Editorial Voice

We couldn’t resist as we welcome back Stephen Lemons as a semi-regular columnist.

Even liberals can cop a fascist line: Take California Attorney General Kamala Harris whose Backpage prosecution hit a roadblock last week in Sacramento, the capital of the bluest of blue states.

It doesn’t give me a lot of faith in Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Arizona to know that it touted former governor Janet Napolitano’s return to the state on Sunday to stump for HRC at the Democratic Party headquarters in Phoenix before heading over to the memorial service downtown for former…

Cracks have appeared in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s plan to outlaw kratom, a popular plant-based pain reliever that’s sold online and in smoke shops in powder, liquid, and capsule form. This past Friday, September 30 — the day the ban was expected to take effect — Wisconsin Congressman Mark…

Delusion is a powerful force. After all, life is often bleak — and obsessively pondering that bleakness can incapacitate one’s ability to endure. Take this idea that rolls around every four years among local Democrats — and, often, folks who don’t have to live here — that this political cycle…

Talk about a metaphor. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was limping toward me on his way out of federal Judge G. Murray Snow’s courtroom in downtown Phoenix, following a recent hearing before the jurist. Snow, the trial judge in the landmark civil-rights case Melendres v. Arpaio, had signaled, for what seemed like…

Perhaps the only thing that can halt Pinal County’s ethically challenged sheriff, Paul Babeu, from winning the Republican primary for Arizona’s First Congressional District is a concentrated campaign of political carpet bombing. By carpet bombing, I mean a deluge of robocalls, mailers, and/or TV ads aimed at bringing voters up…

First they try to frame you, then they don’t want to give your property back. So it goes in the Kafkaesque saga of Leslie Merritt Jr., the guy the Arizona Department of Public Safety tried to paint as “the I-10 shooter” after he was arrested last September 18 for four…

For years, I and other critics of Joe Arpaio have borne witness to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s trashing of people’s constitutional rights, his violations of the law, his general megalomania. And we all want one thing: justice. That has been difficult to obtain, even as Arpaio’s support has eroded, as…

One of the many bouts of culture shock I endured during the years I lived in New York City was watching two grown men get into a fist fight over a dime lying on the sidewalk near the building where I worked. They both reached for it about the same…

Here’s a piece of advice to local newshounds: Whenever Tim Casey is kvetching about “abuse of power,” then your bullshit detector should be flashing fire-engine red. Casey, you’ll recall, has made defending various abuses of power by the satraps of Maricopa County into his personal gravy train. He’s best known…

During a recent hearing at the Arizona House over Maricopa County’s elections fiasco, chaired by state Representative Michelle Ugenti-Rita, there was more podium-pounding and fist-pumping than at a pro-Bernie Sanders pajama party. People rightly were pissed that they had to stand in long lines to vote in the recent presidential…

When the big dog’s ticks, fat with blood, decide it’s time to detach themselves from their aging host, it’s safe to say that pooch is on his last hunt.  So it would seem with Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s parasitic biographer and longtime lackey, Len Sherman, who for two decades has dedicated…

When it comes to the left’s nearsighted infatuation with Vermont U.S. Senato Bernie Sanders and his pie-in-the-sky socialism, color me un-amused.  Sorry all you BernBots and hashtag progressives who want me to “Feel the Bern,” because the only burn I’m feelin’ at the prospect of Bernie becoming the Democratic nominee…

What do you call a politician who texts a “dick pic” to a man he’s never met, but has merely corresponded with, after making contact through an explicit gay hookup site riddled with porn? In Arizona’s First Congressional District, they may end up calling him “Congressman Babeu.” Ahead in fundraising,…

With Valentine’s Day just past, it’s worth noting that Pinal County’s most eligible bachelor, Sheriff Paul Babeu, may finally have found love in a young man 25 years his junior. Babeu’s spokesman, Barrett Marson, who also flacks for the legalize pot initiative Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, confirmed to…

        May 2 will mark the fourth anniversary of the Gilbert murder-suicide in which East Valley neo-Nazi J.T. Ready gunned down 15-month-old Lily Mederos, Lily’s mother, Amber; her grandmother, Lisa; and Amber’s boyfriend, Jim Hiott, before turning his 9 millimeter Beretta on himself. An FBI file on…

Something’s rotten in Coon Bluff, thanks to Sheriff Joe and the MCSO. That something is the headless carcass of Dotty, one of the famed Salt River wild horses, found on October 1, shot to death and floating in the river near Coon Bluff, a heavily trafficked part of the Tonto National…

It must’ve been fate, me first bumping into U.S. Senate candidate Kelli Ward outside the recent meeting of the Maricopa County Republican Committee at a church in Central Phoenix. I recently took the Duke University-educated former state Senator to task for her playing footsie with far-right fanatics, like in 2014…

Is it possible for a successful flack to have a conscience?  No offense to the many honest and diligent PR reps, public information officers and spokesmen and -women out there, but some of the best in that profession are real sleazeballs, amoral sociopaths who would justify Kim Jong-un dropping an…

Now that former Phoenix resident Ammon Bundy, son of bigoted clodhopper Cliven Bundy, has up and taken over a wildlife refuge in Oregon with his brother, Ryan, and a bunch of fellow gun-slingin’ wackos, what do Arizona Republicans — like former state Senator Kelli Ward — have to say about…