Were it not for the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Act, Diane Douglas would not be Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. The crazy cat lady now in charge of the Arizona Department of Education would still be a wall-eyed instructor at Glendale’s Stained Glass Shop if she hadn’t scored $97,620 of…
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has filed a request in superior court seeking to bar alleged child molester and former Minuteman Chris Simcox from personally cross-examining child victims during his upcoming trial in Phoenix, scheduled to begin March 16. In the 14-page pleading, dated March 6, deputy county attorney Yigael…
This is actually two videos of the same stop taken by Anderson Jean-Louis, with a pause between the two. To judge from a recent video of an encounter with a black motorist, it looks like some Tempe cops could use a refresher course in the First Amendment. The video was…
Sadly, I missed all the fun Tuesday at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus, where demonstrators assembled to support two ASU instructors singled out by neo-Nazi groups: ASU English Professor Lee Bebout and Ph.D. candidate Robert Poe. The ASU State Press reports that on March 3, demonstrators “protested outside ASU’s Fulton…
A National Youth Front member, identifying himself as “John Hess,” has admitted to fliering Arizona State University’s Tempe campus with images of ASU English Professor Lee Bebout, labeling the teacher “Anti-White.” During a conversation we had via Facebook, Hess said he is the hooded individual seen in a video on…
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…
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…
