With less then three weeks before the general election, I have serious doubts that whatever “official” results the Maricopa County Elections Department posts will be an accurate reflection of what voters intended. After a week of investigating the department’s mishandling of last month’s controversial recount in the District 20 state…
Lenny Aviles and his girlfriend Lulu Saldana slipped away from his mother’s west Phoenix home on the early evening of June 23, 1999. The longtime couple wanted to shop at Sam’s Club before Lulu went home to Rio Grande, Texas, the next day. Lenny stepped outside to tell his mother,…
Outlaw Joe Wails The magnitude of the evil: Thanks for putting it all together for me. As I read one John Dougherty column after another on Joe Arpaio, I was having trouble getting a handle on the magnitude of the evil. New Times editor Rick Barrs has summed it all…
Looking like the nation’s homeliest eagle scout, John Kerry snapped off a salute and announced to his convention, “Reporting for duty.” George W. Bush had already embraced “Mission Accomplished” on an aircraft carrier flight deck in his après-combat flight suit. With each of these two nimrods trying to convince me…
Arizona State University President Michael Crow’s acting more like Dean Vernon Wormer all the time. Sighing and shaking his head like the Animal House character at the antics of his campus charges, I can almost hear him bellowing: “Looks like somebody forgot that there’s a ban on alcoholic beverages! You’ve…
I’ve got a dreadful message for thousands of young men and women trapped in the horrors of fundamentalist Mormon polygamy in a handful of remote and desolate towns north of the Grand Canyon along the Arizona-Utah border. Governor Janet Napolitano — the rising Democratic starlet who deftly portrays herself as…
King John Today, a baseball tax; tomorrow, the world: Kudos to John Dougherty for his superb column about the second dictator ousted this year — Jerry Colangelo (“Please, It’s About Time!” September 9). Like Saddam Hussein, Jerry exemplifies arrogance to the highest degree, and he has the characteristics of a…
Notorious former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates must have 50 IQ points on Joe Arpaio. Don’t get me wrong, Gates was just as tyrannical as the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America.” He ran the LAPD as a paramilitary force. The police chief who spawned the L.A. riots — and…
It’s barely noon on a Tuesday, and Bob Judd is wearing lipstick. And a sarong. That might seem awfully dressy for a guy who works at home, but it makes sense when you learn that Judd is the Web master (actually, he prefers the title “misteress”) for www.thecockettes.org, an official…
Phoenix is at a crossroads in its history. No major city in the country has such an unprecedented opportunity to boldly create a 21st-century urban landscape that capitalizes on the revolutionary technology driving the modern economy while embracing its own unique geographic character. It is the merger of both place…
Prêt-à-Porter Ranch It’s a sausage fest in Old Town Scottsdale on this Thursday night. And the J-grrl and I are at Martini Ranch, beholding a sea of horny, white and mostly male faces. I haven’t seen this many ofays since the last time the Boston Celtics won the NBA championship…
Downtown Buzz Quibbles and bits: I enjoyed your review titled “Finding Nemo” (Stephen Lemons, September 9), and not for the reasons you might suspect. I’m a total foodie and an avid believer in downtown Phoenix and its forthcoming renaissance. Believe it or not, it’s coming. As an aside, I do…
“NOTHING is over until WE decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? HELL, NO!” — John “Bluto” Blutarsky, National Lampoon’s Animal House, 1978 Bluto doesn’t live here anymore. And that goes for Otter, D-Day and Flounder, too. In fact, they aren’t even welcome in these…
These days, few students at Gateway Community College at 40th Street and Van Buren are aware of the horrible events that happened at the site more than 13 years ago. On a chilly March evening in 1991, 72-year-old John Lee Sr. and his 50-year-old daughter, Ginger, were tending to their…
drinking problem A public service: Finally, somebody had the nerve to say it! People at .08 ain’t the problem (“How to Drink and Drive and Get Away With It,” Bruce Rushton, September 2). I’ve always believed that this is just a ploy for the legal system — be it the…
Nine days after September 11, 2001, a guy named Joe Deihl from Paradise Valley started a company called Regency Medical Research, Ltd. Within months, Regency had an amazing new product on the market. It was KI-Spray, a small bottle of potassium iodide that users could spray in their mouths when…
If you’ve ever stood in line waiting to pass through security at downtown Phoenix’s county courthouse, you’ve surely uttered a word or two that qualifies as obscene. It’s not that the folks manning the metal detectors and rubbing their magic wand over your body aren’t polite. But the lines –…
With the J-grrl back in the saddle this week after her brief leave of absence (though whose saddle, I’ll never tell), I decide to let the lezzie Eva Longoria pick our party-place du jour. Three guesses where the Jettster wants to lick her lips and twist her hips? The new…
Dancing With the Devil Skinheads, freaks and biker chicks: I just wanted to write in and express my love for your Inferno column. The one on the Palo Verde in Tempe (“Motley Crew,” Stephen Lemons, August 26) was very interesting. Skinheads, bikers and all kinds of freaks in one location…
The canonization of Jerry Colangelo as the savior of Phoenix will continue this week as the local media stumble over themselves to heap accolades on him as he’s inducted September 10 into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Be prepared for full-page spreads in the Valley’s two major daily newspapers extolling…
“JSB is here! Jason just saw him in the parking lot!” In the toy-castle-styled arcade building just east of the water park at Mesa’s sprawling Golfland-Sunsplash amusement center, the news is passed above the din of blaring video games and hollering teens as if the words themselves were a stage-diving…
It’s a fine Tuesday night in the Zona, and Saddam Hussein’s chrome-dome, um, brother-in-law Sheik Samir Hussein is getting his ass beat down by a big-assed Catholic priest in a dog collar known as Father Punishment. The shirtless Sheik had come into the rasslin’ ring at The Sets in Tempe,…
