Dem Arrogance In Arizona . . . Danger To Be Far Out Over Skis, Now That Snow Is Gone

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — Katie Hobbs and her crew including fellow Democrat extremist Kris Mayes are getting out too far over their skis this summer, even while the skiing season in Arizona’s snowy mountains has passed and those high elevations aren’t close to the State Capitol here in the Sonoran Desert anyway.
After a springtime of arrogance, both Hobbs, who goes by the title of governor of Arizona, and Mayes, her state attorney general, are asserting powers they simply don’t have.
The Grand Canyon State is a contrast with politics in California, where liberal Democrats control state government, and Florida, where conservative Republicans do. Here, both chambers of the state legislature have narrow GOP majorities while left-wing Democrats hold the major executive offices of governor, attorney general, and secretary of state.
The 2022 general election here in the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, was marked by chaos and malfunctions that left lingering doubt about possible manipulation by a corrupt establishment that affected statewide outcomes to deny victory to some MAGA-endorsed GOP candidates.
Meanwhile, legal challenges to both Mayes and 2022 Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake were being pursued. More on these below.
On June 23 Hobbs announced an executive order taking control of any prosecution of possible abortion crimes away from Arizona’s county attorneys and giving them to fellow pro-abortion radical Mayes, who has said she wouldn’t prosecute any such offense.
There weren’t any criminal abortion cases currently in the news, and now if an abortionist happened to kill his client, or murdered a born infant who had managed to survive a prenatal extermination attempt, that abortionist knows he has the highest elected Democrats in the state ready to laugh away his violations.
Meanwhile, AG Mayes said she would ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 opinion that was decided definitively 6-3 to defend the First Amendment rights of a Colorado web designer opposed to “same-sex marriage.”
Mayes quickly issued a news release saying she wouldn’t abide by the decision of “a woefully misguided majority of the United States Supreme Court.” Instead, Mayes said, she joined in the view of dissenting liberal Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor that “the idea that the Constitution gives businesses the right to discriminate is ‘profoundly wrong’.”
How long does Mayes think she can get away with openly rejecting the decisions of the nation’s highest court that she decides are out of step with her far-left agenda?
As for Hobbs, it’s fair to say that Laurie Roberts, a liberally inclined columnist at the state’s largest newspaper, The Arizona Republic, generally wishes the governor well. However, Roberts posted on July 5, Hobbs is wrong when she “seems to envision herself as a queen — one who, with a stroke of her pen, can gut laws and neuter other elected officials.”
Twelve of Arizona’s 15 county attorney offices, including the largest one, here in Maricopa County, called on Hobbs to rescind her order, which, they wrote and Roberts cited, “is a substantial overreach to suggest the governor may strip away prosecutorial discretion from local, elected officials.”
The Arizona Sun Times posted an article July 5 that quoted Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell saying: “Executive Order 2023-11 sets a dangerous precedent and suggests that any Arizona governor can order the attorney general to assume all duties related to an entire category of criminal prosecution and, by consequence, prohibit local prosecutors from acting.”
Moreover, Roberts noted, none of the county prosecutors had abortion cases they were pursuing anyway.
But Hobbs’ spokesman immediately rejected the request of the prosecutors, hyperventilating and rhetorically blazing away that “Gov. Hobbs will continue to use her lawful executive authority to put sanity over chaos and protect everyday Arizonans from extremists who are threatening to prosecute women and doctors over reproductive health care.”
That part about prosecuting women for having abortions is simply a blatant lie that the blinded Hobbs slavishly parrots for her Planned Parenthood masters. But what does Hobbs think should occur if an abortionist lets a woman bleed to death or strangles a baby girl in a newborn nursery?
Anyway, Roberts wrote, “If ever there was a slippery slope, we are now slip-slidin’, head-first, down the thing.” She wondered that if Hobbs’ and Mayes’ Republican electoral opponents in 2022, Kari Lake and Abe Hamadeh, were in office instead, “would the ideological lines in the sand shift? If your answer is yes, then Hobbs should back down.”
Will the uncontainable airborne Hobbs lean so far down to the tips of her skis that they poke her in the eyes? With the Pride flags of the sexually confused dangling below her tower windows, Hobbs’ office, with its staff turnover, doesn’t seem to be a pleasant place to work.
Examples include Hobbs’ longtime friend and chief of staff since January, Allie Bones, immediately resigning for no apparent reason in May. On May 25 the Washington Examiner said this was “the latest high-profile resignation to plague her administration.”
Before that, Hobbs’ press secretary quickly had to quit in March after tweeting out apparent approval of the Tennessee transgender gun lady’s fatal attack against six people, including three 9-year-olds, at a Christian school.
While their blood still was on the floor in Nashville, Katie Hobbs’ Josselyn Berry proceeded to tweet a GIF of a female movie character holding guns in both hands that Berry captioned, “Us when we see transphobes.”
In another development, Jennifer Wright, an attorney in the office of Mayes’ predecessor, Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich, brought “a $2 million demand to settle a claim of defamation and unlawful release of employee information over comments published by The Arizona Republic that Mayes ‘removed’ Jennifer Wright from her position with the attorney general’s office,” the Arizona Daily Independent reported.
Wright, who headed the election-integrity unit for Brnovich and was disliked by Democrats, previously had complained that she falsely was described as being “ousted” by Mayes once the new AG took office in early January. The $2 million demand is the next step in order to keep alive the possibility of filing a defamation lawsuit.
Wright says she already resigned her position on December 30, 2022, the day after a judge declared Mayes the winner following the recount of an extremely close race with Republican Abe Hamadeh.
On July 4 the Arizona Daily Independent also posted that the notice of claim states: “Further, not only does Arizona administrative code prevent discussing even truthful statements about a state employee’s departure, but well-established case law makes it actionable in defamation to even accurately publicly disclose the terms of an employee’s departure in a way that is not only disparaging, but could harm that individual’s professional reputation.”
Meanwhile, a columnist for the liberal Los Angeles Times took pleasure at the defamation suit by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer filed against Lake. The Times headlined the column by Mark Barabak, posted June 28, “Kari Lake is a deceitful fraud. Now she’ll have to defend her lies in court.”
Barabak described Richer’s account of his sufferings because Lake refused to accept her loss to Hobbs.
The column concluded, “Richer may not prevail in his defamation suit against Lake. But if it deters other prominent personalities from hustling election-fraud fakery — when they know better — it will have served a fine purpose.”
Determined to portray Lake as an intentional liar against the innocent Richer, Barabak avoided such compelling facts as that at the same time Richer was helping to supervise the 2022 Maricopa elections, he headed a political action committee to defeat MAGA Republicans like Lake, the Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona.
When formation of the PAC was announced in November 2021, even the liberal, Democrat-inclined AZ Mirror’s article commented, “For an elections official to get involved in campaigns in such a way is a rarity. Many county recorders and secretaries of state refrain from even endorsing candidates to avoid the appearance of impropriety.”
The article included a large photo of Richer looking visionary in downtown Phoenix.
The AZ Mirror article added later: “It’s highly unusual for an elected elections official such as Richer to get involved in elections the way he’s planning to do, and by spending in elections that his office will oversee, he may open himself up to allegations of impropriety from candidates his PAC opposes.
“Former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, a Republican who held the position from 1989 to 2017, said it’s a bad idea for Richer to run a PAC while serving as the county’s top election official,” the AZ Mirror said.
“. . . Purcell said people might question the results if election officials involve themselves politically in elections — particularly if a race is close. And that is doubly true now, she said, given the skepticism that many people have about the election process due to the allegations about the 2020 presidential race,” the article said.

Horror Over A
Primary Election

Another Maricopa County official helping to supervise the 2022 general election, Bill Gates, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, had made no secret of his horror that MAGA-endorsed candidates won the August 2022 GOP primary and might win the general. Gates quickly spoke out unseemly to Politico and the Phoenix area’s KTAR News Radio (92.3 FM).
Right after the primary, Politico posted an article on August 3, 2022, that included these words: “‘I think the only way back is by humiliation at the ballot box, and the problem is the Democrats aren’t strong enough to do that,’ said Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor. Of the Republicans, he said, ‘I think they are electable, which is frightening.
“ ‘The election last night was a catastrophe for the Arizona Republican Party,’ Gates said, ‘and, I would argue, our democracy’,” Politico added.
On August 5, 2022, KTAR headlined its article, “GOP Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates: Party may need to lose to ‘find itself again’.” The article began, “Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates said Thursday the party may need to lose in order to move away from candidates who deny election results.
“ ‘I fear that if we continue to nominate people who deny the truth, then what may have to happen is that we lose elections,’ Gates told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Gaydos and Chad Show. ‘I don’t want Republicans to lose elections, but I also don’t want candidates who stated that they’re not going to accept the wishes and the will of the voters to be serving in office’.”
The article said Gates specified “certain candidates, particularly Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, regarding the speed of which votes are being counted.” This, Gates said, showed people “not wanting to be serious candidates, not wanting to respect the electoral process.”
Might it be said that candidates like Lake — seeing Richer’s direct partisan political involvement and Gates’ strong words of opposition to putatively unserious candidates like her — would have some justified concerns about officials’ conduct? And then seeing the surprise electoral chaos spring up a little over three months later, on Election Day, November 8?
Purcell, the longtime Republican county recorder mentioned by the AZ Mirror, had a reputation as a nonpartisan who simply got the job done. However, in 2016 there was considerable criticism over two issues, as recalled by Wikipedia — long voter lines in the presidential primary election and an error on the Spanish-language version of the ballots, requiring that they be reprinted.
She narrowly won her own primary election for recorder in 2016 but lost by just over one percent in the general to Democrat Adrian Fontes.
Fontes, however, turned out to be a highly partisan recorder and opposition grew to his reelection. Stephen Richer put himself forward as the Republican alternative for 2020. Richer’s name wasn’t well-known by people I talked to but he seemed to have energetically positioned himself. I recall seeing Richer seeking support at a Tea Party meeting I was writing up.
Richer defeated a better-known Republican name in the 2020 GOP primary by about 15 percent. However, despite the stench of Fontes’ corruption, Richer barely was able to beat him in the general election — 50.1 to 49.8, according to Ballotpedia.
Two years later, in the chaotic 2022 general election, Fontes went on to win as Democratic secretary of state by less than 5 percent. Politics, it’s everlasting.