1 priority would have been to help build Donald Trump's border wall between the United States and Mexico. The money would go to something called the John McCain Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Fund, and this new fund's No. To remove the block, you'd have to be over 18 and pay $20.
The bill would have required electronic devices in Arizona to be fitted with software that would block all internet porn. Griffin signed on as Sevier's political soulmate, introducing HB 2444 in January. The anti-gay activist came up with an anti-porn idea this year as his latest stunt, and spread it like a disease through 18 states, including Arizona. That sounds an awful lot like Utah, where Sevier once tried to marry his laptop as he strongly implied that gay marriage was just as ridiculous. Gail Griffin and Chris Sevier are a match made in a heaven where porn doesn't exist, everyone is fully clothed at all times, and no one ever thinks an impure thought. With this particular investigation, the utility promises, it is fully cooperating with the U.S. It has also been under federal investigation since at least 2016 over its involvement in the 2014 Arizona Secretary of State's race. The utility hasn't drawn the line at trying to buy its regulators, though. That money contributed to the victories of APS's preferred candidates, who were then tasked with regulating the utility and deciding how much it could charge captive customers for electricity. Arizonans were disgusted but unsurprised when the utility disclosed, under threat of subpoena, that it had indeed secretly poured tens of millions in dark money into the 2014 Corporation Commission race. More criminals likely would get busted if the program wasn't so focused on trying to make Ducey look good.Īlthough its greatest offenses took place in 2014, only in 2019 did the largest electric utility in the state and its parent company, Pinnacle West, finally cop to dumping more than $130 million in customer dollars into political spending, charitable contributions, marketing and advertising, lobbying, and sponsorships from 2013 to 2018. But this sort of smoke-and-mirrors crime-fighting program is just what you'd expect of one created by a politician.
That is, if a police agency stops a semitruck and finds a pound of meth on the driver, the task force might list it under its tally for drugs seized for the year. Fewer than 18 percent of the cases it works on involve drug smuggling or organized crime. Statistics detailing the task force's alleged successes borrow from the work of other law enforcement agencies, research shows. As the Arizona Republic and New Times have found out, the program does little beyond act as Ducey's propaganda tool. Yet, if the border strike task force does anything that the state doesn't already expect the Arizona Department of Public Safety to do, that would be unusual. The state reportedly has spent $82 million on the task force since then, and this year it got an $11 million boost that will include the hiring of several new troopers.
The dispensaries and patients were psyched - picture the final scene in Star Wars: A New Hope, when everyone's cheering and the Death Star's in pieces.Ĭreated in 2015 by Governor Doug Ducey, the task force was his way of telling voters he's doing something about illegal immigration, which many Republican voters see as a huge problem.
The justices voted 7-0 that, duh, the 2010 medical marijuana law's protections extended to all forms of marijuana. On May 28, however, the Supreme Court went for concentrates like a hardcore stoner who hasn't seen his dabbing rig for a month. Business owners and nearly 200,000 patients continued to sell, buy, and use the extracted-resin products, but they feared the worst. In theory, that ruling made illegal some of the most popular products sold in dispensaries, like vape-pen cartridges, shatter and hashish, and infused edibles. The agonizing wait began after the state Court of Appeals ruled in June 2018 that the state's medical marijuana program didn't cover products containing resin extracted from marijuana, and that it had been just fine for medical marijuana patient Rodney Christopher Jones to serve two years in prison for something he bought at a state-licensed dispensary. The stakes hardly could have been higher: If the state's highest court had ruled against concentrates, nothing less than the crumbling of the dispensary industry and suffering of the program's most ill patients would have been the result. State of Arizona by the Arizona Supreme Court probably brought in business for local therapists.
The anxiety before this year's ruling on marijuana concentrates in Rodney Christopher Jones v.