Morning Word, 06-08-12

The New Mexico news recap

Yesterday, I said that everyone is looking forward to November, and highlighted spending in the New Mexico Senate race, but today it seems a lot of people are looking back at Tuesday's results.

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  • Lots of money is going to pour into New Mexico for the top-tier U.S. Senate race between Martin Heinrich and Heather Wilson. And
  • it is already starting
  • . One of the groups spending money backing Heather Wilson is connected to a Washington D.C. conservative non-profit that
  • Wilson was on the board of in the past few years
  • .
  • Eliseo Lee Alcon
  • is touting the fact that he beat Susana Martinez's Super PAC
  • -- the only Democrat targeted by the Super PAC who won his race (also, the only incumbent targeted).
  • Steve Terrell of the Santa Fe New Mexican says that the governor's camp is
  • mostly pleased with the primary results
  • . The Pat Woods victory over Angie Spears being the obvious exception, though Woods will likely vote identically to Spears on key issues.
  • Voter turnout
  • was at 25 percent statewide for the primaries
  • . There was no real top-tier race to drive turnout.
  • The Rio Grande Sun looks at
  • Richard Martinez's somewhat easy victory over Alfredo Montoya in Senate District 5
  • .
  • The League of Women Voters wrote a letter to Gov. Susana Martinez and all of the Public Regulations Commissioners about the San Juan Generating Plant:
  • We are asking you to uphold the Clean Air Act by ensuring that PNM complies with EPA’s requirement for the installation of selective catalytic reduction controls (per the Tenth Circuit Court’s March 2 decision rejecting the stay request). These controls would reduce nitrogen oxide by 80 percent. The technology proposed by PNM and the state would reduce nitrogen oxide, which has severe negative health effects, by only 20 percent. If the selective catalytic reduction is not installed, we urge you to require PNM to retire one or more of its coal-fired units altogether and replace them with clean energy.
  • Technology Ventures Corporation (TVC) said it hosted White House Science Advisor Dr. John Holdren this morning at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. Holdren spoke to local entrepreneurs. TVC says it is a nonprofit, charitable foundation funded by both Lockheed Martin Corporation and the Department of Energy.
  • U.S. Senators are still looking at where to put nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain
  • is still a non-starter
  • .
  • Senator Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat, touched on another point — that Congress has been so deeply involved in trying to find a place to put nuclear waste that it may be reluctant to give up on its past efforts. “Nuclear waste policy has a poor history in Congress, as evidenced by our cutting short the site selection process and mandating Yucca,’’ he said.He was referring to a decision in the late 1980s to instruct the Energy Department not to choose the best of three sites then under evaluation but simply to see if Yucca was suitable, largely based on Nevada’s limited political clout at the time. A Nevada senator, Harry Reid, now leads the Senate’s Democratic majority and has opposed a Yucca repository, and President Obama promised to have it shelved during his 2008 presidential campaign.
  • Mary Ellen Broderick, who runs Democracy for New Mexico and is a candidate for state House,
  • is at Netroots Nation in Providence, Rhode Island
  • . I have attended in the past, but have been unable to attend the last few years because of money issues -- namely the lack of having any.
  • Ardee Soriano
  • expands on the views of the sex tourism industry
  • in the Philippines in the web pages of the Santa Fe Reporter.
  • When people make fun of an issue via Youtube, it loses importance, the arguments become jokes. Instead, the media’s attention is starting to go beyond the foreground, investigating into the human trafficking problem of the Philippines. This just proves that sensationalizing is not always a bad thing.< According to the University of Rhode Island’s Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation, there are about 400,000 women working as prostitutes in the Philippines. The small city of Angeles alone has 500, and 75 percent of them are children. There’s also the so-called “Philippine Adventure Tour,” a vacation package that involves tours to bars where men can purchase their own prostitutes. The package, according to URI's Factbook, costs $1,645, which is nauseating.
  • I meant to include this yesterday. Heath Haussamen has decided to announce that he is "taking a stand in one of the great civil rights battles"
  • by backing same-sex marriage
  • . I won't excerpt the column because the piece deserves to be read in its entirety.
  • The Weekly Alibi looks at
  • whether or not New Mexico is still a swing state
  • , something that NM Telegram has been looking at almost since we started publishing. The polls show that it isn't poised to be on the short list of important states in deciding who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2013.
  • A man was
  • charged with misdemeanor battery for ejecting protesters from a speech
  • by controversial speaker Nonie Darwish, the Albuquerque Journal reports. A video showed the man punching protesters who spoke a prepared statement during Darwish's speech.
  • The Journal also reports that students who get their health insurance through the university
  • can expect a hefty hike next semester
  • -- 22 percent.
  • Jim Baca
  • writes about the 1st Congressional District race
  • .
  • I sent a donation to Michelle Grisham Lujan yesterday. Within minutes I received a request for more. She is right in the swing of things. And thats a good thing too after watching her republican opponent Janice Arnold Jones attack her on TV. Jones said Lujan's only experience was 8 months on the 7 member county commission. Except that is 18 months on a 5 member county commission. She said Lujan's experience as a cabinet secretary was nothing more than a single issue lobbying job. As I recall that was what Heather Wilson used to do too.
  • Speaking of that race, Eric Griego and Martin Chavez
  • made tentative steps towards party unity
  • .
  • The Las Cruces Sun-News says Virgin Galactic
  • showed off a Las Cruces office for its space tourism business
  • . I think if I win the lottery that I'll sign up for a flight.
  • The governor
  • sold another aging state plane
  • .