Angry at disclosures that the Internal Revenue Service has admitted targeting Tea Party groups and conservative organizations, an estimated 130 protesters gathered at the IRS office in Albuquerque during the lunch hour on Tuesday (May 21).
A number of the protesters were members of the Albuquerque and Rio Rancho Tea Parties and a line covered the [...]

Gov. Susana Martinez seems to have kept her approval-ratings winning streak intact.
In a poll released by KOB-TV in conjunction with the polling outfit Survey USA, 66 percent of New Mexicans are happy with the job she is doing.
For nearly a year and a half, the Republican governor — the first Hispanic female governor of any party in the U.S. — has finished with [...]

The New Mexico State football team hasn’t played in a bowl game since 1960.
The Aggies haven’t fielded a team with a winning record since 2002 and attendance has slipped.
Now the hottest debate on the Las Cruces campus is whether the football team should keep playing at the college football’s highest level , consider going down a step [...]

A sobering report came from the Legislative Finance Committee at the Roundhouse on Tuesday (Mary 15), citing figures that will put more strain on the state’s health care system.
Among the findings?
*Some 62 percent of adults in New Mexico were overweight or obese in 2009, and
*New Mexico’s percentage of its population over the age of 60 [...]

Gov. Susana Martinez has voiced her support for Sen. Tom Udall, who has introduced legislation challenging the Obama administration’s decision to use sequestration to seize 5 percent of mineral and energy royalties from states..
“The federal government should never have cut these royalty payments to begin with, as they don’t represent the traditional type of programmatic cuts that the [...]

People who follow New Mexico politics remember Adam Kokesh as a 2010 Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Santa Fe, who ran a slightly off-beat campaign highlighting his libertarian ideals before losing in the primary to Tom Mullins of Farmington.
Kokesh has always had a lot of provocateur in him — and since he left New Mexico [...]

Ah, sometimes covering politics in this state is almost too easy. The stories write themselves.
Just last week, at the Democratic Party Central Committee Meeting (a title that seems oddly Kremlinesque) in Las Cruces aspiring Albuquerque mayoral candidate Pete Dinelli, in a speech in front of party faithful, pronounced that Democrats who vote for Republicans were [...]

A liberal politician in a liberal town, Santa Fe Mayor David Coss says he won’t seek another term for the office he’s held since 2006.
“There are other things that I’d really love to do with my family and friends that I can’t do as mayor,” Coss told radio station KVSF Thursday morning (May 2), although he [...]

 
I received a master’s degree from Columbia University five years ago and I remember having a conversation with an economic professor there.
He was a very bright guy who had come to the United States as a graduate student from Malaysia after earning his undergraduate degree in England (I think it was at Oxford).
I asked him what he [...]

Folks can’t remember a drought this bad in New Mexico since the 1950s.
But the dry conditions that have parched virtually the entire state are threatening farms, ranches and cast a thirsty shadow over urban as well as rural communities.
From Susan Montoya Brown of Associated Press:
Models from the National Climatic Data Center show it would take more [...]