I am not sure if anyone outside Minnestoa is following the spectacular impolosion of our state GOP

[SheilaT]

51. New Mexico, which is off the

radar of almost everyone who doesn't actually live here, is astonishingly corrupt. I've only been here three and a half years, and every time I think it can't get worse, it does.

Our recently elected Republican governor, Susana Martinez us amazingly inept. She keeps on pulling stuff that then gets her hauled before the state supreme court, and every time they shoot her down. The most recent was her attempt at a line-item veto in the state budget, and the state supreme court said in no uncertain terms she could not do that.

We have a recently resigned Public Regulation Commission person who almost never bothered to attend meetings or do whatever work he was supposed to do, and was making ninety grand a year. Oh, and it's an elected office. Anyway, he was rather egregiously using his state-supplied gas credit card apparently to buy gas for others and maybe to purchase things that weren't gas. It's not totally clear. He's a Democrat. More recently he's been thrown out of a court-ordered drug program I gather for failing drug tests, and it looks like he'll spend a couple of years in jail.

We had a sheriff, again an elected Democrat, who had to resign because he was caught selling department equipment, including bullet-proof vests, over the internet.

These are just ones I can recite off the top of my head, and there are many, many more. I simply cannot get over the level of blatant, overt, obvious corruption and malfeasance. It makes me wonder if any elected official can be trusted.

At the moment our two Senators, both Democrats, (Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall) seem to be pretty honest and good. Bingamen is retiring at the end of this term, and the Democrats don't seem to have any candidate to run in that office. I have no idea why.