So Kari Lake was in Tucson last week, playing the victim and reliving how she lost the governorship.
Lake just keeps going and going. She’s the Energizer Bunny of defeat.
She’s appealing a May ruling that she lost the 2022 election, and her case was automatically picked to be shipped to the state Appeals Court down here in Tucson (part of how the judges balance caseloads). She’s calling Southern Arizona names and not good ones, as if an appeals case is heard by an Old Pueblo jury, and not judges mostly appointed by Doug Ducey. No matter. She’s a victim of Tucson’s “Marxism” anyway.
She’s had months to ask to take the case straight to the Arizona Supreme Court and have those Ducey-appointed justices make the call.
While holding a micro-rally at a local brewpub, TucsonSentinel.com’s Paul Ingram asked why she doesn’t just do that, if she can’t trust Tucsonans? Her answer was an unintelligible non-commitment to look at options.
But she filed a request to expedite the appeal up the ladder just a couple days later.
The name of her book is “Never Back Down” and I have to ask “from what?” From reminding people over and over again that she’s a losing loser who loses a lot?
Actual Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, meanwhile, is on her second chief of staff, press secretary and communications director.
Lake’s continuing crusade won’t help her do anything but sell books, which may be her real goal.
Oft-failed Democrat Terry Goddard must be saying “Damn, you mean there’s money in losing an Arizona governor’s race?”
Lake was probably on her way to winning, but decided well before the election to refuse to accept the results. Telling moderate and independent voters not to support her probably didn’t help either. She lost a tight race. In another day, she would have conceded gracefully, bird-dogged Hobbs for four years and then worked to flip the 9,000 votes necessary to put her in the governor’s chair.
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote a pretty important article about Trumpism saying “the cruelty is the point.” I’m starting to believe “the stupid is the point.”
Not nobody can’t tell ’em nothing. They don’t have to learn nothing they don’t already know. If the “Deep State” says two plus two equals four then two plus two equals salamander. No one can tell them different. Can’t tell them elections aren’t rigged, the coronavirus was real, they had anything to do with the Iraq War or climate change is happening.
Ignorance gives them license to fail and failure allows them to indulge in euphoric states of victimhood, safe from self reflection. God bless their America.
Lake’s continued folly was just a prelude to facepalm after facepalm, that included the state’s U.S. Rep. Eli Crane going all Jim Crow and referring to “colored people,” the language of the Bull Connor South. I’m going to leave that be because the Internet only has so much space…
Tweedle heil
Who says aligning with the Nazis is dumb politics?
Hah! RINOs, libtards and cuckolds, that’s who.
Pima County Republican Party Chairman Dave Smith has had to back way the hell off supporting an Arizona College Republicans United event that featured Nick Fuentes as keynote speaker.
County GOP parties say they never agreed to support college event featuring a white nationalist
Fuentes is often described kinda accurately as a Nazi, for his racist, antisemitic and Holocaust-denying ways. He doesn’t describe himself that way. He calls himself the Taliban. He’s repeatedly called for establishing a Catholic Taliban right here in the U.S. of A.
A little to their credit, some Arizona Republican leaders have said “Aw, hell no,” to Fuentes. Two other county party chairs officially denounced Fuentes, which means the other 12 didn’t.
The student group apparently didn’t tell anyone they were inviting somebody to speak who was either Nazi or Taliban.
Did they think nobody would notice? Did they think no one would say anything? The hotel has reportedly canceled the event on their grounds. News flash: Nazis make bad PR.
How stupid was this?
Jacob Chansley disassociated himself from the event.
Think on that. Chansley thought it was a fun idea to storm the U.S. Capitol, place himself at the House Speaker’s dais dressed in a furry hat with horns and commence to roar his domination of a seat of American power.
That guy… that guy… is distancing himself from Fuentes. The QAnon Shaman will not allow his brand to be sullied by association with College Republicans United.
A fine electoral strategy. Troll everyone to the left of Q.
I should note here that the racists who argue political correctness is killing America prefer to be called “white nationalists.” So I guess it’s our job to honor their feelings and more accurately describe them as Fashwave Nazis or KKK Now.
Tweedle where?
Back in Tucson, there’s one thing Republicans have wanted for decades, and that’s ward-only city elections.
Ward-only elections could give them City Council seats if wards 2 and 4 — they narrowly trail in voter registration in Ward 2, and still have a bit of an edge in Ward 4. However, because Tucson runs citywide general elections (it’s the primaries that are ward-only), Democrats usually sweep up seats with ease.
Representative democracy should give Republicans seats on the Council. I’m cool with that. Just because they are outnumbered 2-1, doesn’t mean they should be denied representation.
So “a coalition” got together seeking to establish ward-only elections by gathering petitions. This group had a veneer of nonpartisanship with names like Luis Gonzales and Ted Downing behind it. Gonzales is every Tucson Republican’s favorite Democrat. Downing was always more agent provocateur than Democrat.
Be real: the Republicans were lapping every bit of this up.
This ballot initiative would have given Republicans a shot at having voters OK what they’ve long wanted, and they turned in more than 17,000 signatures to have the question on the ballot in November. They needed 14,826 valid signatures.
One problem, the petition gatherers were required by state law to name the county where they were reside on the back of the petition forms. Enough forgot that those petitions got tossed. They forgot to name their county on multiple sheets.
They just left it blank? Did they just think it wasn’t important?
Republicans in 2018 sued to keep a school-funding tax off the Arizona ballot because the signature forms had bad spacing.
This is why Democrats do training for organizers. The word is “PIMA.”
Tweedle fix is in so I’d better fix it first
Speaking of Pima County, former Oro Valley Republican state Rep. Mark Finchem has pulled papers to run for a decidedly non-Pima office. He is in the early stages of challenging Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer for his job. Finchem has resigned his post as a precinct committeeman in this county, as part of his preparations to run up in the megaconurbation.
OK. Well, part of me says don’t let I-10 hit you in the tailpipe on your way out of town, Mark.
But the other part of me wonders, what’s the point?
The problem Republicans have with Richer is that he apparently rigged the 2022 election for Democrats in Maricopa County. Important point: Richer is a Republican. He just famously refused to go along with the idea that his predecessor rigged the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
To become county recorder, Richer beat Democratic incumbent Adrian Fontes in 2020, who two years later beat Finchem to become Arizona secretary of state.
Finchem would stand an honest-to-God shot at beating Richer and then become Phoenix’s problem.
But to what end?
If Richer is an election fixer then wouldn’t he fix his own race? So Finchem can’t win if the voices in his head are correct. If Finchem does win, then elections clearly aren’t rigged and his candidacy is pointless.
Finchem managed in 2022 to do something I didn’t think was doable. He elevated the race for Secretary of State and made voters care about it. The result was they didn’t just cast their ballots by party line. Finchem lost.
He lost Maricopa County in 2022.
I’m willing to bet most voters in Maricopa County were unaware that Finchem has previously sponsored legislation that would have required Arizona state law ignore U.S. Supreme Court decisions because Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided. I’m willing to wager they didn’t know Finchem was the guy who got a state law passed that treats the firearm as a holy relic which no government can legally destroy.
Back in the olden days of 2016, this was the kind of nuts voters vaguely paid attention to but was too “in the weeds” to really care about. Gun desecration and state nullification got columnists’ dander up but no one else cared.
Funny thing happens when candidates ask to help oversee elections, while saying entire counties results be Ctrl+Alt+Deleted because they were “irredeemably compromised.” Voters notice.
If Finchem is looking for a job, he might want to put in a resume to Pinal County, they are looking for a new elections director. It will be the county’s fifth in four years. Then the Kalamazoo Cowboy can see how much fun it is to try to run things when the right-wing masses think anyone who tries to run anything is part of a plot.
He could also ponder how it was he lost Saddlebrooke, a reliably Republican redoubt full of retirees and people he once represented… ohhhhh… they know himmmm … just going out on a thin branch here but maybe that’s Finchem’s problem.
Tweedle Dem
How dumb has the Republican Party become? They stand a 50-50 chance of actually losing any given election to the American Democratic Party.
The Democrats appear flummoxed about how to make hay out of the opposition leader’s multiple criminal indictments and helpless to get a boost from 13 million new jobs. They have, objectively, the most successful president in 60 years and he’s running neck and neck with a crook and adjudicated sex offender.
Permanent minority rule has become the project of the GOP and if it weren’t for guys like Finchem, Lake, Fuentes and Trump, they’d be winning.
Democrats would be powerless to stop them because powerlessness is the Democrats’ happy place. It’s a party that insists on running like union organizers (“we’re fighting for policies to help you out”) because the labor movement has had nothing but success for the last 50 years.
So no, history hasn’t given the 2020s contests of unstoppable forces meeting immovable objects. We are left with a sparring match between one party constantly trying to flee the ring and the other party playing “why are you hitting yourself?” without a big brother anywhere in sight.
I’m still betting the R’s have enough testosterone to knock themselves out in 2024 before Dems soil themselves and faint.
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