I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
In national news, Congress is scheduled to vote today or tonight on a revised Wall Street rescue/bailout plan. NMI’s Heath Haussamen has details about the NM delegations deliberations here. According to the Washington Post, “Leaders of the Senate, where most members have indicated support for the plan, said they would seek a vote on a revised rescue package tonight that would include a one-year increase in Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. caps for bank and credit union accounts, extensions of numerous business tax breaks that have expired and a fix to the alternative minimum tax for individual taxpayers.” Thank goodness they got those business tax breaks in there! Now the American people can really get behind this thing!
Meanwhile, people can’t stop talking about tomorrow’s scheduled debate between vice-presidential candidates Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden. Biden has been debating in the Senate since Palin was in second grade, as she’s fond of saying, but the New York Times today examines their debating styles in a video feature. The Wall Street Journal says today that Palin is an Underrated Foe in Debates:
There are two things people here remember about Sarah Palin’s debating style during her race for governor two years ago. One is the stack of color-coded cue cards she took to the podium for help whenever she was asked a policy question. The other is how quickly she was able to shuck those props, master the thrust-and-parry of jousting with her opponents and inquisitors, and project confidence to an audience of television viewers watching from home.
And in last night’s segment of Palin’s interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, Palin continued to duck and dodge the issue of whether or not global warming is caused by human activity, saying “It doesn’t matter at this point.” WaPo’s “The Trail” blog has more quotes here.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News/MySpace poll of new voters shows they support Sen. Barack Obama over Sen. John McCain by a wide margin: 61 percent to 30 percent. The question is whether or not they’ll actually make the effort to vote this time; Just under 50 percent said they were “very interested” in the election, while 70 percent of all voters say they’re “very interested.” For full results click here.
(I guess NewsCorp’s Rupert Murdoch is finally getting his money’s worth from “synergies” between WSJ and MySpace, his newly acquired purchases. As one observer noted last year: “As far as I can strategize, it is hard to find any real help MySpace could be to the Journal online or offline or to any other Dow Jones digital property. With very different demographics-older and less hip, versus younger and quite trendy, no matter what either company says-little chance for cross-marketing and even very different advertising prospects, it is not the most useful of links.” Oh how wrong she was.)
In local news, there’s Jerome Block Jr. The New Mexican’s headline today pretty much sums up the state of the Northern New Mexico Democrat’s troubled bid for a seat on the Public Regulation Commission. “Block Jr.: I’m not a criminal,” it reads. Oh, boy. Since we last caught up with Block, Jr., he reported a break-in at his house, during which only financial statements seem to have been taken-and the unknown perpetrator used a key. (Swing State of Mind has more on the police report here.) Block, who is using public campaign funds, has admitted to lying about one of his expenditures, but the Secretary of State’s office has not yet decided whether or not to ask the Attorney General’s Office to investigate. Meanwhile, Block Jr. is ditching a Los Alamos League of Women Voters forum tonight to attend the Arizona-New Mexico Telecommunications conference in Mescalero. If elected to the PRC, he would regulate the telecommunications industry.
In Clovis, “voter registrations are coming out of the woodwork,” the Curry County clerk’s office told the Clovis News-Journal. That is to say, registrations are up. There were 10,262 Republicans and 8,053 Democrats registered in Curry County as of Monday. Measured against 2006 numbers, it represents a small increase among R’s and a small decrease among D’s.
In the past four days, 18 people have been killed in Juarez, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports this morning. Several of the victims were killed by assault rifles; there were 17 rifle shells found at one crime scene and 16 at another.
