State Representative John Kavanagh revels in his self-appointed role as the rightwinger Arizona lefties love most to hate. Since recalled, disgraced former state Senate President Russell Pearce (Kavanagh’s pal) was pounded into mainstream political irrelevance in 2011, Kavanagh’s eclipsed his erstwhile mentor to become Sand Land’s Lord Voldemort for liberals,…
Our ethics-challenged Attorney General, Tom Horne, received an unwanted gift over the holidays from his bete noir, the Arizona Public Integrity Alliance, the conservative nonprofit that he hit with a short-lived defamation suit last year. The folks at AZPIA tell me that around 60,000 mailers critical of Horne went out…
Maricopa County has a monkey on its back: Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The local media act as the delivery method, funneling the dope to Arpaio junkies. At least twice a week — sometimes more — the eyes of this town’s TV hacks glow like coke fiends’ as they regale their audiences…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s newly appointed “community liaison” officer Hector Martinez received e-mails during his time with the MCSO’s notorious Human Smuggling Unit from other MCSO employees that contained offensive photos and videos demeaning Mexicans and other Latinos. The e-mails, one of which Martinez forwarded to his home address, speak to…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office has announced the hiring of a new “community liaison” oficer, one of many reforms required by federal Judge G. Murray Snow’s permanent injunction, issued October 2 in the ACLU’s big racial-profiling lawsuit, Melendres v. Arpaio. Deputy Hector Martinez is bilingual and a 10-year veteran of the…
Here’s one for the irony-bin, none other than Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s stone-faced ex-Deputy Chief Brian Sands is acting as if he’s acquired a sense of ethics since saying sayonara last year to a nearly 30 year career with the Sheriff’s Office. Nah, he’s not objecting to the policy of prejudiced…
Florence is exploring the purchase of Johnson Utilities, one of the largest private water and sewer companies in Arizona, which services the San Tan Valley and parts of the town. Some of the players involved are talking about the potential sale as a done deal. But there remain numerous unanswered…
As regional director of the Arizona office of the Anti-Defamation League, Bill Straus has been a rock, a stalwart opponent of hate in a river of acquiescers, squirmers, and equivocators. During the ongoing immigration debate in this state, many in public life caught a serious case of rubber spine or…
Immigration? Yeah, that’s the big issue everyone’s forgotten about, considering that the U.S. Senate bill on immigration is swimming about as fast as as a flounder in the mud toward realization. The hope is that the U.S. House will take another stab at offering up its version, or versions, next…
What fun we’ll have next year watching Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, one of Arizona’s sleaziest politicians, crash and burn. Indeed, Horne’s recent failure to silence the Arizona Public Integrity Alliance, which has been running TV ads critical of him, offers a preview of the vicarious pleasures to come in…
Like most rich folks, deep-pockets Scottsdale developer George Johnson is good at getting his way. Maybe not all the time, but often enough. Earlier this year, when Johnson wanted the right to convey water to an as-yet-undeveloped area of Florence, he got it from the Florence Town Council, saying he…
Monday was a deadline set by federal Judge G. Murray Snow in the ACLU’s big racial-profiling case Melendres v. Arpaio for plaintiffs and defendants to submit lists of prospective candidates for the position of court-appointed monitor over the MCSO. This, assuming the two sides could not agree on a monitor…
SPECIAL REPORT: FLORENCE EXPOSED | Third of three parts Seated in a conference room near his Florence Town Hall office and dressed in his standard collared shirt, silver belt buckle, cowboy hat, jeans, and roughed-up cowboy boots, Mayor Tom Rankin looks as if he has stepped out of Florence’s frontier…
Please see the update at the end of this post. Yep, Chandler attorney Tom Ryan was rarin’ to start writing up subpoenas in his new role as legal counsel for the Arizona Public Integrity Alliance, the group being SLAPP-sued by Attorney General Tom Horne in the world’s dumbest “defamation” case…
Attorney General Tom Horne, elections law violator, is the walking, talking embodiment of the arrogance of power. For him, the rules simply do not apply. But if you criticize him, laws that have no application in your case, suddenly become relevant. It’s bad enough that our sleazy AG recently filed…
SPECIAL REPORT: FLORENCE EXPOSED | Part two of three Dustin Kemp is upstairs making his bed on a Sunday afternoon, when someone carrying a .45-caliber handgun walks into the room. Maybe he sees the person. Maybe his back is turned. Dustin is a cute 9-year-old with short, wavy, brown hair…
What if the MCSO had a community meeting and nobody came? That’s what happened recently when the MCSO held what it called a “community after-action meeting” in a lame attempt to comply with Judge G. Murray Snow’s orders in the ACLU civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio. Videographer Dennis Gilman…
As I’ve said before about Arizona’s ethically-challenged Attorney General Tom Horne, you can tell a man from Harvard, but you can’t tell him much. Which is no doubt why the Harvard-grad persists in some of the dumbest, self-destructive activity possible for a public official, barring that of Toronto Mayor Rob…
SPECIAL REPORT: FLORENCE EXPOSED | Part one of three Richard McAnally was annoyed. His face, framed by a shock of gray hair and a pair of dark-rimmed glasses, puckered with disdain. Florence had hired McAnally, paying him more than $7,000, to preside as a hearing officer in cases involving two…
It ain’t 2014 yet, and already Attorney General Tom Horne is taking it on the chin in a new TV ad, demanding that he return the nearly $400,000 in donations that two county attorneys say were improperly used on Horne’s behalf in his successful 2010 general election run against Democratic…
I’m guessing that members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors are familiar with the phrase, “no taxation without representation,” but maybe they need a refresher course in what that Revolutionary War slogan means. On Halloween, appropriately, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s lawyer Tim Casey filed a notice of appeal, challenging federal…
No one can say Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery lacks chutzpah. For years now, Montgomery has exploited anti-Latino bigotry to obtain and retain public office. When he campaigned for attorney general in 2006, Montgomery was one of many politicians who snuggled up to the racist minuteman movement. In 2010, he…
