jones considered running for Congress last year but ultimately opted to seek re-election to her state House seat after she failed to raise as much money for a potential congressional run as she thought she needed to be successful.

Arnold-Jones’ stature increased when she led the charge earlier this year to bring webcasting to the state Legislature, which many said helped create a climate ripe for the approval of other ethics reforms. For her work on webcasting, the Santa Fe Reporter nicknamed Arnold-Jones “Lady Sunlight.”

Arnold-Jones has also been instrumental in the successful push for reform of the state’s scandal-plagued housing authority system.

In her Sunday letter, Arnold-Jones referenced her work on government transparency.

“Web casting my legislative committees was a start, but it is not enough,” she wrote. “Open government is a mind-set! We can do this AND we will make better decisions in full view of and with the input of all New Mexicans.”

On the Democratic side, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish is the only declared 2010 gubernatorial candidate, though Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez says he’s formed an exploratory committee.

Public option and the free market (Part II)

2009-07-30T13:39:00.002-06:00

By Carter Bundy

Many Americans, including myself, generally believe that strong, competitive, private free markets are effective creators of wealth. In our national health debate, a central question is whether such markets can also solve our access, cost and (to a lesser degree) quality problems.

A key to analyzing whether markets can solve our health issues is to look at whether health systems inherently follow the assumptions necessary for markets to be efficient.

Last column I noted that a major assumption about efficient, effective markets is that consumers have perfect information about themselves and their needs. But no matter how much genealogical research you do, you never really know what kind of health care coverage you and your family will need.

Assumption No. 2: Product information

It’s not just the unpredictability and lack of information about consumers themselves that warps health markets. A second Smithian economics assumption that doesn’t apply to health is the notion that consumers will know what they’re purchasing.

Is there a single reader out there who can tell me which of the four major insurers in New Mexico has the highest cancer remission success rates? Or lowest birth defect rates? Or what the conditions of the patients who make up those statistics were before going in? Do you even know where to find such data? Of course not.

Worse, even if you did know every statistic about treatment, would you have a clue about denial rates, difficulty of getting covered, paperwork and other obstacles to actually getting treatment?

In health care, even if you had a choice of insurer (see below), the lack of transparency and information about performance and coverage renders this critical assumption about the success of markets inapplicable.

Assumption No. 3: Consumers have a choice

There’s a third assumption that underlies market power: competition. Unfortunately, in American private insurance health coverage, this simply doesn’t -- and in many ways can’t -- exist.

Again, health care is unlike most any other industry. Most folks couldn’t change even if they wanted to, because their employer offers only one, or effectively one, option. Or even if the employer offers more than one choice, geographic and population density realities result in only one realistic choice.

Not only do consumers rarely have a realistic choice at their initial point of purchase -- changing private insurance products when you need to most is virtually impossible.

If I’m dissatisfied with Coca-Cola, I choose Pepsi. Or RC. Or the store brand. But if I’m dissatisfied with a big private health insurer, by the time I figure that out I’m locked in.

Let’s say you get some large freckles checked out and it turns out to be skin cancer. Then you find out that your insurer is going to drag its feet on getting you coverage for both the diagnosis and treatment. Does anyone with even remote familiarity with American health care think you can switch insurers at that point? Absolutely not.

A secondary negative aspect of our current system is that once you do the responsible thing and get checked up and find something wrong, then you’re not only locked into your existing insurance for life, you’re probably locked into the same job.

Anyone familiar with the economics of labor markets will tell you that mobility is critical to matching employee skill sets with employer needs. Because of our antiquated, punitive private health insurance system, America also has arguably the least efficient labor markets in the developed world. And we’re supposed to compete in a global economy how?

In short, our current private health insurance system offers very little competition at the point of purchase. It offers zero competition once you start to use a product and become dissatisfied with it.

If there’s a central principle underlying the general truth that markets are efficient, it’s that competition breeds better service and price. But if the practical reality is that there is no choice, then there is no competition and no improvements in service and price. Classic market failure.

Assumption No. 4: Companies are incented to provide good service

Because America’s current private insurance system of health care is a pre-paid insurance service, there is no real incentive, other than fines from government regulators or brutally difficult, expensive and time-consuming lawsuits, for insurance companies to provide the coverage they’ve promised.

In fact, private insurers owe it to their shareholders and owners to maximize profits by cutting service and denying claims as much as possible.

Due to the utter market failures surrounding lack of real competition or ability to change insurers, private insurance companies are able to rake in premiums at virtually any price with little to no accountability, again except by government regulators (who are stretched far too thinly to have any major impact) or difficult-to-pursue legal actions.

If the market doesn’t create incentives for good delivery of promised services by the private insurers, that means yet another central assumption of how markets solve problems is eviscerated when applied to private health insurance.

Ideologues have a solution

Next column I’ll try to address even more market failures that are inherent to a private-only health insurance structure. In the meantime, I have to let as many people as possible hear about this gem from a right-wing business spokesperson defending the current system.

At last week’s annual National Conference of State Legislatures, a representative from the National Federation of Independent Businesses was speaking about current health care reform efforts.

Gamely, realizing that even conservatives and business know how broken our current system is, he offered a few solutions. Sure, he threw out the low-hanging fruit of better information technologies. Great, we found some common ground!

Then in a bizarre tacit admission that our private insurance system has made us a third-world country when it comes to health coverage, he advocated using more medical tourism as a means of alleviating our health crises.

Somehow I think the business members of NFIB would be ashamed both as entrepreneurs and Americans to know that their umbrella organization thinks Mexico offers better health care than our private insurance system. Sadly, though, the spokesperson probably has a decent point. Sporting, if not strange, of him to admit it.