Funny you guys talk about drunk driving. Here in New Mexico, or "DWI USA," our lawmakers are tripping over each other trying to look tough on drunk driving. It's really a tough problem to solve without just throwing a lot of alcoholics in jail, and we've actually made inroads in the last ten years, but there's what I would call a culture of DWI that is just tough to combat. Case in point:

A couple of weeks ago, there was a head-on collision at rush hour on a busy highway about 40 miles north of Santa Fe. All we knew at first was one guy was dead. Then, we found out that one of the vehicles involved had been a county-owned van. The van driver survived, and told police his story -- he had finished taking seniors home from the county senior center (this was his job) and had stopped at his cousin's for a few drinks (six) before going home. He missed his driveway and then tried to do something crazy into oncoming traffic, which resulted in him hitting an oncoming car. Then the police did a check on him and found out that he had two previous DWI convictions (the most recent one was in October) and had his license revoked. Keep in mind this guy's job was driving old people around. The county said it was not aware of this development because it had done a check on his record before he got the license revoked. Then we learn about the victim in the crash -- he had nine DWI convictions to his name and was also driving, you guessed it, with a revoked license. They're awaiting toxicology reports to see if he had been drinking, although reports indicate the crash was pretty much the fault of the van driver. So I guess the moral of the story is, ummm....lots of people drive drunk? Oh, and revoking driver's licenses doesn't, in itself, prevent anything.