Heat City

Joe Arpaio

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is more than two years away from his next election, but he has spent more money campaigning in recent months than almost any candidate running in Arizona this year.

Only Sen. John McCain and wealthy gubernatorial candidate Buz Mills have spent more money. Both Republicans, however, are in red-hot primary races that go to the polls next month.

Arpaio, meanwhile, doesn’t face his next contest until the second half of 2012. Yet his most-recent financial disclosure shows the Republican sheriff has already spent $671,318 on his campaign.

The two Republicans hoping to become Arizona’s next attorney general will face off tonight in a rematch of what may have been the dirtiest debate in local politics so far this year.

Tom Horne and Andrew Thomas threw gallons of political mud at each other when they last faced off on June 3 in front of a Scottsdale tea party group. They largely ignored the moderator and instead tossed around accusations of lies, corruption and secret agendas for almost two hours.

The Mexican government formally joined the fight to stop Arizona’s new immigration law on Monday, telling a U.S. court the law “threatens to poison the well” of diplomacy between the two nations and exposes Mexican citizens to racial profiling by police.

In a 28-page brief filed in the U.S. District Court of Arizona, lawyers for Mexico said the creation of the law, widely known as S.B. 1070, “has been closely followed at the highest levels of the Mexican government and throughout Mexican society.”

The government said it believes the Arizona law, which among other things makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally, violates the U.S. Constitution. It asked the court to throw the law out entirely.

During a joint session of Congress last month, Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon called the law a “terrible idea” that “ignores a reality.” But Monday’s so called friend of the court brief marks the first time Mexico has weighed in on the attempt to challenge the law in court.

Gov. Jan Brewer

Arizona politicians have accused illegal immigrants of a lot of nasty things over the past few months, but Gov. Jan Brewer threw out a new one Wednesday night on national television.

The Republican governor told Fox News she signed the state’s new immigration law to prevent, no kidding, beheadings brought on by illegal immigrants.

“We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it,” Brewer told host Greta Van Susteren live from the Arizona desert. “Everything from the crime to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings.”

Tom Horne

In an interview Tuesday with a Phoenix newspaper, Arizona’s top educator dismissed the terrorism-related deaths and injuries of hundreds of Israelis in recent years as “minor incidents.”

State school superintendent Tom Horne appears to have been trying to walk back his previous quote that “Israel totally put a stop to terrorism by building their wall.”

But while admitting to the Phoenix New Times that Israel indeed still suffers from deadly terrorist attacks, he went on to classify them as “minor incidents” compared with others in Israel of the past decade.

A portion of the barrier being built by Israel in 2004 in the West Bank. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Tom Horne

Tom Horne, the head of Arizona’s public school system, drew huge applause from a crowd of tea partiers earlier this month when he said Israel’s war on terror proves that the U.S. needs to build a wall along the Mexican border.

“Israel totally put a stop to terrorism by building their wall,” said Horne, a Republican whose final term as school superintendent ends after this year and who is vying to become the state’s next attorney general.

The “only way” to stop illegal immigration and drug smuggling in the U.S. “once and for all is to finish building the wall,” he told the Scottsdale audience on June 3 during the first Republican debate of the attorney general’s race.

Despite the applause he received, however, Horne is wrong about terrorism in Israel. Far from eliminated, such attacks remain a regular occurrence there.

President Barack Obama’s job approval among Hispanics dropped to new lows in May after Arizona’s controversial new immigration law drove the issue of comprehensive reform back into the national spotlight, according to Gallup.

Andrew Thomas (left) and Tom Horne

It began with a prayer from an audience member asking for the night to be entertaining yet civil.

But the first Republican debate in the Arizona attorney general’s race quickly descended into a conservative cage match Thursday in Scottsdale, with candidates Andrew Thomas and Tom Horne ignoring many of the moderator’s questions and instead trading smears for nearly two hours.

Each man came to the debate, hosted by a Scottsdale tea party group, carrying a stack of paper that he said proved an ugly narrative about his opponent.

For Horne, it was a thick binder he leafed through all evening. He painted Thomas as a corrupt prosecutor who spent five years as Maricopa County attorney caring more about his own political ambition than the law itself.

For Thomas, it was a stack of plain white paper with typewritten notes and excerpts from newspaper articles. He portrayed Horne as a closeted liberal who made scores of lefty decisions in his years as a state legislator and now as Arizona’s school superintendent.

Neither one could be moved from his accusations.