Biscuits Anyone 🌻🌻🌻

The Crossfire: Remember John Durham, the US Attorney appointed by former Attorney General Barr to prove that Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI investigation into all the Former Guy’s alleged Russian antics, was just a Clinton/Obama plot intended to derail the FG’s presidential ambitions, his investigation appears to have ended with a whimper because though components of the somewhat salacious Steele dossier of yesteryear weren’t for real the investigation into the FG’s Russian related activities was legitimate.  That’s a real bummer for the FG and his echo chamber which likely explains why Hunter Biden’s unseemly life and his laptop remain in the news.  Well only partially, the FG and his crowd really need the counter programming for a lot of reasons, none of it good, not that any of the bad stuff has stuck to the Teflon guy, yet. On Tuesday, we learned that the FBI took away pillow guy Mike Lindell’s phone while he was waiting for takeout at a Hardee’s restaurant. Lindell is characteristically apoplectic over the loss of what he claimed was his only electronic device but the folks at Hardee’s appear gleeful, they used the unexpected publicity to brag about the deliciousness of their biscuits.  Though Lindell didn’t discuss those epicurean delights he did say that before they ran off with his phone the FBI agents asked him about the Dominion voting machines used in Colorado's elections and Tina Peters, the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado who’s been accused of tampering with those machines in order to obtain some data “proving” that they’d been controlled by the very dead Hugo Chavez, you know the ghost who threw the 2020 election to Joe Biden. It’s not just Lindell, yesterday it was reported that former FG Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who hasn’t been seem much lately, has met with the DOJ and has provided them with lots of his emails and other communications. The FG has a lot of reasons to be concerned about what Meadows did or didn’t share; we know that because the notoriously stingy FG had his political action committee contributed $1 million to Meadows’s conservative non-profit organization earlier this year and that’s not chump change. Also, two of the cracker jack lawyers representing the FG over those purloined supersecret documents are now in trouble for representing in writing that all of the boxes housing those purloined papers had been turned over when they hadn’t been, meaning that they can now be asked to testify against him and the DOJ has receipts for that as yesterday they revealed that they’ve got months of videotape from Mar a Lago showing those boxes and some of their contents moving from insecure place to insecure place, which likely explains how some of them ended up in the FG’s personal office alongside his passports.  And for good measure, lawyers for Jeffrey Clark, the FG environmental lawyer who wanted so much to become his Attorney General and who also had his phone seized revealed that he is being investigated by the DOJ for several felonies including for making false statements, conspiracy and obstruction.  

Politics Unusual: On Tuesday President Biden celebrated the passage and signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its catchy name is really a climate bill.  While he was celebrating, new inflation figures were released indicating that inflation remains stubbornly high.  That nugget of economic data should have been a real buzzkill and a gift to the Republicans but elsewhere in the Capitol, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham decided to step to the podium to announce his plan to introduce federal abortion legislation. You might remember that the “official” Republican position and part of the justification for the overturning of Roe v Wade with Dobbs, is that the regulation of abortion is “better” left to the states. By saying that his proposed legislation would “only” ban abortion after 15 weeks, Graham tried to make it sound like a compromise, one intended to counter what he characterized as killer Democrats who want abortion legal up until nine months.  Bachelor Lindsey is not all that familiar with how any of that birthing stuff works. What Graham tried hard to obfuscate is that his proposed legislation would permit states to impose further restrictions so that states banning all abortions could continue to do so. His intent is to impose severe restrictions on abortions in states where they are currently available.  Apparently, Lindsey thought that he could back some of those much coveted suburban moms with the 15 weeks thing as long as no one pointed out any of his bill’s other nefarious details. Unfortunately for Lindsey, his strategy didn’t fool any outspoken Democrats nor did it go over all that well with Republican party leadership especially those up for reelection who’ve been wiping anti-abortion positions from their websites. The enthusiastically anti-abortion set views his proposal as too lenient, the pragmatic set just wants to do anything to win back the Senate and had been hoping to continue to hide behind their disingenuous states’ rights position and Republican outliers Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have been working with a few of their Democratic colleagues on enshrining the provisions of Roe into law.  A few Republicans have gone so far as to suggest that Lindsey Graham must be in Biden’s pocket.  Spoiler alert, he’s not and hopefully his strategy of convincing wavering voters won’t work.   

Primarily Yours:  This cycle’s primaries are finally behind us.  New Hampshire Republicans may have extended a lifeline to Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan by picking the extremely rightwing election denier Don Bolduc as their candidate.  But just a reminder, though Senate race polls in a lot of the swing states, and a few that aren’t supposed to be all that swingy appear to be leaning blue right now, don’t get cocky as a lot of those undecideds will likely vote Republican. So stay focused and involved!    

And:  Early news this morning is that it looks like the country and Biden have dodged another bullet, there won’t be a national freight railroad strike.