The Devil Went Down To Georgia 🌻🌻🌻

Primarily Yours:  So Liz Cheney was trounced in her primary.  Not a surprise but depressing, not because Cheney’s positions on most issues are anything to celebrate, after all she voted with the Former Guy 93% of the time and is a staunch opponent of reproductive rights who celebrated the Roe overturning Dodd decision, but because while most of her Republican colleagues continue to support the autocratic FG, dismiss his coup attempt as a big nothing, and are proponents of the big lie, she’s been standing up for democracy. Cheney says she’s committed to making sure that the FG doesn’t make it back to the White House, and she should be applauded for that, but let’s stop talking about her ever becoming president. Also, please ignore Andrew Yang, his new Forward party is hardly forward, he won’t even endorse reproductive rights because he believes it’s too divisive to discuss.  Enough said. In that other much watched primary in Alaska, it will take days if not weeks for all the results to trickle in from far regions of the state but as of now it appears that Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, another one of the FG’s targets, has edged out her FG supported opponent Kelly Tshibaka.  Together with the race’s third and fourth place finishers including one Democrat who received an anemic 6.2% of the vote, both will advance to the November election. Though much has been written about Sarah Palin garnering enough votes to make it to the November election, so far the first place finisher in her Congressional primary appears to be a Democrat, Alaska native Mary Peltolta.  We’ll have to wait a few weeks for the rest of the results, included the completion of the ranked choice voting calculation, to learn which of the Alaska Congressional candidates won the simultaneously run special election to fill the open House seat vacated by the expiration of Congressman of Don Young until the end of the term.  

Not Over Yet:  Primary season is winding down but it’s not over yet.  Next week Florida Agricultural Secretary Nikki Fried will face off against Charlie Crist who before he was a Democrat was a Republican Governor of Florida.  The two are polling neck in neck in the battle to determine who will face off against presidential wannabee/current governor/culture warrior Ron DeSantis. Though she has a few opponents, Orlando Congresswoman Val Demings is expected to win her primary for the Democratic Senate nomination to run against Republican incumbent Marco Rubio.  Demings is currently polling a few points ahead of Rubio, but polls in Florida are historically unreliable so take that with a grain of salt.  Lastly, Tuesday will be primary day in New York, again. This time voters will be weighing in only on Congressional seats, many of which were recently redistricted as a result of a court order that threw out earlier configurations.  Unfortunately, no matter the outcome, a few competent experienced Democratic Representatives will be falling by the wayside.   

Legal Morass:  Where to begin, there’s so much to cover that it’s hard to get to all of it.  The Teflon FG’s legal woes continue to mount, not that any of them have dented his appeal to his supporters who grow more ardent and militant whenever more damnable facts about his criming and couping surface.  Anyway, here goes.  In NYC later today Allen Weisselberg the former long term CFO of the FG family business is expected to plead guilty to 15 felonies, admitting that he conspired with the FG company to “carry out a scheme to avoid paying taxes on lavish corporate benefits.”  However though his guilty plea is notable and according to many wishful folks in the business and legal peanut gallery might actually take down the FG organization, Weisselberg will not be implicating the FG, though reports are that he will be obligated to testify in the case against the FG’s company.  He’s expected to be sentenced to six months of prison time but is likely to be out in three months or so.  Moving on to Georgia, though Rudy Colludy Giuliani tried to convince a judge that he couldn’t make it to Atlanta, something about his recent stent surgery precluding air travel, an excuse that the judge did not buy at all because of all those other travel options like buses, Ubers, and midnight trains to Georgia, Giuliani made it to the Fulton County court room yesterday where he spent six hours in local District Attorney Fani Willis’s Grand Jury.  We don’t know what he did or didn’t say but since he was recently told that he is one of the targets of her investigation into the FG’s vote finding/stealing scheme, he likely pleaded the Fifth endlessly.  So far Senator Lindsey Graham has not shown up to testify in Fulton County about that time that he called Georgia officials asking them to toss out a few or more Democratic votes as he’s still fighting his subpoena.  He’s been losing in court but he’s appealing, still trying to weasel out of appearing. Likewise, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is also trying to avoid an appearance but Willis remains determined to get everyone on the record under oath so stay posted. And because the election tampering story has multiple legs, earlier this week the Washington Post reported that the FG’s kraken lawyers including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood hired a forensic data firm named SullivanStrickler to access county election systems in at least three states, including Michigan, Colorado and George, charging and receiving an upfront retainer fee for each job which in one case was $26,000.  Tampering with election machines is a bigly crime and these guys most definitely did some tampering. Shifting back to Washington, remember all of those complaints about Attorney General Merrick Garland sitting on his hands, well forget about them.  In addition to going after all those purloined super-secret documents as well as a few passports at Mar a Lago, last night it was reported that the DOJ has subpoenaed all of the House’s January 6^th committee’s documents for their own investigation. By the way, national intelligence analysts are now in the process of doing a risk assessment to figure out just how much our national security was compromised by the FG’s document theft.  As to the Mar a Lago search, the FG and his team of abettors in Congress and the right wing media are insisting that the DOJ immediately release the warrant affidavit essentially because they want to expose which “rats” told on the FG so that they can then publicly skewer them or worse. Today, Judge Bruce Reinhart who signed off on the original warrant and who has been getting lots of those “or worse” death threats is holding a hearing on the affidavit’s release.  Worth noting, during the Spring, the FBI interviewed former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and former senior WH counsel Patrick Philbin who apparently were aware of and concerned about the FG’s “irregular” handling of documents, and by irregular think criminal.  Among other things they are believed to have told the FBI that the FG resisted turning over his purloined cache because he insisted that since he’d been president everything in those boxes were his, so there!  Though its not clear if he really meant it, yesterday while defending the FBI and kind of throwing AG Garland to the right wing wolves, former VP Pence said that he’d consider testifying in front of the January 6^th Committee if asked really nicely.  Lastly, no one should really be surprised to learn that the FG has been having a hard time hiring experienced white collar crime lawyers.  To be clear, he has lots of lawyers with experience in traffic court who are more than willing to show up on TV, spinning stories and espousing fantastical legal theories but even he knows he needs some real ones for serious cases.

Viral Musings:  The CDC is reorganizing itself, and not a moment too soon given all the new and old viruses that keep on emerging.  Their goal is to be less stodgy and more nimble and communicative going forward.  That’s great and much needed but why does it seem like a certain percentage of the country still won’t listen to anything they have to say? The UK has approved a new bivalent COVID booster by Moderna.  The shot targets original COVID as well as the earlier variant of Omicron that was circulating in January.  We’ll be getting a new bivalent booster too but ours, which has not been approved yet, is expected to target original COVID plus Omicron variants BA 4 and BA 5.