Columns

In a rare bipartisan moment, something significant happened last week in the United States Senate and New Mexico’s two senators, Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, helped to make it happen by voting to end the chaos and misunderstanding surrounding the sales tax and online purchases.
And good for them and the 67 other senators who joined in bipartisan passage of the Marketplace Fairness Act.
One of the major fictions about commerce today is that Internet sales are immune from what we here in New Mexico call the gross-receipts tax, but is more commonly known elsewhere as the sales tax.
Yet, while the great bulk of online sales do go tax free, so to speak, others are in fact legally subject to the sales tax in New Mexico and other states with such a tax.
By law, any retailer with an outlet, store or office in a state where a consumer makes an online purchase is required to collect whatever rate the sales tax is levied. So if you live in New Mexico and purchase a coat from Eddie Bauer, you are obligated to pay the 5.125 to 8.6875 percent (depending on location) gross-receipts tax levied on that sale.
Why? Because Eddie Bauer has an outlet in New Mexico.

As long as we have been talking about Gov. Susana Martinez and former Gov. Garry Carruthers, we don’t want former Gov. Bill Richardson to feel left out.
While our current governor darts around the nation and world, our immediate past governor, Bill Richardson is doing much the same. He is serving on numerous boards, some of which he heads. He is speaking at prestigious universities.
He is writing a book, “How to Sweet Talk a Shark.” It tells of his experiences successfully negotiating with dictators.
Richardson said the secrets are to connect with them personally. Let them vent about how badly the United States has treated them. Find out what they really need, not what they say they need. And use humor.
Negotiating with dictators is dangerous business. Richardson was basically by himself with no protection other than his own wits. He always had quiet approval of the presidents he served and he was a U.S. official.
But it all was taking place on a back channel. Richardson was good at it and has lived to tell the story. The book comes out this fall, but he already is being interviewed on television and in newspapers.

By now, most Americans have seen a QR code, even if they didn’t initially understand why these two-dimensional matrix bar codes were suddenly appearing on products, advertisements and business cards.
Called QR for “quick response,” the codes were created in 1994 by Japanese automakers to track parts.
Now companies around the world use them to link consumers directly to their websites, where they can shop and find coupons, special offers and product information.
While QR codes are already considered outmoded by the creators of next-generation apps that link the physical and virtual worlds in quicker and more entertaining ways, at least one New Mexico advertising agency believes QR codes haven’t outlived their usefulness and are more reliable than newer so-called “hardlinking” technologies.
Defining the value
Reading QR codes requires a scanner that’s available as a smartphone application. The scanner converts the image to an Internet address, where the digital content is posted.
Without the smartphone, the QR code is unreadable, making it worthless to people whose mobile phones lack Internet connectivity.

Open voting in primary elections is the latest idea tossed into the policy conversation by Think New Mexico, the Santa Fe-based nonpartisan, liberal think tank.
Open voting would mean registered independents, or “decline to state,” as we call it, could vote in primary elections. A majority of states allow this, Steve Terrell of The New Mexican wrote April 28 in his blog.
Inclusion is the big reason for bringing independents into the primary election process. Besides, better candidates might emerge.
A candidate with broad appeal to the electorate might not be strong enough to win a primary, tilted as they are to the right and left. Democrats embraced the idea. The Republicans, always worried that someone could disrupt the tight cabal, whined that someone might game the system, which is true, but massively irrelevant.
A well-stated general rationale comes from Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto, a Democrat from Albuquerque elected in 2012. “Voting is what legitimizes everything that government does,” Ivey-Soto said as we closed our conversation in his cluttered one-man office.
Fred Nathan of Think New Mexico notes that allowing independents to vote in primaries is called “semi-open,” while having every registered voter pick a primary (Democrats vote in the Republican primary, etc.) is “open.”