Goulash  🌻🌻🌻

Hungarian Hate-Fest: Over the weekend, the former president of the United States “retruthed” (what retweets are called on his Truth Social platform) a message suggesting that the cure for US inflation is civil war.  Also, to hammer home how he feels about minorities and anyone not on his “team” he made a virtual appearance at this weekend’s CPAC Hungarian hate-fest where another featured speaker was a notorious Hungarian racist Zsolt Bayer who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people. Tucker “fish sticks” Carlson and former chief of staff Mark Meadows also spoke, making it clear that white supremacy and ethnic hatred is firmly entrenched in the increasingly right wing Republican party where right of center centrists are considered RINOs at best. Worth noting that it was a Hungarian, Theodore Herzl who founded modern day Zionism, calling for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Israel back in 1897 over a prescient concern that Jews didn’t have a future in Europe.  Back at home, the Republican Party still doesn’t have a candidate for the open Pennsylvania Senate seat but lots of the same election truthers who opposed the counting of all those mailed in votes in 2020 are now screaming for them all to be counted as long as they tip the scales toward their candidate of choice. Tomorrow is another primary day and in Alabama it looks like Republican Congressman Mo Brooks, who had been counted out last week, is making a comeback. Since none of the other candidates running is likely to clear the 50% hurdle that Alabama law requires, all Brooks has to do is come in second place to make it to a June 21 runoff and that looks like it could happen much to the chagrin of the FG who pulled his early endorsement over concerns about Brook’s viability. Of course the real state to watch remains Georgia, where the question isn’t whether or not Governor Brian Kemp wins his primary but rather by how much he trounces the FG endorsed former Senator David Perdue.  And of course there’s that secretary of state race where Brad Raffensperger’s fate is dangling by a thread.

Rotten Apple:  Enough about the Republicans, the Democrats are either in total disarray or not.  New York State is clearly a mess. It’s court approved new map merges NYC’s Upper West and Upper East side districts, pitting Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler against Oversight Chair Carol Maloney, hardly the outcome that was foreseen earlier in the year when expectations had been that the new map would create an additional Democratic seat or two. To make matters worse, former Mayor Bill de Blasio has thrown his hat into the ring too, running in the newly configured 10^th District which now includes much of Lower Manhattan and extends into Park Slope and Borough Park in Brooklyn.  He’ll face off against a number of candidates including Congressman Mondaire Jones who has decided not to go head to head with fellow Democrat DCCC chair/Dutchess County Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney in the redrawn Hudson Valley 17^th district. If all of this sounds confusing, it’s because it is and as a result of all the bizarre redistricting it looks like NY’s Democratic caucus could end up ceding a seat or two to Republicans instead of gaining one at their expense.  On the national front, news is also confusing.  Biden’s popularity remains low but projections about the midterms are all over the place.  Depending on the day of the week, the Democrats are either going to be wiped out in a defeat of epic proportions because of inflation or hold their own, bolstered by voters concerned about their reproductive rights.  And one more thing, a group of Democrats led by Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib and including New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s  Ilhan Omar, Missouri’s Cori Bush, New York’s Jamaal Bowman, Illinois’ Marie Newman, Minnesota’s Betty McCollum have called for a vote to recognize the “continued dispossession of the Palestinian people” at the hands of Israel while AOC seem to be blaming military aid to Israel for the failure of the US to provide health care to all Americans. It’s not a coincidence that their call coincided with the celebration of Israel’s independence or that it comes after the very sad death of a Palestinian journalist who was killed while covering regional violence.

And Monkey Pox.  Oy.