Before today’s successful march of thousands from the Wells Fargo building in downtown Phoenix to Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s gulags, many in the Phoenix activist community tried to dissuade civil rights leader and march organizer Salvador Reza from taking on Arpaio in such a bold, uncompromising way. They feared violence. They…
Apologies for leading with my stomach (something I do in real life, physically), but the mole sauce at Garibaldi’s Real Mexican Grill — the site of a fundraiser Friday night for the Macehualli Day Labor Center — played like a tejano band in my mouth and made me long for my…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is officially freaking out over the May 2 anti-Arpaio Walk for Respect, which will begin at 9 a.m. tomorrow at the Wells Fargo building downtown (100 West Washington Street) and continue on to Estrella Jail, site of a litany of abuses against female inmates. A press release…
Joe Arpaio has always bragged that he wants the feds to “come on down,” like in The Price Is Right. This week, they’re taking him up on his offer. One of the news outlets Joe loves to leak stuff to, aka the Arizona Republic, just posted a little ditty on its…
Gilman’s latest, which takes apart certain sheriff ‘s deputies’ statements one-by-one This latest mini-doc from Dennis Gilman supporting the May 2 Walk for Dignity is a doozy. In it, Gilman contrasts the inflammatory statements that certain sheriff’s duputies made during a recent MCSO press conference to news footage of Joe’s…
What do you get when Shepard Fairey, creator of the iconic Obama “Hope” poster and the artist behind the “Obey Giant” phenom, puts his noggin together with those of Rage Against the Machine/One Day as a Lion frontman Zack de la Rocha and L.A. artist Ernesto Yerena? You get some…
Where the right-wing meets the sick and surreal. That’s my succinct definition of Arizona. Every day in this state, one’s faith in humanity is challenged when it comes to the subject of immigration. I half expect to awake each morn and find Russell Pearce’s recipe for parboiled immigrant infant in…
Zack talks about Arpaio and 287(g) with artist Ernesto Yerena I’ll give you two reasons why demonstrators will be marching May 2 in Phoenix from the Wells Fargo building downtown — where Sheriff Arpaio maintains two floors of pricey executive offices — to Joe’s Estrella Jail, a hellhole that’s home…
Video footage of an MCSO arrest and search during Friday’s sweep The sheriff’s recent two-day anti-immigration sweep in Avondale was disastrous on so many levels. The MCSO’s own press release states that “200 deputies and volunteer posse members” were mobilized for the operation, which would make 400 men total, assuming the…
Footage shot by civil rights activist Salvador Reza of “the cone incident.” Despite everything, I try to keep an open mind when it comes to Joe Arpaio’s boys in beige. As I’ve mentioned previously in this blog, I’ve met numerous ex-sheriff’s deputies who seem like decent human beings, emphasis on…
What’s the first thing that Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha is gonna do when he touches down in the PHX May 1 — a day before the big anti-Arpaio march from the Wells Fargo Building downtown to Joe’s Estrella Jail on May 2? Kick it with…
KTAR 92.3 FM, the unofficial PR arm of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s MCSO, has announced that the sheriff’s department is conducting one of its notorious anti-immigration sweeps in the West Valley town of Avondale today and Friday. According to an article on KTAR’s Web site, the command post for the sweep will be at the sheriff’s command substation near…
I want to thank Minuteman Civil Defense Corps founder Chris Simcox from the bottom of my little black heart for his decision to run against Arizona Senator John McCain in the 2010 Republican primary. In doing so, Simcox is giving me a year-plus of material to blog and comment on. Talk…
Transfer of Jail Inmates in Maricopa County @ Yahoo! Video Eduardo Barraza scores with this video of Joe at the latest prisoner parade Sheriff Joe’s ready to rumble with the Rev. Al Sharpton. At least that’s the smack the sheriff was talking the other day to journalist and editor Eduardo…
Monday night, faux right-winger Stephen Colbert showed how long it takes to make pastry out of Maricopa County’s corrupt top constable: exactly six and a-half minutes. The whole Colbert Report segment was predictably goofy. Sheriff Joe didn’t even lead. Instead, he followed the second mate from the Maersk Alabama, Ken…
UPDATE: Sadly, Meghan McCain’s “Twitter creep” isn’t the real Slim Shady (read, “McCoy.”) Rather, it’s the faux Joe Arpaio that New Times has blogged about in the past. Score one for faux Joe. After painstakingly going through Meghan McCain’s Twitter correspondence, I found only one comment from “Joe Arpaio,” and…
In a last-ditch effort to impact the way Stephen Colbert treats mean ol’ Joe Arpaio on The Colbert Report tonight, the folks at the pro-immigration org America’s Voice are urging people to e-mail a message to the show’s producers through their Web site. Thing is, if you wanna get in on…
Big, bad, neo-Nazis? Um, not exactly. See, the local defenders of the white race — at least the Arizona adherents of the National Socialist Movement, led by pseudo-fuehrer Jeff Schoep nationally — are girly men. When it comes to fliering Phoenix anonymously, under the cover of darkness, they have no problem. But when…
In an attempt to recapture his status as an equal-opportunity sadist, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reprising his 200 Mexican March, which inflamed the Hispanic community and civil rights activists back in February. However, this time, he’s moving 900, and there’s no indication in his press release that it’ll be other than…
I’m not sure what the highlight of Wednesday’s big tea-bag-Obama-hate-fest at the Capitol was for me. Was it the high-school girl carrying a sign comparing President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin? Or the belligerent dork talking to state Senator Thayer Verschoor about how he (the dork) wanted…
It’s been belly-ticklin’ reading all the moonbat paranoia over this recent report on wing-nutbars issued by Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security. Every far right, moonhowlin’ Web site out there jumped on this so-not-news, from the wackos at WorldNetDaily and the wannabe-Brahmins of Breitbart.com, to the Moonie-owned Washington Times and…
With the Obama administration floating trial balloons in the New York Times on immigration reform, it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to foresee nativists, white supremacists and other elements of the far right seething with reactionary rage. The lot of ’em have invested far too much time and energy whipping up hate…
