Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson will be allowed to participate in Thursday’s Fox News debate in Orlando, Fla., among Republican presidential candidates, The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz reports:

The former New Mexico governor won the right to participate, according to Fox sources, by cracking 1 percent in the latest five national polls in which he was included—Fox News, CNN, McClatchy-Marist, ABC, and Quinnipiac—which was the criterion the network had set for inclusion.

Talking Points Memo reports Johnson has yet to receive final notification that he will participate in the debate, though he told TPM, “It would be good news if we get it.”

Johnson is a self-identified libertarian who differentiates himself from Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the more popular of the libertarian GOP candidates, with his support for abortion rights and his opposition to the construction of a border fence. He has attended one other GOP debate, where he was asked about his support for drug legalization and discussed his initial opposition to the war in Iraq.

According to Politico, Johnson’s inclusion in the debate came over the objection of the Florida Republican Party, which has excluded him from Saturday’s Florida straw poll.

If he does indeed receive a debate invitation, Johnson will have temporarily left the ranks of presidential candidates who have too little support to gain the valuable national airtime of a debate. These candidates include former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer (R), Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) and California Republican Fred Karger.

Voters in Tuesday’s Albuquerque municipal elections decided to keep two incumbent city councilors in office but rejected one of Mayor Richard Berry’s top initiatives. A long-standing red-light photo-camera bill was also rebuked.

Mayor Berry’s “ABQ: The Plan” — the pairing of an improved interstate highway interchange and the construction of a 35-acre complex of sports fields and indoor courts, to the combined tune of $50 million — got nixed by voters. Although gracious in defeat of his proposal (a reaction perhaps assuaged by the possibility of dedicating a portion of the city’s $3 million annual operating budget to the interchange project), Mayor Berry said that the “voters spoke, and we’ll listen.”

In a vote that echoed sentiments voiced by other urban drivers throughout the country, 53 percent of Albuquerque voters cast ballots against controversial red-light cameras. Although the vote is not yet law, the results likely spell the end of the program — with a vote on a bill possibly as soon as tonight.

City councilor Dan Lewis, who had helped put the anti-camera proposal on the ballot, had called the devices a “scam,” and said after last night’s results that if those numbers hold true, he’ll introduce a bill to kill off the cameras altogether. The cameras, initially put in place to record drivers who ran red lights and later saddled with the even more contentious duty of issuing citations to speeders, could be gone in as little as sixty days. The cameras were first installed in two intersections in October 2004.

On a supportive note, voters did approve of the $164 million price tag for general obligation bonds, a program that provides money for libraries, storm drainage, parks, streets, and other amenities. And two incumbent councilors, Trudy Jones and Brad Winter, were also reelected.

The Republican Party of New Mexico’s suit filing in federal court last Friday to challenge the state’s Limits Law, a campaign finance law passed in 2009, is poised for a fight. Some who previously supported the law are now joining to dismantle it.

“They’re wanting to go back to the good ol’ days,” said Rep. Jeff Steinborn (D-Las Cruces), sponsor of the 2009 House version of the bill that passed on a 49-17 vote . “They want to go back to being able to funnel as much money as possible through the state’s Republican Party.”

The law restricts individuals or entities from donating more than $2,300 to a non-statewide candidate in an election or $5,000 to a statewide candidate, a political party or political action committee.

The suit was filed with the support of James Bopp Jr., an attorney who claims to specialize in free speech cases out of his Indiana-based law firm Bopp, Coleson and Bostromin Terre Haute, and with the James Madison Center for Free Speech. The plaintiffs have cited Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in their suit.

Sen. Rod Adair (R—Roswell), the sole dissenting vote in the Senate during the law’s passing, is also one of the plaintiffs in the suit. “As long as there’s transparency in the process, I don’t see the need for the limits law,” he said, adding, “I’m glad there are people on the center-right who are willing to take on these issues. That it’s not just the ACLU or the George Soros empire filing lawsuit after lawsuit.”

It’s those other people on the center-right who have Representative Steinborn worried. “New Mexicans need to decide who’s elected,” he said. “Not the Koch brothers [Charles and David, the billionaire brothers who have vehemently campaigned against President Obama and funded various right-wing groups and causes, as well as the Tea Party] or Karl Rove or these outside interests, like the ones who donated $400,000 to Governor Martinez’s gubernatorial campaign. Before the law went into effect.

“They can throw around a modest amount of money here comparatively and win elections,” added Steinborn. “It’s propping up candidates that we maybe wouldn’t support otherwise. And you have to look at the timing of this too: we’re coming up on a presidential election, and we could be a swing state. It’s exactly what we sought to shut down with our bill, and we really wanted to get the big money out of the races. It’s very bad for New Mexico. Very bad.”

The latest salvos against the Occupiers comes not from without but from within. On the Daily Kos website, evergreen2, of New Mexico, tells readers that “The term “Occupy” is not going down well with many indigenous people. . . . we [the Albuquerque “occupiers” of the OccupyBurque site]—and a number of other communities—are having a serious problem with terminology.”

A sit-in participant since last Friday, evergreen2 touts the ethnic diversity of New Mexico and of Albuquerque and points out that “for many indigenous people, the term “Occupy” is deeply problematic. For New Mexico’s indigenous people, “Occupy” means five-hundred years of forced occupation of their lands, resources, cultures, power, and voices by the imperial powers of both Spain and the United States. A big chunk of the 99 percent has been served pretty well by that arrangement. A smaller chunk hasn’t.”

After listening to various indigenous “Occupiers” speak about what the term meant to them, the Albuquerque protesters then debated over what else they might call their movement, wrote evergreen2. In the end, the Albuquerque contingent suggested LiberateBurque. The problem then became, as evergreen2 also pointed out, the anti-Wall Street movement has already become known as an OccupyFillintheBlank phenomenon.

Nevertheless, the debate over nomenclature continues. Up north, the OccupyDenver protesters issued a manifesto that quoted the American Indian Movement of Colorado: “If this movement is serious about confronting the foundational assumptions of the current U.S. system, then it must begin by addressing the original crimes of the U.S. colonizing system against indigenous nations.”

In her NativeAppropriations blog, Adrienne K. of Boston cites other indigenous peoples upset with the Occupiers’ use of the term Occupy—as well as objecting to the use of Native imagery and history. One example she points to is the “Decolonize WallStreet” image that appeared on Facebook. It’s an image that to her “only serves to further stereotype Native people and present mis-information about the land which is currently being double-occupied.”

It’s a point of view, mainly coming from Native Americans and other indigenous peoples of North America, that the Occupiers seemed to have marched right past, according to blogger Jess Yee, who stated her objections to the language of the movement on racialicious.com: “We don’t need more occupation—we need decolonization and it’s everyone’s responsibility to participate in that because COLONIALISM AFFECTS EVERYONE. EVERYONE! Colonialism also leads to capitalism, globalization, and industrialization. How can we truly end capitalism without ending colonialism?”

As Yee stated earlier in her racialicious piece, “good intentions are not enough and good intentions obviously can have adverse affects.”

New Mexico’s attorney general Gary King, a democrat previously linked to pay-to-play scandals, told reporters yesterday that it was entirely legal to accept a $15,000 political contribution from the New York City law firm of Bernstein Litowitz Berger and Grossman LLP last month — despite the nine-month-old campaign contribution limits law he championed less than a year ago.

In his defense, he told reporters that because he was no longer a candidate when the check arrived on September 22 but already an elected official that it was fine to apply the funds to debts incurred during his 2010 campaign. “The easy legal solution,” he said, “is that it applies to candidates in elections 2012 and after. And I am not a candidate.”

The matter now goes to Secretary of State Dianna Duran, whose office tends to turn to the Attorney General for legal advice. King is confident that after Duran’s lawyers reflect on his interpretation of things, “they’ll agree” with him.

King’s contributions come at a particularly busy time in campaign contributions news.

Last Friday,  James Bopp Jr., an Indiana lawyer who specializes in lawsuits aimed at ending campaign finance and disclosure laws, filed, a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s campaign contributions limits law along with other plaintiffs from New Mexico (including state senator Rod Adair, R-Roswell, former New Mexico Republican Party chair Harvey Yates, and state representative James Conrad, R-Albuquerque).

It was also reported today that Governor Susana Martinez took in $66,000 in campaign contributions last month. She claimed her acceptance of the money “adheres to both the spirit and the letter of the law.”

King has come under scrutiny because the $15,000 contributions are well above the limit as set forth in the state’s campaign contributions limits law, which banned pledges of $5,000 or more per election cycle as of November 3 of last year (the day after he was reelected as attorney general).

This past Friday, former Public Regulation Commission member Jerome Block Jr. showed up for a mandatory meeting with his Adult Drug Court administrator in Santa Fe’s First Judicial District courthouse only to fail his mandated drug test.  As a result, he was remanded into custody at the county jail. Within a few hours, campaign-finance figures for three of the 88 declared candidates were released.

The frontrunner, by far, is Danny Maki, son of the well-known lobbyist and former Bill Richardson aide Butch Maki who also worked for the PRC when Congressman Ben Ray Lujan sat on the commission. Maki has dwarfed the fundraising efforts of two of his foes, outpacing Santa Fe County Clerk Valerie Espinoza and banker Brad Gallegos by a count of $12,000 versus their respective takes of $1,712 and $1,693.

Two of Maki’s major contributors are Moses Mercado and Amador Dean Aguillen, both of whom work for the Washington D.C. lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations, whose clients include telecommunications Verizon and T-Mobile. Another $500 contributor is Stephen Crout, a former Richardson aide and a lobbyist for the San Diego-based telecommunicatios company Qualcomm. In addition to regulating the rates and service of electric, gas, water, and wastewater utilities throughout the state, the PRC also oversees the rates and service of telecommunications companies.

Maki says he’s eschewing use of the $40,000 in public funds and relying instead on privately raised capital due to the July ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down part of an Arizona public financing law allowing for “matching funds” for publicly funded candidates outspent by opponents not using public campaign money.

As for Block, the 34-year-old blamed his failed urine test on a technicality, but did not specify what that technicality was.

State Attorney General Gary King said afterward: “This is obviously not a good start toward honoring his commitment to successfully complete drug court under terms of his plea agreement with the state.”

On September 28, Block pled guilty to various felonies (credit-card fraud, identity theft), in exchange for which he could avoid jail time if he successfully completed the drug rehab program, which often takes 12 to 18 months. He was released Saturday morning and is scheduled to appear in court again later this week.

Former Gov. Gary Johnson filed the paperwork for his candidacy in the New Hampshire presidential primary — mere hours before the filing deadline in the crucial early primary state. After a campaign mix-up, Johnson was forced to take a red-eye from Arizona to file his paperwork in person.

The New Hampshire primary is particularly important for Johnson’s long-shot candidacy. He is pro-abortion rights, supports marriage equality and marijuana legalization, positions that make him anathema to Iowa’s social conservative caucus voters. His campaign has counted on performing well in New Hampshire, which is known for its libertarian bent.

In his most recent debate performance, Johnson gained brief national attention for joking that his neighbor’s dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than President Obama. He also repeatedly touted his proposal for a balanced budget amendment, no doubt in the hope that Republican voters would respond more to his fiscal conservatism than to his social liberalism.

According to Democracy in Action, Johnson has spent more time in New Hampshire than any other GOP presidential candidate, a total of 18 visits and 70 days total. His presence in the state has eclipsed even fellow former Gov. Jon Huntsman (Utah), another candidate distrusted by social conservatives who has spent a total of 42 days in New Hampshire.

The New York Times’ Michael Shear notes that had the early winter storm predicted for the East Coast this weekend “swept in 24 hours earlier, Mr. Johnson might have found himself out of luck.”

Last week, New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, along with six of his fellow Democratic colleagues, proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow Congress to regulate the campaign finance system. Long an advocate of campaign finance reform, Udall seeks to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United decision, in which the high court ruled it unconstitutional to regulate the money spent during elections by corporations and unions. In that decision, the Court essentially based its ruling on an earlier Supreme Court decision of 1976, Buckley v. Valeo, which ruled that spending money in elections is a form of speech.

“I strongly disagree with the premise in Buckley and the Supreme Court’s recent reversal of precedent in Citizens United versus the FEC [Federal Elections Commission],” said Udall at the press conference introducing the bill. “The court had previously allowed Congress to pass laws preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption. But the latest reinterpretation of the Constitution has left our political system vulnerable like never before.”

For the bill to become law, it must pass with a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress, then be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures. While acknowledging the difficulty of amending the Constitution, Udall seems to want to capitalize on the growing mood of disaffection with big money overall as evidenced by the Tea Partiers and the Occupiers. In comments to the online site, Politico Influence, days after his proposal, Udall said, “I believe there is a significant grass-roots movement out there to take the money out of politics.”

He said that the momentum on Capitol Hill has already picked up since introducing the bill, claiming 10 of his fellow senators have agreed to co-sponsor the amending (in addition to the six who signed on with him and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, including Richard Durbin of Illinois, Charles Schumer of New York, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Tom Harkin of Iowa). “It’s pretty dramatic how the campaign landscape has changed.”

Although Udall had no response when asked about the recent kerfuffle over both Republican Governor Susana Martinez’s campaign-contribution issues or those of the state’s Democratic Attorney General Gary King, nor did he have anything to say about James Bopp Jr.’s lawsuit challenging the state’s constitutionality of those very same campaign-contribution limits, his bill cosponsor, Durbin, said at the press conference, “If you want to take our political campaigns out of the hands of special interest groups and Super PACs and groups we’ve never heard of, this is the way to do it.

“I do not begrudge corporations or lobbyists a seat at the table when it comes to making decisions in Washington,” continued Durbin. “But they aren’t entitled to own the table. The table really belongs to the American people.”

Schumer put it even more emphatically, referring to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United and Buckley decisions, stating, “These are awful decisions that need to be overturned.”

The office of Secretary of State Dianna Duran says that the names of 641 dead people are still on the voter registration rolls in New Mexico.

Ken Ortiz, Duran’s chief of staff, says they still don’t know whether anyone has voted using the name of a dead person because they need to check the dates of death against the dates when the names were last used to vote.

The review of voter registration records will be part of a report to the Legislature that Duran is compiling. As part of this review, Duran also announced that 2 foreign nationals had confessed to accidentally registering to vote without knowing that it was illegal.

Duran has made pursuing voter fraud by foreign nationals a high priority, and earlier in the year announced that her office had identified at least 117 foreign nationals on the voter registration rolls, and that 37 foreign nationals had voted in the 2010 elections.

As Keesha Gaskins of the Brennan Center for Justice observed after Duran’s announcement, matching the names and birthdays of voters and lists of foreign nationals in the state is a bad way to check if illegal voting has taken place. Statistically, Gaskins points out, finding matching names and birthdays is quite likely when comparing lists with hundreds of thousands of names over long periods of time.

Finding mismatches between names and Social Security numbers on voter rolls is also a flawed method of identifying fraud, because it discounts the possibility that a Social Security number could be incorrectly entered into the system, either due to the voter’s error when filling out the form or due to an error during data entry.

At the time, Duran also claimed that there were up to 64,000 possible cases of voter fraud in the state. The ACLU of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Duran in July after she made this claim and refused to release documentation to back it up, which the ACLU argued was a violation of the state’s public records law.

Duran said this week that her office is asking some voters to re-register due to irregularities on their form. However, she also said that she would not be purging inactive voter files this year or next year because by federal law notices must be sent in advance to the voter’s address notifying them that their file will be eliminated, something her predecessor did not do.

A raft of new commentary and news pieces in New Mexico are indicating some state leaders would prefer a salaried legislature.

An article in Las Cruces Sun-News, an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal, and commentary on NMPolitics.net point to a frustration by legislators, who say they are too tempted by corporate givings or represent a citizenry that has the financial means.

Moving towards a salaried Legislature would require a change to the state Constitution, but there appears to be political will and cross-party interest in pursuing that amendment.

From Las Cruces Sun-News:

The governor would receive support from certain Democrats if she pushed for legislation that would place restrictions on lobbying jobs for former officeholders or government employees.

“We need to do it because of the perception. The perception of corruption is what we need to get rid,” said Rep. Antonio “Moe” Maestas, D-Albuquerque.

He said he favored a bill prohibiting legislators from becoming lobbyists for one year after they left office.

“I’m happy for Kent for getting that big-wheel job, but I think a one-year restriction would be the right thing to do,” Maestas said.

Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, said he had greater concerns about legislative reform than when somebody can go to work as a lobbyist.

Smith said he was especially bothered by the fact that teachers from the Albuquerque Public Schools and certain school administrators can serve in the Legislature without a loss of pay.

He said these situations posed more significant day-to-day conflicts than former legislators taking lobbying jobs.

Lawmakers do receive stipends for the days they are in session, which last for 30 or 60 days depending on whether it is an election year.

The Las Cruces Sun-News also quoted a legislator saying an amendment could be proposed next year:

Maestas said Rep. Henry “Kiki” Saavedra, a 35-year member of the Legislature, could introduce such a bill in 2012.

“It would have to be somebody with the standing of Kiki. If any of the younger people tried it, it would be looked at as self-serving,” said Maestas, 43.