Florence is exploring the purchase of Johnson Utilities, one of the largest private water and sewer companies in Arizona, which services the San Tan Valley and parts of the town. Some of the players involved are talking about the potential sale as a done deal. But there remain numerous unanswered…
Immigration? Yeah, that’s the big issue everyone’s forgotten about, considering that the U.S. Senate bill on immigration is swimming about as fast as as a flounder in the mud toward realization. The hope is that the U.S. House will take another stab at offering up its version, or versions, next…
What fun we’ll have next year watching Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, one of Arizona’s sleaziest politicians, crash and burn. Indeed, Horne’s recent failure to silence the Arizona Public Integrity Alliance, which has been running TV ads critical of him, offers a preview of the vicarious pleasures to come in…
Monday was a deadline set by federal Judge G. Murray Snow in the ACLU’s big racial-profiling case Melendres v. Arpaio for plaintiffs and defendants to submit lists of prospective candidates for the position of court-appointed monitor over the MCSO. This, assuming the two sides could not agree on a monitor…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s agency can’t even arrest a few drunks with the other cop shops without first submitting his plans in writing to federal court. As part of the order by U.S. District Judge Murray Snow last month in a wide-reaching racial-profiling lawsuit, procedures to help stop Arpaio’s…
Please see the update at the end of this post. Yep, Chandler attorney Tom Ryan was rarin’ to start writing up subpoenas in his new role as legal counsel for the Arizona Public Integrity Alliance, the group being SLAPP-sued by Attorney General Tom Horne in the world’s dumbest “defamation” case…
Attorney General Tom Horne, elections law violator, is the walking, talking embodiment of the arrogance of power. For him, the rules simply do not apply. But if you criticize him, laws that have no application in your case, suddenly become relevant. It’s bad enough that our sleazy AG recently filed…
What if the MCSO had a community meeting and nobody came? That’s what happened recently when the MCSO held what it called a “community after-action meeting” in a lame attempt to comply with Judge G. Murray Snow’s orders in the ACLU civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio. Videographer Dennis Gilman…
As I’ve said before about Arizona’s ethically-challenged Attorney General Tom Horne, you can tell a man from Harvard, but you can’t tell him much. Which is no doubt why the Harvard-grad persists in some of the dumbest, self-destructive activity possible for a public official, barring that of Toronto Mayor Rob…
ABC 15 Investigator Dave Biscobing aired a story this week featuring the Superstition Search and Rescue, an all-volunteer team of wildness heroes that has successfully brought closure to families when the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office’s search-and-rescue team could not. “Lost,” a New Times feature in December 2012 delved into why…
It ain’t 2014 yet, and already Attorney General Tom Horne is taking it on the chin in a new TV ad, demanding that he return the nearly $400,000 in donations that two county attorneys say were improperly used on Horne’s behalf in his successful 2010 general election run against Democratic…
I’m guessing that members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors are familiar with the phrase, “no taxation without representation,” but maybe they need a refresher course in what that Revolutionary War slogan means. On Halloween, appropriately, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s lawyer Tim Casey filed a notice of appeal, challenging federal…
A former high-ranking Arizona U.S. Marshal’s agent has had a criminal ethics-violation charge against him dropped and will enter a pretrial diversion program. The move by the government on Thursday to let Bullen off the hook with light treatment came even as Bullen continues pressing a civil lawsuit against the…
For whatever reason, (though probably nothing more than he knows it’ll get him publicity), Arpaio’s got it in his head that his office needs drones. Not Heron TP-style Iran-busters, and not the all-purpose Predators., but those that more resemble remote-controlled multi-copters for sale at the mall. He’s waiting for approval…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio was recently on the Al Jazeera America program “Consider This ” to discuss immigration (what else?) and got b-slapped in the nicest way possible by filmmaker Dan DeVivo, one of the two persons behind the immigration-related documentary Two Americans, the other person being Phoenix-based reporter Valeria Fernandez…
So what do you do if you’re in law enforcement and you want someone’s help catching and prosecuting bad guys? If you’re Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, you start off with an insult. That’s what Monty does in new public service announcements he’s rolling out in Spanish and English, aimed…
Tuesday afternoon, U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow unsealed the operations plan for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “crime suppression” sweep, which took place this weekend in the West Valley. Significantly, the document, which was filed last Thursday under seal by Arpaio’s attorney Tim Casey, does not identify any “exigent circumstances”…
How bad would things have to get for Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne to do the right thing and resign? You’d think pleading no contest to a vehicular hit-and-run witnessed by two FBI agents who’d been tailing him would be enough, at least for the state’s top prosecutor. Then there’s…
Late Thursday evening, the plaintiffs in the ACLU’s big civil rights lawsuit Melendres v. Arpaio fired back at Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s surprise announcement that the MCSO would begin one of its notorious Hispanic-hunting sweeps on Friday. Responding to a filing by Arpaio’s lawyer Tim Casey earlier in the day, plaintiffs’…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is sticking his tongue out at federal Judge G. Murray Snow, telling the jurist that the MCSO will execute one of the sheriff’s infamous crime suppression sweeps beginning Friday, October 18. Though Snow recently ordered that a monitor be appointed to oversee 59 pages of instructions on…
In June 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s then-director John Morton issued a memo outlining the agency’s exercise of its “prosecutorial discretion” in civil immigration cases. Morton emphasized that ICE would use this discretion to ensure the agency’s “enforcement priorities.” And ICE’s number one enforcement priority, as described in a…
They came, they saw, they protested, they partied. I’m talking about the local pro-immigrant activists who have been promising for at least a few weeks now to “shut down” the Phoenix Field Office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Monday, October 14. Though Monday was Columbus Day, a federal…
