By Rob Nikolewski │ New Mexico Watchdog
SANTA FE – After two years of a crippling drought, New Mexico is soaked with rain.
The summer monsoon season is wrapping up with a bang, pelting the state with record amounts. While the state has avoided the devastation happening in northern neighbor Colorado, parts of New Mexico have flooded. [...]

By Rob Nikolewski │ New Mexico Watchdog
SANTA FE – Angry about domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, former New Mexico governor and 2012 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson has launched an online drive centered on the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure.
“My blood’s boiling and I want to keep awareness of [...]

By Rob Nikolewski │ New Mexico Watchdog
SANTA FE — Disgraced former state Senate Pro-tem Manny Aragon isn’t scheduled to be released from a federal prison in Colorado until next year, but New Mexico Watchdog has learned he is eligible to be released to a halfway house.
“I can’t tell you when Manny will be released,” Aragon’s [...]

By Rob Nikolewski │ New Mexico Watchdog
ALBUQUERQUE – The long-running arguments over opening the first horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. in seven years took another turn Thursday.
A U.S. magistrate judge ordered the Humane Society of the United States and other animal rights advocates to post, for one month, a bond of $435,600 to two companies [...]

Dave Cargo, a Republican who became the youngest governor in the history of New Mexico when he was elected at the age of 37 in the mid-1960s, died Friday (July 5) after suffering complications from a stroke. He was 84.
From Associated Press:
Known as “Lonesome Dave,” Cargo championed the film industry  and established the first state film commission. [...]

On Friday (June 28), the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the first horse processing plant in the United States in seven years, giving the go-ahead for the Valley Meat Company to start operations outside Roswell.
Back in 2006, a prohibition was placed in the U.S. preventing horse slaughter and the last plant was closed in 2007. [...]

One day after Republican Gov. Susana Martinez said “the public deserves to know what he knew” about a fast-developing scandal involving hacked e-mails and a Democratic consultant facing child pornography charges, attorney and chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico Sam Bregman responded Thursday (June 6) by saying the governor is playing politics and making “a [...]

Affidavits released by U.S. Attorney’s office in New Mexico indicate that the arrest of a Democratic political consultant on child pornography charges stemmed from the investigation that led to the arrest of a former Republican campaign official charged with hacking into the e-mail account of Gov. Susana Martinez.
It’s the latest twist into the complicated story surrounding electronic [...]

Firefighters battling wildfires on two different fronts in Northern New Mexico are making progress but the blazes outside the town of Pecos and another in the Jemez Mountains are just 5 percent contained as of Monday morning (June 3) and officials worry that warmer weather could make things even more difficult.
Hotter and drier conditions are expected Monday [...]

In May of 2009, Barack Obama held one of his first news conferences with the White House press corps and New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny asked him …
Well, what tough question do you think would come from a hard-bitten group that prides itself on its preternatural skepticism?
Why the new President, three months into his [...]