You’d like to think that the fallout from the 2020 and 2022 elections would have died down by now, but nooooo, not on your life, Cupcake.

In Michigan, legal proceedings continue against the group of fake Republican electors who tried to pass themselves off as the legitimate electors to the Electoral College for the 2020 election — even as the Electoral College will meet again in a little more than a year after the 2024 general election.

Out here in the land of the crazies, AKA Arizona, Maricopa County Republicans are all in a twit because the state’s Democratic attorney general brought charges against two Cochise County supervisors who, frankly, refused to do their job.

Kris Mayes should be impeached, sayeth the Republicans, showing once again that impeachment fever is at an all-time high.

The two supervisors refused to certify the 2022 election, as they were supposed to do in 20 days, and they also ignored a court order to certify. Mayes indicted them for election interference, sending the Maricopa Republicans and state legislative Republicans into a tizzy with talk of weaponization of state offices, etc.

“You can bet you’re a– that the @AZFreedomCaucus will be looking at every possible option to make weaponizing our state’s government and abusing Executive power as painful as humanly possible,” said Sen. Jake Hoffman, R-Queen Creek and Freedom Caucus chairman after the indictments were announced.

He said everything was on the table, up to and including impeachment.

Now I ask you, who is weaponizing government here?

Was Mayes weaponizing her office by holding county officials to the law? I don’t think so. By failing to certify the election the supervisors were in effect negating the votes of 47,000 voters in the county, according to The Arizona Republic.

The reality that election “integrity” and “election fraud” will be big talking points as this year’s election season progresses would appear to be a given.

And then again

Much as I bemoan the profligate use of water by some in Arizona, along comes journalist Tgom Zoeliner, who writes in The New York Times that it’s not time to flee the American Southwest just yet.

Taking notes of news stories that questioned the viability of the Southwest after a blistering summer (third hottest in Tucson history), Zoeliner views things a little differently.

“The foregone conclusion seemed to be that the region was heading for a crash — destined to become an overpopulated, unlivable dead zone, plagued by ranch foreclosures, unemployment, water wars and heat deaths.

“As a writer who has studied the Southwest’s history and spoken to some of its top environmental experts this year, I see its future differently — not as a hellscape but as an opportunity for centuries of climate ingenuity and adaptation to be put to good use. For generations, the people who were determined to come here have found ways to cope and even thrive,” he wrote.

One thing that works and may be expanded is to pay farmers to NOT grow alfalfa and hay for cattle. It is by far the biggest water gobbler of the Southwest.

“As water resource managers like to say,” Zoeliner writes, “the Southwest’s cities could disappear tomorrow and there would still be a water shortage, thanks to the thirsty farms and hungry cows. One way or another, desert agriculture must shrink and adapt to what remains.”

Arizona’s housing boom is helping by taking ranchlands that were water-hungry and turning them into suburban areas that are much more frugal with their water.

There have been, Zoeliner says, major cultural changes.

“We now use treated wastewater on golf courses and parks. Phoenix is already building a facility to turn wastewater into high-quality drinking water by 2030. And Southwestern cities have an exceptionally simple solution for curbing residential water use: Charge more for it in the summers. After Phoenix started using this powerful incentive, the number of homes with front or back lawns went down from nearly 80 percent in the 1970s to about 10 percent today, according to Kathryn Sorensen, a former water services director for the city. “That’s a wholesale cultural change,” she said.

Arizona, he notes, uses 3 percent less water than it did in 1957, while the population has exploded 555 percent.

Which is all good news for those of us who love the Southwest and what it has to offer.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Kendall Stanley: Let the fun continue