Looking like the nation’s homeliest eagle scout, John Kerry snapped off a salute and announced to his convention, “Reporting for duty.” George W. Bush had already embraced “Mission Accomplished” on an aircraft carrier flight deck in his après-combat flight suit. With each of these two nimrods trying to convince me…

Joseph Stedino, the Cadillac-size Mafioso, shoved wads of cash toward Bobby Raymond, a state legislator who looked like an altar boy holding a collection plate. Stedino bribed the politician to secure off-reservation, goombah-style gambling in Arizona. Public servant Raymond promised action and plenty of it. To establish street cred with…

Haven’t you always wondered what Ralph Nader groupies look like? I have. Nader’s a sort of celebrity in the way that tofu’s a sort of food, and in these effervescent days of cable exposure, all politicians — even a serial scold — are national personalities. The best-kept political secret is…

I am terminally ill with rectal cancer. (Go ahead, make a crude joke. I’d have cracked wise if the tables were reversed. If only.) The pain is unimaginable in a place that should never hurt. The hospice attendants have given me control of the morphine drip, something I longed for…

Bishop Thomas J. O’Brien is the highest ranking Catholic cleric ever charged criminally in the United States. As we go to press, a jury is mulling whether the bishop will celebrate his next Mass behind bars. Bishop O’Brien is accused of “leaving the scene of a serious injury or fatal…

Picture the Jerry Lewis telethon. See that guy in the wheelchair with the crooked arm? Now imagine him trying to juggle a dozen raw eggs. This conjures up a mixture of revulsion and fear, doesn’t it? Which is precisely what I feel when confronted by a microphone. Except the eggs…

New Times is bringing pop-culture luminary Richard Florida to the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix at 6:30 p.m. on October 21. We expect him to save us from ourselves. You’re invited; tickets are free. Florida was last year’s — “Check out the big brain on Brad” — author of The Rise…

If Governor Janet Napolitano isn’t a lesbian, I’ll eat your hat. She is a walking, one-woman LPGA tour all by herself. It may be the thing I like best about her. I’ve known Attorney General Terry Goddard almost from the first moment he entered politics, and I’ve never known a…

Have you ever gotten behind the wheel and done a California roll you know, slowing to a crawl but not coming to a dead stop at a marked intersection? Of course you have. Luciano Arriaga Jr., 35, was accused of this minor moving violation. It cost him 10 years in…

And my dog died, too. For some months I believed, simply enough, that this year was just a bad year, a particular period with much death and cancer. So when my 17-year-old hound dog passed on this winter, it was more than just her time. Missi’s demise was one more…

I am thinking of pip-squeaks the other day, when who should come to mind but congressional candidate Fred Duval. Duval is running against a field of 13, including my dog in this hunt, Steve Udall. If you are a Democrat in Phoenix, you have been solicited for money for Duval’s…

Attorney General Janet Napolitano said at a hastily convened press conference on Friday that she is filing a class-action lawsuit against Southwest Airlines because of the company’s new policy of charging stout customers double the normal air fare. The airline’s intent to force fat passengers to pay twice the cost…

Machine-gun nests manned by teenage Indians in Mexico’s army confront the eco-tourist intent on whale watching in today’s Baja. The soldiers are there to search you and your sports utility vehicle for drugs. In Canada, interdiction dogs sniff for, of all things, pirated abalone. You may yearn for what Henry…

Big-name sophisticates like Jean-Michel Cousteau and Robert Kennedy Jr. rejoiced when it was announced last year that a controversial salt plant proposed in Mexico had been stopped. As news reports crackled across Japan, North America and Europe, environmentalists celebrated the unprecedented victory that saved the gray whale. The globe-encircling crusade…

In frigid waters north of Japan, in the Sea of Okhotsk, fewer than 100 Western Pacific gray whales, until recently thought vanished from the planet, feed each summer. Imagine scientists’ excitement at discovering this lost tribe — and their dismay that their research is intertwined with massive oil and gas…

Cheri Jarvis raced to the emergency room, afraid. “When I arrived at the hospital, I did not even recognize my son. He was covered in blood and his head was swollen and his nose was everywhere on his face. He had so much blood caked on his teeth and mouth…

The young man at the end of the pew is a professional car thief. Law enforcement also recognizes him as a cocaine user and a drug peddler. Yet here he sits in church, a child of God as much as you or your neighbor. He accepted Jesus while locked up…

As the cruise missiles fell in her Belgrade neighborhood, one woman’s writing floated her spirit with the buoyancy of hope. Maritza Yosimlevic longed that her short stories might give pleasure, a desire that exceeded her fear of death. “I must leave now. The air-raid sirens are going off. The bombers…

When the shooting erupted in the living room of the Pueblo Street crackhouse, Larry Jack had just stepped out of the apartment’s bathroom. His babies, a 4-year-old girl and a little boy, just 20-months-old, were splashing in the tub as their mother fussed nearby. At first, the fire from the…

There isn’t but 120 pounds to Howard Youngblood, and every single ounce of the young black man is torqued with anxiety. He is one of four people who shared a home on East Chipman Street in South Phoenix. His roommates, Man-man, Dink and Mookie, as well as a visitor, Rolanda,…

Like a bowl of granola laced with prune bits, I know I am supposed to like Janet Napolitano. But, damn, it’s a dry chew. Here in Arizona, amongst a certain crowd that came of age during the civil rights and Vietnam protests, it is gospel that Napolitano must be our…

Hey you! Mister! Gimme a buck. I need a drink. Christ, I feel like I’ve got gum in my hair. I’m feeling mentally ill and homeless. I’m feeling like Larry Naman. Who wouldn’t after watching our politicians? I’m watching Governor Jane Dee Hull slap the snot out of kids at…