"For reasons I don’t need to go into, you may feel that now is a bad time to visit the once United States. I thought the same..."

"... but having just returned from a tour of Arizona, I’d argue that it’s the perfect time. What Barack Obama described as 'an inflection point' is America’s worst domestic crisis since the civil rights movement of the 1960s: the relationship problems of a democracy still a few months short of its 250th birthday. For curious travellers and for those who prefer to make up their minds based on what they’ve seen rather than what they’ve been told, now offers the opportunity to witness not only history in the making but the events that brought America to where it stands today. Arizona is the place to start. Everywhere is open, everyone is delighted to see you...."

I'm reading, in The London Times, "My week taking America’s temperature in the Grand Canyon state/The history is fascinating and the scenery is astonishing but is the welcome as warm as it used to be? Chris Haslam finds out on a slow drive through Arizona."

Sample text:

"In northern Arizona my zinnias and cosmos are still flowering. My cannabis is half harvested (2 of 4 plants)..."

"... and it looks like I'll be yielding at least 6 lbs of dried flower. I don't even like the stuff, but decided to grow it for a lark this year. It is legal to grow 6 plants after all. I'm going to end up with vast quantities of the stuff, and it is apparently very strong. All my pot smoking friends and relatives are delighted with my new hobby. It's better than when I was making my own whiskey. That led to too much drinking for me. The funny thing is that this is entirely legal, and the whiskey was not."

Wrote the commenter who calls himself "Old and slow" in last night's sunrise post — the open thread.

I should reformat this post and give it the headline: How to win friends and put people under the influence.

I'm expressing no opinion on what's "entirely legal" in Arizona, but I was motivated to do a little fact check on ChatGPT. I had several questions. You can do your own research. I'll just quote my favorite sentence from the response I got: "The law doesn’t police casual social reciprocity ('hey thanks for dinner, here’s a little bud'), but if there’s a pattern that looks like payment-in-kind, it can cross into illegal distribution."

"Republican Kari Lake took yet another bite out of Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego’s lead in the race for Arizona’s open U.S. Senate seat on Friday evening."

"After cutting nearly 13,000 votes off Gallego’s lead on Thursday and Friday morning, Lake gained about 2,100 more votes when Maricopa County released the results of nearly 100,000 ballots just before 7 p.m. The state’s largest county is expected to release another update Saturday morning.... Gallego... was ahead 5.4 points in the initial results posted after the polls closed on Election Day...."

KTAR News reports on the only Senate race that is still not yet determined.

"The three [Arizona Democratic] state officials learned a computer glitch meant 98,000 voters had not provided proof of citizenship. In a candid phone call, they debated what to do."

The Washington Post reports (free-access link).

Their predicament was “an urgent, a dire situation,” Gov. Katie Hobbs said, according to audio of the call obtained by The Washington Post. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said critics would “beat us up no matter what the hell we do.” Attorney General Kris Mayes worried they would be accused of rigging the 2024 election in a crucial state....

"About 30 percent said inflation or the economy was central to their vote. And Mr. Trump holds a wide advantage with those voters."

"The [abortion] amendment, which is one of several abortion-related ballot initiatives across the country this fall, is seen by Democrats as a potential opportunity to increase turnout, since abortion has come to be a motivating issue on the left. Polling on ballot initiatives is notoriously challenging. Ballot language can be complicated for voters to understand to begin with, and they do not always understand which side accurately represents their views. Translating ballot language into a clear polling question adds another degree of complexity."

I'm reading "A Majority in Arizona Supports Establishing Right to Abortion, Poll Finds/A ballot measure codifying 'the fundamental right to an abortion' is supported by 58 percent of the state’s likely voters, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll" (NYT).

The NYT links to the Arizona ballot initiatives. There are a lot of them! I had to scroll to find the one on abortion and struggle to read it — and I taught the law school course that covers the right to abortion! The all-caps are painful:

Looming and dooming.

I'm reading "How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Doom Joe Biden/The independent candidate looms as a serious drag on Biden’s Latino support in Arizona and Nevada" by Adrian Carrasquillo in Politico.

Kennedy’s popularity appears to be a function of name recognition and a general lack of enthusiasm for President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, not to mention voters brushing their views onto the somewhat empty canvas of his candidacy.

As if RFK Jr. is mainly an empty space and Biden and Trump are just guys people are blasé about. Sorry. That's just a random/filler sentence. The article is full of specific material Latinos in Arizona and Nevada. Those are important swing states and in both the Latino population is about 30%.

So... another excerpt:

"It is the driver who takes tourists on Jeep tours. It is the veteran who works as a carpenter. It is the person who works at the Whole Foods..."

"... that sells sashimi-grade salmon for $44.99 a pound. They all live a precarious life sleeping every night in their cars parked somewhere around Sedona, Ariz. It’s become a big problem for the tony tourist town, which is why the Sedona City Council approved a program last week that temporarily converts an empty parking lot into a place where families or workers or students can live while trying to find a permanent home.... There was an outpouring of emotion from both sides of the issue.... 'The site is likely to become a magnet for chronically unemployed people who come to Sedona seeking an essentially free place to sleep,' wrote resident William D. Noonan.... Another resident, Joanne L. Makielski, wrote that it was unfortunate that it had to be considered, but it did. 'These are people who work in our town and we all depend on them. We must support them....'  [Mayor Scott] Jablow said... 'Who’s gonna run the food stores?'..."

From "Wealthy Sedona’s answer to housing crisis: A parking lot to sleep in" (WaPo).

"The burn appears to be about an inch deep, and mars the swath of intricate, black-inked tattoos of skulls and faces that once covered his back."

A description of a burn in an anecdote about a man who fell asleep on the sidewalk in Phoenix that begins the Guardian article "‘The burns can cook them’: searing sidewalks cause horrific injuries in US." 

The article quotes Kevin Foster, director of the Arizona burn center:

Among the sunburn cases in Phoenix that have required hospitalization: fentanyl users who have collapsed and spent "minutes or hours splayed on the pavement."

I'm reading "Burning pavement, scalding water hoses: Perils of a Phoenix heat wave/Amid record-breaking temperatures, risks to public health from burns and other exposure soars" (WaPo).

Homeless people are particularly vulnerable. But other cases involve freakish missteps — people burned by their seat belts or mailboxes. Swimmers attempting to walk across not-so-cool cool decks. The hospital has seen truckers who drive barefoot, step down onto a parking lot surface and end up badly blistered. On the hottest days, patients have been scalded by the water coming out of their garden hoses. “That first burst of water out of there, it’s practically boiling,” said Kevin Foster, a physician and the director of the burn center. One current patient was celebrating his day off with a cocktail, fell and burned 20 percent of his body, requiring surgery and skin grafting, Foster said. “He was not a drinker. It was just enough. He went down and couldn’t get up,” he said. “All it took was that one little thing.”

The top-rated comment over there is: 

Jeezuz Christ getting burned from lying on the goddam ground?! From opening your mailbox?! From your garden hose?! And climate change deniers expect us to believe this is "just summer"? 

When will you notice that you made your home in a desert? Why are you living there in the first place?

I'm reading "When Will the Southwest Become Unlivable? Air-conditioning and swimming pools are sustaining my community. I worry about the day when they won’t be enough" by Ruxandra Guidi in The Atlantic.

You're living where it was never livable. You kept yourself alive with artificial means in a place where the animal that is the human being did not evolve. Look around at what naturally lives there. That isn't you. Your arrogance is finally catching up to you. 

"Arizona’s Republican governor.... Doug Ducey is driving a project that is placing double-stacked old shipping containers through several miles of national forest, attempting..."

"... to fill gaps in Donald Trump’s intermittent border fencing. The rusting hulks, topped with razor wire and with bits of metal jammed into gaps, stretch for more than three miles through Coronado national forest land, south of Tucson, and the governor has announced plans to extend that up to 10 miles, at a cost of $95m (£78m). The area, with mountain ranges rising abruptly from the desert and a diverse environment of plants and animals, is federal land maintained by the US Forest Service."

The Guardian reports, in "Arizona governor builds border wall of shipping crates in final days of office."

If it's federal land, maintained by the federal government, why doesn't the federal government stop this ramshackle building project? Is this just another side of the federal government's inability/unwillingness to control the border?

It turns out, there is a lawsuit:

"I will call in a bit to talk about the doomsday ticket. Let me wake up and finish crying."

Said Barrett Marson, an Arizona Republican political strategist, quoted in "Republican ‘doomsday ticket’ ready for November" (Politico).

A prominent Republican in the state had texted him a GIF of Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff....

"Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Voting Restrictions."

Adam Liptak reports (in the NYT).

The new case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, No. 19-1257, concerned two kinds of voting restrictions in Arizona. One required election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The other made it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.” 

The law made exceptions for family members, caregivers and election officials. The larger battle in the case was not whether the particular challenged restrictions should survive. The Biden administration, for instance, told the justices in an unusual letter that the Arizona measures did not violate Section 2. 

But the letter disavowed the Trump administration’s interpretation of Section 2, which would have limited its availability to test the lawfulness of all sorts of voting restrictions. Section 2 bars any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” That happens, the provision goes on, when, “based on the totality of circumstances,” racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

Here's the opinion. Of course, it's 6 to 3.

"President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has said he hopes to halt construction of the border wall, but the outgoing administration is rushing to complete as much wall as possible..."

"... in its last weeks in power, dynamiting through some of the border’s most forbidding terrain. The breakneck pace at which construction is continuing all but assures that the wall, whatever Mr. Biden decides to do, is here to stay for the foreseeable future, establishing a contentious legacy for Mr. Trump in places that were crucial to his defeat. In southeastern Arizona, the continuing political divisiveness around the president’s signature construction project has pitted rancher against rancher and neighbor against neighbor.... The region is emerging as one of the Trump administration’s last centers of wall building as blasting crews feverishly tear through the remote Peloncillo Mountains, where ocelots and bighorn sheep roam through woodlands of cottonwoods and sycamores.... 'This isn’t just heartbreaking but totally pointless,' said Diana Hadley, a historian whose family’s ranch includes much of Guadalupe Canyon. She said natural barriers had long served as a deterrent against crossings in the remote area.... Karen Hasselbach, who lives on another stretch of the border in Arizona near the San Pedro River... had begun likening the border wall, which she despises, to the work of Christo, the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist known for epic-scale environmental projects. 'I try to look at it as a temporary art installation.... My hope is it gets torn down.'"

From "A Rush to Expand the Border Wall That Many Fear Is Here to Stay/Despite the president-elect’s vow to halt the project, the Trump administration is expanding the wall at a breakneck pace." (NYT).

Ahem... Arizona...

"Tucson voters overwhelmingly opted against the 'sanctuary city' initiative, which would have limited the circumstances in which police officers could ask about immigration status."

The Arizona Star Daily reports.

Partial results for Proposition 205, also known as The Tucson Families Free and Together Initiative, showed 58,820 voters, or 71.4%, voted “no” on the proposal compared to just 23,562, or 29%, who voted “yes.”...

The vote ends months of contentious debate over whether Tucson, which is located just 65 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, would buck a state law that prevents sanctuary cities and become Arizona’s only city to formally limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

"I always say this is one city of 400,000 people divided by a fence. But now it’s divided by concertina wire."

"If the president gets his billions of dollars they’re not going to spend it in Nogales. We’ve had a wall. Now we have a wall with concertina wire."

Said Arturo Garino, the mayor of Nogales, Arizona, quoted in "Trump’s troop deployment strung ‘lethal’ razor wire on the border. This city has had enough" (WaPo). The city already has an 18-foot fence, but now there are rows of coils of razor wire.

The tensions with the town have been exacerbated by the fact that federal authorities have shut out local officials from the process, Garino said.... He shared his concerns during a sit down with three agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Wednesday, but said they had a ready made response, speaking about “rapists, murderers and drug dealers,” and telling him that they had had a lot of incidents with people jumping the fence, he said.

“But that was strange, because the police chief, assistant chief and deputy city manager were there, and we don’t know of those things happening,” Garino said. “I don’t know where they’re getting their stats.... They can’t say they’re putting something up to protect us.... .They’re putting up something that’s lethal all the way to the ground.”....

The city’s fate is closely connected to Nogales, Mexico — a bustling city of a few hundred thousand on the other side of the fence with which it exchanges millions of dollars of goods and other commerce every year, Garino said. This symbiosis has given rise to a name that marries the two cities, despite the boundary between them: Ambos Nogales, or Both Nogales in Spanish.

"These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends, and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism..."

"... because they’re choosing to live that life. That’s bullshit. I mean, what the f*** are we really talking about here?"

Said Kyrsten Sinema back in 2006. She's now the Democratic Party's nominee to represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate.

I haven't been following the Sinema drama, so anything about her is news to me. But I was motivated to read her Wikipedia page because I wanted to know if she had children. If you stay home with children, you probably don't see yourself as "leeching." Some facts:

Sinema married, and later divorced, her BYU classmate Blake Dain.

On November 17, 2013, Sinema completed an Ironman Triathlon in a little more than 15 hours. Sinema was the second active member of Congress—behind Senator Jeff Merkley—to finish a long distance triathlon, and the first to complete an Ironman-branded race. On December 25, 2013, Sinema summited Mount Kilimanjaro.

So, her idea of doing difficult things is way beyond the average person's. But if you're running for office, it's not a good idea to reveal to ordinary people that you basically think they're not working hard enough. The normal bullshit is to butter them up continually, calling them "hard-working" and blaming government and corporations for their insufficiently affluent condition. But Sinema wants to call bullshit on that bullshit. Okay, Sinema. It won't get you into the Senate, I don't think, but it's kind of wonderful, shouted from the top of Mount Kilamanjaro.

Sinema is now the only openly non-theist or atheist member of Congress, although she herself has rejected such labels. She is also the first openly bisexual member of Congress.

Okay with me.

"Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is required by law to fill vacancies in the state's U.S. Senate delegation...."

"The governor has only said he will not appoint himself. But does Ducey want a temporary caretaker to hold the office only until the 2020 election? Or someone he hopes would seek re-election?..."

AZ Central looks at the 8 names that "have been floated," beginning with Cindy McCain and including former Senator Jon Kyl, both of whom fall in the "temporary caretaker" category. 2020 is a long time for a temporary caretaker to serve, I would think.

"Will the 'blue wave' continue with Arizona special election?"

Yesterday, on MSNBC (video at link):

Today’s special election in Arizona’s eighth district is being watched closely to see if Democrats can continue flipping seats held by Republicans. Dr. Hiral Tipirnen, the Democratic candidate in the race, joins Katy Tur to discuss today’s election.

Answer, in yesterday's special election: NO.

Let's see how MSNBC reports the story: "Republican Debbie Lesko scores tight win in Arizona special election, NBC News projects/Lesko's lead might have kept a conservative congressional district in Republican hands — but the margin might be too close for comfort."

How tight?

Lesko held a 52.6 percent to 47.4 percent lead over Tiperneni, or 91,390 votes to 82,316 — an Republican advantage of 9,072 votes, with 100 percent of precincts reporting, according to the Arizona secretary of state's office.

Doesn't seem tight to me.

That margin may concern Republicans. President Donald Trump carried the district in the conservative Western Phoenix suburbs by 21 percentage points, and its previous occupant, Trent Franks, a Republican, ran unopposed.

The blue wave. It's there even when it's not there.