Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer advises justice that some opinions could 'bite you in the back'

Betting he wasn't thinking "back" when he said that, :)

From CNN -

Breyer warns justices that some opinions could 'bite you in the back' in exclusive interview with CNN's Chris Wallace

Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is warning his colleagues against "writing too rigidly" in their opinions, saying that such decisions could "bite you in the back" in a world that is constantly changing.

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN's Chris Wallace on "Who's Talking to Chris Wallace," which debuted Friday on HBOMax and airs Sunday night on CNN, Breyer also bemoaned his position in the court's minority liberal bloc during his final year on the bench, addressed the court's reversal of Roe v. Wade and spoke about the ongoing controversy regarding Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Mark Finchem, proving yet again that he's unfit to be Secretary of State for Arizona

Maybe he's fit to be Secretary of his nearest klavern, but that's it.

From the AZ Mirror, written by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy -

Mark Finchem held a fundraiser with 9/11 truthers and QAnon influencers

Republican Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem held a fundraiser in California on Sunday that was hosted by a conspiracy theorist who believes 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government and attended by a prominent QAnon influencer. 

Nicole Nogrady, who hosted the event, has shared a litany of debunked stories and posts concerning COVID-19, abortion and other falsehoods on her Instagram account. 

Ginni Thomas to talk to January 6 committee; the committee should expect to hear two things

Lies and obfuscations.

From CNN -

First on CNN: Ginni Thomas agrees to January 6 committee interview

The House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, has come to an agreement with Ginni Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to be interviewed by the panel in the coming weeks, according to a source close to the committee.

Ginni Thomas' attorney, Mark Paoletta, confirmed the voluntary interview in a statement, saying, "As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas is eager to answer the Committee's questions to clear up any misconceptions about her work relating to the 2020 election. She looks forward to that opportunity."

Unsurprisingly, men are among the most strident anti-choicers

And also unsurprisingly, this trend has an Arizona element to it.

From CNN (emphasis added by me) -

These male politicians are pushing for women who receive abortions to be punished with prison time

A businessman turned state representative from rural Oil City, Louisiana, and a Baptist pastor banded together earlier this year on a radical mission.

They were adamant that a woman who receives an abortion should receive the same criminal consequences as one who drowns her baby.

[snip]

This year, three male lawmakers from Indiana attempted to wipe out existing abortion regulations and change the state's criminal statutes to apply at the time of fertilization. In Texas, five male lawmakers authored a bill last year that would have made getting an abortion punishable by the death penalty if it had gone into law. A state representative in Arizona introduced legislation that included homicide charges — saying in a Facebook video that anyone who undergoes an abortion deserves to "spend some time" in the Arizona "penal system." And a male Kansas lawmaker proposed a bill that would amend the state's constitution to allow abortion laws to pass without an exception for the life of the mother.

[snip]

Eric Swank, an Arizona State University professor who has studied gender differences in anti-abortion activists, said his research found that while men aren't necessarily more likely to consider themselves to be "pro-life" than women, they "are more willing to take the adamant stance of no abortion under any conditions."

[snip]

Lawmakers then gathered on the House floor to debate the bill while dozens of supporters gathered outside the chambers in what resembled a church service, reciting Bible passages and swaying together while singing hymns such as "Amazing Grace." Jeff Durbin, an Arizona-based pastor and head of a Christian production company Apologia Studios, which has more than 300,000 subscribers on YouTube, emceed and live-streamed the event. Durbin, who once played Michelangelo and Donatello in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise and became fervently religious after overdosing on ecstasy, is now "unapologetically seeking to criminalize and eliminate all forms of abortion without exception." He did not respond to requests for comment.

The article doesn't state it explicitly, but in 2021 failed Congressional candidate Walt Blackman introduced HB2050.

PSA time: REGISTER TO VOTE and then VOTE!

From the website of the Arizona Secretary of State -

Election Date	Election Type	Deadline for Voter Registration	Deadline to Request Ballot-by-Mail	Early Voting Begins/Ballots Mailed if Requested

November 08, 2022

State General Election

October 11, 2022 at 11:59 PM

October 28, 2022 at 5:00 PM

October 12, 2022

The Secretary of State's Vote-By-Mail information page is here.

The AZ SOS' printable voter registration form is here.

Maricopa County's voter registration page is here.

ServiceArizona's online voter registration process starts here.

Guessing that Biden's response to Fiona won't involve throwing paper towels

From Axios -

Hurricane Fiona brings "catastrophic" flooding, power outages to Puerto Rico

An intensifying Hurricane Fiona is bringing heavy rains, high winds and power outages to Puerto Rico. The power has been knocked out to the entire island.

The big picture: The storm is dumping more than two feet of rain in Puerto Rico, "causing catastrophic" flooding, the National Hurricane Center warns. Hurricane-force winds have taken out the island's fragile power grid.

• Fiona made landfall near Punta Tocon, on the island's southeastern coast, around 3:20 p.m. local time with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, per an NHC tweet.

• The storm has seen winds increase by 15 mph since the NHC updated on then-Tropical Storm Fiona at 8 a.m. ET.
• Fiona is a Category 1 hurricane and is expected to remain so through landfall in Puerto Rico.
• Ponce, on the southern side of the island, has seen sustained winds of 69 mph with a maximum wind gust of 103 mph, per the Hurricane Center.
• President Biden has declared a federal disaster for Puerto Rico, mobilizing the delivery of aid to the island.

Cheeto took a *slightly* different approach when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017

From BBC -

Puerto Rico: Trump paper towel-throwing 'abominable'

IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS

Image caption,

Trump tossed rolls of paper towels into the crowd

The mayor of Puerto Rico's capital, San Juan, has described Donald Trump's visit to the hurricane-hit island as "insulting" and called him a "miscommunicator-in-chief".

Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz described his televised meeting with officials as a "PR, 17-minute meeting".

The sight of him throwing paper towels to people in the crowd was "terrible and abominable", she added.

Mr Trump tweeted it had been a "great day" in Puerto Rico.

Think that Cheeto's acolytes will want people to honor elections that go the way the Cheeto's acolytes want?

I'm thinking yes.

But for elections that don't go their way?

The preemptive whining has already started.

From the New York Times via Yahoo! -

Echoing Trump, These Republicans Won't Promise to Accept 2022 Results

Nearly two years after President Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 election, some of his most loyal Republican acolytes might follow in his footsteps.

When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results, and another five Republicans ignored or declined to answer a question about embracing the November outcome. All of them, along with many other GOP candidates, have preemptively cast doubt on how their states count votes.

[snip]

Aides to several Republican nominees for governor who have questioned the 2020 election’s legitimacy did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their own races in November. Those candidates included Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, Kari Lake of Arizona, Tim Michels of Wisconsin and Dan Cox of Maryland.

Lake was asked in a radio interview this month whether she would concede a defeat to Katie Hobbs, her Democratic rival and Arizona’s secretary of state. “I’m not losing to Katie Hobbs,” Lake replied.

Hobbs’ spokesperson, Sarah Robinson, said her candidate “will accept the results of the election in November.”

[snip]

In Arizona — where Republicans spent months on a government-funded review of 2020 ballots that failed to show any evidence of fraud — Masters, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for Senate, baselessly predicted to supporters in July that even if he defeated Sen. Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, enough votes would somehow be produced to flip the result.

“There’s always cheating, probably, in every election,” Masters said. “The question is, what’s the cheating capacity?”

A Masters aide, Katie Miller, sent the Times an August article in The Arizona Republic in which Masters said there was “evidence of incompetence” but not of fraud in the state’s primary election. Miller declined to say if Masters would respect the November results.

Kelly “has total trust in Arizona’s electoral process,” said a spokesperson, Sarah Guggenheimer.

Get ready for a bumpy ride - the election may be over on November 8th, but the need for cheese to go with that whine will go on for a while.  

A long while.

Blake Masters loves him some Ted Kaczynski; apparently, he doesn't think that the rules apply to him

Pointed at this by Taegan Goddard's Political Wire.

Like the First Rule of Holes.

From Goodreads -

From AP, dated 7/30/2022 -

Fealty to Trump defines Republican Senate primary in Arizona

An interviewer asked Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters to pick 

a “subversive thinker” whom people should know more about.

Masters gave it some thought and came up with a risky response for someone 

running for elected office.

He picked the Unabomber.

“I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Masters responded. “How about, like, 

Theodore Kaczynski?”

What does it say about his character that Masters loves some who famously killed people while I love someone who was famously fired from the New York Times for submitting a story that referred to a chicken festival as a "gang pluck"?

Katie Hobbs declines a debate with her opponent for AZ governor, Kari Lake. It was a wise choice.

From KJZZ, written by Lauren Gilger and Ron Dungan -

Katie Hobbs says no to Arizona governor debate against Kari Lake

Democrat Katie Hobbs’ campaign announced Sunday that she would not debate Republican Kari Lake as the two battle for the Arizona governor’s office, calling off any negotiations with Lake and the state commission overseeing debates.

The decision came after more than a week of efforts by Hobbs, currently secretary of state, to change the debate into separate half-hour interviews with the moderator. The Citizens Clean Elections Commission, which has held debates for two decades featuring candidates for statewide and legislative offices, flatly rejected that proposal on Thursday.

Instead, the commission urged its staff to work with Hobbs to come up with minor changes to the debate and gave her a week to come to an agreement. Hobbs' campaign manager's statements to the commissioners made it seem unlikely that a deal could be reached.

Nicole DeMont instead repeated the campaign's concerns that debating Lake would "just create another spectacle, like we saw in the GOP primary debate. But on top of that, I would just add, you can’t debate a conspiracy theorist and at the last debate, she brought the conversation back to the 2020 election no less than a dozen times.”

The GOP primary debate featured four candidates who almost immediately devolved into a free-for-all of talking over and constantly interrupting each other.

From Goodreads -

Of course, I don't believe that Lake is a fool.

Nope, she's a nutjob.

The quote still works though.

GQP to courts: "Your orders are irrelevant to our desire to hurt people"

From NBC -

Montana defies order on transgender birth certificates

Just hours after a Montana judge blocked health officials from enforcing a state rule that would prevent transgender people from changing the gender on their birth certificate, the Republican-run state on Thursday said it would defy the order.

District Court Judge Michael Moses chided attorneys for the state during a hearing in Billings for circumventing his April order that temporarily blocked a 2021 Montana law that made it harder to change birth certificates.

Moses said there was no question that state officials violated his earlier order by creating the new rule. Moses said his order reinstates a 2017 Department of Public Health and Human Services rule that allowed people to update the gender on their birth certificate by filing an affidavit with the department.

However, the state said it would disregard the ruling.

Is contempt of court a felony?  If not, it should be, at least for elected officials and public employees.

Dear Andrew Cuomo: Go away. Just go away.

You may be nominally a Democrat, but your underlying nature is that of a perv and predator.  And your ego is almost as big as Cheeto's.

From NPR -

Andrew Cuomo files a complaint against Letitia James for her sexual harassment report

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is asking the state's Supreme Court to investigate New York Attorney General Letitia James for publishing a report claiming he sexually assaulted multiple women during his tenure.

Cuomo claims James manipulated the investigation in order to pursue her own run for governor, failed to appoint independent legal travails.investigators to the case and omitted crucial evidence from her report released last August.

*You* complaining about someone else's behavior?  Really?

Maybe you hoped that it would distract from your ongoing legal travails.

From CNN -

Accuser sues former New York Gov. Cuomo for sexual harassment and discrimination

One of the first women to accuse former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment filed a federal lawsuit against him this week.

Charlotte Bennett, a one-time staffer for Cuomo, is suing him for sexual harassment and discrimination.

Bennett has previously spoken publicly about her time working for the former governor as a briefer between 2019 and 2020. In her suit filed Wednesday, Bennett claims that Cuomo made sexual comments about her appearance, gave her "humiliating and demeaning tasks" and asked her invasive and unwanted questions about her romantic and sexual relationships, as well as her history as a sexual assault survivor.

This may be the most craven example of your bad behavior, but at least you are consistent in your cravenness.

From Columbia Law School -

The Moreland Commission: What Happened?

New York, December 5, 2014—Advocates of government ethics reform cheered in 2013 when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo created the Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, popularly known as the Moreland Commission. Less than a year later, however, Cuomo abruptly shut down the commission, setting off an ongoing controversy.

Columbia Law School professors Richard Briffault and Tim Wu joined Moreland Commission special counsel Janos Marton Nov. 17 for a postmortem examining what happened and how best to clean up government in the future. Briffault served as a member of the commission, named for a 1907 law granting governors authority to investigate state bodies, while Wu made ethics reform a centerpiece of his recent campaign to become New York’s lieutenant governor.

[snip]

The commission issued around 300 subpoenas, which ran into stonewalling from legislators who many speculated were planning to wait out the commission’s projected 18 to 24 month life span. The New York Times later reported that Cuomo’s office had interfered with the commission’s work, prompting a federal investigation from U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara ’93.

Mr. Cuomo, unless you are volunteering to become Cheeto's cellmate, no one wants to hear from you (and since I don't believe that a prison cell has built that can take that much ego, that's probably not going to happen),

As soon as the dead man's family accepts restitution, they'll be benefiting from his crime and should pay his victim restitution, too

From CNN -

Judge orders an Iowa teen who killed her alleged rapist to pay his family $150,000 in restitution

An Iowa judge ruled Tuesday that a girl who was 15 when she killed a man she said raped her multiple times must pay his family $150,000 in restitution.

Pieper Lewis, who killed her alleged rapist in 2020, received a deferred judgment from Polk County District Judge David Porter after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter.

I just like the word

From Colorado Public Radio (emphasis added by me) -

Sept. 8, 2022: Adam Frisch wants to overcome ‘angertainment’ and focus on issues

"Angertainment" is definitely a word that describes the campaign platforms of Kari Lake, Blake Masters, et. al.

After they lose a primary, partisan hacks don't go away, they just get hackier

Jan Dubauskas challenged State Rep. John Kavanagh in his quest for a seat in the state senate.

She didn't succeed.

From the website of the Arizona Secretary of State -

She challenged him from the right, which is a very difficult place to find - he proposed criminalizing the recording of police officers.

Anyway, she may have lost the primary, but she's still looking to affect elections in AZ.

From the website of the IRS -

From her committee's filing -

.

.

.

While I've found no evidence of her registering her committee with the AZSOS, I expect her to do so be raising or expending funds intended to affect the outcome of elections in AZ; those are the rules, after all.

And wingnuts are all about rules, right? :)

Stating the obvious time: The R demographic skews older

From an article from KTVK/KPHO, re-published from Stacker -

Counties with the most seniors in Arizona

Seniors will comprise more than 20% of U.S. residents in 2030, up from 15% in 2020.

By 2034, older adults will outnumber children, according to Census Bureau projections. Across the U.S., 52 million Americans are 65 years or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and a quarter of them live in just three states: California, Florida, and Texas. By comparison, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, and Alaska each have fewer than 150,000 senior residents.

[snip]

Stacker compiled a list of counties with the most seniors in Arizona using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Counties are ranked by the highest percentage of residents 65 years or older according to 2020 5-year estimates. Keep reading to find out which counties have the most seniors in Arizona.

I noticed that some of the highest-ranked counties tended to be red counties.

(Ranks and senior citizen data from the article; voter registration [as of August 2022] and voting history data from the Arizona Secretary of State's office)

Most counties in AZ voted the way their registration advantage indicated they would (i.e. - D counties voted for Biden; R counties voted for Cheeto).  There were two exceptions to this - D-leaning Yuma County voted for Cheeto while R-leaning Maricopa County voted for Biden.  Both voting margins were close and the registration advantages are also close.

It isn't a coincidence that the six counties in AZ with the highest percentage of senior citizens are also R-leaning.