Ruben Gallego Is Running to Unseat Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona Senate Race

Days after Kyrsten Sinema gallivanted around the Davos World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps with the world’s richest people, Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego officially announced his campaign to unseat the Arizona senator.

“If you’re more likely to be meeting with the powerful than the powerless, you’re doing this job incorrectly,” Gallego said in his announcement.

Gallego is a former Marine who served in the Lima Company, one of America’s hardest-hit units in the Iraq War. Elected to the Arizona state House in 2010, Gallego led the charge to grant in-state tuition status to veterans living in Arizona. He has served in the House of Representatives since 2014 and has been a chief advocate for veterans there as well.

In a 2024 race that has already generated much intrigue, Gallego will benefit from a groundswell of Democratic and even independent support against Sinema. Polls have shown massive Democratic preference for Gallego over Sinema; independent voters have expressed net favorability for Gallego at +31 points, while Sinema was net negative at -39.

Sinema’s recent decision to become an independent, however, complicates things slightly. One recent poll has found that a three-way race between Sinema, Gallego, and failing Arizona gubernatorial candidate and right-wing extremist Kari Lake could result in a slim Lake victory. The poll found Sinema garnering a meager 13 percent, with Gallego netting 40 percent and Lake edging by with 41 percent.

Of course, the poll is just one poll, and it’s only the dawn of 2023. Moreover, Sinema has not expressed her intentions for 2024, nor has Lake officially announced any plans. But there have been heavy rumors of her intention to run for Sinema’s seat, and she has urged her supporters to “mark your calendars” for January 29.

If Lake does run, the pressure is on Sinema to decide, first, whether she will run at all and then whether she will do so in the Democratic primary or mount a cynical, completely ego-driven campaign as an independent. Being a political independent is nothing to look down upon, but someone pretending to be an independent when their entire politics is driven by the interests of the rich and powerful is simply embarrassing.

Representative George Santos has called the reporting and photographic (and now videographic) evidence of him having done drag in the past “categorically false” and “outrageous.”

Now it seems one of his alternate identities has added even more evidence to the pile.

In a Wikipedia page rife with spelling and grammatical errors discovered by Politico Friday, someone with the name Anthony Devolder wrote on his user page that he “startted his ‘stage’ life at age 17 as an gay night club DRAG QUEEN and with that won sevral GAY “BEAUTY PAGENTS.’” The page was last updated in April 2011.

Devolder (one of Santos’s many aliases) also wrote that he was in a few television shows, including The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and Hannah Montana—as well as the 2009 film The Invasion, starring “Uma Turman,Chris Odanald ,Melllisa George and Alicia Silver Stone.” This movie doesn’t exist; The Invasion of 2007, however, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, does.

The Wikipedia user page reportedly contains information that aligns with Santos’s background, like his exact birthday. His office did not provide Politico with comment, but it’s tough, as with most of Santos’s lies, to see how he can even provide an alternative explanation.

Other accounts likely attached to Santos, like Georgedevolder22, have been active in more recent months, editing the public-facing Wikipedia page for then-Congressman-elect Santos, including edits to Santos’s personal life and removing the name “Anthony Devolder,” so the page would read George Santos. Numerous accounts linked to “Georgedevolder22” have been banned by moderators due to suspicion of their linkage to each other.

All the lies come after one weeklong chapter of the enormous book of lies Santos has written. Just this week, Santos has been revealed to have raised and stolen funds meant to save a homeless veteran’s dying dog and lied about his mom being at 9/11.

For the sake of any dignity Santos still has, and for the sake of reserving ink for members of Congress who didn’t lie about practically every single part of their lives, may the book conclude soon.

Read more at Politico.

One of the keynote speakers at the anti-abortion-rights March for Life on Friday invoked football player Damar Hamlin, who is recovering from cardiac arrest, as an analogy for why abortion should be banned.

Buffalo Bills safety Hamlin collapsed during a nationally televised game on January 2 after he was struck in the chest, stopping his heart. He was hospitalized for nine days, and while he has made a remarkable recovery, his spokesman says the 24-year-old has a long way to go.

Pro Football Hall of Famer Tony Dungy somehow decided this was the perfect comparison to banning reproductive freedom. While speaking at the March for Life, the first since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Dungy argued that because everyone came together to hope that Hamlin would live, they should also hope that people won’t choose to get abortions.

There is, of course, no comparison. Hamlin suffered a medical tragedy. Abortion is a private decision. And it’s worth noting that in spouting off about innocent lives at risk, Dungy makes no consideration for the life of the pregnant person, whose entire world might be negatively upended by the arrival of a child.

Since the loss of the nationwide right to abortion, restrictions on reproductive rights have been growing ever tighter. This week alone, Kansas lawmakers introduced a bill that would allow counties and cities to ban the procedure, undermining a vote last year by state residents, and Arkansas introduced a bill that would let prosecutors charge people who get abortions with homicide.

This kind of twisted logic coming from Dungy isn’t a surprise. The former NFL coach is extreme in his views. He has for years advocated against LGBTQ rights, and this month spoke at an event hosted by a deeply anti-LGBTQ preacher. The day before coming to Washington, D.C., for the march, Dungy said that public schools are giving litter boxes to students who identify as cats. This is a widely debunked far-right conspiracy theory that stems from a refusal to let trans kids use the bathroom they want in school.

The Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky held an event this week honoring one of the cops in the raid that killed Breonna Taylor.

The event took place on Tuesday at Anna’s Greek Restaurant, a well-known local restaurant in Bowling Green, with a dining area and second-floor space where events can be held. There, former Louisville Metro Police Department Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly, one of the officers who conducted the no-knock warrant and raid that killed Taylor in March 2020, reportedly shared photos and blared video footage with gunshot noises.

The restaurant was open to the public at the time of the event. Guests, some of whom had made reservations, were not informed by management about the last-minute event happening upstairs. Guests, including people of color, there for their own dinner plans were then shocked by what appeared to be a bustling event celebrating an officer who was part of the raid that killed a Black woman in her own home.

Cayce Johnson, a guest at the restaurant that night, told The New Republic that the lights dimmed in the middle of their meal. “The woman comes back on and introduces Jonathan Mattingly, and everyone just roared upstairs—applause, cheers, and our mouths just dropped.” Sound carried throughout Anna’s, a retrofitted old church.

Johnson said Mattingly took the audience “back to March 2020,” before going through the presentation with photos and video footage with the sound of gunshots. “One of the members of our group was a war veteran and he has PTSD, so we were just in extreme shock.”

Katelyn Jones, another diner, told TNR the event also included a raffle and jokes about Covid-19. She said the event was initially so loud her father couldn’t hear anything at the table.

After realizing the event included Mattingly, Johnson and her friends sought out the restaurant owner, Vilson Qehaja. Qehaja responded to the group’s concerns by literally shrugging his shoulders, according to video footage. “I have no idea what’s happening, so,” he said as the group complained about the presentation on Taylor. “I have nothing to do with that, so.”

One of Johnson’s friends said, “Do you realize who that is? They killed somebody, a cop. He’s a cop … I made reservations, I came from Kansas City.”

“You’re being served, right?” Qehaja responded.

Guests say Qehaja later simply turned up the music.

“He was drinking his coffee and staring at us, raising his eyebrows, kind of intimidating us, like, ‘What are you going to do?’” Johnson said. Qehaja’s behavior mimicked what event attendees upstairs allegedly were doing, as guests claimed men from the audience glared down from the second-floor balcony at restaurantgoers, seeming to warn them not to disrupt their event.

An estimated 80 people reportedly attended the event.

Since the event, Mattingly has left a glowing review of Anna’s—and gotten into fights with people who say his presence disrupted their dinner. He did not explicitly deny reports of gunshot noises during the presentation.

“It is beyond reprehensible to subject anyone, let alone children and customers of African American descent, to such indecent exposure, graphic and upsetting images while they were attempting to enjoy their meal,” said the Bowling Green–Warren County Branch of the NAACP in a statement. “Such disturbing occurrences must not be tolerated especially in places of public accommodation. At a minimum, these acts are devoid of humanity and violate the most fundamental principles of human decency.”

TNR reached out to the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department. They had no comment.

The event took place despite earlier controversy about Mattingly’s presence. He was originally slated to appear alongside Agriculture Commissioner and Kentucky gubernatorial candidate Ryan Quarles at the Bowling Green Country Club. In a post from their now-removed Facebook page, the Republican Women’s Club said Mattingly was going to “share what really happened during the raid that killed Breonna Taylor, what he saw, and how the media’s narrative has been corrupted and twisted to fit into a false, woke storyline.” After the event garnered attention from the media and local political leaders, Quarles and the Bowling Green Country Club both backed out.

Attempts were also made to contact the Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky and its officers, to no avail. Regina Webb, a Republican who ran for the state House of Representatives in 2012, claimed ignorance about the event to TNR. Webb, listed by the secretary of state in 2020 as vice president and director of the Republican Women’s Club, also said she was not involved in the club.

“A lot of people attending are actually people in positions of power in Bowling Green.… People are hesitant to put their name out there for fear of retribution,” Johnson said. “They thought that because they were going to secretly and quietly move the event, there would be no one who knew what it was, and no one to call them out.”

“We are calling them out.”

A federal judge ruled Friday that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis violated the state Constitution and First Amendment when he suspended an elected Democratic state attorney last year, but the court would not step in and overturn that suspension.

State Attorney Andrew Warren sued DeSantis in August, two weeks after the governor suspended him for alleged “willful defiance of his duty.” DeSantis cited in particular a joint statement Warren signed with other elected prosecutors the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, stating “our firm belief that prosecutors have a responsibility to refrain from using limited criminal legal system resources to criminalize personal medical decisions,” such as abortion or transgender health care.

In his suit, Warren denied explicitly refusing to enforce laws and argued his suspension was political retaliation and a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech. He sought a judge’s order to restore him to office and to bar DeSantis from taking further action against him.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle sided with Warren that his rights had been violated, blasting DeSantis’s argument that the prosecutor had neglected his duty by making blanket promises not to prosecute certain cases.

“Mr. Warren’s well-established policy, followed in every case by every prosecutor in the office, was to exercise prosecutorial discretion at every stage of every case. Any reasonable investigation would have confirmed this,” Hinkle wrote in his ruling. In his opinion, there was “not a hint of misconduct by Mr. Warren.”

But, the judge said, he was unable to restore Warren to office. He argued that the Eleventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which restricts individuals from suing states in federal court, tied his hands.

“The Eleventh Amendment prohibits a federal court from awarding … relief of the kind at issue against a state official based only on a violation of state law,” Hinkle said in the ruling.

Not only is it frustrating to watch an elected official break the law and still get away with it, it is also worrying that this case will push DeSantis to go further. The Republican—and current favorite to face off against Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination—has gone to war with what he calls “trendy ideologies.”

He signed Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and pushed the so-called Stop Woke Act, which restricts certain race-based conversations and analyses in colleges. That bill has been temporarily blocked from being implemented. This week, he banned an A.P. African American studies course in schools.

DeSantis getting away with suspending Warren without so much as a slap on the wrist could embolden him to take retaliatory measures against other public officials whom he deems too “woke.”