A group headed by Al Gore is hosting a library roundtable this Wednesday to talk about the hoped-for benefits of the Waxman-Markey bill, a plan to kickstart clean-energy industries now wending its way through Congress. (No, Gore won’t be there). According to Repower America, a “project” of the Gore-led Alliance…
This is one Titanic fishing expedition. The requests made of county offices by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Office have received a lot of attention because they’re so broad, but details about them in the press have been scarce. We figured that folks who are interested in the ongoing dispute between county…
An undercover agent who infiltrated the Arizona Hells Angels basically called his federal superiors cowards this morning on NPR for not doing more to find out who burned down his Tucson home last year. Jay Dobyns, a University of Arizona grad who has been promoting his recently released book about…
Chatting the other day with Hillary Foose, spokeswoman for Metro Light Rail, we ran into a dead end of confounding numbers. Goes something like this:The light-rail system has two sets of measurements for freeloaders: The average number of people not properly ticketed, according to ticket inspectors, and the amount of…
Bashas’ employees who say they’re tired of a labor union’s dirty tactics have launched a “grassroots effort” to strike back. The group “Save Our Stores” is fighting against the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 99, which has targeted the locally run chain for unionization. We covered the battle…
Experienced elections law attorney Lisa Hauser (pictured) isn’t the only applicant to face rejection for an appointment to the Arizona Supreme Court. Seventeen people applied for the vacancy on the high court to be left by outgoing Chief Justice Ruth McGregor, so Hauser had plenty of competition. But Hauser’s application received special attention…
The Phoenix Police Department couldn’t shut up Bruce Jacobs, even after he said a dead cop would have been “ashamed” of his wife’s immigration opinions. Now a local, “semi-retired” substitute teacher wants to take up the charge to get Jacobs, a right-wing talk show host with KFYI (550 AM), off the air. Phillip…
The government has a program in place that could freeze illegal workers from the workplace — E-Verify. But political leaders on both sides of the aisle don’t want to use it. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass makes this point today with quotes from a former immigration agent from Scottsdale, Neville Cramer (pictured). As…
One of our fleet-fingered readers managed to cut and paste the text of a right-wing blog post and its comments about Brett Mecum (above), executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, just before the blog site deleted the content. Like many blog sites, including our own Valley Fever, the popular, conservative blog Sonoran Alliance…
Walter Staton, 27, is being punished for a good deed. A Tucson man was found guilty by a federal jury this week of littering. His crime: Placing water jugs in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge for thirsty illegal immigrants.Staton belongs to a group called “No More Deaths,” which has…
Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas has charged a Glendale man who stabbed his family members with two counts of first-degree murder.
How times change. Four years ago, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano sent the feds a bill for $118 million, the amount she said the state had paid to incarcerate illegal immigrant prisoners. Now, as an A-list fed herself, Napolitano expects residents of her former home to be happy with $12.8 million…
The founder of the call-girl-finding Web site, www.theeroticreview.com, David Elms, has been arrested in California after two months on the lam from Maricopa County criminal charges. Phoenix police say Elms: …was arrested today south of San Diego while trying to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. It…
The Arizona Republic’s immigration reporter, Daniel Gonzalez, came across some interesting stats today from the Phoenix Police Department’s Professional Standards Bureau that show cops aren’t asking arrestees about immigration status, like they’re supposed to. Police put the rule into effect in May of 2008 after months of controversial debate (which…
So-called human traffickers were apparently trying to set up shop in Arizona before authorities caught up to them. According a May indictment of 12 people, including eight from Uzbekistan, the alleged traffickers had already brought several immigrants to Missouri for construction projects, intentionally allowing them to overstay their work…
A bus collided with a light rail train just after 6:30 a.m., sending eight passengers to the hospital “for precautionary reasons,” cops says. Some victims complained of neck and back pains. (Cha-ching!)Phoenix police report this morning that a city bus trying to turn right onto Washington Street from 1st Avenue…
Zoinks, Batman, can’t a superhero have a good time without being accosted constantly by the paparazzi?We can’t tell you for sure if this is Brett Mecum behind the Captain America mask, but that’s what the The Dirty says. We thought Mecum saw himself more as The Flash…
No surprise here: Anti-photo-enforcement Judge John Keegan has dismissed the speed camera case against Arizona Republican Party Director Brett Mecum. Keegan, justice of the peace for the Arrowhead Justice Court, has tossed hundreds of photo-enforcement cases because he believes the system is unconstitutional. The Department of Public Safety sends…
Paul Chagolla can’t stop being a spokesman for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.Though Chagolla left Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s flighty “communications” department in December, having been promoted the department’s first Hispanic deputy chief, he’s been filling the pages of local newspapers in guest columns. His latest diatribe in the East ValleyTribune…
The number of homes sold in Phoenix continues to smash records made during the peak of the housing boom in 2005. The numbers look quite impressive on a chart made by a local real estate sales blog, click2az.com:…
The State Senate still intends to boot reporters out of rooms at the State Capitol that they’ve worked in for more than three decades — it’ll happen at the end of this legislative session, staffers say. So, in the interest of preserving a (somewhat moldy) slice of history, here is…
An Apache Junction woman claims the Arizona Heart Hospital violated her right to religious freedom by demanding she be immunized as a condition of employment. Melissa Allen, a licensed nurse, applied at the Phoenix hospital two years ago as a patient care assistant and was told by the “charge nurse” that…
