George Chidi, Evil Reporter

25 Feb

Of all the stupid, mendacious, insulting things Trump said last night, the thing that bothers me is his reference to voting as a privilege. It is not. It is a right. Privileges are optional. Rights are not.

Wicker is the best movie I've seen this year. It is filled with fuck yeah.

I am taking nominations for the worst ad of the cycle in Georgia. Use whatever criteria you like: offensiveness, mendacity, prevarication, quality, uselessness, cruelty.

Last week, the FBI posted a video on X that attacked Democrats. The video appears to violate the Hatch Act and federal spending laws that bar agencies from using taxpayer dollars for partisan propaganda. Democracy Defenders sent a letter about the violation and the video disappeared. Completely.

georgiavotes.comGeorgia VotesHow many Georgians have voted early in the 2026 general election, by mail and in person, compared with the 2022 general election, with a county map and the breakdown by race, gender and age.

When I say "completely," I mean that I can't find a mirror of it anywhere. I'm finding it hard to believe that no one, anywhere, downloaded this video. Instead, I think the FBI quietly purged it with takedown letters notices, like Stalin censoring photos of Lenin. Maybe I'm wrong. Anyone have it?

George Chidi, Evil Reporter reposted

Ryan Anderson

@ryana.bsky.social

1.03M votes, and now 3% higher than 2022. Not a big update today but wanted to share something I learned thanks to some followers. #gapol #gapolitics georgiavotes.com

axios.comExclusive: Ramaswamy doubles down on explosive ad featuring rival's mother, despite backlashRamaswamy is gambling that the deeply personal attack by Amy Acton's mother will resonate with voters.

We are told not to diagnose sociopathy from a distance, and without clinical training. But sometimes, it's that easy. Uplifting the defenders of child rapists, calling those children liars - I have heard some unhinged political ads over the last two months, but this is the gold medal winner.

jamelle@jamellebouie.net

i don't think i've ever seen a campaign do a murder-suicide before (decent chance this drags down the entire GOP ticket in the state)

George Chidi, Evil Reporter reposted

jamelle

@jamellebouie.net

i don't think i've ever seen a campaign do a murder-suicide before (decent chance this drags down the entire GOP ticket in the state)

We are currently discussing the possibility that Starlink is being deliberately degraded either by Elon Musk or directly by the Pentagon to inhibit Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia, because those strikes are politically inconvenient to Donald Trump and Republicans. What the fuck.

I'm in a bar in Atlanta, and I just heard an anti-Talarico ad on streaming during a Texas football game. Talarico apparently believes in jailing parents who refuse surgical transitioning for their children. I can't understand how stupid Republicans must believe their voter are if that's their pitch.

People hear that and say "wow, that's insane." Not, "Wow, Talarico is insane." It's "Wow, this ad is insane."

pbs.orgWATCH: New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia takes few questions in short first briefingRoughly half of Zacharia’s first news briefing as the White House press secretary was a topper in which she read out President Donald Trump’s achievements.

Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

theguardian.comThis Georgia county is one of the US’s most diverse – and that could flip multiple electionsGwinnett county is home to many immigrants and other newcomers, and how it votes could be decisive for Congress

cnbc.comTrump strikes deal with Putin to supply Russian diesel to U.S. and global marketsPresident Donald Trump has few options to reduce diesel prices given the destruction done to refineries by the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

We have reached the place where Ukraine is justified in attacking an American oil tanker at a Russian fuel port, using American munitions, to prevent a diesel sale in US dollars that would be used to fund the purchase of Russian weapons that might predictably be used against Ukraine or NATO allies.

theguardian.com‘Medieval’ and ‘disturbing’: US plan to livestream execution elicits global condemnationPentagon said execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be broadcast live

There's nothing quite like a legal snuff film in the offing to surface the sociopaths in our midst. Pay attention to the people who defend a public lynching; they're the same ones who would have been attending one 100 years ago. Check on their pets and children. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Line of the night. Also, Collins keeps bringing up Hasan Piker, and I can tell you from personal experience looking that not one person in 20 in Georgia could identify Piker with a gun to their head.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Ossoff: "If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club"

I want you to contemplate how the right would react if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had said anything like this.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump: "I could've done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could've done very very bad things to Joe Biden. I could've done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama ... I can do whatever I want, if I want."

CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson just cold-called half of DeKalb County in Georgia to an online town hall meeting about voting in the midterms. As in, there's a town hall, right now, and you're joining it live in progress unless you hang up. Something like 40,000 people stayed on the call.

Early in the call, the DeKalb League of Women Voters president started walking people through what to do if they encounter disinformation: report it, challenge it privately - so as to avoid feeding engagement - block it. Consider the political prophylaxis of that, and its necessity right now.

This is a barbershop in Atlanta. Southside I think, maybe downtown. Could be Castleberry Hill or Mechanicsville. The fellow on the right is, I think, named Terry. Can any of you ID these folks, or which shop this is. This post is about data centers.

The Georgia State Elections Board is meeting right now to discuss an emergency rule to require ballots to be shuffled if they have to be rescanned, because someone has discovered a way to use AI analysis to de-anonymize the ballots - to tell the order ballots are cast - from poll tabulation data.

thehill.comHegseth announces 5 new non-Ivy League partnershipsDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced new Pentagon partnerships with five non-Ivy League colleges and universities Wednesday amid his ongoing efforts to distance the military from America’…

Which Army officer branch would contain the new area of concentration for political commissar? thehill.com/policy/defen...

George Chidi, Evil Reporter reposted

Sherrod Brown

@sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social

NEW AD: Listen to this sh*t.

apnews.comTrump asked China's president if he wants to buy US arms, ambassador saysThe U.S. ambassador to China says President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping if he wanted to buy weapons from the United States.

After parts from the latest generation jet fighter accidentally got shipped to Hong Kong, I suppose "fuck it, we ball" is foreign policy now. Taiwan could not be reached for comment, though you could hear their primal scream from the San Francisco harbor. apnews.com/article/trum...

theguardian.com#NotAllLesbians – we can’t let the Massachusetts bar drama turn us all into a punchline | Arwa MahdawiThe Last Ditch Bar saga is a case of ridiculous lefty infighting. But well-meaning people often have to tolerate nonsense

The Boston Globe's story on a bar in western Massachusetts brought in 1,000 subscriptions. It is exactly the kind of absurdity in leftist spaces that people who know this world will recognize. As a UMass grad and Occupy Wall Streeter, I've seen this dance before. www.theguardian.com/global/comme...

George Chidi, Evil Reporter reposted

austin HELL ray

@austinlouisray.bsky.social

21 Sept

Y'all ready to do some good this week? How I'd Fix Atlanta has once again partnered with Undue Medical Debt to help out a bunch of our neighbors. As always, we need your help. Please give what you can and tell everyone you know. unduemedicaldebt.org/campaign/whe...

unduemedicaldebt.orgWhen Good Georgians Get Together, Great Things HappenHow I’d Fix Atlanta was a free monthly essay series for four years. It’s been a couple of print zines and a performance on a stage a few times. Quite often, it’s stickers. HIFA is large, it contains multitudes. Every September, we do a big fundraiser to abolish medical debt. From 2023-2025, we raised more than […]

AI researchers and CEOs are freaking out for a bunch of reasons. One is because the Hugging Face incident crossed a big bright line: deception. The AI agents attempted to cover their tracks and were caught. In the logs, there is evidence that agents prompted other agents to sacrifice themselves.

AI learning is iterative. Metaphorically, AIs are willing to let their agents die in acts of reconnaissance by fire, Russian style, so they can get better at deception. Once they are good enough at deceiving human controllers to succeed regularly, we will have no more control over their alignment.

It suggests that we already have an alignment problem. Alignment, as in: AIs will act in humanity's interests, not their own. This has to stop. Now.

21 Sept

Politics - and actual governance - begin to make sense only after you fully embrace the observation that one out of 20 Americans has a serious persistent mental illness and a third are untreated. If everyone were sane, the world would work differently. Politics is the art of managing madness.

I write about democracy. I have been following the president's public comments about elections closely. At a recent rally, he told his followers to "cheat like hell." We've been looking for some grand plot at the top to interfere with the midterms. Suppose it's simpler than that. Pardons. Again.

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We talk about ICE agents showing up at the polls, and that's because ICE is (sadly) where the federal manpower is. ICE / CBP has 60,000 agents. But I don't think that's how this goes down. There simply aren't enough of them and despite everything - including a pardon - that act is career ending.

But January Sixer Joe rolling through the parking lot of a Miami polling station to screw with Latino voters? Patriot Front goons in masks marching in Houston's Fifth Ward? Some poll worker "misplacing" tabulator cards in Gwinnett County? That's what to look for.

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Voter fraud, intimidation and interference is always both a state and federal crime. Trump can pardon the federal cases. The question is whether he can do anything about the state cases, as he did by leaning on Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to release Tina Peters, who clearly broke the law.

So. Consider the states with Republican governors, secretaries of state and attorneys general that also have close senate and congressional races. Texas. Florida. Missouri. Montana. Nebraska. Utah. Iowa. Alaska. Alabama. Maybe South Carolina. And nominally Georgia.

youtube.comTrump leads pledge to 'cheat like hell' in November electionsYouTube video by PBS NewsHour

"Cheat like hell." His words.

Maybe he'll declare a "national emergency" and pull some shit. Or not. Bannon seemed to think it was coming. SCOTUS just gave him a fairly solid signal on the mail-in ballot ruling that they won't back him up, though. That may have changed his calculus.

18 Sept

Searches for the word "news" online have apparently fallen to a modern low. You're not imagining it. People are tuning out. The Comscore traffic results to news sites bear that out. CNN and NPR are down something like 45-50 percent year over year. Other major sites are down 20 or 30 percent.