Sneezy and Dopey 🌻🌻🌻

Primarily:  When not golfing the Former Guy spends his time at Mar a Lago stewing about the last election and trying to play kingmaker in the upcoming ones. The NY Times likens his malicious election meddling to an updated version of the Apprentice.  To that end he has been auditioning a steady stream of candidate wannabees, dolling out endorsements and an occasional check for a piddling $5000 to those who flatter him the most with the most important criteria being that they assert that the last election was rigged.  Of course no one who voted to impeach him need apply.  Sometimes those he endorses are already on track to win their state primaries, other times they’re not and may never be.  We will know soon enough whether those endorsement translate into victories as primary season kicks off next month.  First up will be Ohio where hillbilly guy JD Vance is hoping to overtake Josh Mandel who at least until he didn’t get the FG’s endorsement was leading in most of the local polls. The Ohio primary takes place on May 3. Though he has to make it through a primary too, the expectation is that Congressman Tim Ryan will be the Democratic challenger for the Ohio Senate seat and though Ohio leans heavily red, Ryan shouldn’t be counted out as Ohio’s other Senator is Democrat Sherrod Brown who was recently reelected.  The Pennsylvania primary where the FG endorsed New Jerseyan/TV star Dr Oz over the more main stream Republican candidate Connecticut “resident” David McCormick who is married to Dina Powell, a former member of his administration, takes place on May 17.  Polling at 14% each, right now Oz and McCormick are in a dead heat though the majority of Pennsylvania’s Republican voters are still undecided.  On the Democratic side, populist Lieutenant Governor Fetterman is leading centrist Congressman Conor Lamb by a wide margin.  However, there too a lot of voters are undecided and the field contains a few other candidates.  The FG has also endorsed Ted Budd’s Senate run in North Carolina for the seat being vacated by the retiring Republican Richard Burr.  The NC primary takes place on May 17, and there the FG’s endorsement seems to be working as Budd now looks to be in the lead. NC’s likely Democratic candidate is Cheri Beasley, the former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.  Then there’s Georgia, where ex-football player/alleged wife abuser Hershel Walker, the FG’s Senate candidate of choice, will most certainly move on to face incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock in November in a contest that will be depressingly close and could result in Walker making it to the Senate.  The big race to watch in Georgia is for the Governor spot.  Incumbent Brian Kemp is facing off against former Senator David Perdue who Jon Ossoff edged out in 2020.  The FG has endorsed Perdue, not because Kemp didn’t support everything he did as president, but because Kemp really pissed him off by refusing to upend the results of the 2020 election.  Perdue, who was photographed this week alongside some of those “both sides” folks with his hand forming the white supremacist symbol cemented his FG support by refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory or even that he lost to Ossoff.  Perdue doesn’t expect to win the first round, he’s just praying that Kemp won’t get the 50% he needs to avoid a runoff where he hopes to consolidate enough votes to emerge victorious.  Right now that outcome seems unlikely as Kemp is polling in the 51 to 52% range.  The Democrat’s candidate of choice is Stacey Abrams. For the record the Wyoming and Alaska primaries where the FG has endorsed Liz Cheney and Lisa Murkowski’s Republican opponents do not take place until August.

Never Ending Story:  Getting back to Georgia and the 2020 election, yesterday Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis broke her silence, revealing that she’s still hard at work investigating the FG’s attempt to get Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find those 11,780 votes.  Apparently she has interviewed around 50 witnesses and plans to subpoena 30 more in May as soon as her special Grand Jury is up and running.  By the way Raffensperger is also running for reelection without the FG’s endorsement, of course.  And because at least for some people the 2020 election isn’t over, the NY Times reports that many of the usual characters including lawyer John Eastman who is still trying to keep thousands of pages of his correspondence away from the probing eyes of the January 6^th committee, are still trying to get the 2020 election decertified because of course.  Though most Disney stories end happily, the one going on in Florida might not.  Governor DeSantis’ battle with Disney continues to rage.  He says it’s about their delayed dismay about his “don’t say gay” law  but it’s probably more about the fact that Disney has cut off contributions to his campaign fund.  Anyway, he really is moving ahead with plans to strip the company of its special status even though doing so could cost residents of a few central Florida counties $2200 per household.  Speaking of hurting constituents and economies, it appears that Texas Governor Abbot who for a while was double and triple checking all trucks crossing the Mexico border for contraband and illegal immigrants, has managed to decrease the US GDP by around $9 billion.  Remember when the Republican party was good for business?

Viral Musings:  So no more mandatory masking on planes, not because it’s the right thing from a health perspective but because one of those seriously underqualified, Federal district judges, 33 year old Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who Mitch McConnell and the FG rushed through at the end of 2020 says that mandating them is against the public health law, at least the law as she interprets it, and anyway as far as she’s concerned  we don’t need them because in her Dopey opinion they don’t work.  Again, they do work.  As to her decision, besides the fact that she’s wrong, it’s also a bit political that she ruled before hearing arguments from the CDC’s side.  By the way, Mizelle is from Florida and is a member of the Federalist Society who previously clerked for Clarence Thomas, of course. Her husband worked for Homeland Security during the FG administration.  The mask mandate was likely going to expire in May but was being kept in place this month because the nonpartisan virus is surging again. Worth noting that a week or so after airplane mask mandates were lifted in Europe, there were lots of flight cancellations.  Something to do with coronavirus related staff shortages.  Wonder how that happened?  Anyway, the good news is that air circulation is good on planes so if you wear a quality mask during your flight and you should you will probably be okay unless of course the person sitting right next to you or right in front of you is Sneezy.  The CDC is expected to appeal the decision mostly because we may need those masks again during the next pandemic.