A former member of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s posse was arrested by MCSO deputies on child-pornography charges.According to the Sheriff’s Office, 73-year-old Roger Byg was a posse member in the old-folks community of Sun City and even had served on the posse’s board before resigning early last year. MCSO’s computer crimes…
A humorous brief to the U.S. Supreme Court filed last week invokes Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness” in a defense of the right to tell fibs about elected leaders. Penned by lawyer Ilya Shapiro on behalf of the Cato Institute and satirist P.J. O’Rourke, the amicus brief, written to defend…
After a week of allowing voters in Congressional District 9 believe that she didn’t want to serve them any more, Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema has finally made a Sherman-esque statement about the prospect of running in CD 7, where Congressman Ed Pastor recently announced he would not seek re-election. The following…
Update: Sadly, since this list was published, Sinema has decided not to commit political seppuku and parachute into CD 7. Sigh. Looks like we may have her to kick around a la Dick Nixon for a while longer. One week after Democratic Congressman Ed Pastor announced that he would not…
To read all the fake outrage spewed by schoolmarmish lefties over state Representative John Kavanagh’s skewering of Sheriff Joe Arpaio during a recent roast of the aged autocrat, you’d think Kavanagh had shot a Mexican man in Reno just to watch him die. Don’t get me wrong, I take a…
According to one nationally recognized expert in correctional medicine, medical care in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s vast incarceration complex is not just potentially hazardous to the health of pretrial detainees and jail staff, but to that of the general public. Dr. Robert Cohen, a member of New York City’s Board of…
Guadalupe’s come a long way from the days when Sheriff Joe Arpaio laid siege to its mean streets, hunting for illegal immigrants. On Wednesday, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved two groundbreaking amendments to Guadalupe’s contract for police protection with the Sheriff’s Office. The first requires that deputies…
Update 2/26/14 5:59 PM: Jan Brewer Vetoes SB 1062 Back in the dark ages, Republicans used to be all about the economy, stupid. A chicken in every pot, a home-entertainment center in every living room. Take, for instance, our last great Republican president — William Jefferson Clinton. He demonstrated that…
See how the blind mice run . . . as far away from Senate Bill 1062 as they can get. This morning, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce officially joined the increasingly crowded bandwagon of opposition to the anti-gay “religious freedom bill” that Arizona…
Maricopa County was ordered by a federal jury to pay $638,147 for retaliating against former county lawyer Maria Brandon after she commented to a newspaper. See our previous article today for details on the case. The jury verdict, released minutes ago, rejects all of Brandon’s claims except for two –…
Did top Maricopa County officials fire Maria Brandon, a longtime county lawyer, because she appeared to side with disgraced former sheriff’s official Dave Hendershott in a newspaper article? Or, as the county says, was Brandon fired solely because she instigated a catfight with a paralegal at the office in which…
Check out this awesome new video from Phoenix videographer Dennis Gilman, catching some of the action from a demonstration at the state Capitol, where protesters denounced the Arizona GOP’s asinine “religious freedom” bill, aka Senate Bill 1062. That bill would allow business people to discriminate against the LGBT community, and…
Recalled, disgraced former state Senate President Russell Pearce’s never been known as a friend to gay folks. Well, save for one: Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu. Ironically, Babeu — who embraced his sexuality in 2012 after New Times exposed claims of harassment made by his undocumented Mexican ex-boyfriend — legally…
Now why would Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne want to make it difficult and costly for reporters and regular citizens to obtain public records? Given the trouble Horne’s gotten himself into regarding public records requests to his office — resulting in an FBI investigation, two county attorneys concluding that Horne…
With almost no discussion, the Florence Town Council on Tuesday unanimously voted in favor of putting a plan to purchase Johnson Utilities, the company that provides water and sewage services for much of the San Tan Valley and parts of Florence, to a May 20 vote of the Florence electorate…
Most places in the United States are not dominated by a single personality. Sure, in Washington, President Obama’s every movement is news, and in New York, it’s Gotham’s mayor who garners the most media time. Yet here, in the nation’s sixth-biggest city and fourth-biggest county, not a week goes by…
This Sunday, Channel 3’s Politics Unplugged focused on Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s legal woes, and featured the two candidates who’d like to replace him: Republican Mark Brnovich and Democrat Felecia Rotellini. Brnovich aims to bump off Horne in the GOP primary, and Rotellini wants a general election re-match with…
Recently, I addressed the issue of whether or not Republican state Senate hopeful Ralph Heap is a “revenge candidate” for recalled, disgraced former state Senate President Russell Pearce, currently First Vice Chair of the Arizona GOP. Heap is taking on state Senator Bob Worsley, the guy who buried Pearce by…
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne looked so peaceful during his testimony Wednesday afternoon that if someone told me he’d done a bong hit during lunch, I’d have to consider the possibility. It was a marked change from the rest of the hearing into his, um, alleged campaign finance shenanigans, which…
Day one of an administrative hearing into alleged campaign-finance shenanigans by Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne found Phoenix attorney Buddy Rake’s genteel Texas drawl dipping in and out of the Federal Election Commission’s definition of what constitutes illegal “coordination” by a candidate. That’s what Horne is alleged to have done…
Maria Brandon’s federal wrongful-firing complaint is a messy leftover of years of infighting among Maricopa County officials. But unlike lawsuits that have resulted in millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded settlement payouts to former county leaders and judges, this one’s gone to trial. The veteran lawyer accuses her former bosses at…
Federal officials will investigate the fatal shooting last month of a suspect by a Pinal County Sheriff’s deputy after the man led law enforcement officers on a nearly hour-long car chase. Manuel Longoria, shot in the street on January 14, wouldn’t obey officers’ commands at the scene. He told police…
