By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The person who calls herself governor here has what seems to have become standard among many left-wing Democrat politicians: She has some part of a man, some part of a woman, and the tragic stamp of approval from the blundering elite.
Katie Hobbs has the political radicalism of Mr. Joe Biden, the clueless partisanship of Ms. Kamala Harris, and the red carpet to the statehouse thanks to a grim establishment that fooled itself into thinking it knew better than the voters and thus was entitled to overrule their choice to fill the open governor’s seat in 2022.
Just like a national elite in 2020 had elevated Biden, who was impaired physically, mentally, and morally, but who they deemed preferable to the effectively conservative incumbent President Donald Trump.
Even though the Arizona state legislative session opened on January 9, Hobbs impatiently complained only seven weeks later that she couldn’t work with the Republican majorities in the state House and Senate, and she was launching an initial fund-raising effort of $500,000 to unseat them in the 2024 election — in addition to other money on hand that donors weren’t told would be used against the GOP.
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard expressed surprise that Hobbs proclaimed her effort to remove them so early in her first weeks as governor, when much work requiring cooperation remained to do in the session.
Querard told The Wanderer on February 22: “Hobbs was an obstructionist as a legislator who voted against increased school funding and teacher pay and other good ideas just because they were Republican bills, so it isn’t a surprise that she’s a very partisan governor as well.
“Of course she wants to take over the legislature, but it is very unusual for her to start open political warfare while the legislature is still in session and working with the governor’s office on a host of issues that ought to be not political (think water, school safety, jobs, public safety, etc.),” Querard said.
“She would rather fight than govern and her hope is that she wins in 2024 and can rule Arizona with a Democratic legislative majority that will just do what she tells them to do,” he said.
Meanwhile, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake vowed to continue her fight for election integrity after a second court chose to be blind to the widespread vote suppression here last November.
In a video posted by the Citizen Free Press website on February 22, “Tracy Beanz interviews Kari Lake,” Lake said, “I don’t plan to back down. . . . I will continue to be a thorn in their [the corrupt establishment’s] side.”
Beanz, an investigative reporter, replied that thousands of volunteers in Arizona already are “working to recall the sham governor, Katie Hobbs.” Lake said she thinks “it’s great,” and that people look at the current “sham government” and say, “This is not our government representing us. These people walked into these offices after a stolen election. Everyone knows it.”
The crude, ill-prepared Hobbs was, in her own way, like the seriously ill Pennsylvania stroke patient John Fetterman, whom the elite shoved into the U.S. Senate in the 2022 election despite his obvious incapacity to do the job.
Fetterman hadn’t even served in the Senate for two months in 2023 before he was hospitalized twice, the second time currently expected to last weeks for treatment of depression.
Gaining or keeping power was what mattered to the establishment, no matter how manifestly unsuited or ill-equipped its candidates were.
When word came in on February 16 that Fetterman had just checked himself in for treatment for depression, national radio talk host Clay Travis said he was angry and this was evil, that power and election victory were all that mattered to the Democrats, and even Fetterman’s family didn’t stop him from running.
Katie Hobbs checks the necessary boxes to be a left-wing Democrat governor, including radical pro-abortionism, opposition to school choice, and favoring open borders.
Upon taking office, Hobbs quickly ordered the removal of large metal shipping containers that her predecessor, term-limited Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, had installed in southwestern Arizona in order to close an opening in the border barrier that illegal immigrants came through.
When new U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) visited the southeastern Arizona border in February, he lamented the chaos and said the criminal border cartels run the show. Fox News quoted McCarthy on February 16: “The Sinaloa Cartel controls who comes across and the amount of drugs that come across.”
Arizona, which has the second-longest border with Mexico — Texas having the longest — has most if not all of its international frontier under threat.
With Hobbs installed as governor, the future was clouded for the Grand Canyon State.
Because of widespread disruption and voter suppression on Arizona’s November 8 Election Day, when significantly more Republicans than Democrats were expected to vote, the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate, Lake, took her case challenging the declared results to court.
Following a long post-Election-Day count, the reclusive Hobbs, who absolutely refused to debate every foe throughout the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, had been declared the narrow victor over Lake, who offered to debate anytime, anywhere, by less than 18,000 votes out of about 2.5 million total cast.
However, a Maricopa County Superior Court on Christmas Eve, and Arizona Court of Appeals on February 16, declared that the balloting process was conducted acceptably. The judges brushed aside numerous problems and difficulties that left Republican voters fuming in November.
Lake said she was taking her appeal to the next level, the Arizona Supreme Court.
Hobbs was proving to be such a fumbling, tone-deaf pseudo-governor that even if the establishment insisted on rejecting the legitimate court challenge to her, the next possibility down the line was the recall.
As if the appeals court couldn’t even comprehend facts, its February 16 opinion said: “Lake’s arguments highlight election-day difficulties, but her request for relief fails because the evidence presented to the Superior Court ultimately supports the court’s conclusion that voters were able to cast their ballots, that votes were counted correctly, and that no other basis justifies setting aside the election results. Accordingly, we affirm.”
During her interview with Beanz, Lake said the Appeals Court basically told vote fraudsters, “Yeah, you don’t really have to follow the laws.”
Partisans Didn’t Belong There
Wanderer readers know from following the general-election developments that almost as soon as voting centers opened at 6 a.m. on November 8, they began having serious problems that involved more than 60 percent of the centers and still were occurring when the polls closed at the end of the day.
The Arizona Senate’s Elections Committee held hearings into serious irregularities. The Just the News website reporter Natalia Mittelstadt wrote that among sworn testimony given, Shelby Busch, the co-founder of We the People AZ, testified to the hearing “that 217,305 ballots of the 464,926 ballots fed into tabulators on Election Day in Maricopa County in 2022 were rejected.”
As tabulating machines repeatedly rejected completed ballots, lines of voters sometimes were backed up for hours as they tried to participate, either discouraging them from voting at all or forcing them to try to find a voting center that worked. Untabulated votes were known to be commingled with tabulated ones, and the chain of custody was broken when ballots were transported elsewhere.
Lake and the Uncover DC website were among those calling attention to the “heat maps” of Republican turnout at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTEC). For instance, Uncover DC, February 8, “Maricopa Heat Maps: The Story Keeps Getting Worse,” said this:
“On Election Day, the overall vote was coming in 75 percent for Kari Lake or more. Given the distrust of the mail-in balloting in the wake of the 2020 election, many — if not the majority — of Kari Lake voters had opted to wait to vote in person or drop off their ballots. Combined with the chaos created by the tabulator issues in mostly Republican-heavy voting centers, the volume of ballots arriving at MCTEC was overwhelming.
“The presence of the MCTEC heat maps very well might have been used to quickly identify which ballots shipments were arriving from the most heavily Republican-leaning voting centers,” Uncover DC said. “Given the complete lack of CoC [chain of custody] documentation when the shipping containers were being opened, that could have made it very easy for unscrupulous elections officials at MCTEC to siphon off votes by simply omitting large numbers of ballots coming from those locations that were likely coming in 90 percent or more in favor of Kari Lake.”
As for the long time consumed for ballot counting, the article asked, “Could it have been Maricopa officials needed the extra time to replace ballots omitted in order to get the total count by location reasonably believable?”
Among other remarkable points in the election, officials Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and Stephen Richer, Maricopa County Recorder, were on record opposing MAGA candidates like Lake, with county official Richer actually running a PAC against them and Gates expressing his dismay at their success in the August primary election and hoping for their humiliation.
The Politico site quoted Gates right after the August primary’s conservative victories saying: “The election last night was a catastrophe for the Arizona Republican Party and, I would argue, our democracy.”
Such partisans belonged nowhere near an attempt to count ballots.
Even if, for instance, no one produced videos of thugs burning sacks of Lake ballots, these were such significant developments that at least a new election should have been called, instead of judges calling themselves into disrepute.
However, Maricopa County’s corrupt establishment insisted on its choices of left-wing Democrats Hobbs, Adrian Fontes as secretary of state, Kris Mayes as attorney general, and Mark Kelly as U.S. senator. Being the most populous county by far in Arizona, Maricopa’s vote easily can decide statewide races.
Mayes supposedly won the attorney general’s post over Republican candidate Abe Hamadeh by fewer than 300 votes out of about 2.5 million total cast. Hamadeh was continuing his challenge to her tiny alleged victory.
Veteran Arizona political reporter Howard Fischer was puzzled over Hobbs’ belief that her narrow victory last November already entitled her to condemn GOP legislators and make plans to spend for their ouster.
In addition to the half-million dollars Hobbs seeks to raise for campaigning, Fischer noted that Hobbs kept control of around an unspent $1.5 million in donations that she putatively collected for her inauguration expenses in January but could use for political aims instead.
“There is no evidence that members of the governor’s inaugural committee made specific promises to donors of how any leftover funds would be used,” Fischer wrote. “But the largest contributor, Arizona Public Service, said in a statement it clearly had an idea that its $250,000 would go specifically to the” inauguration instead of partisan campaigning.
Republican legislative leaders called on Hobbs to use the leftover money appropriately by putting it into the state’s Protocol Fund instead of diverting it to political campaigns unanticipated by donors.
The conservative Center Square website posted on February 21 to cite former Gov. Ducey’s chief of staff, Daniel Scarpinato, that “Hobbs had not given Republicans much to work with her on, which he believes will hurt her in the long run.”
The website quoted Scarpinato: “I think her announcement today is a declaration of war against legislative Republicans 45 days into the legislative session. So it feels right now like it’s pretty much all politics all the time for Gov. Hobbs and her team, and that they’re not even making an attempt to work with the other side, or to govern. And I think that that’s very shortsighted and is going to derail any ability she may have had to get anything done.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress