44 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 — Mitch- ell’s prosecutors would’ve made sure he spent serious time in a cell under the prison. 22222 B E ST ACT O F C O U R AG E 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 preg- nant 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 abor- tions,” but that she was choosing to do so, “because I want us to be able to have mean- ingful 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 preg- nancy was not viable. She discussed how she was not able to obtain an emergency abor- tion in the past when she began to miscarry, and she did not want to go through a miscar- riage 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. 22222 B E ST P O L I T I CA L PA R AS I T E 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 tradition- ally cash-poor Arizona GOP and the old- school conservatives that used to be its power brokers. Now, Kirk’s organizations play king- maker 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. 22222 B E ST E N E M Y O F P RO G R E S S Tom Horne How did former Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne go from being synonymous with political corruption to besting rising Demo- cratic star Kathy Hoffman in the 2022 race for state Superintendent of Public Instruc- tion? 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 Amer- ican 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 inclu- sion 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.
