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.
A top aide to GOP gubernatorial nominee Susana Martinez received $24,000 in extra pay over a two-year period in addition to seeing her side business receive a no-bid $60,000 deal to provide supplies to the Doña Ana District Attorney’s office, the Santa Fe New Mexican is reporting.
The extra pay came from the additional work Janetta Hicks, now the Fifth Judicial District Attorney, picked up as she headed up Martinez’s DWI prosecution unit until 2007, the Martinez campaign told the New Mexican. The extra pay came in fiscal years 2006 and 2007, the paper reported.
Martinez, the Doña Ana District Attorney, has made ending corruption in New Mexico, including conflicts of interest, a central theme in her run for governor. Whether these stories about Martinez’s tenure as Doña Ana District Attorney will undermine that line of attack remains to be seen. (The Albuquerque Journal first reported on the no-bid deal that Hicks’ side business received last week.)
The stories are important in their own right. But in the context of the governor’s race their importance is understood in how effective they are in shifting the debate in the back-and-forth between the two campaigns. Will this cause Martinez to stop, or reduce, the number of attacks aimed at linking Denish, at least in voters’ minds, to scandals that have plagued the administration of Gov. Bill Richardson? Or does this give Denish the opportunity to launch her own attacks against Martinez along the same line, or shift the debate altogether to a different topic?
As with most of life, what will happen will be more complicated than the simple cut-and-dry scenarios outlined above. All of the different scenarios might happen simultaneously, or none of them, or just certain ones.
This is what makes this race so intriguing. Stay tuned.
