How much power do Republicans in Arizona need, for cryin’ out loud? They own every statewide office in Arizona, including the governor’s, and they have majorities in both chambers of the legislature, squirting out crazy bills with astonishing regularity. The Rs currently boast a 5-4 advantage in U.S. House members…
A Maricopa County Superior Court Judge will allow former Minuteman leader Chris Simcox to represent himself during his upcoming trial on allegations that he molested two young girls, one his own daughter, in 2013. During a pretrial hearing Monday morning in Phoenix, Judge Jose Padilla summarily granted Simcox’s request, which…
My, how the canine crazies will howl. Actually, they’re howling already, because on Thursday, Austin and Logan Flake, the son and daughter-in-law of U.S. Senator Jeff Flake, submitted a notice of claim to Maricopa County and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, demanding $8 million for their wrongful indictment in last year’s Green…
Chris Simcox, former minuteman leader and alleged child molester, is looking to test that old saw about how any defendant who acts as his own attorney “has a fool for a client.” According to a February 12 filing in Maricopa County Superior Court, Simcox wants to fire his public defenders…
An Arizona State University professor and his family are being targeted by white supremacists and neo-Nazis over a controversial class he’s teaching called U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness. Lee Bebout, an associate professor of English at ASU, has faced fierce criticism after Fox News anchor Elizabeth Hasselbeck…
Talk about a missed opportunity. On Wednesday, Phoenix city leaders gathered for a press conference at City Hall to announce that February is “Graffiti Free Awareness Month,” and to pat themselves on the backs for all the great work Phoenix does in combating graffiti. The media event included City Council…
Like a bad case of shingles, dealing with Rim Country crackpot and state Senator Sylvia Allen is both painful and seemingly without cure. In 2012, in the wake of redistricting, Allen chickened out of a run in a newly-drawn Legislative District 6, following a poll’s showing her with a 22…
Roxana Bacon really should know better. A former president of the State Bar of Arizona, she recently penned an op-ed for the Arizona Republic wherein she blasted state Attorney General Mark Brnovich for a blame-the-victim “you asked for it” opinion of rape. “In Brnovich’s view,” she wrote, “prisons are places…
Save for his cast-bound right leg and the scooter next to him, which he uses to get around while recuperating from a recent bone-graft operation, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich looks like John Belushi in Animal House. Maybe it’s the wiry black hair, dark features, and jovial persona. The comparison…
Cross Super Bowl XLIX madness with the insanity of the Green Acre dog fanatics, and you’ve got yourself one hothouse loony bin. The canine crazies are online crying for revenge again, riled up this time by the news that New England Patriots’ defensive tackle Alan Branch lost four dogs at…
What’s former Attorney General Tom Horne doing these days? Apparently, he’s joined up with his former law partner, Scottsdale attorney Sandra Slaton. His mug is on Slaton’s website and the State Bar of Arizona now cites Slaton’s office as his professional address. Slaton, you’ll recall, briefly represented Horne in an…
Would it surprise you one iota if I told you that Sheriff Joe Arpaio has boasted of investigating federal Judge G. Murray Snow and his family, according to some very credible sources? I doubt it, particularly if you’ve been in Maricopa County for any length of time and have not…
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, I’ve heard a lot of lame talk, sometimes from very intelligent people, about how the terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly reveals the general intolerance of Islam, particularly when compared to (supposedly) enlightened Western democracies. American commentators have been emphatic on…
Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery has verbally spanked a pack of loony dog lovers who are pushing for animal-cruelty charges to be refiled in the Green Acre dog boarding case. During a regularly scheduled press conference Wednesday, Montgomery explained why he wouldn’t meet with the Green Acre lynch mob last…
An indigo army of the insipid recently laid siege to the Maricopa County Administration Building in downtown Phoenix to berate County Attorney Bill Montgomery for dropping almost all charges against the owners and caretakers of Gilbert’s Green Acre Dog Boarding facility in the deaths of 20-plus dogs last June. Purple…
During her five-plus years as Maricopa County’s communications director, Cari Gerchick demonstrated a backbone of titanium, going where most public information officers fear to tread. Whether it was calling out Sheriff Joe Arpaio on his agency’s misspending more than $100 million in voter-protected jail funds, or, literally, standing in the…
Am I wrong to feel weirdly optimistic, here at the start of 2015? First, there’s the prospect that federal Judge G. Murray Snow finally will find Sheriff Joe Arpaio in contempt of court in the ACLU’s big racial-profiling case Melendres v. Arpaio. Granted, waiting for Arpaio to get his just…
In yet another blow to Arizona’s state-imposed system of terror targeting the undocumented, U.S. District Court Judge David Campbell on Monday enjoined both Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Sheriff Joe Arpaio from enforcing two identity theft statutes that underpinned Arpaio’s infamous worksite raids. Campbell, a conservative judge nominated to…
I’ve known ex-radio host and recently-elected state Representative Jay Lawrence for a while now, and I’ve always liked him. He’s a genial guy, who can wow you with tales of how he used to show the Beatles a thing or two back in the day, when they first came to…
Former Phoenix Police Chief Danny Garcia fought the law, and the law won. And too often, the law in this town is spelled P-L-E-A, the acronym for the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, the union that “represents” around 2,600 rank-and-file Phoenix cops. I write “represents” in quotation marks because, though PLEA…
The older I get, the more I appreciate that line by Elvis Costello: “Oh, I used to be disgusted/ Now I try to be amused…” But you’ll forgive me if Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s latest stunt nevertheless leaves me nauseated. According to an MCSO press release, he will be hosting five…
Righteous rage fills the air as a young African-American demonstrator yells through his bullhorn. “We are fed up!” cries Jarvis Johnson, his face filled with emotion. “We are done! We want justice, and we want it now!” Johnson’s walking back and forth in the middle of the intersection of Seventh…
