Ann Kirkpatrick Is on the Hunt For John McCain — Well, His U.S. Senate Seat, At Least

Photo by Jim Louvau/New Times

If there’s one thing Ann Kirkpatrick doesn’t want to talk about, it’s John McCain.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, the congresswoman is seated at a long wooden table in a boardroom in Tucson. She’s just finished a round-table discussion with 20 men and women who work with veterans, and managed to go the entire hour without anyone mentioning the five-time Senate incumbent she’s trying to unseat this November.

And now, as she rests her forearms on the table and answers a question about her life before politics, she looks almost excited, as if she’s gotten away with something.

She tucks her shoulder-length brown hair behind her ears, revealing a pair of silver and turquoise earrings, and smiles, waiting for the next question.

“What’s it like to run against John McCain?” she’s asked.

“Well, I think more about it like I’m running for Arizona,” she replies, not missing a beat. “I’ve seen Arizona go through too many boom-and-bust cycles over my lifetime, and so my work and my vision for Arizona is really about building a strong, diverse, stable economy.”

She makes eye contact with the journalist across the table. Smiles again. This isn’t her first rodeo.

Asked whether she’s running a pro-Ann Kirkpatrick campaign or an anti-John McCain campaign — given that her TV ads, daily e-mails, and tweets always target the incumbent — she demurs, changing the subject.

“I’m running on the vision that I have for Arizona. That’s what drives me; that’s what my work is about,” she answers, glancing quickly at the smiling campaign staffer also sitting at the table. “And look, I’m out all over the state, and unemployment is still really high in the tribal and rural areas. This is still about jobs; it’s really about jobs.”

When pressed about the campaign message, Kirkpatrick doesn’t squirm in her seat or fidget, but the corners of her smile do droop just slightly, as if she’s either annoyed by the question — or bored.

Given the opportunity, Kirkpatrick prefers to talk about the challenges facing working-class families and veterans or bolstering Arizona’s infrastructure. She’ll talk your ear off about water policy or the problems with mining uranium in the Grand Canyon. And having grown up in rural Arizona on the White Mountain Apache Reservation, she has plenty to say about local and national policies that affect farmers, loggers, and tribes.

But a few minutes later, while talking about the things she’s been hearing from people on the campaign trail — their fears about the cost of education or their struggles to access their VA benefits — she slips up.

“[People] are very concerned about the vicious, hateful, racist, insulting things that Donald Trump has said, and they want somebody who will stand up to Trump. And I hear from a lot of people who don’t think that’s John McCain,” she says. “I mean, Trump insulted John McCain, and he hasn’t stood up to him.”

With that, she pivots and begins talking about a recent round-table event she had with Latino business leaders and the importance of supporting entrepreneurship.

Ann Kirkpatrick might not want to talk about John McCain, but even she can’t help it. (Continue reading at the Phoenix New Times.)

Why the Phoenix Goddess Temple Founder Insists She’s a Priestess, Not a Prostitute

Tracy Elise thinks we have a sex problem in Arizona.

As someone who has studied ancient sex practices for more than two decades and served as the head priestess at a Tantric temple in Phoenix, she should know.

She thinks we don’t talk about sex and orgasms enough, and that when we do, the discussion is hampered by the conflicting teachings we get from religious authorities and pornography.

She thinks that the human orgasm is a religious experience, and that sexual energy has tremendous healing powers, but that we don’t take advantage of it.

And she thinks a lot of men don’t know how to honor, worship, or treat women like goddesses — a problem that fuels a cycle of women having bad sexual experiences that prevent them from attaining their orgasmic potential.

“Sexuality is natural, it’s necessary, and a lot of it happens with ignorance,” Elise says. “I’m sad about what’s happening with orgasms: They’re meant to be a shared experience, but people are having them alone, if they’re having them at all.”

These problems aren’t necessarily unique to Arizona, she says, but because state leaders lean so far to the political right, our chances of fixing these problems on our own are grim.

That’s not to say all is doomed. As a priestess, healer, and minister of Tantra — the religion she practices to further the sexual and spiritual health of society — she says she’s successfully helped many people overcome a wide variety of sexual and emotional problems…. (Continue reading in The Phoenix New Times.)

As University Tuition Skyrockets, Arizona Coeds Turn to Sugar Daddies to Cover Costs

When Victoria was 15, her father took her to the Red Light District in Amsterdam.

“Vicky,” he said, pointing to the women dancing behind the glass of a shop window, “if you don’t go to college, you’ll end up like this.”

More than a decade later, Victoria sits in a dimly lit booth at the Cheesecake Factory in Tucson Mall on a Tuesday night, a year away from getting a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona.

At 28, she’s older than most students. And with surgically plumped lips, veneer-capped teeth, and Ugg boots covered in red rhinestones, she doesn’t look like them, either.

She was early today, early enough to have already ordered and finished a salad by the time her slightly late dinner date arrived, so she sips lemonade from a sugar-rimmed glass while talking about the classes she’s taking this semester: two studio art classes, art history, and a digital communications course.

But she doesn’t want to talk about school. She’d rather discuss her plan to become a photographer for a luxury lifestyle magazine or her favorite hobby: shopping.

She describes her closet full of clothes from “Bloomies” and Victoria’s Secret and gushes about the chocolatey perfume she’s obsessed with these days. It costs $375 a bottle.

At some point, she mentions that she grew up poor in Virginia — her father was in the U.S. Marines and her mother was a hairdresser — but not in a defensive way, just to highlight that her life wasn’t always like this. In fact, just two semesters ago, she felt like a lot of college students: uncertain she’d graduate because she couldn’t afford tuition.

But money isn’t an issue anymore because Victoria has a sugar daddy — three, to be precise.

She met them through Seeking Arrangement, the leading matchmaking website for sugar daddies (usually older wealthy men) and sugar babies (usually young attractive women) looking to connect for “mutually beneficial arrangements.” She says she’s romantically involved with two of the men (one is 57 and the other is 62) but just friends with the third. He’s 81…. (Continue reading in the Phoenix New Times.)

A Phoenix cop might go to jail for sexual assault, but a little-known state law will protect his employer from fault.

Jane was certain the police officer was about to hurt or kill her. She sat handcuffed and sobbing in the back of his patrol car in a corner of a dark Walgreens parking lot in the middle of a hot night in June.

Can Arizona’s Broken Child Welfare System Ever Be Fixed?

Two-year-old Cloud Gerhart weighed just 17 pounds when the Department of Child Safety finally removed him from his home in September 2014. The first call to authorities had come before he was even born, after Cloud’s mother, Megan, tested positive for marijuana during two prenatal appointments.

Between the time of his birth and the day DCS took him away, the state’s child abuse hotline received six more calls expressing concern that Cloud was skinny and hungry, that Megan drank and smoked a lot, and that their trailer in Sierra Vista was dirty and full of trash.

Though it’s unacceptable that Cloud had languished in Arizona’s “broken” child welfare system, it’s almost unfathomable that he continued to do so for seven months after what arguably was the most drastic overhaul of the system ever attempted in this state… (Continue reading in The Phoenix New Times.)

Jessica Burlew was only 16 when she strangled her boyfriend and mutilated his body. Should someone have seen it coming?

 “This guy is dying. He might be — this guy is dying!” the woman screams into the phone. Her voice is panicked. Her breaths are raspy.

“Is he breathing?” the 911 emergency dispatch operator asks.

“I don’t think so.”

“Bring the phone over to the patient — bring the phone over to him, okay?”

“I don’t think he is, and he’s — oh, my God . . .”

“Ma’am, take a breath. Bring the phone over to the patient,”

“Okay, I’m there,” she gasps.

“Okay, are you looking at him now?”

“I am.”

“Is he breathing?”

“No!”

“Okay, I need you to kneel at his side — did you witness this happen?”

“No!”

“Kneel at his side, and we need to begin compressions, okay? Put your hands flat in the center of his chest.”

“He might be alive!” …Continue reading in The Phoenix New Times

Last year the FAA changed flight paths over Phoenix without warning. A lawsuit is in the works.

Gerry McCue gets a kick out of describing the moment last fall when he first heard the airplanes over his house.

“I thought the city of Phoenix was being evacuated and I didn’t get the memo,” the 85-year-old says, opening his eyes wide for dramatic effect.

Like many residents in Phoenix’s downtown historic area — as well as those living in Laveen and certain parts of Tempe — when Gerry and his wife, Marge, woke up on September 18, 2014, the house they had lived in since 1962 was suddenly under a major flight path out of Sky Harbor International Airport. At the time, they had never heard of “NextGen,” but that would change very quickly.

“They come in batches. You can hear it for four continuous hours — rooooaaaar, rooooaaar, rooooaaaar,” Gerry says, trying to imitate the drawn-out sound of an engine. “You hear it coming, and just as it peaks out, you hear the next one.”

He likens it to Chinese water torture: “constant, chronic.”

The noise interrupts their conversations and keeps them from sitting outside or inviting guests over for a BBQ. The sound makes them unconsciously tense their jaws and grit their teeth. And even worse, it has reduced the value of their home by over 30 percent — no small dent in their life savings… (Continue reading in The Phoenix New Times.)

Massachusetts is widely lauded for its world-class universities, competitive public school rankings, and top-notch private high schools. But there’s another school system that’s locked up in a decades-old conflict affecting thousands of students: vocational education

Photo by Miriam Wasser

In 2008, Ed Bouquillon, then the new superintendent of Minuteman Regional Vocational Technical High School, noticed something odd: dozens of 8th graders who wanted to attend his school weren’t allowed to apply. In Massachusetts, before prospective students can submit applications to Minuteman—or any other vocational school, for that matter—they need their hometown superintendent’s approval. Students are rarely denied, and if they are, it’s usually because they live in a town that already offers the exact program they hope to study.

Minuteman Tech could be called the Harvard of vocational high schools. Last September, American RadioWorks produced a four-part documentary that spotlighted it as the example of a 21st-century vocational school. The school is located in Lexington, but serves as the district vocational school for 16 suburban towns in Middlesex County. Of the 700 or so students who enroll at Minuteman every year, historically about half have come from out-of-district communities.

The 8th graders who weren’t allowed to apply to Minuteman were all from out-of-district, but, Bouquillon reasoned, it wasn’t like they lived on the other side of the state. They were mostly from Medford, Somerville, and Waltham, towns that have always sent quite a few students to Minuteman. As far as Bouquillon could tell, there was no obvious reason these kids should be prohibited from applying…. Continue reading at Boston Magazine

New York City has more than a million feral felines. One Queens resident has a humane—and controversial—plan to save them all.

Brad Horrigan/Narrative.ly

No one opens a can of cat food quite like Debi Romano. Gracefully, she peels back the metal lid and dumps the mushy contents onto a pile of dry cat food. With mesmerizing speed, she opens and dumps cans like a seasoned assembly line worker, tossing the empties into a plastic bag.

Working out of the trunk of her red Camaro, she puts the food into disposable containers and places them under dumpsters and cars, near fences and building crawl spaces. Romano spends four hours every night hitting five Queens neighborhoods and feeding upwards of 100 street cats. She goes through $2,000 of cat food a month, and puts forty dollars worth of gas in her car every other day.

When she was twelve, her mother predicted she would become “that crazy cat lady.” Now fifty-four, she probably is New York’s ultimate one. Continue reading at Narrative.ly.com

Miriam Wasser/ The Big Round Table

Cathy Caracciolo is no amateur rabbit breeder. She got her first bunny at a birthday party when she was five, and fifty years later, she still considers herself a rabbit addict. Cathy brings to mind a fondly recalled kindergarten teacher – she is in her mid-fifties, and her bearing and attire of jeans, sweatshirts, and sneakers suggest comfort. She is also a star in the rabbit world.

Cathy is among the nation’s best known breeders of Flemish Giants, a type of rabbit that, as the name implies, are really, really big—often growing to the size of a small dog and weighing as much as eighteen pounds.That she has achieved this status as a woman makes her ascent and position all the more remarkable.