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It was pretty comical yesterday watching Andrew Thomas, the former DA in Arizona's Maricopa County and Joe Arpaio's right-hand man in their corrupt attempts to intimidate county officials, hold his press conference denouncing the fact that he had just been disbarred for his behavior.

You see, it's all the fault of his enemies, and he's a martyr:

"I did my job. A lot of powerful people didn't like that," he said.

An Arizona ethics board disbarred Thomas Tuesday for failed corruption investigations that he and America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff launched against officials with whom they were having political and legal disputes.

"We now have a constitutional crisis in which prosecutors and members of the executive branch are being targeted by the judiciary for blowing the whistle on misconduct in the judiciary," he said.

He compared the figures behind his disbarring to corrupt Mexican officials.

"Arizona, after what happened yesterday, has become Mexico," Thomas said.

The best part, as Stephen Lemons observes:

"Other men, far greater than I, have gone to jail in defense of principles they believed in and so they would not kowtow to a corrupt ruler," Thomas said at one point. "People like Gandhi, people like Dr. King, people like Solzhenitsyn, people like Thomas More, people who stood for something....and I'm going to stand firm."

"Gandhi?" wondered one onlooker in amazement.

Yep, I could hardly believe my ears, too, as Thomas blamed his current situation on others -- a corrupt judiciary, powerful politicians, insiders who knew "how to work the system," Presiding Disciplinary Judge William O'Neil, his fellow lawyers, you name it. Anyone but himself.

Meanwhile, Joe Arpaio was whistling past Thomas' political graveyard in his noncommital remarks. Mainly because his head is next on the block:

And despite Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s efforts to distance himself from cases at the center of a legal ethics panel inquiry that cost a pair of former county prosecutors their careers — the fallout has moved closer.

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Christmas came early for the law-abiding residents of Arizona's Maricopa County yesterday:

PHOENIX — In a strongly worded critique of the country’s best-known sheriff, the Justice Department on Thursday accused Sheriff Joe Arpaio of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detention and arrest and retaliating against those who complain.

After an investigation that lasted more than three years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said in a 22-page report that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which Mr. Arpaio leads, had “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that eventually led Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies to cooperate.

“We have peeled the onion to its core,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, noting during a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning that more than 400 inmates, deputies and others had been interviewed as part of the review, including Sheriff Arpaio and his command staff. Mr. Perez said the inquiry, which included jail visits and reviews of thousands of pages of internal documents, raised the question of whether Latinos were receiving “second-class policing services” in Maricopa County.

Mr. Perez said he hoped Sheriff Arpaio would cooperate with the federal government in turning the department around. Should he refuse to enter into a court-approved settlement agreement, Mr. Perez said, the government will file a lawsuit and the department could lose millions of dollars in federal money.

A separate federal grand jury investigation of Sheriff Arpaio’s office is continuing, focusing on accusations of abuse of power by the department’s public corruption squad.

That investigation -- unlike this probe, which involved civil law -- is a criminal matter. The other shoe has yet to drop on that score.

Arpaio, of course, claims that this is all politically motivated:

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"Don't come here and use me as a whipping boy for a national, international problem," said Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The DOJ warned Arpaio to stop racially profiling Hispanic members of the community, or face the consequences. But Arpaio vowed to continue his controversial immigration sweeps.

"I took an oath of office. I'm enforcing the state and federal laws," Arpaio said.. "It's as simple as that, and I will continue to enforce those state laws."

The normally media friendly sheriff stayed away from the cameras for most of the day today. And when he did speak, it was during a late-afternoon news conference with his attorneys at his side.

"I'm going to say it again, I will continue to enforce all the laws," Arpaio said during the 40-minute news conference.

...

"President Obama and his band of his merry men might as well erect their own pink neon sign on the Arizona-Mexico border saying welcome to your United States," Arpaio said. "Our home is your home."

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Credit: Tom Tingle/The Arizona Republic

Michele Bachmann said she considers Sheriff Joe Arpaio "one of my heroes" in a brief news conference the Republican presidential candidate held before meeting with the 79-year-old sheriff on Wednesday afternoon.
Bachmann spent her time with the media - it lasted less than 4 minutes - highlighting her position on immigration and getting Arizonans to understand why she considers the state an important battleground in her efforts to secure the Republican nomination.

Bachmann said solving the "border issue" is something that can be done in phases, by first increasing security along the U.S. border with Mexico and then reducing programs, such as in-state tuition for undocumented students, that can entice immigrants to remain in the country without authorization.

"I want to solve the border issue," said Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman. "I want to build the fence that needs to be built."

Bachmann also said she wants Arpaio's support.

"He's a great guy - anyone would want his endorsement," she said.

He sure is great at locking up brown people and detaining them in pseudo internment camps. Poor Gov. Jan Brewer didn't even warrant a heads up from Michele.

Her visit came as a surprise to many in local Republican and conservative circles.

"NOT good form when a presidential candidate comes to Arizona and fails to notify the state party or Governor," Shane Wikfors of the conservative blog Sonoran Alliance said Tuesday night on Twitter. In a follow-up Twitter message, Wikfors expressed dissatisfaction with the Bachmann campaign "for blowing off conservative supporters in AZ tonight!"

He did support Mittens last time so I doubt he'll give her a thumbs up endorsement, but he might giver her a tour of his detention centers.

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What do you get when you put a draft dodging, conservative 70's rock guitarist and a xenophobic and possibly corrupt Arizona sheriff? Dinner with Wingnuts. FOX Phoenix:

They come from two different worlds, but Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and rocker Ted Nugent do see eye to eye on the issue of illegal immigration.

That was a topic of discussion at a dinner date between the two Monday night.

The two see eye to eye on pretty much everything -- just two friends from two very different backgrounds, having dinner, and they let us crash the party.

Nugent is still known for his guitar playing, but these days his conservative politics are becoming just as well known. He's even a special deputy in the sheriff's office.

"He's a captain. If he does good we'll make him a colonel," chuckles Arpaio. Nugent was sworn in last year and since then the two have stayed in touch. Nugent was invited to dinner at Bobby Q's near Dunlap and I-17 in Phoenix, and he asked the sheriff to come along. So what does Nugent like so much about Sheriff Joe?

"How about truth and logic and the American way and doing the right thing whether it's politically correct or not. Getting the job done protecting the citizens and enforcing the law… what I just mentioned is all the right things and all the obvious common sense thing to do. And he is my common sense guy," he says.

Nugent has become well known for his support of gun rights and his distaste for some prominent Democrats. He's also heavily involved in the DARE program

.
They may come from two different worlds which would be law enforcement and music, but they carry the same ideological background. And they both like to hunt things except Joe hunts people.

Stephen Colbert abuses Ted Nugent's last column in the Washington Times which attacks American youth and calls them 'stoned on apathy.'

: Millennials sleep as their future crumbles

While I personally condemn violence of any kind, I am stunned that they are not participating more in the Tea Party, even rioting in the streets, clashing with the cops, conducting sit-ins at their colleges, interrupting political events and so on. Instead, the young people of this generation appear to be sound asleep, lethargic and seemingly unaware of how badly their generation is being royally abused by the deep-seated corruption and abuse of power in the government. They appear to be terminally stoned on apathy.

Ted is condemning violence but is calling for riots in the streets. Shockingly, Wall Street, Banks and corporations were spared his ire. See, that's who would benefit from Nugent's riots.

Young Americans were politically naive in 1960 but at least willing to be engaged. Although I remember the various protests and marches, I was either squirrel hunting or putting a sharp edge on my sonic guitar-slaying skills, having not awakened to my “we the people” duties quite yet. Regrettably, I knew nothing about politics and, sadly, little of our nation’s history.

I lived in the 60's and 70's too and protests and riots were initiated because of the draft which forced us to be sent to Vietnam. That didn't end too well for over fifty thousand of American youths.

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Back in August of last year, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the folks from Tea Party Nation exercised their inner Nativists by holding a big rally near the border in Cochise County. What was little noted at the time was where the rally was held: On Glenn Spencer's ranch. The same ranch where, a year before, Minuteman leader Shawna Forde had been arrested for the murders of a nine-year-old girl and her father.

David Holthouse at Media Matters has the whole story -- including the big picture:

Grinning on the sidelines behind mirrored sunglasses was Glenn Spencer, the leader of the border vigilante group American Border Patrol and the owner of the Tea Party Nation rally site.

Spencer's founding of American Border Patrol in 2002 pre-dated the first Minuteman "civilian border patrols" by three years. Before his ranchland became a Tea Party rallying point it served as both meeting grounds and temporary housing for high-ranking members of various border vigilante factions. Minuteman American Defense leader Shawna Forde lived on the property in an RV owned by Spencer in the summer of 2008.

Over the past two years, more than a dozen former border vigilante leaders have taken on key roles in the Tea Party movement. Some, like Spencer, continue to maintain their hard-core nativist personas. Others have sought to separate themselves from their Minuteman identities in pursuit of mainstream political legitimacy.

Spencer's border-watching activities well predated 2002; he was actively organizing such vigilante action back in the early 1990s, when his American Patrol outfit was a player in the Patriot/militia movement, and his vicious rhetoric earned his organization a hate-group designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Spencer is no bit player in the Nativist movement. He has, in fact, been the wellspring of many of the most cherished lies about immigrants, Latinos and the immigrant-rights movement over the years, including the time he spread false rumors that immigrants were carrying the Ebola virus into the USA. Spencer is the original source of the false claim that MEChA is a racist organization, as well as the accompanying phony Reconquista! conspiracy theory.

Above all, Spencer was one of the first people organizing vigilante border patrols -- serving in many ways as the original inspiration for the Minuteman movement, and he indeed continued to play a major leadership role in the movement until its sudden demise at the hands of Shawna Forde. Her conviction in February for the murders in Arivaca signalled the death knell for a movement already on its last legs, splintering into renegade subgroups like Forde's with no accountability, no restraints, and no conscience.

These border watch groups don't call themselves "Minutemen" anymore. Now they use newer, Tea Party-friendly monikers with lots of Patriotic references.

As Holthouse explains:

"The Forde killings really made the whole movement sordid and these guys [Minuteman leaders] needed to find somewhere else for their ambitions," said Heidi Beirich, co-director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which tracks extremist groups. "Rebranding themselves as Tea Party figures is their effort to stay relevant. They saw the rising populism as a good thing to latch onto, so they just toned down their anti-immigrant messaging a bit and synced themselves with the larger Tea Party agenda."

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While Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been busy arresting Latino car-wash workers and hapless mothers at roadblocks in his Ahab-like pursuit of undocumented immigrants, he's also been looking the other way when it comes to rape and other sex crimes, and letting criminals escape justice.

It's not exactly news that Arpaio's anti-immigrant fetish (not to mention his publicity-hound style) has meant that other kinds of crime in Maricopa County have not received the full attention of the Sheriff's Office. But now it's produced a particularly ugly and telling twist:

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office failed to adequately investigate more than 400 sex-crime cases, including dozens in El Mirage, over a two-year period because of poor oversight and former Chief Deputy David Hendershott's desire to protect a key investigator from bad publicity, according to documents pertaining to a recent internal investigation released by the Sheriff's Office.

The errors led to interminable delays for victims of serious crimes who waited years for the attackers to be brought to justice, if they were ever caught.

More than 50 El Mirage sex-crime cases, most involving young children reportedly victimized by friends or family, went uninvestigated after police took an initial report. The lack of oversight was so widespread in El Mirage that it affected other cases: roughly 15 death investigations, some of them homicides with workable leads, were never presented to prosecutors, and dozens of robberies and auto-theft cases never led to arrests.

Concern about the handling of the cases dates back several years. However, a recently concluded investigation by Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu revealed that an internal probe to get to the root of the problem was blocked by Hendershott two years ago because it would have reflected poorly on an investigator he considered crucial to a separate case.

Hendershott, according to investigators, killed the internal probe to protect Sgt. Kim Seagraves, because she was potentially needed to testify in a corruption case he was pushing.

The Pinal County investigation not only found fault in the El Mirage case, but it illustrated a larger problem with agency investigations.

"It wasn't just El Mirage PD cases," Deputy Chief Scott Freeman told Pinal County investigators. "As they started to look into that, they found that there were a lot of cases that hadn't been worked properly, hundreds of cases."

The Sheriff's Office would not comment on the mishandled investigations, which are the subject of an ongoing internal probe that began after Hendershott was placed on administrative leave last fall.

This reflects something the conservative Goldwater Institute reported three years ago:

The Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office is responsible for vitally important law-enforcement functions in one of the largest counties in the nation. It defines its core missions as law-enforcement services, support services, and detention.

MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions.

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America has gone crazy! Well, Arizona certainly leads the way to bizzaro land with the actions of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. And is there such a thing as Action Star Steven Seagal anymore?

Sheriff Joe Arpaio rolled out the tanks to take down a man suspected of cockfighting. West Valley residents in the neighborhood are crying foul after armored vehicles, including a tank, rolled into their neighborhood to make the bust.

Neighbor Debra Ross was so worried she called 911 and went outside where a nearby home had its windows blown out, was crawling with dozens of SWAT members in full gear, armored vehicles and a bomb robot.“When the tank came in and pushed the wall over and you see what's in there, and all it is, is a bunch of chickens,” Ross said.

In a massive show of force on Monday, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office executed a search warrant and arrested the homeowner, Jesus Llovera, on charges of suspected cockfighting.

Llovera was alone in the house at the time of the arrest, and he was unarmed.“I think taxpayers should be shocked,” said Robert Campus, Llovera’s attorney. Campus said he believes the operation costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Deputies had no probable cause to believe Llovera was armed or dangerous, according to Campus.

Campus said he believes the entire scene was basically a stage, to help actor Steven Seagal’s TV show, “Lawman.” Seagal was riding in the tank. The Sheriff’s Department has entered into a contract with Seagal and part of that contract gives Seagal carte blanche to go along with the sheriff as he arrests people.

Thousands of dollars in damages were made to the property and 115 birds were euthanized on the spot.Llovera was convicted of a misdemeanor last year of attending a cockfight and has no history of owning weapons.

Yet the sheriff’s office said they had reasons to believe Llovera might be armed. “We're going to err on the side of caution. We're going to make sure that we have the appropriate amount of force in case we do run into anything like that,” said Sgt. Jesse Spurgin.

We noticed that Seagal had been recruited along with Lou Ferrigno into Arpaio's "posse" of brown-people-rounder-uppers back when it happened. Gee, who could have foreseen it would turn out to be a gigantic publicity stunt at taxpayer expense?

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Well, we already knew that Sheriff Joe Arpaio's plan to create a "citizens posse" to hunt down illegal immigrants was one of the stupidest publicity stunts we'd ever heard of (not to mention a profoundly bad idea bound to end badly).

Now we get the proof: HULK SMASH IMMIGRANTS!

Television 'Hulk' actor Lou Ferrigno has joined an Arizona sheriff's posse targeting illegal immigrants in the Phoenix valley area, the sheriff's office said on Wednesday.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Ferrigno, 59, a body builder who donned green makeup to star in the popular 1970s television series 'The Incredible Hulk,' was among 56 people sworn in as volunteers for an armed immigration posse.

Arpaio said the posse would work with sheriff's deputies in operations targeting smugglers and businesses suspected of employing illegal immigrants in the county, among other duties.

Also sworn in alongside Ferrigno: Steven Segal, world's biggest wanker action star.

As a protester who showed up at the event said:

"They must have sunk pretty low in their career to stand by Sheriff Joe Arpaio."

This whole scheme gives me the willies. You just know it's going to turn out badly, for everyone involved.

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Well, for anyone who's watched the saga of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's corruption bubbling along, this won't be a big surprise:

On November 10th, Fox News released their list of America's "toughest sheriffs" on immigration, applauding local law enforcers who want to file suit against Mexico and are encouraging armed vigilante groups in their Counties to name a few notable mentions. Not coincidentally, those named are also America's Worst Sheriff's with Sheriff Arpaio at the top of both lists.

The Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona runs an unaccredited jail facility due to poor standards and is the subject of more than 2,700 lawsuits for civil rights and other violations. Additionally, he's the subject of a two year Department of Justice investigation and an additional criminal investigation for misuse of funds.

The other mentions on the list share a similar profile. Frederick County, MD Sheriff Jenkins is the subject of a one million dollar civil rights racial profiling suit. Similarly the Cobb County, NC Sheriffs earned a lawsuit when their "toughest" officers stopped a 23 year old Latino man riding his bicycle and beat him up, breaking his nose and eye socket in the process.

That's pretty much backed up by the latest revelations regarding Arpaio's corruption. Eric W. Dolan at Raw Story has the rundown:

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Gee, who would believe that something like this would happen in the great bigoted principled state of Arizona?

Maricopa County officials believe the discovery of a duplicate payroll log and database hidden in a secure computer system at the Sheriff's Office could reveal the extent of alleged misspending in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's agency.

The sheriff's employee database operated parallel to a county-run system, recording a different set of sheriff's staff assignments and payments than official records provided to county auditors. County officials say the system has existed since the early part of the decade, but they learned of it only recently through paperwork produced in a case alleging racial profiling against the Sheriff's Office.

Details of the sheriff's employee database and steps taken to investigate will be outlined to county supervisors at a hearing this morning.

The supervisors plan to subpoena 20 to 30 people to testify in the future about the hidden database, which is housed in a computer system at the center of a costly legal battle between Arpaio and the supervisors.

County administrators believe the Sheriff's Office intentionally misappropriated as much as $80 million designated for jail operations over five years to pay employees working in patrol, human-smuggling operations and investigative units. Those employees should have been paid with other funds, but county officials suspect the Sheriff's Office tried to maintain staffing levels by using money that legally was inaccessible.

The voter-approved jail-detention funds were established more than a decade ago with a sales tax of one-fifth cent per dollar to build and operate jail facilities.

If proven, the misappropriation of funds could lead to criminal charges. County Manager David Smith has called for an investigation by various agencies led by the U.S. Department of Justice.

A spokesman for the Sheriff's Office denied any intent to deceive county administrators. He blamed the confusion on a lack of compatible technology between the Sheriff's Office and other county agencies.