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3. New Mexico Number of food stamp recipients: 430,622 Percentage of the state’s population on food stamps: 20.65% Total cost of just these benefits alone (That is, how much do just the money on those EBT cards cost the state?): Around $53.12 million Cost of benefits alone per capita in this state: $25.47 per person

"The Roundhouse," New Mexico Government Building NRA-ILA: Institute for Legislative Action New Mexico: Measure to Ban Firearms...Returns Concealed Carry Reform Bills Continue To Move Last week, state Representative Brian Egolf (D-Santa Fe) introduced House Resolution 4 to amend House rules and ban the possession of firearms in the House chamber, galleries, lounge, hallways and committee rooms by anyone except law enforcement or concealed carry license holders. In 2014, he filed a similar measure which passed out of the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote and then died in the House Rules Committee. This solution in search of a...

This link allows you contact 10 legislators to support New Mexico Senate Bill 192 (SB 192) - SPECIAL PROSECUTOR FOR ELECTION VIOLATIONS with one mouse click. Your support will be expressed to all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee (all their contact info is listed on the action page). Please consider calling each member to follow up. Please act as soon as possible as the Judiciary Committee is discussing the bill today (2/16/15).The people of New Mexico have been frustrated with the lack of compliance from local governments concerning election law compliance. Complaints filed are hitting road blocks because our...

A vote is expected this evening in the state House of Representatives on legislation that would stop the state from issuing drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. It's a political dispute that has been simmering and occasionally boiling over for a half-dozen years. Susana Martinez made this a key issue in her first campaign for governor back in 2010, urging state lawmakers to repeal the state law allowing the licenses. Tonight it looks like she will finally have the votes to move the license legislation through the House. Republicans are now the majority party there, and they expect to pick up...

Senate Democrats’ filibuster of a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security that would block deportation amnesty is not about the immigration issue but about respecting President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday. “This is not a question of protecting illegal people in our country, it’s a question of respecting the authority of the president of the United States,” Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, told reporters at her weekly press conference at the Capitol. Current funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out Feb. 27, but Senate Democrats are blocking the spending bill that includes a prohibition...

An Albuquerque man has been ordered to pay nearly $180,000 in restitution for the theft of government funds. Prosecutors say 57-year-old Scott Till was sentenced Tuesday to two years of probation in the case. Till pleaded guilty last October to taking money in November 2011 from the Department of Veterans Affairs that he wasn't entitled to receive. Prosecutors say Till isn't a veteran. They say he kept open a bank account into which the Department of Veterans Affairs was depositing money and he maintained sole access to the funds. Till was ordered to pay $179,491 in restitution to the VA.

Opponents say New Mexico has become a haven for those seeking to fraudulently obtain driver's licenses. "These fraud operations involve the trafficking of humans to our state for the purpose of committing crimes; and with no intention to live here, they snatch up our license to take elsewhere, to places unknown and for purposes unknown," said Mike Lonergan, spokesman for Republican Gov. Susana Martinez. Martinez, the nation's only Latina governor and a rising figure in the Republican Party, has been pushing to repeal the driver's license law since she was first elected in 2010. The governor and others have said...

Thankfully, Democrats in New Mexico, didn’t fair so well in their recent push for gun control. The Bloomberg initiated “universal background checks” failed in the Regulatory and Public Affairs Committee, 4-3 along party lines.

The first Republican elected sheriff in Eddy County, New Mexico, became the first sheriff in 25 years to stand up to the IRS. He physically stood at the gate of a troubled citizen's property while US Marshals threatened his arrest. The landowner filed an appeal with the court and expects his case to receive due process before his land is publicly sold. The sheriff agrees. The judge does not. (Sheriff Scott London says he learned more about the Constitution in the year he spent campaigning for his job than in all of his years of schooling combined.) WASHINGTON, February 7,...

AMC’s “Better Call Saul” set a new record for a cable series premiere audience Sunday night, drawing 6.9 million viewers. That’s down from the 10.3 million who watched the finale of its parent series, “Breaking Bad,” but it’s well above the audience “Breaking Bad” had averaged for every episode before the finale. As late as the end of its fourth season, “Breaking Bad” averaged fewer than two million viewers. “Saul” stars Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman, the sleazy lawyer who facilitated Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in “Bad.”

‘ISIS Is Here’: Islamic State Graffiti in AmericaPosted By Dawn Perlmutter On February 10, 2015 @ 12:45 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 6 Comments On February 4, 2015 the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, Michael Steinbach said that the FBI has seen children as young as 15 recruited by the Islamic State aka ISIS, ISIL. Two days later FBI Director James Comey said there are open cases looking into individuals who may be connected to ISIS in every state in the Union except Alaska. Evidence of the Islamic State’s successful recruiting efforts in America is literally written on...

SANTA FE (KRQE) – It doesn’t seem like that long ago that Albuquerque became the center of the national abortion debate. Now, New Mexico itself is set to be front and center. On Friday, lawmakers announced a new bill to ban late term abortions in a state with one of the only known late-term abortion clinics in the nation. The bill would ban abortions after five months and once the fetus is capable of living outside the womb. Unlike the failed November 2013 measure in Albuquerque, the bill provides exceptions for rape, abuse, incest, and when the mother’s life is...

According to New Mexico 2013 state population estimates, 46.4% of New Mexicans were Hispanic, and 41.3 % were White, so why do Hispanic women account for the majority of abortions in the state? Hispanics in New Mexico In New Mexico, reporting of legal induced abortion became law in 1977, and 1978 was the first full year of reporting. The number of abortions reported in New Mexico in 2013 was 3,408. This is an 8.7% increase from the 2012 number. In 2013, 67.6% of abortions in New Mexico were to women who were less than nine weeks pregnant and 86.0% of...

Police discover valuable Momaday art in condemned apartment Art showed up in a surprising place last week, when a police officer discovered more than $33,000 worth of prints by renowned artist Al Momaday in a condemned property in the Northeast Heights. According to the incident report, an Albuquerque police officer accompanied city officials who were boarding up an apartment known to him as a site for stashing stolen property. He spotted a portfolio box on the floor containing 72 prints by Momaday, a Native American artist from the Kiowa tribe in Oklahoma. The artist lived on the Jemez Pueblo for...

And now for a lighter moment from last night’s debate, or at least the weirdest moment. Jim Hoft calls this Ron Paul’s Checkpoint Charlie moment, but it’s really more like an apex of Paul’s paranoid band of libertarianism. In this exchange, Paul opposes building a border fence because he doesn’t believe it represents American values, which is a fair enough argument that one usually hears from Democrats. He then tips over into hilarity when he suggests that the US government might use it to stop Americans from fleeing to, er, Mexico:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO I immediately noted on...

Rep. Ron Paul has a problem with the idea of a U.S. border fence.“The people that want big fences and guns, sure, we could secure the border,” the congressman noted. “A barbed wire fence with machine guns, that would do the trick. I don’t believe that is what America is all about.” “Every time you think about this toughness on the border and ID cards and REAL IDs, think it’s a penalty against the American people too. I think this fence business is designed and may well be used against us and keep us in. In economic turmoil, the people...

- 4:42 PM (CNSNews.com) - Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said Thursday that contrary to what attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch said in her confirmation hearing on Wednesday that illegal aliens do not have a right to work in the United States and that by printing work authorizations for them the Obama administration is effectively “counterfeiting immigration papers.” CNSNews asked asked Cruz: Do you believe illegal aliens should have a right to work in the United States as Loretta Lynch told Senator Sessions? Cruz responded: Federal law is unequivocal. Those who are present in this country illegally are barred from working....

A disgruntled, former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist promised to build 40 nuclear weapons for Venezuela in 10 years and design a bomb targeted for New York City in exchange for "money and power," according to secret FBI recordings released Wednesday. In the recordings, Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni tells an agent posing as a Venezuelan official that the bombs would prevent the United States from invading the oil-rich nation and brags to his wife that the passing of secrets would make him wealthy.

(AP) - A House panel is expected to discuss efforts to repeal a New Mexico law that allows immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally to obtain driver's licenses. The House Safety and Civil Affairs Committee is scheduled Thursday to discuss two bills aimed at revamping the state driver's licenses laws. One proposal by Rep. Paul Pacheco of Albuquerque calls for creating a "two-tier" driver's license system. But Marcela Diaz, executive director of the Santa Fe-based Somos Un Pueblo Unido, says that would only create "scarlet-letter" licenses from immigrants. Republican Gov. Susana Martinez has tried repeatedly to have the...

AN ACT RELATING TO ANIMALS; PROHIBITING COYOTE-KILLING CONTESTS; DEFINING "COYOTE-KILLING CONTEST"; PROVIDING PENALTIES. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO: SECTION 1. A new section of Chapter 30, Article 18 NMSA 1978 is enacted to read: "[NEW MATERIAL] LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS.--The legislature finds that it would benefit the state to retain its tradition of nonfrivolous hunting by eliminating the practice of coyote-killing contests in concert with long-standing conservation guidelines for hunters and anglers."