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Sorry about today’s email, the heat fried our brain … Kris is finding facts … And take Marco’s free business tips.

It’s officially that time of the year when all anyone wants to talk about is the heat, us included. 

Former Phoenicians are bemoaning their visits back home, and every Arizonan capable of driving two hours north has to brag about it online, which is not cool. 

The New York Times has published at least four “Arizona is Hot” stories in the past week. Former Iraq correspondent Jack Healy, now sentenced to Phoenix, calls the Arizona heat a “brutal test of endurance” an “ultramarathon of sweat” and an “invisible disaster” of sunshine. You can’t even touch metal things, he explains to his East Coast audience. 

Other Arizona newcomers, and even locals, agree that metal and pavement get really hot. The newcomers tell Healy it’s like “walking around in a blow-dryer.” But the Phoenix natives know this isn’t even that bad. 

“We haven’t even gotten to the worst,” Phoenix native Stacey Sosa told the Times. “We’re just starting out.”

But as the national media paints Arizona as a scorched hellscape, our local press corps, defensive over being scooped on the heat yet again this year, is fighting back. It was a cold winter, after all, we reminded everyone. 

In fact, our scientific analysis of long term historical trends shows that the heat wave coverage arrived right about on schedule this year. Last year’s breakout Times feature debuted on July 28, and in 2021, it landed on June 20. That late-June to late-July window has consistently provided the Times with “It is Hot in Arizona” content since as far back as 1887. 

But we local reporters have our ears to the ground¹. We know the question isn’t “Is it hot in Arizona?” or even “How can anyone live there?” 

The real burning questions are: “What does Phoenix’s heat officer do?” “Is any of the heat mitigation working?” “Why do people get so angry when it’s hot?” “Will this year’s heat deaths again break records?” and “If grass makes it a little cooler, but takes a lot of water, will developers still build in Scottsdale if they can’t plant any?”

But still, it is pretty hot. 

Data reporter Garrett Archer tried to dispel the conspiracy that it is not hot using data and graphs, but everyone knows he’s rigging the weather. 

The thing is, us locals are used to it. Summer is hot, and Archer rigs the weather. That’s life in Arizona. You get used to it. And we agree with the Daily Star’s Tim Steller when he explained that there’s no need to dwell on the temperature — in yet another heat-related column and a 13-tweet thread. 

Finding facts: Attorney General Kris Mayes is escalating her probe of the “fake electors” who attempted to overturn Arizona’s election by signing, certifying and submitting documents to Congress claiming Arizonans had supported Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election. The Washington Post’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez reports that Mayes assigned a team of prosecutors to the case in May, four months after taking office, and the prosecutors have contacted fake electors and their lawyers. The office wouldn’t say much, other than the investigation is in the “fact-gathering” phase.

“This is something we’re not going to go into thinking, ‘Maybe we’ll get a conviction,’ or ‘Maybe we have a pretty good chance,’” Mayes’ Chief Deputy Dan Barr told Wingett Sanchez. “This has to be ironclad shut.”

To be a fly on the wall: Substacker Dillon Rosenblatt got his hands on Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ and AG Mayes’ calendars for the first few months of the year. Fontes’ calendar was busier, color-coded and included fewer redactions. The meetings we would have most liked to attend are: Mayes’ lunch with former AG and current Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne in his office, and Fontes’ string of meetings with Cochise County Recorder David Stevens and the county’s supervisors. 

Subscribe today so we can afford awkward lunches with politicians.

A memorable semi-exit: The Pinal County election director who quit with a viral “no regrets” letter to the county board of supervisors last month is back working for the county — this time in the County Attorney’s Office, where she previously worked, Votebeat Arizona’s Jen Fifield confirms. The county attorney is independently elected and doesn’t report to the board.

Conspiracies are fun until they aren’t: Former Arizona resident Ray Epps, who voted for Donald Trump twice and showed up to the U.S. Capitol to support him on Jan. 6, 2021, only to become the main character in a conspiracy theory that he was an FBI informant, is suing Fox News and Tucker Carlson for defamation, the New York Times reports. 

“Just as Fox had focused on voting machine companies when falsely claiming a rigged election, Fox knew it needed a scapegoat for January 6th,” the complaint says. “It settled on Ray Epps and began promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol.”

A whole lot going on there: The lawyer who invented a conspiracy based on a grudge against his ex-wife that Mexican cartels are bribing politicians, judges, the Mormon church and entire police forces in some ill-defined real estate title scheme — and then had his girlfriend air that conspiracy at a legislative hearing, eventually leading to the expulsion of the lawmaker who invited her — has “seven active warrants for his arrest that together would require him to post a cash bond of over $200,000 to get out of jail,” and all sorts of other legal problems including allegedly violating a restraining order from his ex wife, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. 

“Detective Brandi George of the Mesa Police Department said John Thaler was last apprehended in Phoenix in December 2021 on 21 active warrants. Police noted he had mental health issues and he was later released from jail, she said,” Stern Reports. 

Why not try camping?: Lawmakers are keeping busy this summer by launching an ad-hoc committee on freedom of expression at state universities to seek testimony about how campus liberals won’t allow free speech, following up on their promise to investigate after a former ASU official claimed in the Wall Street Journal that she was fired for hosting an event with conservative speakers. 

Just stick to talking taxes: Congressional Democrats’ path to taking the U.S. House of Representatives runs right through Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, where Republican Rep. David Schweikert used to win by wide margins among the area’s center-right Republican voters, but those margins have shrunk. Although Schweikert doesn’t fit the MAGA mold, his party’s popularity has been slipping since its hard-right shift under Trump, the Associated Press’ Jonathan Cooper reports. 

Just like the old days: State policymakers are shutting the public out of a meeting where they’ll debate changing the state’s assured groundwater supply rules, Tony Davis reports for the Daily Star. The subcommittee of the State’s Assured Water Supply Committee was originally supposed to be open to the public, and Democratic state Sen. Priya Sundareshan and others say it’s “concerning” that the public can’t listen to such an important discussion.  

“In my 26 years of experience with this issue, a lot of times, you get people in a less public forum, you can pry what you really need out of them and arrive at a mutually agreeable position, after they yell, cuss and scream,” Doug Dunham, water resources manager for Epcor Water, told Davis, adding that Gov. Bruce Babbitt and stakeholders hammered out the original Groundwater Management Act of 1980 in “a hot springs with a bottle of whiskey.”

Marco Lopez, the former mayor of Nogales who ran a low-impact bid against Katie Hobbs in the Democratic primary for governor last year, is doling out “Marco’s Business Tips” online. And we gotta say, his latest post about familiarizing yourself with the laws when doing multinational business is pretty solid advice.

1. We do not literally have our ears to the pavement. It’s scorching hot, as previously noted.