Editorials

To its credit, Congress was able to avert a crisis a couple weeks ago by not shutting down the government. But that’s about the only credit Congress  deserves, since just about everything else in Washington is currently dysfunctional.

THUMBS UP! FUN FOR A GOOD CAUSE. Saturday’s “Jamboree for Japan” was a rousing success — and a lot of fun to boot. Members of First United Methodist Church, students from United World College and other volunteers organized various “booths” in the basement of the church for such things as how to make origami and paper lanterns, write haiku poems, use chopsticks, and more.

And the $10 admission also got you a full meal. It was all to benefit Japanese people suffering after the effects of last month’s earthquake and tsunami.

State Land Commissioner Ray Powell did the right thing by reversing a land swap that his predecessor, Patrick Lyons, had arranged. Powell has effectively returned White Peak in Colfax and Mora counties to the people — where it rightly belongs.

In 2009, Lyons negotiated an agreement to swap 7,205 acres of state trust land at White Peak for 3,330 acres of ranch land. The exchange was one of four proposed by the State Land Office under Lyons that would have traded 14,000 acres of public land for 9,600 acres owned by White Peak ranches.

Last year, New Mexico school districts were facing an across-the-board cut of more than 3 percent when then-Gov. Bill Richardson decided he didn’t want it to happen on his watch. So he used some stimulus money as a band-aid and passed the bleeding on to the new governor.

Then came the Susana Martinez administration, ready to take on the state budget by cutting but not taxing. So when public education cuts came in at about 1.5 percent, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

It was too good to be true.