U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual is resigning. Pascual's cables, critical of the Mexico President Calderon's handling of the drug war, were among those released by Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks cables on Mexico and the drug war are accessible here.

Susana Martinez, New Mexico's new Republican Governor and a former prosecutor, campaigned on a tough-on-immigration platform.

With her support, including ads paid from leftover campaign funds, a bill to repeal a law allowing undocumented residents to get driver's licenses passed the state house.

Today, the New Mexico Senate has rejected the bill.

Some law enforcement groups opposed the repeal, saying it would result in tens of thousands of unlicensed and uninsured drivers.

Immigrant rights groups are also happy with the bill's defeat:

"This goes to show that you come in with a radical, extremist agenda, you're going to get push-back because New Mexico is not a radical extremist state," said Marcela Diaz, head of immigrants rights group Somos un Pueblo Unido.

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U.S. Tomahawk missiles have landed in Libya. President Obama today said he has authorized "limited military action in Libya" and that "that action has now begun."

The first airstrikes will take out Gadhafi's air defenses in the western part of Libya, mostly concentrated around Tripoli and Misrata.

"Once we do that, that would open up the environment where we could enforce the no-fly zone throughout, from east to west of Libya," the official said.

The next phase will be "planes flying over Libyan airspace near Tripoli, and in the Mediterranean Sea near Benghazi. ." Also participating: The UK, Canada, France and Italy.

Obama says no ground troops will be going to Libya. On the strikes, he said today in Brazil:

This is not an outcome the U.S. or any of our partners sought...We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy."

8 games today and tomorrow for a trip to the Sweet Sixteen. Here are my picks:

Temple +6 over San Diego State (2 units.) SDSU has good athletes but I do not think they can hold up on this stage. Temple, playing with no pressure, having won a nailbiter in the first round, seems poised to not only cover the spread, but to win outright.

More . . .

The Colorado Department of Revenue has issued new rules relating to Medical Marijuana Centers (MMCs) in Colorado. They go into effect July 1, 2011. You can read the 77 pages of rules here.

Via e-mail received from Cannabis Therapy Center, which is still studying the rules, the Department of Revenue made some effort to comply with patient privacy and confidentiality but they fall short in some areas, for example: [More...]

A Wisconsin judge has blocked the state's new union law.

For those of you not following March Madness, here's an open thread for all other topics.

Talk about it here.

Did the efforts to boycott Arizona have some impact? The answer is yes. After passing the deplorable SB 1070, yesterday the Arizona Senate defeated five new restrictive immigration bills.

One bill would have denied citizenship to children of undocumented residents (not a chance it would have passed a judicial challenge if enacted.) The others bills would:

• Require hospitals to make an effort to determine if the people they are treating are here legally.
• Restrict the registration of vehicles to only legal residents.
• Bar admission into state universities and community colleges to anyone who cannot prove citizenship or legal residency.

Other provisions in the bills would have required cities to evict all residents of a public housing unit if just one resident is undocumented, required parents to show proof of citizenship or lawful presence when enrolling a child in school, and made it a crime for an undocumented resident to drive in Arizona.

Republicans voting against the bill said the boycott had an effect. [More...]

The Phoenix Police Department says it needs more manpower to fight the increased number of kidnapping and home invasions in the city. But last month, Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris was reassigned due to an investigation into alleged inflated kidnapping statistics by the department. Why would police fudge those statistics? To qualify for a $1.7 million federal grant.

The ATF has recently come under heavy criticism for its reverse stings, particularly those involving guns ending up in Mexico.

So what happens? The ATF teams up with the Phoenix Police. Six ATF agents have been permanently assigned to the Phoenix police Kidnapping and Home Invasion Unit. [More...]

The U.N. has authorized military strikes and imposed a "no fly zone" in Libya. Secretary of State Clinton said in Tunisia today.

"...that a no-fly zone would include "certain actions taken to protect the planes and the pilots, including bombing targets like the Libyan defense systems."

The U.S. is monitoring inbound flights from Japan for radiation. So far, there's no cause for concern. Also, the U.S. has chartered flights to evacuate family members of state department officials from the Northeast region of Japan. [More...]

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has released its December, 2010 report critical of U.S. detention policy for immigrants. The focus of the report is on ICE’s civil immigration operations. From the Report's Introduction:

the Inter-American Commission is convinced that in many if not the majority of cases, detention is a disproportionate measure and the alternatives to detention programs would be a more balanced means of serving the State’s legitimate interest in ensuring compliance with immigration laws. The IACHR is disturbed by the rapid increase in the number of partnerships with local and state law enforcement for purposes of enforcing civil immigration laws.

The Inter-American Commission finds that ICE has failed to develop an oversight and accountability system to ensure that these local partners do not enforce immigration law in a discriminatory manner by resorting to racial profiling and that their practices do not use the supposed investigation of crimes as a pretext to prosecute and detain undocumented migrants.

The New York Times has more here.

Jeh Johnson, the General Counsel for the Department of Defense, is urging Congress not to rule out civilian trials of detainees.

Jeh (Jay) Johnson said a Republican bill to virtually remove the civilian option would make it more likely that courts would step in when detainees challenge their detentions. He testified Thursday before the House Armed Services Committee.

Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald has much more on new Republican efforts to prevent closing Gitmo:

But the focus was the Republican draft legislation that would further thwart Obama’s efforts to close the detention center in southeast Cuba. It also would give the defense secretary rather than the attorney general final say on keeping a detainee in military custody. The bill imposes such tough requirements on transfers of the last Guantánamo captives that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he might not be able to approve any release.

Best line from the hearing:

They turn Guantánamo Bay into the Hotel California,” said the top Democrat on the committee, Washington Rep. Adam Smith. “You can check out any time you want but you can never leave.”

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