Arizona: $200 Million Fraud & Voting Rights AG and DeSantis: Unconstitutional Firing & Humiliates NHL
Alabama Scrapes Bottom, GOP Dresses Down Drag, AI Lawyer for the Defense, Etta James Wows, and More
Each of these newsletters takes three to four days of reading, researching and writing. I often have too much material to fit, so I’m usually working on two newsletter at the same time. While writing them, I can feel my own outrage building as I see the deliberate injustices committed against people by those they trust to care more about them than about their own careers. Once I exhaustedly post a newsletter, I sit back, take a breath, read a mystery, and await my favorite part: your comments.
Here’s why I love the comments: I’ve always promoted my Substack site as a community and that’s exactly how it feels when I read the comments. Everyone is generally respectful, even when disagreeing, which is very important to me. People feel free to share other points of view, include links to dissenting voices, and even correct me when I’ve made a mistake (which I greatly appreciate).
For me, this is what discourse should be like. I’m happy to provide a place where my readers can express their opinions to many thousands as well as to me. We all deserve an outlet for our thoughts. When I read the Comments section of other online sites, I’m often appalled at the viciousness, the vitriol, and mostly the lack of reasoning. Fortunately, we have very little, if any, of that here. To me, it’s a conversation on a Sunday afternoon with some good jazz in the background and some delicious snacks in the foreground.
In case you were wondering, I read every single comment, even though I don’t always have time to respond. Sometimes I pop in long enough to respond to one or two comments, then I have to go do something else. I just want you all to know that I hear you. You are not writing into a void.
And, thanks to you, neither am I.
Politics: Ex-Gov Paves Paradise; New AG Brings a Jackhammer of Hope
Arizona: It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times
Here are two articles about Arizona that show the best and worst in politics. In some ways, Arizona is the symbol of where America stands politically. We’ve come out of some very bad governing by the worst president in U.S. history. His legacy of greed, lying, and self-serving still lingers in the remnants of the worst of the GOP: Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, George Santos, and others. They are the balled-up, crusty sweat sock left on the corner of the locker room over the summer. They stink of Trump’s eau de inhumanity.
There are politicians in both parties trying to bury this embarrassing and ignoble past by a return to decency, transparency, and earnest discourse. We can see both the sad past and the hopeful future—America’s id and superego—battling it out in Arizona.
Ex-Arizona governor’s illegal makeshift border wall is torn down – but at what cost?
SUMMARY: “Former governor Doug Ducey had planned to build 10 miles of border ‘wall’ made up of double-stacked old shipping containers through the federally protected forest.
“But local residents and environmental groups occupied the construction site, running out the clock in December on Republican Ducey’s waning days in office.
“Ducey, under threat of litigation from the Department of Justice, finally agreed to remove the rusty hulking barriers installed near Yuma in the west and Sierra Vista in the south-east of the state. Environmentalists are now warning that the damage already done to the areas will require a huge recovery effort.
“…Now two related lawsuits [one is now moot] between Ducey and the federal government are on hold as Arizona’s new governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, negotiates the project’s end.”
MY TAKE: What’s the financial cost to Arizonians for Ducey’s attempt to remain politically relevant after leaving office? First, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity has filed two lawsuits against Ducey and AshBritt, the Florida-based company that installed the makeshift wall, citing violations of the federal Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Second, Ashbritt, the company that installed the wall for $123.6 million, is also being paid $76.5 million to remove it. That’s $200 million paid by taxpayers for a wall that didn’t do anything (certainly not keep out immigrants) but promote the man who wanted to fluff his own career at the expense of all the good that amount of money could have done for Arizonians.
Politics at its worst by a politician who is the worst.