Governor Jan Brewer’s political operatives are by no means as dumb as their candidate. Evidence the PR stunt they let drop Friday, berating the U.S. State Department for daring to mention Arizona’s breathing while brown law, SB 1070, in America’s first ever report as part of its “Universal Periodic Review”…
State Schools Superintendent Tom Horne declared victory Saturday night over former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, his rival in the GOP primary for state Attorney General. This, after today’s count left Horne 853 votes in front, with only around 4,500 votes left to tabulate across Arizona, according to the Secretary…
Here’s a little news for those Sand Land haters out there who’ve dissed Shaun Attwood, author of Hard Time: A Brit in America’s Toughest Jail, the subject of my most recent Bird column. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the guy Attwood takes to task for the squalid, dangerous conditions in his vast incarceration complex, is…
(Alert: Please see 8/28 update below.)As of 6:36 p.m. today, the Arizona Secretary of State’s office was reporting that state Schools Superintendent Tom Horne leads his rival, former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, by 485 votes in the GOP primary for state Attorney General. SOS spokesman Matthew Benson told me that there…
The end is apparently at hand for former County Attorney Andrew Thomas. Sources within the campaign of state Schools Superintendent Tom Horne, Thomas’ rival in the GOP primary for state Attorney General, have told me that they expect Thomas to concede today. As if to confirm this, Thomas’ PR flack…
It’s not looking good for former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. As of the end of today’s count of the remaining ballots, state Schools Superintendent Tom Horne had expanded his lead of about 400 votes from yesterday to 1,073. This, in the GOP nod for state Attorney General. According to the…
The U.S. Department of Justice has given Sheriff Joe Arpaio yet another deadline in its ongoing civil rights investigation of his office: August 27.In a lengthy letter from DOJ attorney Judy Preston to Arpaio’s D.C. mouthpiece Robert Driscoll, Preston details what the DOJ told Driscoll it wants from the MCSO…
Delay, delay, delay. Thow up legal obstacles. Thumb your nose. Hold out till what seems like the last minute. Appear to compromise. Start all over again, and never give anything up unless you absolutely have to. Even then, you can always keep the worst stuff back. This is the shell game Sheriff…
Can we finally say sayonara to Sith Lord and former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas?Thomas’s unctuous campaign flack, spin-pimp Jason Rose thinks so. Last night, with Thomas’s early lead over state Schools Superintendent Tom Horne in the GOP primary for Attorney General evaporating, Rose tweeted this ice-pick to Thomas’s kidneys:”The jaguar roars:…
Standard practice by the Tucson PD, as captured by Three Sonorans Although activists are normally up in arms about Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio separating mothers from their children and otherwise breaking up families during his anti-immigration sweeps, this video by Tucson’s Three Sonorans blog reveals that things may be even worse…
Budweiser, which in 2008 was bought out by a Belgian beer giant to form Anheuser-Busch InBev, has spent millions on advertising to the Latino market. According to a 2009 article in Hispanic Market Weekly, the company spent more than $21 million in the first half of 2008 alone on Spanish…
Dougherty’s campaign spot, running this weekendI like both Randy Parraz and John Dougherty in the Dems’ primary for U.S. Senate. I wish I could vote for both of them, to be honest. Both are very different kinds of candidates. And neither one is a traditional politician. Not by a long…
Staffers for Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Rodney Glassman’s campaign are jumping ship so fast it might as well be a reenactment of James Cameron’s Titanic.Since July, three top staffers have bailed on Glassman: Political Director Junelle Cavero left last month; Field Director Kristin Gwinn resigned a couple of weeks ago; Communications Director…
The Romley campaign’s latest YouTube video dissing MontgomeryU.S. Senator John McCain took some time off from horsewhippin’ GOP primary rival J.D. Hayworth to endorse Rick Romley for Maricopa County Attorney over Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s boy in that primary race, Bill Montgomery.To call McCain’s endorsement of Romley “glowing” would be an…
A group of diverse individuals including Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Barry Hess, former Republican state Senator Karen Johnson, and voting activist John Brakey are suing Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, alleging that Maricopa County Elections is involved in various voting shenanigans. Their claim, which you can read in its entirety, here,…
What the U.S. Department of Justice needs to grok about Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his upper echelon is that they are consummate prevaricators. Period. They’re sleazy weasels of the worst type. Essentially, the MCSO, as run by Arpaio and minions such as Chief Deputy David Hendershott, is akin to a mafia enterprise. With…
Undoubtedly many of you have seen the latest action by anti-SB 1070 demonstrators urging Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to nix the 2011 All-Star Game scheduled for Phoenix’s Chase Field and hold it at another location. About three dozen protesters demonstrated against the Arizona Diamondbacks during their Sunday game versus the Washington…
Sheriff Joe just keeps racking up the victims. The latest report comes courtesy of reporter Aura Bogado in Mother Jones magazine. In her article Hazing Arizona, Bogado details the death by pneumonia of David de la Fuente, an illegal immigrant held in Joe’s gulags for three weeks before being turned…
Although the United We Stand for Americans Web site announcing its Tea Party rally on the U.S.-Mexico Border this Sunday August 15 includes the address of the event and maps leading there, it carefully omits one piece of interesting information: The rally is being held on a ranch owned by…
So President Barack Obama, who still talks a good game about “comprehensive immigration reform,” has now signed a supplemental border security package worth $600 million to add 1,000 Border Patrol agents, as well as hundreds of new officers for U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio apparently forgot that he’s a politician during an appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 this afternoon, right before a brief “oh shit” moment when he realized that, well, he is a politician.Arpaio is a media whore and seems to like seeing his name in print even…
I recently interviewed an associate of neo-Nazi J.T. Ready’s, someone privy to details about Ready’s group U.S. Border Guard, who claimed Ready was using donations to his outfit to pay his rent and buy personal items. This source, who asked not to be identified, told me that Ready had received substantial contributions,…
