Want another fact to remind you that New Mexico isn’t as bad off as other states? New figures released by California on Wednesday showed that in eight counties, more than 1 in 5 people were out of work, the Los Angeles Times reported. The state’s unemployment rate, meanwhile, rose to 12.5 percent. That compares with 8.3 unemployment in New Mexico, up from 4.7 percent in early 2009.

Moreover, revised numbers for last year show that fewer people were employed in California than was previously believed. So I guess the lesson here iscount your blessings. You don’t live near Hollywood Boulevard and the Walk of Fame (LA) or Coit Tower (San Francisco). But you live in a state where things are tough, not apocalyptic.

On the other side of the country, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has sued two of the nation’s most prominent credit rating agencies Wednesday. Blumenthal alleges the two firms misled investors about the soundness of certain types of investments and unfairly reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, the Hartford Courant reports. Here’s the money quote from Blumenthal, who is seeking to replace Chris Dodd in the U.S. Senate:

“These credit rating agencies gave the best ratings money could buy, catering to their powerful investment bank clients, rather than objectively rating risky bonds,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “Moody’s and S&P violated public trust, resulting in many investors purchasing securities that contained far more risk than anticipated and that have ultimately proven to be nearly worthless.”

Blumenthal is known for such lawsuits. New Mexico lost its share of taxpayer money due to the recent Wall Street meltdown. We’ll see how many states follow Connecticut’s aggressive move.

O.K., when you hear the phrase ‘water war’ you don’t automatically think of the Southeastern U.S. You think American West and the decades-long, multi-state tiff over the Colorado River and other waterways, right? But Georgia state lawmakers are close to passing a bill that highlights a two-decade long water-rights battle between that state, Florida and  Alabama, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

The bill, among other things, would curtail outdoor watering and require builders and apartment building owners to more efficiently manage water, according to the paper. Underlying the legislation is ongoing tension among the three states and who has the rights to the Chattahoochee River, which feeds a federal reservoir that metro Atlanta relies on. The paper explains:

Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson ruled last summer that Georgia has little legal right to Lake Lanier, the main drinking source for metro Atlanta. Georgia, Alabama and Florida have been embroiled in a two-decade-long spat over the sharing of the Chattahoochee River, which feeds Lanier.

Magnuson has given the states until mid-2012 ­­ — when the legislation would kick into gear — to resolve their dispute. Failing that, the judge could restrict Georgia’s access to Lanier, a federal reservoir.

This is a big, big deal in that part of the country, seeing as how metro Atlanta has grown from a sleepy Southern urban center in the 1960s of 1 million or so people, to a cosmopolitan behemoth of more than 5 million people these days. As some wise person said somewhere, water is the new gold.

In the world of science, two research teams have independently decoded the entire genome of patients to find the exact genetic cause of their diseases. The approach may offer a new start in the so far disappointing effort to identify the genetic roots of major killers like heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, reports the New York Times.

The feat heralds a new approach apparently. Geneticists had hoped to identify common diseases through a particular approach that assumed those diseases were caused by common genetic mutations. The new studies suggest common diseases, surprisingly, are caused by rare, not common, mutations, the paper goes on to report.

Geneticists said the new research showed it was now possible to sequence the entire genome of a patient at reasonable cost and with sufficient accuracy to be of practical use to medical researchers. One subject’s genome cost just $50,000 to decode. And some say the cost of sequencing an entire genome could drop to around $5,000.

Are we standing on the precipice of a brave, new world?