Best Resignation 2024 | Roger Smith | Megalopolitan Life | Phoenix
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Best Resignation

Roger Smith

Activists and victims of police brutality in Phoenix have been trying to bring oversight to the city's notorious force for years. The Office of Accountability and Transparency, created by Phoenix City Council in 2021, was supposed to be a tool to do that. But over time, the office was weakened and couldn't even conduct its own investigations. Roger Smith was the first director of the agency. After the city manager's sketchy, panicked, last-minute effort to stop Smith from hiring a second-in-command with extensive legal experience on policing issues, city officials formally criticized his behavior in a performance improvement plan despite giving him top marks in an annual review three months earlier. Smith resigned in defiance. In a letter, he said the agency he led "does not have the independence required to effectively perform its responsibilities." As Phoenix started up its fight against possible independent oversight in anticipation of a damning report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Smith's resignation highlighted the city's lie that the watchdog agency provides "robust, independent, civilian review of the PPD."

Best Dumpster Fire

Kari Lake

Newscaster-turned-MAGA-fanatic Kari Lake just cannot stop being a mess. The defining feature of her campaign for a U.S. Senate seat has been marked by turbulence, inconsistency, unforced errors and lies. After handily losing the 2022 election for governor to Katie Hobbs, Lake was claiming she won and suing as late as July 2024, even though the courts have consistently rejected her outrageous, evidence-free claims. She kept changing her public stance on abortion, which led to questions from the conservative base on the campaign trail. She spoke in front of a Confederate flag at an event and attended a fundraiser at the house of a wealthy conspiracy theorist couple. Lake was loudly booed at an annual meeting of the Arizona Republican Party. She was caught in a lie that she did not collect speaking fees from several appearances and was outfundraised by Democrat Ruben Gallego. And yet, these events only scratch the surface. No one in Arizona is able to match Lake in running such a deeply chaotic public campaign.

Best Policy Disaster

Attempted Abortion Ban

Chaos erupted on April 9 when the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated an 1864 near-total ban on abortion, including in cases of rape or incest. It turned out that Republicans' 2022 law banning abortion after 15 weeks contained a clause clearly expressing that it did not supersede Arizona's 1864 law. The decision caused panic, as medical providers prepared for the worst and activists rallied against the prospect of forced births. Even several Republicans, like former Gov. Doug Ducey and state Rep. Matt Gress, said they thought the ruling went too far — despite the fact they endorsed the position by passing and signing the 2022 law. Though the 1864 law was eventually repealed within a month of the decision, the abortion ban highlighted the fact that disaster is just a decision away, and individual freedoms are at risk of being ripped up.

Best Wacko Political Race

8th Congressional District Republican Primary

Right-wing nutjobs flocked to the northwest Valley after Rep. Debbie Lesko announced she would not run for reelection. In a primary between some of metro Phoenix's most extreme Republicans, Abe Hamadeh emerged as the winner, beating out fellow MAGA bro Blake Masters, Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives Ben Toma, fake elector and state Sen. Anthony Kern and disgraced former Rep. Trent Franks, who held the office before Lesko but resigned after asking young female staffers to be surrogate mothers for him. Hamadeh nabbed an early endorsement from convicted felon and former President Donald Trump, which no doubt played to his benefit. Masters, who lives 120 miles from the district in Tucson, also received an endorsement from Trump a few days before voting ended but finished second. Toma's position as a top state official and conservative bona fides weren't enough to match the MAGA kids' public profiles; he finished third. With the district heavily favoring Republicans, the 33-year-old Hamadeh is set to coast to a victory in November, which will make him one of the youngest members of Congress.

Best Religious Nuttery

Anthony Kern

When it comes to old-fashioned, moon-howlin' political and religious extremism, Arizona boasts an embarrassment of mostly right-wing riches. From former Sheriff Joe Arpaio to cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs Kari Lake, the Grand Canyon State rivals Alabama and Florida for public paragons of all kinds of goofball nuttery. This year, one stunt elevated Republican state Senator Anthony Kern to the top of the heap when it comes to crackpot spirituality: leading a group of religious wackadoodles as they knelt and spoke in tongues while praying on the Senate floor. As a half-dozen antiabortion fanatics jabbered in gibberish, their hands touching the Great Seal of the State of Arizona emblazoned on the carpet before the empty dais of the Senate president, Kern moaned in religious ecstasy, "Lord, right now, we ask thee to release the presence of the Lord in the Senate chamber." Better known for his presence at the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and for being part of the fake electors scheme to overthrow the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump, Kern clearly had outdone himself in his newfound religious lunacy. What's next? Handling snakes on the Senate lawn? Dispensing Flavor Aid to passersby a la Jim Jones? Casting demons out of Gov. Katie Hobbs? Sheesh. Give that man a straitjacket before he hurts someone.

Best Act of Crass Favoritism

Rachel Mitchell

A good way to wind up dead in the Valley of the Sun is to barricade yourself in your home with a gun and a bottle of Don Julio and point said firearm at the po-po when they show up.That's what happened in January 2022 when former Arizona prisons honcho Charles Ryan reportedly sucked down a half-bottle of tequila and started playing with his pistol. His wife called the Tempe police, and during the resulting standoff, Ryan pointed his gun at two officers. If he'd been anyone else, he'd be enjoying a dirt nap right now. But the cops didn't kill Ryan, and Ryan was later arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and misconduct with a weapon. Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell's office allowed Ryan to plead guilty to the former and receive probation as part of a generous plea deal. The Tempe officers involved thought Ryan had committed aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a class 3 felony with a mandatory prison sentence of five to 15 years. But Mitchell's top flack told the press that since Ryan was blotto, he could not form the necessary "intent" to commit a crime. Mitchell denied she'd given Ryan a "sweetheart" plea deal. But let's face it, if Ryan had been Joe Sixpack — and survived the confrontation — Mitchell's prosecutors would've made sure he spent serious time in a cell under the prison.

Best Act of Courage

Eva Burch

In March, during the heated and still-ongoing debate over abortion access (or lack thereof) in Arizona, state Senator Eva Burch rose to tell her colleagues that she was pregnant and was planning to have an abortion. Surrounded by other legislators, the Mesa Democrat explained that she didn't think "people should have to justify their abortions," but that she was choosing to do so, "because I want us to be able to have meaningful conversations about the reality of how the work that we do in this body impacts people in the real world." Burch, a nurse practitioner, has two sons, but she also has a history of miscarriages, she explained. She recently discovered that her current pregnancy was not viable. She discussed how she was not able to obtain an emergency abortion in the past when she began to miscarry, and she did not want to go through a miscarriage again. She told the Senate that Arizona abortion law forced her to go through a series of hoops, including having to go through an unnecessary ultrasound. Video of Burch's act of incredible courage soon went viral, with Burch receiving a phone call from Vice President Kamala Harris, who praised Burch's speech. Burch is now a hero of the pro-choice movement, and rightly so.

Best Political Parasite

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, is a one-man wrecking crew whose organization has surpassed the Arizona Republican Party in influence. The 30-year-old pro-MAGA wunderkind started Turning Point in 2012 at age 18, transforming it over time into a fundraising juggernaut, with a reported $39.2 million in revenue in 2020. Turning Point's political nonprofit, Turning Point Action, is pouring millions of dollars into a national get-out-the-vote effort aimed at returning former President Donald Trump to power. Turning Point's success has made Kirk a popular and wealthy man. According to the Associated Press, Kirk earns a yearly salary of $407,000 and lives in a "$4.75 million Spanish-style estate" that is "tucked away in a gated Arizona country club that charges nearly a half-million dollars for a golf membership." Haters gonna hate, but Kirk's rise has come at the expense of the traditionally cash-poor Arizona GOP and the old-school conservatives that used to be its power brokers. Now, Kirk's organizations play kingmaker in Republican primaries, but those candidates, such as Turning Point darling Kari Lake, can be flops in general elections, where extremist election-denial rhetoric is a turn-off for voters. If Trump flounders come November, the Turning Point brand will be tarnished, though Kirk will have made bank nonetheless.

Best Enemy of Progress

Tom Horne

How did former Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne go from being synonymous with political corruption to besting rising Democratic star Kathy Hoffman in the 2022 race for state Superintendent of Public Instruction? Chalk it up to name recognition, the short attention span of the public and a not-ready-for-prime-time Arizona Democratic Party, which failed to inform voters of Horne's seedy past — a past this paper has documented at length. The nearly 80-year-old Elmer Fudd lookalike previously served as state Superintendent from 2003 to 2011 before moving on to the AG's office. During that tenure, Horne waged a race-baiting war on bilingual education and Mexican American ethnic studies programs. Now back in Arizona's educational catbird seat, Horne's up to his old tricks, backing a failed lawsuit to stop Spanish-English dual language immersion classes and supporting the inclusion in schools of materials authored by the uber-conservative educational outlet PragerU. Horne shouldn't be in that office, and hopefully he's not reelected in 2026. That is, if the Democrats can finally get their act together and trounce this far-right fossil.

Best Failure to Protect and Serve

Gilbert Police Department

Gilbert police officers often were called to the In-N-Out Burger at SanTan Village Parkway and East Williams Field Road to deal with crowds of rowdy teens, who sometimes brandished brass knuckles and went on violent rampages, posting the attacks on social media. Yet Chief Michael Soelberg and his officers never noticed. It took reporting by the Arizona Republic to stitch things together and embarrass police and prosecutors, who acted as if they'd never scrolled through TikTok. Even then, Soelberg blamed the victims for failing to alert police and continued for weeks with a tone-deaf approach to teen violence in the affluent Phoenix suburb. Gilbert police made their first arrests in the Gilbert Goons violence in January, about a month after the Republic did the investigative work for them. But even then, Gilbert police fumbled, announcing just one arrest and insisting that no others had been made. Only when the Republic provided documents showing three other arrests did police acknowledge that, oh yeah, they cuffed those folks, too. The controversy over teen violence and the city's handling of it prompted Mayor Brigette Peterson to end her reelection campaign. It's a wonder Soelberg has remained in place.

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