Crooked Media - What A Day: Boudin on the splits

 -Lauren Hogg, sister of David, wrecking Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

Tuesday's primaries were a real dog's breakfast. Here's what happens and why it's great news for John McCain. 

• As expected, voters in San Francisco recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the progressive prosecutor who has become a scapegoat for violent crime, which has increased the past couple years across the country, but interestingly not in San Francisco. So, thank you NIMBYs for playing along with and feeding a highly destructive right-wing propaganda campaign. San Francisco Mayor London Breed will select Boudin's replacement. (Progressive prosecutors in areas with larger black populations fared much better Tuesday).
   
•  In further expected news, Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) and billionaire-Republican-running-as-a-Democrat Rick Caruso will face off in the general election for Los Angeles Mayor. With 50 percent of precincts reporting, Caruso led Bass in the jungle primary 42.1-37.0, with 10 other candidates splitting the remaining vote. Caruso has wildly outspent Bass thus far, and many Dems fear that might allow Republicans to succeed in L.A. where their gubernatorial recall effort failed last year. 
   
• In better California law-enforcement news, L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva will likely face former Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna in the general election. With 42 percent of precincts reporting, Villanueva has netted only 34.4 percent of all votes, to Luna's 24.5, with six other candidates divvying up the rest. For more on why this is good news, just read this. 

• Starting with the best news, South Dakota voters derailed a GOP scheme to make it impossible for them to adopt the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion by ballot initiative. Republicans put a different amendment on the ballot (Amendment C) that would've held the Medicaid expansion initiative (but few other initiatives) to a 60 percent supermajority threshold—and did so knowing that primary night in South Dakota would mean overwhelmingly Republican turnout. Nevertheless, their scheme failed miserably, 67-33. 
   
• Trump-related news is more mixed. Rep. Michael Guest (R-MS) failed to clear 50 percent of the vote in his primary, and will thus face Trumper Michael Cassidy in a runoff, all because Guest voted to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection. Meanwhile, Donald Trump's notoriously corrupt former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is stuck in an extremely tight, too-close-to-call race to run for Montana's new House district, with only 41 percent of the Republican vote to his name.

This month began as a cry from the trans community, demanding better for our own people and envisioning a world where transgender people didn’t have to fight tooth and nail to simply exist. In 1969, BIPOC Trans women weren’t just asking society to accept the trans community, they were fighting for inclusion within the cis queer community. Over 50 years later, the trans community has turned our ancestors’ impossible dreams into a world of unlimited possibilities for our youth.

Today, Pride Month is a celebration. We celebrate our history, our resilience, and our joy. Sometimes we even talk about our ancestors’ fight in the past tense, as if trans people aren’t still fighting for the same things Marsha and Sylvia spent their entire lives trying to give to the next generation. What this fight looks like has changed, but the foundation remains the same- transgender people are still fighting for racial equity, economic justice, migrant’s rights, disability justice, rights for sex workers, and inclusion within the greater cis gay community.

This month is not a celebration because our work is done, but a celebration of what we have achieved. We need to give flowers to the living and celebrate our ancestors by investing in the people continuing their fight. We celebrate by uplifting trans leadership, building trans power, and investing in trans futures.

To donate or learn more about our Pride partners, head to crooked.com/pridefund.

A federal judge has ordered Donald Trump's top coup lawyer, John Eastman, to turn 159 more documents over to the House January 6 Committee, including yet another email that contains evidence of criminal conduct. In that email, according to Judge David Carter, an unnamed attorney advised the coup plotters not to test their so-called "January 6 strategy" in court, because they'd likely lose, and thus "tank" the coup plot they ultimately pursued. That email "cemented the direction of the January 6 plan,” Carter wrote in his opinion, and suggests the Trump conspirators proceeded with consciousness of their own guilt. “Lawyers are free not to bring cases; they are not free to evade judicial review to overturn a democratic election. Accordingly, this portion of the email is subject to the crime-fraud exception and must be disclosed.” Just in time for the committee's public hearings, which begin tomorrow.

• A fourth-grade survivor of the Uvalde massacre, a parent whose child was killed in the attack, and a doctor who tended to the victims all appeared before the House oversight committee Wednesday, providing wrenching testimony that congressional Republicans don't care about because, as one witness noted, they think "guns are more important than children." 
   
• The oversight committee has also launched an investigation of the gift-bribes from foreign government that disgraced former president Donald Trump seemingly pocketed, in violation of the Constitution's foreign emoluments clause, instead of leaving those gifts, which belong to the public, with the National Archives.
   
• The White House has begun rationing pandemic-relief funds, taking money from testing and plying it into vaccines, because Republicans hope to create vaccine scarcity before the election, and have refused to fund further coronavirus aid.  
   
• The vaccine scarcity Republicans are trying to create will likely result in a fall shortage of "bivalent" next-gen vaccines, which provide better protection against Omicron subvariants than the first generation of COVID-19 vaccines.
   
• Donald Trump and spawn have reluctantly agreed to be deposed by the New York attorney general's office, pursuant to its sprawling fraud investigation of their real estate business. 
   
• Twitter caved to Elon Musk, again.
   
• Notorious abomination Carl Paladino—who's now running for Congress, with the blessing of House GOP leadership, in a New York district adjacent to Buffalo—posted a lengthy screed about how the recent Buffalo and Uvalde, TX, gun massacres were false flags. 
   
• Scientists are of a few minds about the best strategy for vaccinating people at risk of acquiring monkeypox. 
   
• Ron Desantis's infamously fascist—sorry, America First—press secretary Christina Pushaw was an unregistered foreign agent for Georgia's former president Mikheil Saakashvili, and only disclosed her role after the Justice Department notified her she was in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. 
   
• Retired Marine Gen. John Allen, who currently serves as president of the Brookings Institution, seemingly did not get a polite call from the Justice Department about his FARA violations, though he allegedly lied to the FBI about lobbying on behalf of Qatar and withheld incriminating documents from investigators. Brookings has placed Allen on leave. 
   
• Michael Franken beat Abby Finkenauer in the Iowa Senate Democratic primary, and will face Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Fossils) in the general election.
   
• An armed California man aborted a plan to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh and himself, and turned himself in, after he spotted U.S. deputy marshals guarding Kavanaugh's Maryland home.  
   
• Jared Kushner had nothing whatsoever to do with the insurrection or the Big Lie (which he never believed anyhow) and was busy doing Good, Important Work, which unfortunately allowed Bad People to get close to Trump, according to "people close to" Jared and Ivanka Trump, according to a 2017 edition of the today's New York Times.

The criminalization of abortion in post-Roe America may end up looking like it already does in the country of Poland, and American providers are already taking steps to protect their patients from mass government surveillance of pregnancies. Poland, which prohibits abortion in nearly all instances, will begin logging patients' pregnancy status in a central database of health information, creating in effect what its critics quite reasonably call a "pregnancy registry." Whether they know what's happening in Poland or not, doctors in anti-abortion states "are rushing to take precautions to guard their communications and their patients’ data, fearing that the information could be used in future prosecutions." Keeping pregnancy records out of intrusive government hands will be key to protecting women's continued access to reproductive health care. Republicans are already eyeing new laws that would prohibit women from traveling terminate pregnancies, the enforcement of which would, for obvious reasons, require them to ascertain pregnancy status in advance.

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A California district attorney in heavily Republican King County, who prosecuted two women whose babies were stillborn, lost his seat last night to a challenger who vocally opposed those prosecutions, in what is hopefully a good omen for post-Roe politics. 

Gov. Tony Evers (R-WI) will call the Wisconsin state legislature into emergency session on June 22 to debate repealing the state's latent abortion-criminalization law, which will snap back into effect if and when the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

The E.U. has agreed to require all mobile-device manufacturers to engineer their products to use a single charging port—USB-C—in a huge but long-overdue blow to Apple and the dongle economy.

Portland General Electric has built the nation's first battery-based electric utility, which can keep pumping solar and wind energy, even when the air is still and the sky is dark, without toggling back to fossil fuel sources.