GOT A SPARE MILLION OR TWO?

It seems our Legislature (yeah, William Payne and his cronies) decided last year that we should all have "voter Id's" in order to vote. So the Secretary of State dutifully had them printed at the order of the electees. And she mailed them out.

They arrived, except in about 200,00 cases, at people's residences, in time for the prmary. Yep, 200,000 people didn't get theirs on time. I called the Secretary's office and was told that no, I did not need the card to vote. My driver's licence was plenty good enough identification. "Why," I asked, "did you mail this useless card to me then?" "The answer," she replied sweetly, "is that the Legislature said we had to mail them out."

Cute, huh? Not when you consider that some cards that were sent to incorrect addresses, there were umpteen mistakes on others, some were mailed to dead people and some went to wrong addresses. And it cost us $1 million bucks.

And our Governator just signed a bill in March that revokes this plan. This bill was thought up by the Republican minority and formally won the Dems vote, too. But so did the original bill that cost us the money. Nothing was mentioned about the hours and hours put in to originate these "ID" cards, nor how much that cost us.

But I'm willing to bet that William Payne and Tim Jennings (another Republican Senator) pushed for this bill, too. These are the guys who want Albuquerque to return to wiping out innocent drivers by getting rid of our red light cameras.

Anyway, how about taking up a collection for us, Washington? We could use it.