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Whether it's the "can't make this up" moments or the hard truths hitting our streets in our state,
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No spin, no nonsense, just the facts, the fallout, and a little bit of humor.
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Grab your coffee, it's time for the morning drip on WRTO.FM, Radio Free Georgia.
Hey, good morning everybody.
Welcome to the morning drip.
It is Wednesday, the 17th of June, 2026.
the day of the day, the day of the day.
Phone lines are open, 229-520-5957.
Again, that's 229-520-5957.
the day of the day of the day of the day of the day of the day of the day of the day.
that you're either going to get booted out of the country or you're going to get killed.
I mean, that's a hell of an ad, right?
To basically threaten people.
I don't care if you are here, quote, illegally.
You don't threaten to kill them.
I mean, come on, folks.
What has happened to us, honestly?
I know exactly what's happened to us, but I'll gloss over on that one.
But anyway, Republican businessman Rick Jackson.
Well, he won Georgia GOP gubernatorial runoff.
He defeated Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones.
Burt Jones had endorsements from both dear leader President Donald Trump and Governor Brian Kemp.
But Jackson still captured around 52.7% of the statewide vote.
He narrowly carried Tiff County right here in good old city of Tifton after reportedly spending more than.
And this is what this is just I'm going to say it, folks.
So if you've got any kind of if you got virgin ears, you might want to put your fingers in your ear.
This is fucking ridiculous to spend this kind of money on damn election campaigns that that right there.
When you spend a hundred million dollars of your own money tells me everything I need to know about you.
You have no concept of what money actually means to people.
You don't. And that's the other issue I have with all of this.
Why is it that every time we turn around, we have billionaires that are getting in the office?
They're not representative of us.
Why are you assholes out here voting for billionaires?
Why?
They don't give a shit about you.
All they care about is how much more money they're able to fleece off of your ass.
Anyway, he narrowly carried Tiff County.
Spent a hundred million dollars of his own money.
And of course, now he advances to a November matchup with Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms.
I'm going to nickname her KLB if somebody else hasn't already done it.
In one of the nation's most closely watched governor's races.
Because, yes, it is time and it has been high time.
Now, I'm going to give Kemp, I'm going to give Kemp some positives.
Okay.
As a Republican governor, he hasn't been that bad.
We could have had worse.
He did sort of stand up against Trump when it mattered.
He's still about to do one of the dumbest things.
I don't understand.
You know, he's called in a special session.
I think it starts today so that they can look at redrawing the maps for the state of Georgia.
And anytime, anytime a state starts doing that.
And I know what you're going to.
Well, the Democrats.
The Democrats are doing it because the Republicans started this.
That's the reason.
The Democrats never approached this idea of, hey, we need to we need to basically rig the elections.
We basically need to rig the elections by redrawing the maps in the states so that they favor and give us more Democratic representation.
Not once.
But then you have Trump who tells the Texas governor, you need to you need to find us four or five more seats in the House.
And he's like, sir, yes, sir.
And then and then that starts the whole snowball effect for far too long.
And is my opinion for far too long.
The Democrats have played too nice.
This when they go low, we go high.
Oh, that is a great sentiment.
And I like it.
But there comes a time when they just stay low and you've got to get down in the damn ditch in the mud and fight fire with fire.
And so it's time for the Democrats to basically just stop acting like a bunch of pussies and do what needs to be done to get this country back on track.
Because we're badly derailed right now, folks.
Badly.
If you think everything is great in this country right now and everything that this this regime is doing is fantastic and you view this as the way America should should be.
This is the country that you want.
You need to leave because you don't understand anything about what America is and what the principles of America is at all.
And don't even get me started if you're going, well, I'm a Christian in this.
No.
Fuck you.
You don't understand your religion either.
I understand it better than you and I'm an atheist.
You do not follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I've studied the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I follow the teachings of Jesus Christ more than you do.
Anyway.
All right.
So Jackson's campaign emphasized election related issues, including, again, criticism of Georgia's handling of the 2020 presidential election and calls to revisit congressional and legislative district maps.
There was no fraud in 2020.
Donald Trump even admitted in private conversations that he knew that he had lost.
He knew it, but he was trained by Roy Cohn, who essentially told him, never admit defeat.
Never admit you're wrong, because if you push a narrative long enough and you hammer it into the lame brains of people, they will believe it.
Also, he faces ongoing scrutiny over tax disputes with the Internal Revenue Service involving roughly $90 million in charitable deductions tied to film rights.
Donated to a charity that he controls.
Jackson's company maintains the deductions were based on legitimate valuations and has won portions of previous court challenges, though several cases remain unsolved or unresolved, I should say.
Also, let's not forget, Jackson Health Care was involved in a Medicare or Medicaid scandal.
I don't think they admitted any wrongdoing and basically said we didn't know this was going on and we're going to fully cooperate.
And here's seven or eight hundred million dollars or whatever.
I can't I can't weigh in on that one because I'm not going to make any accusations that he, you know, he was personally guilty or his company was guilty.
I'm not going to do that because I don't know.
Other major runoff races were also settled Tuesday.
Mike Collins won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate.
He's going to go against Senator John Ossoff in November.
Everybody, you better vote for John Ossoff.
If you want to keep Georgia the way Georgia is in a shining beacon of prosperity and hope and what it means to be an American and what it means to be a Southerner, you better stick with John Ossoff in November.
State Senator Greg.
Well, I don't know you dozel dollars all one of the Republican lieutenant governor nomination.
Democrat Josh McLaren or McLaren McLaren secured his party's nomination.
Income at state school, Superintendent Richard Woods of Tifton narrowly won renomination.
So now we're looking at an expensive and nationally significant general election as we careen for November.
But yeah, that that's the bee in my bonnet.
I'm sick and tired of these rich assholes thinking that they know what's best for the average working American.
You don't know shit about the average working American.
And don't come give me this rags to riches BS story.
OK, I don't care.
I don't care because even if you did start out poor and almost destitute.
And I think Rick Jackson, he was in the foster system or whatever.
And look, that that's sad.
OK, I say that's sad.
I mean, the foster system, there's there's good families out there and, you know, people that are adopted and what have you.
And they wind up going on and and having wonderful lives with wonderful families.
And so just being in the foster care system does not mean that, you know, the individual was was fighting against the system the entire time.
I don't know his backstory, but hell, he could have been part of a rich family.
Who knows? I don't care.
The point that I'm making is he's a billionaire, just like Donald Trump, who is now more of a billionaire after being back in office for two years than he was before he went in.
And that's not right.
That's not the way the office of the president is supposed to be handled or managed.
But billionaires, I even say this about Pritzker.
Pritzker is a Democrat.
He's a governor.
He's a billionaire.
And I don't like the fact that he is a billionaire and tries to represent a state before you're going, you know, well, you're just going after Republican billionaires.
No, Democratic billionaires, too.
There comes a point where you have got so much damn money that it means absolutely nothing to you.
You know, you can take several million hundred million dollar hits and not have to worry about anything.
And that's the big issue I have with these assholes running for offices like governor and president.
And I honestly I don't know how we should handle this, but I think if your worth is and I'll get a lot of pushback on this and I haven't fully thought this out.
So just take it with a grain of salt.
I think if your net worth is above a certain threshold, you're no longer eligible to run for certain public offices.
If it's an office where you are supposed to be representing your constituents of a district or a state, you need to be able to connect with those constituents and someone who can spend a hundred million dollars of their own money to win the Republican nomination for the governor of the state of Georgia.
There's absolutely no way that he can connect with the average working person in Georgia.
It's just not possible.
Anyway, let me know your thoughts.
All lines are open to 2 2 9 5 2 0 5 9 5 7.
Or you can text me 24 7 2 2 9 5 2 0 5 9 5 7.
Shoot us an email morningjip@wrto.fm.
We're going to take a short break.
We'll be back.
Talk soon.
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Oh, it's been a morning, man.
I don't know.
Ah, I got a headache.
And it's right between my eyes.
Anyway, I want to thank you for listening to the morning drip right here on WRTO.
It is Wednesday.
It is the 17th of Wednesday of June.
Man, I think I just probably should call it a day, right?
No, seriously.
Yeah.
I want to thank you for joining us.
This segment is brought to you by Visible.
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I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, somebody I've known, God, over 20, 20 years now, 25 years.
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All right.
So we talked about elections.
Now let's talk about some FCC stuff.
The Federal Communication Commission, also known as the FCC, is considering a proposal that would require mobile phone providers to verify the identity of both new and renewing customers.
So under this proposal, carriers would be required to collect and retain information such as your name, physical address, government issued identification number, and an alternate phone number before providing service.
Supporters say that this measure would make it harder for scammers and criminal organizations to use anonymous phone numbers to commit fraud.
Of course, privacy advocates are warning that the proposal could effectively eliminate anonymous prepaid "burner phones" and privacy-focused cellular services.
Companies such as Freely, which is spelled P-H-R-E-E-L-I, which currently allow customers to sign up with minimal personal information, would be forced to collect and store significant more data that could identify the individual.
Critics argue that anonymous phone access can be important for journalists, whistleblowers, activists, domestic violence victims, and others who need to communicate without creating extensive digital records.
This proposal remains under review. FCC is accepting public comments through June 25th.
But look, I don't trust this FCC, especially with Brendan, whatever the hell his name is, Carr.
That dumbass.
If adopted, the rule would represent a significant shift in how mobile phone service is regulated in the United States.
Bringing customer identification requirements closer to those already used in banking and financial services.
Okay. You know what? Cell phone service isn't a bank. It's not a financial service.
So this debate, this ongoing debate, does highlight familiar tension in technology policy, balancing fraud prevention and public safety against privacy, anonymity, and civil liberty.
So it's the reason why they want to do away or they want back doors into all kinds of encryption services.
Signal. Signal is a chat app, if you will, just like WhatsApp, kind of like iMessage.
But Signal, like WhatsApp, will run on an iOS device, it'll run on an Android device, and those messages are encrypted end to end.
The company that manages all those servers and runs those servers cannot see the messages that you're sending.
We use it for our family chat, not because we're notorious gangsters or criminals or anything like that.
It just happened to be what we decided to go with.
We did like the encryption factor because there is a certain portion of our lives that we don't like to necessarily, you know, we wouldn't want to share publicly.
Though I don't really have that much to hide.
I mean, you can't do what I do as far as not my core business, but, you know, podcasting and social media and stuff like that.
You really, you really can't hide a whole lot when you do that.
And I get it.
I get it.
They're like, well, this makes law enforcement harder to track down criminals and what have you when you can buy these prepaid cell phones where you don't really have to gather any information.
I get that.
But what is the what is the Benjamin Franklin quote about liberty and safety?
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
It's a good quote.
Now, the statement actually arose during debates over British policies, including taxation and stationing of troops in the colonies.
He argued that yielding essential liberties for temporary security would result losing both colonists, urgent colonists to resist compromises that would weaken their self-governance.
So it does reflect that quote does reflect a broader enlightenment belief in the the primacy of individual rights and the dangers of trading freedom for perceived safety.
You know, we we have that issue.
We have that issue.
We have that issue today when it comes to ice raids and crap like that.
So I get it.
I understand where they're trying to come from.
But quite honestly, I'm not willing to concede that level of privacy just so it makes the police department or the FBI's job a little easier.
OK.
There's got to be a middle ground somewhere.
But just wholeheartedly going, yeah, we're going to we're going to make it more difficult for you to not be tracked.
I don't like that.
I don't agree with that at all.
At all.
Let me know your thoughts.
Again, the phone lines are open.
2 2 9 5 2 0 5 9 5 7 or send a text 24 7 2 2 9 5 2 0 5 9 5 7 or email morning drip at WRTO dot FM.
We're going to take another short break.
And when we return, we're going to talk about alpha gal syndrome.
It sounds horrible.
We've actually mentioned it before, but apparently it's become a little bit bigger as we get into the summer months of 2026.
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Hey, good morning.
Welcome back to the morning drip.
It is Wednesday, June 17th, 2026.
As we barrel into our last segment of the morning, health officials are warning about the rise of alpha gal syndrome, a potentially life threatening allergy triggered by tick bites that causes people to react to red meat and in some cases dairy products.
I got to tell you, if I got it, if I found that I could no longer eat red meat because it made me sick or potentially could kill me, that would be a very, very depressing day to discover that that's what I was suffering from because I love my meat.
That sounded wrong.
I love red meat.
I love hamburgers.
I love steak.
I like chicken.
I like pork.
I know that's not red meat, but the point is I like meat.
I like fish.
Unlike diseases such as lime disease, alpha gal syndrome isn't caused by virus or bacteria.
Certain ticks, most notably the Lone Star tick, which we looked up and we do have those here in Georgia, introduce a sugar molecule called alpha gal into the bloodstream, prompting the immune system to produce antibodies that can trigger delayed allergic reactions hours.
After eating beef and pork and lamb, see, there you go.
And other mammalian products.
Symptoms can range from hives, digestive distress to swelling, difficulty breathing, anaphylaxis, which if you don't have an EpiPen can kill you.
And I mean, right here in America, you know, everybody can everybody should have an EpiPen, even if they do cost $600 a pop.
That is that's actually kind of funny.
There's this show.
I'm going to digress a little bit.
There's a show called My Life is Murder.
It stars Lucy Lawless from Xena fame and other other things.
It's a quirky little show.
I think we're watching season three.
I believe they just released season four earlier this year.
And in one of the episodes, they were trying to determine what happened with a bride to be.
She was deathly allergic to bee venom, bee stings.
She did everything that she possibly could to make sure that she was safe.
But one of the things that was brought up is the fact that she always had an EpiPen with her.
Which if someone if you're someone who has a death, a deathly allergy like a peanut allergy or whatever, some type of nut allergy or, you know, maybe like her.
You have an allergy.
If you got sung by a bee and it could kill you, you would carry an EpiPen.
And the show takes place in New Zealand, started out in Australia.
But Lucy Lawless is actually from New Zealand.
So the show starting in season two was shot in New Zealand.
So the backdrop, of course, is New Zealand.
And one of the things that she's attempting to do is trying to figure out why the EpiPen looked the way it did, because when it was used to try to try to save the bride to be, it didn't work.
And what caught me, what struck me funny is the fact that she had an EpiPen or two that she was trying to figure out what would make this EpiPen look the way it does so that I can prove that it was tampered with.
And she wound up figuring out that it was boiled in water.
And my first thought was, well, here in America, that that was six hundred dollars down the drain.
It's so.
Yeah, it's it's wild.
Yeah, I know.
Beating a dead horse here.
It just again, if you're not well off or rich and you get into a health crisis, you're probably going to die.
Researchers estimate that roughly 450,000 Americans may have developed the condition with cases increasing due to greater awareness and the expanding range of ticks capable of spreading it.
Experts are also investigating whether black legged ticks, best known for transmitting Lyme disease, may also contribute to alpha-gal syndrome.
Diagnosis typically involves a combination of symptoms, patient history, blood tests for the alpha-gal antibodies, although doctors caution that positive blood tests alone do not confirm the condition.
treatment has traditionally focused on avoiding mammalian meat, basically just avoid meat and carry an epinephrine for emergencies and EpiPen.
However, newer options are emerging.
The Zolair, X-O-L-A-I-R, injectable medication originally developed for asthma has been approved to help reduce severe reactions following accidental exposure.
And some patients eventually outgrow the allergy about 15 to 20 percent, according to researchers.
But avoiding future tick bites remains critical.
The growing awareness of alpha-gal syndrome serves as another reminder that a tiny tick bite can have surprisingly life-altering consequences.
Always those tiny ticks or tiny pricks, depending on how you look at it.
What would you, what would you do if you suddenly discovered that every time you ate a hamburger or a good steak or chicken sandwich or bacon?
Oh my goodness.
If I can no longer have bacon, life is not worth living.
It's just not worth living.
But what would you do?
That would suck, right?
I guess the question is, what type of preventative measures do you do for you and your family?
If y'all were going out into the woods and things like that.
See, we used to have a bunch of cats here.
Um, our, our last outdoor cat, because our, our last indoor cat passed away two and a half years ago now.
Actually, I think we're coming up on three years, maybe.
Honestly, it's, it's been a while or it may be coming up on two years.
But, uh, and then our last outdoor cat disappeared about a month ago.
So we do have to deal with the flea issue, which look, I love the cats, but I'm hoping now I won't have to try to remediate a fee, a flea infestation every year.
Um, we did have, you know, occasionally we'd find a tick on one of the outdoor cats and remove it and kill it.
We're not wanting to go traipsing through the woods and that kind of stuff.
But what type of preventive measures do you take if you're going to be going out into the woods for you and your family to try to make sure that you do not wind up being denied the pleasure of a good, juicy, slightly pink, slightly bleeding steak.
And hot take, if your steak requires that you put steak sauce on it, then the steak was not properly seasoned, nor was it cooked correctly.
At no point should a steak require Heinz 57 or any type of steak sauce.
That is a heel that I will die on right there.
Anyway, that's it for the show for Wednesday, the 17th of June, right here on The Morning Drip.
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All right.
That's it for me.
I hope you're doing well.
Hope you have a fantastic Wednesday.
And we'll be back tomorrow around 7:30 AM for The Morning Drip right here on wrto.fm.
Good morning, everybody.
.