The Department of Homeland Security has identified a new threat to our nation: a group of nine New Mexicans that includes a Jesuit priest, a retired librarian, a high school student and a church-going grandma.

A Soldier’s Words--Television news usually cuts to the talking heads whenever our leader lets us know just how he is going to make things worse.

Sen. Bernadette Sánchez is serious about payday lending regulations. So serious, she killed a bill in the Senate in last year's session because she believed it was too lenient on the lenders.

In the realm of diamonds and cubic zirconia, one stone is imperfect and made of carbon, the other flawless and made of zirconium oxide. Diamonds are formed deep in the Earth via 2,000-degree heat and intense pressure, over millions, if not billions of years. Cubic zirconia is made in a laboratory. Regardless of mining controversies, conflict diamonds and an international De Beers conspiracy, the diamond is natural and intensely beautiful. The cubic zirconia is an abundant, fabricated imitation. Its look is unfortunately overpowering; plus, it has no humorous urban nickname. (Diamonds you can call "ice.")

Moshe Dayan, the former Israeli defense minister, once said, “If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies.”

I recently toured the still almost-new Bernalillo County Detention Center (BCDC). It was opened about three years ago and this year saw a new psychiatric wing completed, making its total capacity more than 2,500 inmates.

Dateline: England--A woman admitted to a hospital for treatment of a severe migraine had her stay extended when a television fell off the wall and hit her on the head. Sharon Blake, 36, was ready to leave Yeovil District Hospital when she moved the TV, attached to an adjustable arm above her head, and it toppled over. She was left mildly concussed and needed extra observation according to the Sun newspaper. Patientpal, which runs the coin-operated TV system, has apologized for the “isolated incident.”

Here ya go, Albuquerque

Spend the $103 I just paid you

On repairing your countless potholes

Or maybe you could put it toward

Building some kind of recreational center

Or pop forty trash haven for your

Bored shitless teenagers and twentysomethings

Anything to keep them from drag racing

Up and down Montgomery at all hours

Blasting their Christina Aguilera and Ashlee Simpson bullshit

I watched the video online