Some might say that they knew immediately, when, in Kevin Sumlin’s first game as Arizona football coach, his Wildcats played like dookie. Sloppy and listless, unable to take advantage of late-game opportunities, and having to deal with a suddenly mercurial quarterback who quite obviously had seen his own picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the Wildcats lost to a barely average visiting BYU team. (BYU would go on to lose home games that season to Utah State and—gulp!—Northern Illinois.)

The loss to BYU was bad enough—putting the Cats in a hole from which they would struggle to emerge the rest of the season—but what troubled some was Sumlin’s reaction to it. Or, more correctly, his lack thereof. Sumlin shrugged like a monk learning dinner would be crackers with no salt.

The next week, Houston smacked Arizona around like it was a bad kid at a Catholic boarding school. Again with the shrug. Suddenly, the season that had had eternally optimistic Wildcat fans engaging in serious debates of 8-4 vs. 9-3, looked bleak.

Arizona, bolstered by a huge upset of powerful Oregon, eventually got back to .500, standing at 5-5 with two games left. But through it all, Shruglin stayed the same. Was he sullen or just pensive? Did he not like to talk or did he have nothing worthwhile to say? Fans hungry for a winner tend to feel that there’s a very fine line between keeping an even keel and not giving a crap.

The Cats took a 40-point whuppin’ from Washington State, but the season was still salvageable. All they had to do was beat visiting ASU in the regular-season finale and all would be good. That win would mean that they had beaten ASU, that they would go to a bowl game, and, most importantly, that they had beaten ASU.

Arizona went into the fourth quarter that day with a whopping 19-point lead and then it all fell apart. Aided by a couple bad turnovers in the wrong part of the field, ASU stormed back to win, 41-40. That’s when I knew. The turnovers were bad (and so was the missed field goal attempt at the gun that would have given the Cats the win), but it was painfully obvious that, in that fourth quarter that determined the fate of the season, Sumlin had been out-coached. Not by ASU Coach Herm Edwards; Sumlin had out-coached himself.

For months now, we here in Arizona have said that health care is on the ballot this November—and that is even more true today than it was six months ago when this pandemic began.

The dual public health and economic crises from the coronavirus have raised the stakes even higher when it comes to the importance of having quality, affordable health care coverage,  especially in our rural and border communities.

As someone who has worked in public health for 35 years, I know how important it is for working families across Arizona to have the peace of mind that comes with quality, affordable health care coverage.

So when I see Donald Trump and the Republican Party try to rush through a Supreme Court appointment just to overturn the Affordable Care Act, especially in the middle of a pandemic, I am as confused as I am horrified. Why fight to undermine something that has benefitted so many people?

The Affordable Care Act helped more than 400,000 people in Arizona gain coverage and led to a 42 percent reduction in the uninsured rate.

But if Trump and Republicans have their way, the Supreme Court will decide to rip away health care from 363,000 Arizonans and strip away protections from 2.8 million people in Arizona with preexisting conditions. To make matters worse, overturning the ACA would jeopardize protections for people with pre-existing conditions at a time when complications from COVID-19, like lung scarring and heart damage, could become the next deniable pre-existing condition.

By continuing his crusade to dismantle the ACA, Trump is gutting the protections that so many Arizonans families in our rural, border, and foothills communities depend on. We have worked so hard over the last several years to create a safety net infrastructure among our communities in Arizona with critical access hospitals, rural health clinics, and our community hospitals.

We can’t let Trump undo the progress we’ve made. Arizonans deserve so much better. We need leaders who will fight to protect our care and put working families first. That’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will protect and build on the Affordable Care Act to give Americans more choice, reduce health care costs, and make our health care system less complex. This will greatly benefit families in our border and rural communities who depend on the ACA to keep themselves and their families safe and healthy.

Biden and Harris also have a plan to help rural, border, and foothills communities like ours across Arizona meet the pressing health challenges they are faced with. When elected, Joe and Kamala will adequately fund our rural hospitals, double funding for community health centers, and help build new clinics and deploy telehealth in rural communities.

These common-sense solutions will help our neighbors and families stay healthy, especially as we continue to battle COVID-19.

We can’t afford four more years of attacks on our health care. I’ve seen the faces, I’ve seen the devastation, I’ve seen the work that my doctors do every day to save lives. Dismantling the Affordable Care Act and ripping away health care coverage is not an option. We cannot let it happen—and that starts with voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this November.

Former Arizona State Senator Amanda Aguirre presently serves in the capacity of President & CEO of the Regional Center for Border Health, Inc. since 1991 and its subsidiary San Luis Walk-In Clinic, Inc., a primary care rural health medical center. Ms. Aguirre has been involved for more than 35 years in health care and business administration.

Mayor Regina Romero and Council Member Paul Durham have proposed a Tucson Climate Emergency Declaration as part of a nationwide call for mobilization to act locally and think globally as a community of communities.

This declaration focuses on issues relevant to our Southwest region needs, including resource conservation, restoring and rehabilitating ecosystems through green infrastructure, and carbon sequestration with a focus on massive tree planting.

A comprehensive climate action and adaptation plan is needed to ensure good quality jobs for a just and equitable transition as we recover from our current COVID-19 crisis. These efforts need community support and adoption. Local First Arizona is in full support.

The climate emergency is indeed the greatest emergency. Scientists have put the crisis in sharp focus: we have less than a decade to act before there is irreversible damage to our communities and economy.

As the largest local business coalition in the country, Local First Arizona supports the established science and our sustainability programs focus on taking action to support both businesses and the community through plans and strategies that are cost-effective and provide long-term economic and community benefits. Our award-winning SCALE UP project planning program provides support for businesses and nonprofits focused on beneficial sustainability strategies that also support the community’s needs in our current crisis.

We are already experiencing realities of the climate crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic. The United Nations finds that zoonotic diseases such as the disease caused by the novel coronavirus are spreading with greater frequency due to human activity, including industrial farming and deforestation.

Sen. Martha McSally took to the Senate floor today in an effort to squeeze back into her “pragmatic problem solver” persona, but it’s an ill fit.

McSally delivered a sequel to her speech last week urging her colleagues to extend the extra $600 in unemployment benefits that out-of-work Americans have been receiving during the pandemic.

“I deployed to Washington to be a pragmatic problem solver,” McSally said Thursday, July 30. “And for the past five and a half years, I’ve made it my mission in Congress to better the lives of hardworking Arizonans. In a time of toxic partisanship, this is no easy feat.”

McSally is no stranger to toxic partisanship herself. Ever since she gave up defending a moderate Southern Arizona congressional district to seek a U.S. Senate seat, she’s fully embraced President Donald Trump and his takeover of the GOP. If you read her fundraising emails, you’ll see lots of references to radical left-wing mobs who are bent on eliminating all law enforcement, destroying our borders and stealing our precious bodily fluids. (OK, we made up the last part.) When Trump’s scheme to extort Ukraine came to light, McSally criticized those who revealed Trump’s corrupt extortion effort rather than the crooked effort itself—and, of course, she voted to acquit Trump on the charges. And let’s not forget her dismissal of CNN reporter as a “liberal hack” because he asked her if she would consider new evidence in that impeachment trial. None of that is pragmatic problem solving.

And none of appears to be helping McSally on the campaign trail as she faces Democrat Mark Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who has staked out a major lead over McSally. (Several polls in recent weeks, including surveys from Marist College and Morning Consult, show McSally down by double digits to Kelly; the Real Clear Politics polling average has Kelly ahead by 6.8 percentage points.)

The Big Bang Theory had a recurring character, a likeable dimwit named Zach who was best-known for saying things like, “That’s one of the great things about science—there’s no one right answer.” That’s cute (and utterly false), but in the Time of the Pandemic, in these life-or-death days, being dimwitted (especially intentionally so) is not likeable or useful or acceptable. It’s criminal.

Not everybody is good at math and science. That’s just a fact of life. However, I’ve never understood why it’s socially acceptable to brag about one’s deficiency in that area. (“Oh, I’m horrible at math…giggle”). It’s like standing up at a formal dinner party and announcing that you have really bad incontinence. It happens, but keep it to yourself (in both word and deed).

It was obvious from the start of this mess that the media would often take the lazy route and just throw a bunch of numbers at the watchers/listeners/ readers. That way, there is something for everybody and essentially nothing for anybody. You give people a smorgasbord of figures and they can pick and choose what they want to bolster their argument or (as is more often the case) to give themselves an excuse to ignore the reality that’s right in front of their faces.

I could spout real (and important) raw numbers, but then I would be engaging in the same folly I just criticized. More enlightening are trends.

The main problems with numbers are twofold. First, unless you’re like John Nash (of “A Beautiful Mind”) or Srinivasa Ramanujan (who had an even more-beautiful mind), a series of numbers thrown at even a well-educated person will eventually begin to cascade and dissolve into mathematical gibberish. (So imagine what it must do to the average Trump voter.)

It’s okay if the figures are online or in a newspaper or magazine because the reader has time to pore over the numbers and try to make sense of them. But when they are presented on the radio or (especially) television, it does a disservice to the person who is trying to get pertinent information. Again, trends are more informative than raw numbers. If the TV talking head comes on and says that Arizona had 314 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on May 1 and then, just two months later, that number was 4,877, people would say “Wow, that’s a bigger number.” But if the TV guy said (on July 1), “Today, Arizona is reporting 16 times as many cases of the virus as we did just two months ago,” that actually conveys information that, which less specific, is actually more significant.

Of course, the other main problem is that numbers can be misused. And it’s not just the Benjamin Disraeli (and Mark Twain) quote about, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” People have long cherry-picked stats to bolster their argument, but in the Trump era, the lazy bastards don’t even bother. They just make stuff up and their audiences lap it up. (I read a disturbing thing about Trump followers who refuse to believe their own eyes. Three-and-a-half years after the fact, they had a bunch of them look at the aerial shots of the Obama and Trump Inaugurations and they still swear that they see more people in the Trump picture, apparently seeing tightly packed-together white people who showed up for the thing disguised as empty sidewalk.)

The other day, I was listening to the local morning Trump licker and he was trying to claim that things have not gotten worse in Arizona since Ducey re-opened the state. (The radio talker was an early cheerleader for opening things up and God forbid that he admit that he was wrong.) So, he's going on this rant and he finishes by claiming that “things have gone down 17 days in a row in Arizona.”

What could he possibly be talking about? Over that 17-day period, the number of confirmed cases in Arizona went up eight times over the previous day and went down nine times, so nothing has happened 17 days in a row. Likewise for the number of deaths—up eight times, down nine times. And, in both cases, the total on the last day of that period was higher than the number on the first day. (The number of ICU beds occupied by COVID patients also went up sharply over that 17-day period.)

So, what then? Obviously, from experience, he knows that he can just make stuff up and nobody is going to question him. (Stations like that will never take callers with an opposing viewpoint. Their preference of callers, in ascending order, is Angry Supporter, Loud Angry Supporter, and Loud Angry Supporter With a Side of Racism.)

Honorable Governor Ducey:

The July 4th holiday saw examples of what you have correctly called ‘bad actors’ ignoring both mask wearing and social distancing protocols. We will very soon see the impacts of that behavior in increased COVID-19 infection rates. I feel confident in predicting that surge in sickness because we saw a similar trend in the weeks following the Memorial Day celebrations. During that holiday, scenes such as this were commonplace in the news:

Sir, that photo was taken of you at a party that took place shortly after Memorial Day. If bar operators are "bad actors" needing to be controlled by the State, I suggest your own behavior falls well within that same category.

The residents of Tucson have elected me, along with my City Council colleagues, with the expectation that we will do all we can to ensure the safety of the public. If we cannot count on the Governor of the State to set a ‘good actor’ example, then we will. I once again call on you to rescind the portion of your standing Executive Order in which local jurisdictions are prohibited from taking local action related to COVID-19.

Local conditions call for local solutions. Our hospitals are beyond capacity. Out-of-state health care workers are being flown in to help support our local workers. Through the surge line, our friends and loved ones are being flown out-of-State in order to receive health care. I do not believe the actions your administration has taken go far enough in protecting my constituents. I also do not believe even your own health care advisors feel the measures in place are having the desired effect.

We as elected officials will stand before the voters and be held accountable for decisions we make on the local level. All we need is for the State to step out of the way and return to us that authority.

Sincerely,

Steve Kozachik
Ward 6 Council member

I deployed to Afghanistan in 2012 as a Civil Affairs Team Leader in Mazer-e Sharif. I patrolled the rural Afghan villages of Chimtal and Chahar Bolak, leading reconstruction projects in these communities during a time I thought was the twilight of the war. I was wrong about the war coming to an end, now an ongoing two-decade conflict and by far the longest in U.S. history.
I returned to Afghanistan in 2016, this time as the commander of a small detachment of Army Reserve Soldiers from Arizona conducting intelligence operations in support of counter-terrorism operations throughout the country.

When the New York Times reported that Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers I was not surprised. Sadly, I was also not surprised to learn that President Trump and the White House’s National Security Council have done nothing in response.

Russia is our adversary, virtually every elected member of Congress agrees on that. We can’t trust them, and we know they want to undermine our democracy. That’s why Congress sanctioned Russia for meddling in the 2016 election.

Congress, in the House and the Senate, needs to conduct a full investigation to understand the breakdowns at the highest level of our government that have failed to protect American troops serving overseas.

Martha McSally, a fellow veteran who was appointed to the late John McCain’s U.S. Senate seat, was asked about the New York Times report earlier this week, and her response was shocking and offensive.

McSally told the Arizona Republic “ I’m just concerned about the leaking here and the politicization of it.”

The leaking? The politicization?

Senator McSally, how about you show some concern for your brothers and sisters in combat who are putting their lives on the line to create a safer world? How about you show some anger over a president and an administration who will turn a blind eye to naked aggression from a nation you yourself have called one of America’s top adversaries? How about you recognize that as a U.S. Senator you have the power to do something about it? Stand up to the President and call for the Senate investigation.

As someone trained in the collection, analysis, and reporting of intelligence I know what goes into corroborating information before briefing a commander. To make it into the president's daily brief, information must be deemed urgent and credible. The Commander in Chief and his National Security Council had this information and took no action.

I’m disappointed that Martha McSally is putting her political allies above the safety of American troops—the men and women that she served with. She should spend her Fourth of July weekend thinking about why she wants to serve Arizonans in the first place, what it means to defend democracy, and her oath to defend the Constitution against all foreign enemies.

Aaron Marquez is a member of the Individual Ready Reserve. The views expressed here are those of him only and not those of the Department of Defense.

That Mount Rushmore display last night—an alternately smirking and glowering Mussolini declaiming to howling hyenas—shook me to my toenails. Each time they chanted “USA! USA!” he paused with that look of self-adulation I’ve seen from Mobutu to Ceausescu to Qaddafi. They roared when he said anyone defacing a block of stone can be sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in prison. They booed when he labeled long-overdue protests enshrined in the Constitution as extremist leftwing terrorist acts, all the work of “liberal Democrats.” Unlike all those other despots I’ve covered, this man is deeply disturbed in a different way. And others were propped up by corrupt, coopted armies. We have no excuse. We put him there ourselves.

How many qualified voters, too sanctimonious to choose “the lesser of two evils,” voted for a no-chance also-run or sulked at home because Bernie Sanders wasn’t on the ballot? How many just stayed home, with something better to do than save America from what was blindingly obvious before November?

I’ve watched democratic states slip into shitholes since the 1960s. From time to time, I’ve covered Trump’s sociopathic, racist narcissism as he threw poor families out of their homes to build yet another Trump-Dump palace bound for bankruptcy. Before November 2016. I wrote about a coup d’etat attempt. In hindsight, I fell far short, never imagining that craven senators, greed-blinded tycoons and mindless morons would take us to this point. And now we learn that his fan-boy obsession with Putin now amounts to outright treason, shrugging off $100,000 bounties on the heads of U.S. troops he extols in speeches.

That speech, crafted by his Rasputin handlers, had none of the usual rambling and boastful asides. It railed against those “communists” in our streets, yet it was straight-up Stalin. He refused to meet first with Indian tribal leaders, whose spiritual grounds he desecrated. He insisted on lavish fireworks against the pleas of foresters who feared wildfire after years of a beetle infestation. His cults packed in tight, unmasked, simply to feed his insatiable ego.