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Should someone--like Senate Finance Committee Chairman George Muñoz--put Western New Mexico University and the taxpaying public out of their misery and force the resignation of school President Joseph Shepard, or will there be even more reports of the president's outrageous and unaccountable spending abuses? 

Shepard is paid over $$350,000 a year and has been president of the Silver City-based university since 2011. He has taken liberties with the school's expense account far beyond proper boundaries and his onetime celebrity wife Valerie Plame has gone along for the ride. 

State Auditor Joseph Maestas says as much in his review and now the State Ethics Commission is taking a look.

Still, the recalcitrant and tone-deaf WNMU Board of Regents clings to the tarnished president, putting them on course for a showdown with the Legislature. (The Governor, who appoints the Regents, could also put pressure on the Regents to give Joe the boot but hasn't indicated she will.) 

Shepard

Overlooked in the scandal is that Muñoz and company hold the purse strings to WNMU. That leverage may be needed to convince the WNMU Regents that their President has gone off the rails and send him to the Mustang showers.

Shepard and and Flame are lucky that a DA is not looking into the mess and are able to head for the exits without skidding. But time is not on their side. 

WNMU boosters are hoping Santa Fe does what it does best and uses that power of the purse to get the blindfolded Regents and their wayward President to see the light--and the door.

 LIVIN' LARGE WNMU STYLE

WNMU spent $25,500 in taxpayer money to send six people to the Ritz-Carlton, Rancho Mirage, a resort in the scenic desert of Palm Springs, California. The auditor’s report says that figure was part of a total of $363,525.99 misused as part of the university’s “wasteful” and “improper” spending. . .Examiners. . . found that the university spent more than $214,000 on 402 domestic and international trips that violated its own policies, along with nearly $150,000 on university credit card transactions that also broke policy. . . . WNMU President Joseph Shepard has often traveled with his wife, former CIA agent-turned-author Valerie Plame, and with members of the WNMU Board of Regents, visiting faraway places like Zambia, Greece and Spain in the name of courting international students and their out-of-state tuition dollars.  

ROBINHOOD

Reade Ron Nelson pushes back against last week's Our Voices column from progressive Mitchell Freedman:

Hi Joe, Freedman writes: "I will be pushing our representatives to ensure nobody making $40,000 or less should be paying any state income tax--plus those earning over $175,000 should be paying 7% on the margin and those making over $500,000 9% on the margin.” 

Hint: this isn’t progressive economics, it is the old Democrat version of Robin Hood, robbing the rich to pay the poor.  

THE LATINO VOTE 

The question du jour for Democrats is how do they stop Hispanic voters from drifting towards the Republicans as many did in the November election. Arizona Dem US Senator-elect Ruben Gallego has some thoughts:

What about Latino men, specifically, who moved away from Democrats in a striking way for the second presidential cycle in a row? Latino men feel like their job is to provide security for their family, economic security and physical security, and when that is compromised, they start looking around. What happened post-pandemic with inflation, Latino men felt that no matter what they did, they couldn’t get economic security for their family because the prices were so damn high. Mentally speaking, Latino men believe they could always work their way out of anything. Oh, if I want to buy this, I’ll just add extra hours or I’ll just cut here. I’ll just work here. And I think for the first time in a while, they felt that they weren’t doing that and they weren’t providing it. And the future, to them, seems bleaker also for the kids. 

THE BOTTOM LINES

Dem Rep. Eliseo Alcon, 74, who announced his resignation from his western NM House seat over health-related issues over the weekend, now says he suffers from liver cancer and is in hospice care. We wish him well. 

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