From the website of the FEC -
Republican Martin is a 2020 candidate who has signed on for another run at the CD2 seat currently held by the retiring Ann Kirkpatrick.
And my lack of regard for the job Sinema has done as an elected is well known; putting the word "leadership" in anything associated with her is a lie.
Trump on what would prevent 2024 bid: 'I guess a bad call from a doctor'
Former President Trump suggested in an interview Friday night that only a "bad call from a doctor" would prevent him from seeking another White House bid.
Trump, who has openly flirted with launching another presidential campaign while so far declining to reveal his plans for 2024, was asked by television host David Brody what might prevent him from running again.
1. Wear a damn mask.
2. Get vaccinated.
Ex-Colorado GOP Head Ryan Call Disbarred In Pro-Trump PAC Funds Case
Former Colorado Republican Party chair Ryan Call will be disbarred after acknowledging he took nearly $280,000 from a super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump while Call served as the political action committee’s treasurer. Colorado Politics reports that the state Supreme Court’s presiding disciplinary judge issued the decision after Call admitted to transferring the funds from 2016 to 2019.Call also acknowledged he misled members of his former Denver-based law firm about his activities with the committee. Rebuilding America Now PAC was created in 2016 by former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and Tom Barrack, a real estate investor. Call didn’t return requests for comment.
[snip]Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, a physician, tweeted support for people who have been pushing ivermectin as well, even suggesting that Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, who is leading the controversial “audit” of the 2020 election, use the medication after contracting COVID.
Somerset County District Attorney Jeffrey Thomas charged with rape, assault
Somerset County District Attorney Jeffrey Lynn Thomas was arrested Wednesday and charged with raping a woman on Sept. 18 after showing up at her Windber Borough residence late that night, Pennsylvania State Police said.
In a criminal complaint filed against him Wednesday, Thomas is accused of entering the woman’s home without permission after sending her a message on the social media app Snapchat.
Oh, wait - there's more.
From The Daily Beast -
A Republican district attorney in Pennsylvania who styled himself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor—while refusing to pursue charges against anyone cited for disregarding state mask mandates—now stands accused of violently raping a female acquaintance in her own home, according to Pennsylvania State Police.
Anyone wanna bet that he moves to AZ and becomes a legislator here?
Turns out that a corruption case in DC has some serious AZ ties.
From Politico -
Longtime GOP operatives charged with funneling Russian national’s money to Trump, RNC
Two veteran Republican campaign operatives — including one who got a pardon from then-President Donald Trump one month before he left office — are charged in a new federal indictment with funneling $25,000 from a Russian national into the Trump campaign in 2016.
Jesse Benton, 43, and Doug Wead, 75, made brief appearances Monday at a video hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, pleading not guilty to six felony charges including facilitating a campaign contribution by a foreign national, acting as a straw donor and causing the filing of false campaign finance reports.
[snip]
For example, the indictment’s reference to a $25,000 donation on Oct. 27, 2016, to a political committee by Benton — allegedly to cover up the foreign source of the money — lines up with a donation of the same size and date to Trump’s political committee attributed to a “Jesse Bentor,” which prosecutors said is a garbling of Benton’s name.
While I didn't find any contributions to current GOP members of the AZ delegation to Congress, the penchant of electeds to seek and accept "bundled" contributions, I expect most of them are hoping that none of the money that they received came from foreign nationals.
From the website of the FEC (the blacked out name is that of someone with a similar name who donated to a GOPer, but is someone who doesn't seem to be part of this scheme) -
Mr. Wead may be someone who tends to back the winners of horse races after they've won one, but he doesn't always pick winners -
The donation by Bentor...errrr..."Benton", referenced in the story.
I didn't find anything else under their names on the FEC's website, and I did search some others, but the website of the AZSOS kept crashing when I attempted to look up individual contributors, plus the campaign finance websites of Maricopa County and the City of Scottsdale do not sort but individual contributions. If a user knows the candidate receiving a contribution, and approximately when it was made, one can look up the report. If not, the user is SOL.
Plus, the habit of using aliases makes searching problematical, no matter the campaign finance website in question.
From Business Insider via Yahoo! -
We're watching the implosion of the Supreme Court in real time
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett admitted that the Supreme Court is crumbling as an institution.
Earlier this month, the newest justice gave a speech lamenting how the Court is viewed as partisan and warning that her fellow justices must be "hyper vigilant to make sure they're not letting personal biases creep into their decisions." She must know something we don't.
While we're talking about the Supreme Court here, other institutions like the police and prosecutors have the same problem - they may work for society at large, but they cannot be trusted, or even have earned some trust, by society at large.
Whether it's a police officer killing an innocent person and the insisting that it was OK, DAs/CAs falsely prosecuting people on inflated charges, and then wanting money when those charges are dropped, or judges acting like partisan hacks, no matter how much one of those judges insists otherwise, there's no accountability for be unfair.
Do honest mistakes happen?
Of course.
But where the rest of us are expected to own up to our mistakes and learn from those mistakes, folks that are part of the system are never expected to be, nor do they expect to be, accountable for theirs.
And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt and assumes that many of the "mistakes" are honest ones; too many seem to be nothing more than misuses of public office.
Bottom line: Certain things are absolutely irrelevant, or should be, when someone is in contact with the "system" - age, race, gender, financial status, where someone is employed, partisan affiliation, religious choice, etc.
Until those are truly irrelevant, and seen as such by society at large, trust in the system, and the people who are part of it, won't be given.
America's enemies and those that wish to destroy it look to very happy; Cheeto may no longer be in office, but America's institutions are still imploding.
From Dennis Welch of AZFamily.com (note: I usually quote the first two paragraphs of a story here, but since this only a three paragraph story [actually, it's a four sentence story], so I'll quote the entire story) -
Finchem calls for statewide door-to-door voter verification
State Rep. Mark Finchem, who is a strong supporter of the partisan election review of the 2020 election, is calling for a "statewide door- to-door voter verification."
Finchem, who is also running for the Republican nomination for Secretary of State, made the announcement in a fundraising letter sent out this week. He is running in a crowded republican primary where former president Donald Trump's endorsement could play a key role in who wins.
There are more than 4.3 million registered voters in Arizona and it's unknown how he intends to carry out such a massive project because he did not return requests for comment.
But the GQP is going there anyway.
I've previously written about being on the mailing list of a GQP fundraising operation called "ConservativeIntel.com".
Still am, and they still get the 'Intel' part of their name wrong.
They send lots of frantic emails to me, many asking questions like "Are you still a Republican?" (never was) and "Are you still a Trump supporter?" (also, never was).
I hit 'delete' a lot.
However, one of their emails came across my inbox that grabbed by attention.
Personally, I don't think that publicly announcing any part of a plan to deal with the pandemic is subtle enough to be called 'sneaky', but perhaps conservatives think that the best way to deal with Covid is to ignore it.
670K dead people might beg to differ.
Otherwise, the next remake of the movie "The Wizard of OZ" may have to cast anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and trumpkins.
Of course, we know who will be playing the parts of the flying monkeys.
And Cheeto, who I expect would want the part of the Wizard, would probably be nothing more than the Cowardly Lion.
If the part was written so that the Lion never did anything brave in his life.
From NPR -
9 Lions And Tigers At The National Zoo Are Being Treated For COVID
Humans aren't the only ones who have to worry about COVID-19. A number of lions and tigers at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C., are now being treated for the virus.
Six African lions, a Sumatran tiger and two Amur tigers have tested presumptive positive for the virus that causes COVID-19 and are undergoing treatment, the zoo said in a news release Thursday.
And yes, The National Zoo does have some bears in it.
From the website of the Arizona Secretary of State -
Quezada is a current state legislator and the first Democrat to form a committee in the race for state treasurer.
There are no new federal committees in AZ to document.
If it was in public education, it would be.
Turns out, it's not.
From CBS -
Arizona becomes first state to sue Biden administration over COVID-19 vaccine mandates
Arizona's attorney general filed a lawsuit Tuesday that seeks to invalidate President Biden's latest COVID-19 vaccine requirements for federal workers and large companies, becoming the first state to mount a legal challenge to the administration's newest rules.
In a 14-page complaint filed with a federal district court in Arizona, Attorney General Mark Brnovich argued Mr. Biden's new vaccine requirements unconstitutionally discriminate against U.S. citizens because undocumented immigrants apprehended by federal law enforcement are not subject to a federal vaccination requirement.
If Brnovich's misuse of his office only harmed anti-society types like himself, nobody would care. At least, no decent folks would care.
However, his quest for the Trumpkin vote is now threatening to harm the rest of us.
If Brnovich had any honor, he'd resign.
Of course, if he had any honor, he wouldn't be Mark Brnovich.
Florida Gov. DeSantis threatens heavy fines for local governments that impose vaccine mandates
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is threatening to impose hefty fines on city and county governments that require their employees be vaccinated against Covid.
DeSantis said Monday that his state would fine the local governments $5,000 for each employee that is forced to get a vaccine in order to continue working.
Larry Elder Announces He’s “Detected Fraud” in California Recall Vote Results, Which Don’t Yet Exist
Tuesday is the last day for Californians to vote in the state’s gubernatorial recall election, which incumbent Democrat Gavin Newsom is expected to win. His leading Republican opponent is a conservative talk-show host named Larry Elder who has been endorsed by a number of the party’s most nationally prominent right-wing figures and is campaigning against vaccine mandates. (In July, Elder hosted a self-identified doctor from Texas, “Kathy,” on his radio show. She suggested Bill Gates may be using the vaccine to control minority populations and said that COVID-19 can be treated with, among other things, hydrogen peroxide and the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin.)
On Monday, NBC News noticed that Elder’s campaign website has begun linking to another site funded by his campaign, StopCAFraud, which asserts that fraud has been “detected” in the results of the recall election, which, if you’ll remember from earlier in this post, is not over:
Republican Larry Elder appealed on Monday to his supporters to use an online form to report fraud, which claimed it had “detected fraud” in the “results” of the California recall election “resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor.
To be fair, a Republican may consider both to be a "librul conspiracy".
From The Hill -
Alaskan legislator says airline ban preventing her from getting to capital for votes
An Alaskan state senator, who has been banned from Alaska Airlines for failing to comply with masking policies, says that she asked to be excused from legislative business because the ban prevents her from being able to be present for votes.
Earlier this year, the airline announced that state Sen. Lora Reinbold (R), of Eagle River, Alaska, would not be allowed to fly on the airline after she refused to comply with masking guidelines multiple times. Federal COVID-19 protocols require people on certain modes of transportation, including on planes, to wear a masks.
Maybe the Alaska legislature should just declare the seat to be vacant because the current occupant refuses to appear at the state capitol and fulfill the job requirements.
1. Wear a damn mask.
2. Get vaccinated.
Got no words on this one.
From USA Today -
Alabama man dies of cardiac event after 43 hospitals with full ICUs turned him away
The family of a man who died of heart issues in Mississippi is asking people to get vaccinated for COVID-19 after 43 hospitals across three states were unable to accept him because of full cardiac ICUs.
Ray Martin DeMonia died last week in Meridian, Mississippi. He was three days shy of his 74th birthday and a well-known native in Cullman, Alabama, his family said.
1. Wear a damn mask.
2. Get vaccinated.
