Friday, October 19, 2007

By the Time You Get to Phoenix...



...You could be under subpoena, if you click this news link from the weekly Phoenix New Times. For those of you who don't want to end up in pink uniforms in the Desert Loon's jail, here's a link from the Gannettoids at the timid Arizona Republic, Phoenix's daily paper, which blandly reports that New Times is "at odds" with the sheriff and various worthies in the county prosecutor's office.

At freakin' odds! Jayzus! Do sentient creatures edit these newspaper stories?

Last night, the sheriff's boys arrested two editors from New Times, which (unlike the local Gannett paper) has a long tradition of aggressively investigating the astonishingly weird (and worse) activities of the Desert Loon.

As noted here yesterday, Sheriff Joe (Pinky) Arpaio and the Keystone Kops in the Maricopa County prosecutor's office issued a subpoena to New Times seeking the names and Web browsing histories of every single person who visited the online edition of New Times since 2004.

How, oh how, does a really nice place like Phoenix -- home of great weather, superb restaurants, magnificent scenery, a public radio station way better than that preternaturally prissy station in New York City -- manage to elect these invincible goofballs?

Meanwhile, the great battleships of the Mainstream Media are slowly responding with their 5-inch guns, instead of their 16-inchers, popping out little 800-word summaries about this truly astonishing sequence of events -- a free press under brazen assault; editors hauled off to jail in the night.

Every one of these great bastions of the First Amendment ought to prominently post live links to Phoenix New Times on their own Web sites (here's another one, reporting that the editors were released from jail today) -- so that 10 or 20 million people could stand up against this stunningly anti-American assault on the First Amendment. There can't be that many pink jail suits in all of Arizona.

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