As of September, 2015, cases involving Arpaio or his office have cost Maricopa County taxpayers $142 million in legal expenses, settlements, and court awards.[2]
.. Arpaio has, throughout his tenure as sheriff, sought out media coverage. He has been featured and profiled by worldwide news media, and claims to average 200 television appearances per month.[27]
.. In March 2015, a month before the scheduled contempt hearing, Arpaio admitted that he violated several court orders, and consented to a finding of civil contempt against him
.. Arpaio asked the Ninth Circuit to remove Judge Snow from the case.[177] On September 15, 2015, the Ninth Circuit denied Arpaio’s request to remove Judge Snow, as well as Arpaio’s related request to halt the lower court’s proceedings.
.. In the report, a Justice Department expert concluded that Arpaio oversaw the worst pattern of racial profiling in U.S. history.[188]
.. The complaint included accusations that Arpaio and his staff forced women to sleep in their own menstrual blood, assaulted pregnant women, ignored rape, and criminalized being a Latino.[190]
.. On March 1, 2012, Arpaio and members of his Cold Case Posse held a news conference announcing their contention that President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate, released by the White House on April 27, 2011,[196] is a computer-generated forgery.
What are Donald Trump, Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon Really up to?
“Win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” One of Ellison’s sources also reported that Trump resents the fact that he has helped raise the ratings of certain news organizations, such as CNN, without getting a cut of the additional revenues. Trump has “gotten the bug,” the source said, “so now he wants to figure out if he can monetize it.”
.. As part of his lucrative severance package from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, Ailes almost certainly signed a noncompete agreement. But how long does it last? And does it preclude him from providing some informal advice to an old friend?
How Can America Recover From Donald Trump?
Anyone hoping to build a serious solution to immigration after this election will have to confront the unworkable ideas and vicious emotions that Mr. Trump, with many enablers, has dragged into the open.
.. Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s chief purveyor of conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant venom, is the natural ally of a candidate who hints that President Obama is a secret Muslim and who insists that Muslims in New Jersey danced by the thousands as the towers fell on 9/11.
.. Trump supporters have now been promised a nation where non-natives, and their children, are locked outside the borders forever. They have been promised, inside a new wall, new factories where everyone will build things, speak only English and be rich. What will happen when they learn that none of this is real?
Why the GOP Will Never Accept President Hillary Clinton
One of the roots of this argument can be found in the famous list of words that the then-Rep. Newt Gingrich and pollster/communications strategist Frank Luntz offered Republican candidates in the run-up to the 1994 midterms. “These are powerful words,” they said, “words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party. … decay… failure (fail)… collapse(ing)… deeper… crisis…… corrupt…destructive… destroy… sick… pathetic… lie… … betray… traitors…”
.. They paint the opposition not simply as incompetent, but as malevolent. And it is an approach to politics that fits perfectly with the rise of right-wing talk radio
.. Conspiracy theories emerged suggesting that Obama, the Chicago community organizer, had managed to get his liberal, black friends at ACORN (the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to steal the national election. A year after an election that Obama had won by 10 million votes ..
.. “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” Among Republicans, only 27 percent say Obama actually won the race, with 52 percent—an outright majority—saying ACORN had stolen it, and 21 percent were undecided.
.. 43 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim
.. more than half of Republicans do not think Obama was born in the United States.
.. That may help explain why they have nominated a candidate who in 2011 repeatedly and insistently argued that he had unearthed evidence so astounding that “you wouldn’t believe” what his investigators had turned up. We still haven’t seen it.
.. wouldn’t the Republican Party use every device at its command to thwart the Democratic president’s malevolent goals? Threaten to default on the government’s debt, thus risking the collapse of the global financial system? Sure; that’s the way to force Obama to sign the repeal of Obamacare. Refuse to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee with a year left in the president’s term?
.. “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
.. Much like the most militantly revolutionary radicals of the late 1960s and early 70s, Trump’s most ardent supporters are convinced that they are battling an irredeemably corrupt system, which must be combated “by any means necessary.” If the only way they can lose (as Trump said of Pennsylvania) is to be cheated out of their victory, the normal reconciliation between victor and vanquished does not apply.