• Eric Kroll

Famed photographer Eric Kroll, who suggested we go on a photo safari to the Tucson Rodeo yesterday, captured a set of portraits and candids while I snapped action shots. He shared a few with TW. More photos after the jump and more from Kroll at his blog.

• Jim Nintzel

It was sunny Saturday afternoon at the Fiesta de los Vaqueros yesterday for all the cowboys and cowgirls in attendance. Today is the final day for the Tucson Rodeo. Details here and more photos after the jump.

On last night's edition of AZ Illustrated Politics: Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, Tucson Tea Party founder Trent Humphries and former Tucson City Council aide Miguel Ortega discussed Mayor Jonathan Rothschild's State of the City speech, a renewed call for annexation, the City Council's recent push for background checks at gun shows on city property and comprehensive immigration reform.

Here's your itinerary for today. Do not deviate. If you do, your Saturday will suck.

4:30 p.m. (Park Place)/5:10 p.m. (El Con) Bless Me, Ultima
This movie adaptation of Rudolfo Anaya's controversial novel opens this weekend for a limited time, so you better go today before our state Attorney General Tom Horne bans it. It's about a young boy and the arrival of Ultima, the curandera who moves in with his family at just the right time. She inspires him to question authority and see the world from a new and magical perspective. The movie is showing at Century 20 El Con Mall and Park Place Mall.

Here's the trailer:

7 to 10 p.m., Erotica 5
This annual erotica art show is at the Tucson Sculptural Resource Center, 640 N. Stone Ave. They tell you to leave the kids at home, so yeah, please, listen up. The show is cool, beautiful, interesting, freaky and includes some performances that usually mean naked people doing something interesting. The body is cool and beautiful folks, and the artists involved the past five years in this show understand how to celebrate it.

Here's an image from Erotica 4, so you understand why you may want to get a babysitter for this portion of our evening:

We've been here before — or, should we say, State Senator Steve Gallardo and Representative Sally Ann Gonzales have been here before — introducing legislation to the state house and senate to repeal SB 1070.

When the state lawmakers, Gallardo from Phoenix and Gonzales from Tucson, introduced similar legislature last year they were told by leadership that it was too late for their bills to get hearings. During today's press conference at the State Building in downtown Tucson, Gallardo and Gonzales said this time there are no excuses. They introduced their their laws to repeal SB 1070 early — HB 2651 from Gonzales and SB 1120 from Gallardo.

Today, is the deadline for bills to pass through committees or the bills die. It was reported yesterday that Gallardo confronted Republican leadership for not having assigned the bills to committees. Gallardo specifically confronted Republican Rep. John Kavanagh, who was outside the senate building talking with reporters.

In the Arizona Republic:

There was more passionate debate among lawmakers outside the Capitol than in it Thursday. Gallardo confronted Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, about the lack of discussion as Kavanagh stood outside the Senate building talking with reporters.

Kavanagh, who was instrumental in passing the state’s immigration law, said that the Legislature won’t entertain bills to repeal “good laws” and that Gallardo and his colleagues should “get used to it” and stop trying to “stir up the pot.”

“We have work to do in this chamber about new legislation, new problems, and we’re going to do that,” Kavanagh said. “Any debate on 1070? We’ll have it right here in the street, and we will not clog up the system that has to deal with the budget and other critical issues.”

John Chamblee, research chair for Humane Borders, will present "A Borderlands Transformation: Reflections on Migrant Death Maps Since 2002," tonight, 6 p.m. at Grace St. Paul Episcopal Church, 2331 E. Adams St.

Chamblee, research chair for Humane Borders, heads the organization's mapping project. While not about Chamblee's work, Margaret Regan wrote this interesting piece in 2007 on Ed McCullough, a retired UA geosciences professor, regarding the mapping of migrant trails.

From the press release for tonight's event, co-sponsored by Humane Borders and the Border Action Network:

For centuries, present-day Arizona’s desert borderlands have been corridors connecting northern and southern peoples. These passages themselves have undergone transformations — cycles that included times of lesser and greater violence. In this presentation, Dr. John F. Chamblee, a long-time Humane Borders volunteer and head of their mapping project, will discuss a most recent borderlands transformation by providing a historical view of the migrant death mapping project’s data. By looking at changes in death rates and locations, he will explore connections between globalization, border policy, drug trafficking and increasing mortality rates over the last decade within Arizona’s undocumented migrant travel corridors.
...

John (Chamblee) became involved with Humane Borders in 2003 when his wife, Ruby, then a volunteer, recognized that the organization needed a geographic information system (a type of electronic mapping software) database to manage their migrant death maps and encouraged him to develop one for the organization. He has managed the migrant death mapping program ever since.

The results of these efforts have been more accurate maps of deaths, a model of the potential benefits of additional cell phone towers in the western Sonoran Desert, and warning posters that inform potential migrants of the dangers associated with undocumented border crossings.

These maps and posters have raised awareness about risks to migrants through their distribution in Latin America and by being featured in many news outlets.

• Courtesy of the Fox Tucson Theatre

If your living room’s sorry lack of a red carpet is a detriment to your Oscar experience, the Fox Theatre has you covered for Sunday’s festivities. For the fourth year in a row, the Fox is hosting the Oscar Experience for Tucsonans seeking a bit of glamour on film’s big night.

Besides being the only screening of the show officially sanctioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Tucson, the Fox pitted against even the most impressive of home theaters is hardly a contest. The restored theater goes back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, and the interior is stunning enough ("The ceiling! The mosaics! The vintage marquee!" Do I sound like a red carpet commentator yet?) to draw comparisons as the Kodak Theatre of the Southwest. Pardon, the “Dolby Theatre”...still trying to get used to that.

Alex Teves was 24 when he was killed last year in Aurora, Colo., one of 12 who died last year in a mass shooting upon a theater full of movie-goers. His father, Tom Teves, of Phoenix, recently wrote to Arizona Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, urging them to reconsider their stances on assault weapon legislation, referencing his son's death in great detail and passion.

What he got in return were impersonal form letters, rife with references to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.

From Talking Points Memo:

Tom Teves can’t remember exactly when his correspondence with the senators began. He estimated it was in early February when he went to the website of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the gun control organization launched by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Because he filled out a web form, he also doesn’t have an exact copy of the text he wrote in the letters. But he did have an earlier draft, which he said he had to cut down by about half to meet the space requirements of the website.

Teves said he remembered some of the sections that made it into the final version included how his son died shielding his girlfriend from the theater gunman, who was armed with high-powered guns and high-capacity magazines.

“He was in the third row to the back of the theatre on the ground covering the love of his life with his body and a ballistic bullet from an assault weapon blew his head off,” the draft of Teves’ email said. “The bullet was designed to do the most damage possible to a human body and it was extremely violent.”

Teves said he also remembered pleading with his senators to enact bans that would help do away with such guns.

“My son was not with us at Christmas and he won’t be EVER AGAIN,” Teves wrote in his draft, “it’s time our politicians had ONE TENTH of the courage my 24 year old son showed that day by protecting his love with his own body.”

But as passionate as Teves’ draft emails were, the responses he received were equally dispassionate. Both senators got back to him, but their messages didn’t express condolences or even mention the Aurora shooting.

“Thank you for contacting my office regarding the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and its impact on federal gun legislation. I appreciate your taking the time to share your views with me,” McCain’s letter said in its opening.

Flake’s letter also opened with an impersonal reference to the Newtown massacre.

“As you may know, I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, and I do not believe that our society needs more laws restricting gun ownership,” Flake’s letter said. “What we really need is to do a better job of keeping guns out of the hands of those who should not have them, while ensuring that those who break existing laws are fully prosecuted.”

This news comes on the heels of a Town Hall event in which McCain addressed similar concerns from Caren Teves, Tom's wife, by saying that she needed some "straight talk" on the issue, and that an assault weapons ban "will not pass the Congress."

To see Teves' letter and the Senators' responses to TPM's inquiries (including a straight-up stonewalling from McCain's office,) head to Talking Points Memo.

Odd news out of the Vatican, courtesy of the U.K.'s Guardian:

Last May Pope Benedict's butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested and charged with having stolen and leaked papal correspondence that depicted the Vatican as a seething hotbed of intrigue and infighting.

According to La Repubblica, the dossier comprising "two volumes of almost 300 pages — bound in red" had been consigned to a safe in the papal apartments and would be delivered to the pope's successor upon his election.

The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were "united by sexual orientation".

In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to "external influence" from laymen with whom they had links of a "worldly nature". The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail.

It quoted a source "very close to those who wrote [the cardinal's report]" as saying: "Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments."

The seventh enjoins against theft. The sixth forbids adultery, but is linked in Catholic doctrine to the proscribing of homosexual acts.

Considering concerns of Benedict XVI's declining health during his time in the papal office, and the timing of this news (it's been said he made the decision to resign on December 17, the day that he received the report containing this information,) it's not hard to imagine that these could be related. The pope's spokesperson, according to the Guardian, has chosen to neither confirm nor deny the report.

On tonight's edition of AZ Illustrated Politics: Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, Tucson Tea Party founder Trent Humphries and former Tucson City Council aide Miguel Ortega join host Jim Nintzel to discuss Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild's State of the City Speech; Rothschild's call for more annexation; Vail's push to incorporate into a town; the ongoing debate over immigration reform; TUSD's school closures; and the future of TUSD's Mexican-American Studies program. (Or at least that's all on the agenda. We'll see how much of it we can cover!)