Jamaican Drug Dealers Head to the Valley

From kpho.com -There's a new kind of drug dealer in town. They aren't from around here, but they're showing up in Arizona specifically to pick up marijuana. Police said dealers here are more than happy to help.  They said they're seeing more and more Jamaicans these days and that the drug dealers have one goal in mind - saving money. "It's the entire state. It's the entire region," said Chandler Police Det. Seth Tyler.  More News New Mexico

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NM GOP's Watkins Calls Out Heinrich

Martin Heinrich
“The question on everyone’s mind is where in the world is Martin Heinrich?,” according to a press release from Republican Party of New Mexico Executive Director Bryan Watkins. The release went on to say, “Heinrich is unwilling to show up and talk with his constituents face-to-face but he has managed to find time to hold face-to-face fundraisers with major donors. Heinrich is already showing the people of New Mexico that he values fundraising dollars more than the voices of his constituents.”
Heinrich who represents New Mexico's first congressional district is seeking to become the next Senator New Mexicans send to Washington when Jeff Bingaman retires early in 2013.
Hector Balderas
Watkins also questioned the motives behind Heinrich's seeming lack on interaction with constituents. "Martin Heinrich recently said he isn’t holding town hall meetings because security is too expensive. By contrast Congressman Steve Pearce has been holding town hall meetings all across his district without any complaint of unbearable expense. Congressman Heinrich’s excuse simply doesn’t hold water."
Heinrich who voted against Cut, Cap, and Balance legislation as well as Paul Ryan's budget plan before finally approving the debt ceiling lift that was passed earlier this month faces primary opposition from New Mexico State Auditor Hector Balderas next year.

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Judge Tosses New "Rules" Designed to Slow or Halt Domestic Energy Production

(Newsroom America) -- A federal judge on Friday threw out rules imposed by the Obama administration to put the brakes on expedited environmental review of oil and gas drilling on land belonging to the federal government. U.S. District Judge Nancy Freudenthal ruled in favor of petroleum industry group Western Energy Alliance in federal court in Cheyenne, Wyo., in the group's lawsuit against the Obama administration and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The administration had dismissed Bush-era rules that allowed for expedited oil and gas drilling under categorical exclusions provisions on all federal lands, but Freudenthal's ruling reinstated them.
The administration argued that the group had failed to show how the new rules, implemented last year by the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, caused delays and increased drilling costs. "Western Energy has demonstrated through its members recognizable injury," Freudenthal said in rejecting the administration's argument. "Those injuries are supported by the administrative record." The government declined to comment on the ruling, but Kathleen Sgamma, the Denver-based group's director of government and public affairs, said the court made the right decision.
"She completely discounted the government's argument that the harm was speculative," Sgamma said of Freudenthal's ruling, according to The Associated Press. Read full story here: News New Mexico
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Artesia Goes Hollywood

Cast of Roswell FM
Carlsbad Current-Argus - ARTESIA — The Artesia studios of Pecos Valley Broadcasting - home of KSVP AM and KZ93 FM radio — took on a new set of call letters for as it plays a fictional radio station for the filming of "Roswell FM", a comedy/romance being shot on locations in Roswell and Artesia. Set in Roswell at the fictional station KLEN, the movie revolves around an FM radio station that specializes in focusing on the paranormal and the bizarre. Producer Carl Lucas, a Roswell native and former employee of Pecos Valley Broadcasting is now working in California, said PVB general manager Gene Dow. He said Lucas didn't have to look far for a set location. "When Carl got involved with the project and knew they needed a location, he knew this would be the place," said Dow. "The art director and advance team came through and they thought our studios would be perfect," he said. Filming has been underway in Roswell since late July and began in Artesia this week. Dow said his radio staff and the film crew have learned to work around each other. "We are the set, and we're still running our radio station," he said. "They started shooting Tuesday and will be here through Wednesday of next week." Read full story here: News New Mexico
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Chavez: Ingratitude, Insolence, and Entitlement

Linda Chavez
Townhall - The riots that have wracked England in the last week should be a sober warning to the United States: This is what happens when a country breeds a generation of welfare dependents who are happy to bite the hand that feeds them. For days, roaming gangs of young people have engaged in looting, setting fires, intimidating citizens, even killing innocents. Speaking to a special session of Parliament, Prime Minister David Cameron said, "This is not about poverty, it's about culture, a culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities." He's right.
Liberals in England and the United States have tried to explain the riots by pointing to the Tory government's proposed austerity plans. But it's not the cutbacks in social services that are the problem but the welfare state itself that has taught generations that society owed them a living; that the government -- not parents -- were responsible for raising children; that those who worked hard were either suckers or exploiters; that those who didn't work were entitled to the fruits of other people's labor. Cameron pledged his government would "address our broken society, we will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility -- in every town, in every street and in every estate." But it's a tall order.
In many respects, Britain is in worse moral decline than the United States. About half of all children in the U.K. are born out of wedlock -- a number that has been growing rapidly in recent years. When the Labor Party took control in 1997, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was at 37 percent. It has grown about 1 percent per year ever since and will exceed half of all births in the next couple of years. In the U.S., out-of-wedlock births are now at 41 percent of overall births, but there is tremendous variation in illegitimate births by race. Such births now are the norm in both the black (72 percent) and Latino (53 percent) communities, but less than a third of white births (29 percent) are illegitimate. In England, however, race accounts for less of the difference in births outside of marriage, with whites having higher illegitimacy rates than some immigrant groups, most notably South Asians.
More than a decade ago, the social scientist Charles Murray warned that the U.K. was fast developing an underclass similar to the one that plagued the U.S. in the 1960s and '70s. In the Sunday Times in 1996, Murray wrote, "Britain has a growing population of working-aged, healthy people who live in a different world from other Britons, who are raising their children to live in it, and whose values are now contaminating the life of entire neighborhoods -- which is one of the most insidious aspects of the phenomenon, for neighbors who don't share those values cannot isolate themselves."
Proof of the validity of Murray's thesis was evident on the streets of Tottenham, Manchester, Birmingham and other neighborhoods and cities this week. Thankfully, the U.S. has not yet succumbed totally to the lure of the welfare state. But the class-warfare rhetoric coming from the White House and liberals in Congress encourages the same kind of entitlement mentality that has infected the U.K. Read full column here: News New Mexico
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Another Secret Tunnel Under the Border

Breitbart - Mexican troops have discovered an unfinished 300-meter (980-foot) tunnel beneath the US border that would likely have been used to smuggle drugs and people, officials said Friday. Mexican General Alfonso Duarte announced the find, saying the entrance to the tunnel was inside a house in the border town of Tijuana that was made to appear as though it was under construction. He added that 10 people were detained in the operation, including a woman who had been helping to dig the tunnel for nearly a year. The tunnel was around 1.8 meters (six feet) high and a meter (three feet) wide, and had a lighting and ventilation system, officials said. US officials said in June that more than 150 secret tunnels for smuggling people and drugs into the United States have been found since 1990. Read full story here: News New Mexico
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Rick Perry to Announce Today

Rick Perry
James Richard "Rick" Perry (born March 4, 1950) the 47th and current Governor of Texas will announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency today. Perry was elected Lieutenant Governor of Texas in 1998 and assumed the governorship in December 2000 when George W. Bush resigned as governor to become President of the United States. Perry has been elected to full gubernatorial terms in 2002, 2006 and 2010 all victories by healthy margins. Perry is the longest-serving governor in Texas state history. Perry is also the only governor in modern Texas history to have appointed at least one person to every eligible state office, board, or commission position (as well as to several elected offices to which the governor can appoint someone to fill an unexpired term.
Perry won the Texas 2010 Republican gubernatorial primary election, defeating U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and former Wharton County Republican Party Chairwoman and businesswoman Debra Medina. It was a bruising competition. In the 2010 Texas gubernatorial election, Perry won a third term by defeating former Houston mayor Bill White and Kathie Glass. Perry's entry into the crowded GOP field will likely shake up the balance of polling power, chase away some of the potential entrants, and inject a major dose of executive experience. White House advisor David Axelrod wasted no time attacking Perry's record on national television yesterday suggesting education and health care have been decimated in Texas.

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Consumer Confidence Craters in August

Bloomberg - Confidence among U.S. consumers plunged in August to the lowest level since May 1980, adding to concern that weak employment gains and volatility in the stock market will prompt households to retrench. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment slumped to 54.9 from 63.7 the prior month. The gauge was projected to decline to 62, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.
The biggest one-week slump in stocks since 2008 and the threat of default on the nation’s debt may have exacerbated consumers’ concerns as unemployment hovers above 9 percent and companies are hesitant to hire. Rising pessimism poses a risk household spending will cool further, hindering a recovery that Federal Reserve policy makers said this week was already advancing “considerably slower” than projected. “The mood is very depressed,” said Chris Christopher, an economist at IHS Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts. “Consumers are very fatigued and very uncertain. In the short term, people are going to pull back on spending.” Read full story here: News New Mexico

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