Day of Suffering Night, 5th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has confirmed that El Niño conditions have officially developed in the equatorial Pacific (oh shit, there goes the old man talking about the weather again). As has been widely speculated, this El Niño has the potential to become one of the strongest on record. The good news is we can expect a quieter Atlantic hurricane season but it likely also means a much wetter winter for the southern U.S. and a near-certain spike in global temperatures. 

Tomorrow, Georgia will hold a runoff election for last month's primaries. Most of the important Democratic candidates have already won their primary and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, is the Democratic nominee for governor (although I didn't vote for her). Tomorrow's runoff will decide between Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Rick Jackson, a creepy billionaire health-care executive. Both are awful, but Jones has the backing of the Stable Genius and outgoing Governor Cheatin' Brian Kemp, while Jackson has no government experience, no record of public service, and has never ran for office before. However, he has run a seemingly endless stream of television commercials, each one more vile than the others, to the point where I've even heard Republicans complain, "enough already."     

I'm invested in the outcome of the Republican primary because I think there's no way Keisha Lance Bottoms (a black woman, a Democrat, and from Atlanta on top of all that) wins the statewide election, and whichever Republican wins tomorrow's primary will probably be my next governor. Please, please don't let it be Jackson!   

The Republicans are also in a runoff here to face Senator Jon Ossoff. With KLB also on the ballot for November, Democrats here are testing the slogan "Vote Your Bottoms and Ossoff." It's going to be a long year. 

Sen. Ossoff has proved to be a prodigious fund-raiser with a knack for going viral, and even Republicans acknowledge that he's a formidable candidate. He may even be a potential 2028 presidential candidate. Tomorrow, two Republicans will vie to run against him - Representative Mike Collins, a MAGA loyalist and immigration hard-liner, and Derek Dooley, a former football coach and son of legendary Georgia coach Vince Dooley. 

The Stable Genius has endorsed Collins, but Dooley is family friends with Kemp and has his support. Kemp famously has clashed with Trump before, refusing to join his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Senator Raphael Warnock, Georgia's other Democratic Senator, was on the Sunday morning talk-show circuit promoting his new book, The Crooked Places Made Straight, and possibly testing his presidential campaign potential.