Winners
MADD
New Mexico falls smack dab in the middle of the rankings in a new "state progress report" by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Our notoriously sloshed-behind-the-wheel state had 133 drunk-driving deaths last year, down 2 percent from 2006.
Thirty-two percent of traffic deaths involved alcohol, the report says. The deadliest state was North Dakota; the safest was bone-dry Utah. Gov. Bill Richardson credits New Mexico's 2005 mandatory ignition interlock law for the slow but
steady decrease in booze-fueled traffic fatalities. Maybe he should pass them
around more (see Losers).
New Mexico wardens
It may be small consolation for New Mexico's prison population—see this week's cover story on page 16—but prison officials in Honduras, El Salvador and the post-soviet republic of Georgia have been visiting for tips on how to manage their own jailhouse gang problems. "The worst jail or prison in the US is 100 times better than what the El Salvadorians have," NM Corrections Department Secretary Joe Williams tells the state employees' newsletter. Sure, if you don't count Gitmo or Abu Ghraib as being "in the US."
New Mexico teachers
Who cares about that 50 percent dropout rate? New Mexico's public education system still produced a likely Obama cabinet member. Last week, word spread that Obama would name Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a 1975 graduate of Albuquerque's Sandia High School, the next Homeland Security secretary. Gold star! This somewhat makes up for the fact that Sandia High also produced David Addington, the bureaucratic muscle behind the Bush administration's torture and warrantless wiretapping policies.
Losers
New Mexico State Police
There's no way to spin this. Before Santa Fe's bars closed Nov. 25, State Police Sgt. Alfred Lovato, a member of Gov. Bill Richardson's security detail, got into a car with his buddy Carlos W Fierro, a young hotshot lawyer who worked for US Sen. John McCain and NM's US Sen.-elect Tom Udall. Police say Fierro's car struck and killed a pedestrian, William Tenorio from San Felipe Pueblo, outside WilLee's Blues Club. Fierro fled the scene with Lovato; the two had been seen drinking that night. Really, shouldn't the sergeant have known to call a taxi?
Pedestrians
God bless the rain. Anyone strolling downtown the night before Thanksgiving had more than boozed-up motorists to worry about: There was also the flood of human vomit on the sidewalks. We witnessed a half-dozen public pukers in a 15-minute walk down San Francisco and Guadalupe streets. It looked to be another night out for the Hash House Harriers, an international club for "drinkers with a running problem."
Hey, at least they weren't driving.
Military science
British journalist Jon Ronson's improbable-yet-true book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, exposed the vein of utter bat-shit insanity that runs through America's security establishment. (The title refers to a secret Army project to give livestock cardiac arrest with Jedi mind tricks.) So it can't be good news for the thousands of men and women who keep the nation safe by blowing billions of dollars on dead-end research that George "Midas Touch" Clooney will star in the Hollywood adaptation of Goats, now being filmed in New Mexico.
