Shuckins, The Rail Runner not running Saturday

From NewsNM - the very existence of the New Mexico Rail Runner is threatened by the New Mexico budget crisis since the Rail Runner runs in the red. So we are surprised that on a day when there will be lots of people going to Santa Fe (Saturday, January 1, 2011) for the Governor Susana Martinez celebration - none will go on the Rail Runner since the Rail Runner took the entire day off. What a great chance to show off the Rail Runner to the people. Instead, the management parked them. The schedule

Shuckins, The Rail Runner not running Saturday

Cover-up Begins in Border Agent Murder

Janet Napolitano

Examiner - Life in the field for Border Patrol Agents is often lonely work, as police officers most agents patrol alone in their vehicles as they travel remote territory off the beaten path. Agent Brian Terry was different; he served as a Marine in the Middle East during wartime, loved law enforcement and was selected for the elite BORTAC (the SWAT of the) U.S. Border Patrol. Arguably, Terry had a lot of experience under his three-year Border Patrol belt.

Brian Terry

He knew combat. He knew how to stay alive. Yet it would be a fateful night in the December desert that took his life – not a terrorist in a warzone, but a cartel smuggler/bandit in Arizona. The 40-year old agent was planning his new life out, marriage, and perhaps one day a family of his own, but in the blink of an eye it was snatched from Terry. A week has passed since the assassination and few details are being released. No trigger man, no justice. What there has been is plenty of Border Patrol management scrambling to cover the fact Agent Terry was armed with a weapon that shot bean bag rounds- something that was a contributing factor to his untimely murder. Department of Homeland Security is busy covering their tracks, while Janet Napolitano, DHS secretary, levels inaccurate statements like; “the border has never been more secure and there is not an increase of drug trafficking across the border,” – and agents continue to patrol undermanned and under-armed. Read full story here:

Cover-up Begins in Border Agent Murder

Accused Rapists and Their Friends

Julian Assange

The Nation - Here's what I've learned so far from the furor over the rape allegations against Julian Assange: when it comes to rape, the left still doesn't get it. The problem is not that many WikiLeaks supporters question the zeal with which Swedish authorities are pursuing Assange. Maybe it's true that an ordinary guy, faced with similar accusations, would have been allowed to slip away quietly once he left Sweden rather than become the subject of an Interpol red notice. (Maybe not, though. The eleven Swedes on Interpol's public red list include people wanted for fraud and other non-spectacular crimes.

Roman Polanski

Much has been made of the fact that only one of these, an alleged child molester, is charged with a sex crime. But the vast majority of wanted people are privately listed, so actually there's no way of knowing if Assange's case is exceptional.) Given that US politicians, from Joe Biden to Sarah Palin, have called for Assange's head, it isn't paranoid to suspect that he is being singled out in order to extradite him to the United States. But it could also be that Sweden is following up because prosecutors get mad when world-class celebrities flee the country and then thumb their noses at them—cf. Roman Polanski.

Keith Olbermann

What's disturbing is the way some WikiLeaks admirers have misrepresented the allegations, attacked the women and made light of date rape. It's been known for some time that Assange was accused of using his body weight to force sex on one woman, ignoring her demand that he use a condom, and penetrating the other woman while she slept, also without a condom despite her wishes; but writer after writer has treated the whole thing as a big joke. It was "sex by surprise"—some arcane Swedish thing—wrote Dave Lindorff on Truthout. Plus, Assange didn't tell the second woman about the first and didn't return her phone call. Hell hath no fury like a groupie scorned. Appearing on Keith Olbermann's show after he put up $20,000 to help bail Assange out of a British jail, Swedish rape law expert Michael Moore called the case "a bunch of hooey": "the condom broke during consensual sex."

Michael Moore

Olbermann made matters worse when he retweeted BiancaJagger's tweet linking to a post on Mark Crispin Miller's blog claiming that Assange accuser "Miss A" had "interacted" in Cuba with an anti-Castro women's group supported by terrorist and former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles, and had published anti-Castro "diatribes" in a Swedish magazine. You would think the left would be more sensitive to charges of guilt by association—since when did marching in a demonstration mean you sign on to everything its supporters support? By those lights, everyone who went to an ANSWER-sponsored march against the Iraq War thinks North Korea is a Marxist paradise. Read full story here:

Accused Rapists and Their Friends

2010: The Year of Government Without Bounds

Carrie Lukas

Townhall - by Carrie Lukas - The Associated Press's poll of editors and news directors declared the British Petroleum oil spill 2010's biggest story. They're way off the mark. The oil spill's impact recedes from the Gulf of Mexico and from the American mind. What will live on from 2010 is the movement of Americans disgusted with a government that knows no bounds. The year began with the great health care debate, which was as much about process as policy. A majority of Americans rejected the underlying premise of the legislation—that more government intervention will make our health care system better. But even many sympathetic to government-run health care knew something was wrong with the process used to advance the legislation.
The dense, two thousand page bill was unread by Members of Congress. Americans saw Senators' support openly bought with favors, learned terms like “deem and pass” and “reconciliation,” and watched a determined Congress circumvent the normal legislative process. Constituents' concerns were dismissed, and the public told they'd learn what's in the legislation after it was passed.  And indeed the public is learning plenty. Health care costs will rise, not fall, as result of ObamaCare. While the Administration assured the public that the individual insurance mandate wasn't a tax, they now defend its constitutionality in court as justified by the government’ power to tax. The Department of Health and Human Services busily hands out waivers to new mandates, a process inevitably viewed as political, confirming for the public that there will always be one set of rules for the politically connected and another for the rest of us. Read full column here:

2010: The Year of Government Without Bounds

Sowell: End Run Around Constitution

Thomas Sowell

Townhall - The Constitution of the United States begins with the words "We the people." But neither the Constitution nor "we the people" will mean anything if politicians and judges can continue to do end runs around both. Bills passed too fast for anyone to read them are blatant examples of these end runs. But last week, another of these end runs appeared in a different institution when the medical "end of life consultations" rejected by Congress were quietly enacted through bureaucratic fiat by administrators of Medicare.

Although Congressman Earl Blumenauer and Senator Jay Rockefeller had led an effort by a group of fellow Democrats in Congress to pass Section 1233 of pending Medicare legislation, which would have paid doctors to include "end of life" counselling in their patients' physical checkups, the Congress as a whole voted to delete that provision. Read full column here:

Sowell: End Run Around Constitution

Williams: Airlines Worse Than Ever

Armstrong Williams

Townhall - Considering how much I travel abroad and domestically constantly, I'm actually surprised how much I hate and resent the thought of flying. It’s not the fear of heights, or the turbulence, or even the perpetual fear of a terrorist attack. No, the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of airline carriers. Also, the utter agony and different standards for every airport of what can and can't pass through security screening is baffling. Think about it. Every major industry today is progressing. Auto manufacturers are building cars with better fuel economies, more room, more horsepower and with fewer emissions. The same holds true for consumer electronics, power companies, phone carriers, freight rail, and trucking. Even the Postal Service seems to be trending in the right direction. Except the airlines. Read full column here:

Williams: Airlines Worse Than Ever

One More Fast One From Richardson

Bill Richardson

Capitol Report New Mexico - More tension between the outgoing Richardson administration and the incoming Martinez administration. On Monday (Dec. 27), the state Supreme Court granted departing Department of Public Safety boss John Denko the authority to move the state’s DNA lab from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Denko says it will save the state $400,000 a year. Susana Martinez released this statement upon hearing the news:

Susana Martinez

“It is politics at its worst to move the DNA lab to Santa Fe in the final hours of the current administration only to move it back to Albuquerque on Monday, which is exactly what will happen. Instead, we should be putting victims and justice first. The move is opposed by both Republicans and Democrats, along with victims’ advocates and law enforcement. I will not be bullied into doing anything that will jeopardize cases and justice for New Mexico victims.” Read full story here:

One More Fast One From Richardson