Amtrak Service in Northern NM at Risk

From krqe.com - While the railroad has been a significant part of Albuquerque’s history for decades, it may not be around for much longer. Representatives of Amtrak and the BNSF Railway Co. met with leaders from New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas on Tuesday to try and figure out how to keep the daily Southwest Chief train between Chicago and Los Angeles on its current, longtime route.  That train stops in Raton, Las Vegas, Lamy and Albuquerque on its way west and return to Chicago. Amtrak officials, however, estimate it will cost $100 million to fix or replace the tracks along the route, while another $10 million a year is necessary to maintain the tracks. "We need to have a good idea that this is all going to come together by 2014,” said Amtrak spokesperson Marc Magliari. “Because by 2016 the current agreement we have where BNSF Railway maintains this goes away and the entire cost of this falls on Amtrak."  More here
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ACLU Sues City of Roswell and Police Dept.

From therepublic.com -The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico is suing the city of Roswell and its police department for repeatedly arresting two local street preachers. The ACLU's suit says the arrests violate the free speech rights of Joshua and Jeremy De Los Santos. The brothers are members of Roswell's Old Paths Baptist Church and believe they have a duty to preach in public. ACLU-NM Executive Director Peter Simonson said Thursday that the First Amendment gives all a right to express their religious beliefs in public. The ACLU says charges were dismissed after every arrest. ACLU-NM Executive Director Peter Simonson said Thursday that the First Amendment gives all a right to express their religious beliefs in public. Roswell police referred questions to the city attorney's office, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Joshua De Los Santos was arrested twice and Jeremy De Los Santos five times in two years.  More here
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Roswell Police Still Suffering From Officer Shortage

From therepublic.com -The city's police department is still short more than a dozen officers as the city faces high rates of gang violence, officials said. In January, Roswell police announced it was 25 officers down, and Police Chief Alfonso Solis notified the Roswell Independent School District that he was pulling the resource officer from the schools to work patrol. The department is down 17 officers from the normal complement of 96, The Roswell Daily Record reported. Since January, eight entry-level officer positions have been filled, and Solis said 11 officers are undergoing the hiring process. "We're hoping by October we'll be, hopefully, if not fully staffed, very close to being fully staffed," Solis said. From the time a person is offered a job with Roswell police, it takes around a year before they are fully certified to work as an officer. Of the eight new officers, those who are already certified will have to undergo training and others will have to attend the state's six month police academy, in addition to the training.
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Obama Campaign Opening 3 New Offices in NM

From krqe.com -The Obama campaign is ramping up its New Mexico outreach this month with the opening of three new campaign offices.  The campaign, which currently has offices in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Las Cruces, is opening a grassroots volunteer office in Rio Rancho on Friday and another on Albuquerque's West Side on Saturday. Later this month, the campaign will also open an office in Las Vegas. Campaign officials say the openings demonstrate the campaign's commitment to Hispanics, the middle class and New Mexico. New Mexico is one of several Western states that both Republicans and Democrats are focused on winning in November.
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93 Drug Resistant Bacteria Found in Carlsbad Caverns

From latimes.com -No place on Earth demonstrates the resilience or inventiveness of life quite like Lechuguilla Cave, whose subterranean tunnels stretch for 130 miles through Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. Deep in the cave's most arid recesses, deprived of all sunlight and mostly starved of life-giving water, a lush garden of bacteria grows. Untouched by humans for all of their 4 million years, these strains of bacteria thrive on the harsh minerals of the geological formations to which they cling and fend off other life forms that would prey on them. It is a simple life. But new research suggests it could tell us volumes about the medicines doctors rely upon to combat infection and why, increasingly, they are failing. Scientists who collected 93 strains of bacteria from the forbidding depths of Lechuguilla found that all were resistant to at least one of the antibiotics that modern medicine uses to fight bacterial infections and some were resistant to at least 14. In addition, virtually all of the 26 antibiotics tested as part of the study proved useless in killing at least one of the strains of bacteria collected.  More here
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President Obama holds lead over Romney in New Mexico

Barack Obama
KOBPresident Barack Obama continues to hold a double-digit lead over Mitt Romney among New Mexico voters in the race for president, but a solid lead for the president means New Mexico could be out of the spotlight on the stage of national politics. New Mexico has been a critical toss-up state in recent presidential elections, the center of attention for both political parties, but now it looks like the state may be moving back to the dim shadows of the back row. It was not that way four years ago. With New Mexico's five electoral votes up for grabs, Democrat Barack Obama was here a half dozen times.
Ditto for Republican John McCain and sometimes with his crowd-pleasing running-mate, Sarah Palin. In fact, New Mexico was pretty much a toss-up in the last five presidential races, but not this year. "It's not clear that we're going to be one of the top states in terms of toss-up in 2012," said University of New Mexico Political Science professor, Lonna Atkeson. "That might really impact us in terms of the kind of attention that we usually are getting, and we may not be getting it this time." "We've gone from tossup to maybe battleground, where they'll still fight for it," said politics blogger Joe Monahan of joemonahan.com. 
Mitt Romney
"It'll be up to the Republicans to turn the trend around. If they can't, the president will not engage here as much as he would have." The latest Rasmussen Reports poll provides ample evidence of the trend Monahan talks about.  The poll of 500 likely voters across New Mexico shows Obama with a solid 16 point lead over Romney, 52 percent to 36 percent, with 9 percent favoring other candidates and 3 percent undecided. "The state is not solidly Obama in this case, but it's leaning more to Obama than typically it would as a battleground," Atkeson said. "He can spend that money in other states, where it really is close," said Monahan. "Right now, it is not really close. Can the Republicans make it that way? We still have time." Indeed we do - 209 days until Election Day, November 6, 2012. Read More News New Mexico

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Can Government Do Anything Well?

John Stossel
 Reason - I’m suspicious of superstitions, like astrology or the belief that “green jobs will fix the environment and the economy.” I understand the appeal of such beliefs. People crave simple answers and want to believe that some higher power determines our fates. The most socially destructive superstition of all is the intuitively appealing belief that problems are best solved by government. Opinion polls suggest that Americans are dissatisfied with government. Yet whenever another crisis hits, the natural human instinct is to say, “Why doesn’t the government do something?” And politicians appear to be problem-solvers. We believe them when they say, “Yes, we can!” In 2008, when Barack Obama’s supporters shouted, “Yes, we can!” they expressed faith in the power of government to solve problems. Some acted as if Obama were a magical politician whose election would end poverty and inequality and bring us to “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” At least now people have come to understand that presidents—including this president—can’t perform miracles. Read More News New Mexico

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Benito Obama and the New American Nightmare

Charles Payne
Townhall - I got some interesting feedback yesterday after I compared President Obama’s speech at Florida Atlantic University to speeches and writing from Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini. I’m surprised people would want to look the other way and imagine that such comparisons are harsh when indeed the aim of those dictators was to take power from a small ruling class of rich people and redistribute wealth to the masses.
Of course that’s the official theory on socialism and Marxism. But of course it never works out that way. Yet still today the hype is nonetheless the same. I’ve written about this before especially comparisons of the economic elements of various types of fascism. For me the most frightening aspect of the speech wasn’t that President Obama is looking to forge a new economic model where socialism meets capitalism with heavy government oversight. Everyone has a theory and belief on what works and what doesn’t work.
No, the scary part about that speech (it was tamped down a little yesterday in front of sympathetic business executives and CEOs) is that it’s now out in the open. While his kimono isn’t open all the way, President Obama and the left are now selling their agenda not as a true economic policy but as a form of “fairness” or more succinctly “social justice.” This acknowledges his economic agenda failed but it failed within the confining restraints of a capitalistic system that he says is simply rigged. That’s why President Obama always mentions rich people aren’t paying their fair share legally. Read full column here: News New Mexico 

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DNC/Obama Advisor: "Ann Romney Has Never Worked a Day in Her Life"

Hilary Rosen who is a Democratic National Committee advisor to the Obama Administration told CNN's Anderson Cooper that GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney's spouse Ann Romney, who raised five children "Has never worked a day in her life." Watch the video here: News New Mexico
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