Oh look; another round of unneeded "inactive voter purges" in Georgia. Nevermind that they make mistakes. Often. I gave one anecdotal example.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast gave more: "...Maj. Gamaliel Turner of Columbus, Georgia, because he filed a change-of-address to get his absentee ballot while assigned by the Pentagon to California. He was one 4,000 who lost their vote to a challenge by the Georgia Republican Party on or near his military base.

Then there was Christine Jordan, MLK’s cousin, who put in a change of address form because, at 92, she wanted her daughter to review her mail.

Then there is the case of Dr. Carry Smith, expert on voter purges, who herself was removed for cockamamy reasons. "

He opines that Georgia's GOP is ensuring 2026 victory already with these tactics.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't running for a Senate seat, and she announced earlier this week in a 600-plus word screed on X that she won't be running for governor either. In that rant, she railed on the "good ol' boy" network being on obstacle for her while simultaneously bragging that if she did run, she'd win. You know, overcoming that "good ol' boy" network she's upset at stunting her ascendency. She seems to believe there's this patriarchy unfairly stunting the advancement of marginalized people like women. Isn't that what D.E.I. initiatives she and her party eviscarated would mitigate?

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HOW has it flown under the radar for American political media that Donald Trump's Mar-A-Lgo had 16-year old girls working in its spa and that Jeffrey Epstein poaching such a 16-year old girl from him? Never mind that the story doesn't line up with previously revealed dates chronicling their rift; actually no, don't pass that on by. It's noteworthy. Still, Jon Stewart ribs Donald over his "poaching pouting."

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Brian O'Neill, former CIA executive and guest teacher on national security at Georgia Tech, scribed an op/ed for the Atlanta Journal Constitution insisting that Tulsi Gabbard abandoned core intelligence standards. O'Neill believes Trump's national intelligence director used her position to make politicized claims against President Barack Obama, flouting norms in intelligence accuings "officials of selectively quoting or suppressing intelligence - without acknowledging that selective citation is standard." He writes "what matters is whether the selection is transparent, justified and consistent with tradecraft, not whether every fragment appears."

"Her rhetoric - 'shoddy,' 'irrefutable,' 'dubious' - wasn't the language of objective critique," O'Neill continued. "It was a prosecutorial script. That matters. Intelligence doesn't operate in absolutes."

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The state Senate special election in GA-21 has but one Democrat running against a half dozen Republicans in a 'jungle primary' August 26th, and low turnout is expected, but GOP infighting could help Shigley clear the field, too. Well, a touch of that came to fruition this week, with a "hit website" (read HERE) coming out attacking one Republican candidate. The AJC reports "It accuses him of not paying his taxes, pocketing taxpayer money from a COVID-era government loan and even threatening to shoot his neighbor’s dog."

Woof.

With Mike Collins making his move to take Jon Ossoff's Senate seat comes a wide-open Congressional seat in northeast Georgia. Republicans like state representative Houston Gaines and former Congressman Paul Broun are licking their chops, but as we here know, there's a plucky Democrat already on the road campaigning in that district: Lexy Doherty. She was on this show about seven weeks ago. A worthy and timely revisit no?

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'Fixer Upper' power couple Chip & Joanna Gaines have built a reality TV empire and had been the darlings of evangelical America; that is, until they - gasp - cast a married gay male couple and their twin boys for the reality series "Back To The Frontier." Then came the ugliness.

Listen, I know somewhere there's some written or unwritten reason I'm not supposed to like Chip & Jo, but I like 'em. Their having never booked a gay person or couple for their 'Fixer Upper' series isn't an issue for me (mostly because what gay person wants to move to Waco? I kid; I kid), because I see inherent goodness in them. Well, so did most of evangelical America until this show's cast was revealed.

It's that element of religious extremism that just keeps dividing humanity. I noted a passage on friend of the show Dom Kelly's personal Facebook page. On a recent post, he shared that he'd become something of a pen pal with a Palestinian Gazan father not unlike him - in fact quite similar. Despite Kelly being a Jewish American and Ahmed being a Muslim Palestinian, they had plenty of common ground to develop a lovely bond. There's no citation (yet) to attribute because I share this from his personal and private page, but I do hope you'll listen to me sharing the passage. It's so moving, and gut-wrenching, too.

Georgia's 10th district Congressional representative, "MTG with a mullet" Mike Collins has thrown his trucker hat into the ring to seek the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in 2026. He hopes, of course, to unseat Senator Jon Ossoff, and cast the Democrat (along with Reverend Senator Raphael Warnock) as working for "California crazies or New York nut jobs."

He stepped in not longer Governor Brian Kemp informed him he'd be backing the (potential, still, I guess) campaign of former college football coach Derek Dooley. They're lifelong friends, after all, but Dooley's conservative bonafides are already coming into question in right wing media.

There's this concept that Kemp was trying to play "kingmaker" (does he really have that kind of sawy herding cats with Georgia GOP voters, though?) and keep the Senate primary race from being a bitter fight. Good luck with that.

For what it's worth, I happen to think Georgia Democrats might flex a little "ranked choice" and cross party lines to choose the lesser of all the evils that'll be on that ballot as a de facto "second choice."

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"The Georgia Gang" panelist (and Georgia WIN List executive director) Melita Easters brought an interesting point to the political conversation ... there seem to be a lot of "daddy issues" in the Georgia GOP. Between the Derek Dooley (son of UGA football coaching legend Vince Dooley) and Lt. Governor Burt Jones and his daddy's influence (and wealth) ... it's just hard to ignore.

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Atlanta growth is "slowing" (still growing, but slower), as noted in a Wall Street Journal article, and noted on Sunday's "The Georgia Gang" as well. Housing costs and woeful traffic affecting "quality of life." With an abundance of office space available, post-pandemic, it's not easy converting office buildings to residential use, as natural as that seems to be a solution for a lack of housing supply.

A for the traffic issue, I go right back to the well insisting it's past-due time for someone to champion connecting the entire state with high speed rail and networking to the airport here, strengthening MARTA's usability and convincing Atlanta's mayor (and Atlanta Regional Commission chair) to reconsider his position on Beltline Rail necessity where it's already necessary to be first.

Americans have not only become so hyper-partisan that they distrust the concept of "government" on the whole, they also distrust "the news," or "the media." Except for the "media" or "news" choices they make, of course.

Since media consolidation and profit margins have weighed in so heavily on decisions made in news rooms with dwindling numbers of personnel, that "trust void" has left us wanting - and yet we're seeing dandelions popping up out of the concrete as entities like the Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC), The Atlanta Objective and Pro Publica press on.

In Atlanta, for example, the ACPC pushed and pushed, pursuing FOIA (freedom of information) requests until the Atlant Police Foundation had to cough up nearly 300 pages of records detailing their lobbying efforts to push the Atlanta Public Training Facility (aka "Cop City") through city hall despite intense public scrutiny and opposition.

Pro Publica, for its part, researched to learn more about the men who'd been deported to el Salvador by the Trump administration: 230 Venezuelan immigrants, 197 of them having "not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. — and that only six had been convicted of violent offenses." They also "identified fewer than a dozen additional convictions, both for crimes committed in the U.S. and abroad, that were not reflected in the government data."

There's more: "Nearly half of the men, or 118, were whisked out of the country while in the middle of their immigration cases, which should have protected them from deportation. Some were only days away from a final hearing." You know, going about it "the right way" MAGA's implore to us that that's all they want from immigrants. Okay.

They dove into the use of tattoes as predetermining factors and the flaws in that rationale, which we've done here, too.

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To wrap the show last week, I couldn't help but enjoy the deliciousness of Donald Trump whipping out his "gotcha" data in front of a press pool spary while touring the Fed renovations with Fed Chair Jerome Powell, only to have Powell dutifully correct him in front of same pool spray. Trump (and Senator Tim Scott touring with him) thought he had ambushed Powell, and it went like one of those Wile E. Coyote cartoons. "Boom."

So we now know what AG Pam Bondi has long known and then relayed to Donald Trump: he's on "the list." Democrats in the House are eager to have that information coughed up so Speaker Mike Johnson shut the House down for five weeks. The White House kitchen is going to need more ketchup.

Meanwhile, the first WSJ bombshell on this was that Trump allegedly drew a "bawdy" birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein, but Trump doesn't draw (he does) or use the word 'enigma' (he has) or ... ehh, Jon Stewart spells it out quite well.

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All of this makes me nostalgic for when we only focused on divisive social issues; who's with me? Well, far be it for opinionated men (hey, I'm one, too ...) to sound off on WNBA players wanting a pay raise. Who do these women who're playing while the league's finally turning a profit for the first time in it's 28-plus year history think they are? Uhm, maybe the current players a) aren't responsible for the league's past but b) are responsible for its present and future, in the green?

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Senator Jon Ossoff held a rally in Savannah late last week and all indications are "Trump is on the ballot" in his mind. I reviewed his 20-plus minute speeach where Donald figured prominently.

You almost knew when you heard the name "First Liberty" that the people running said business were aiming for a specific kind of client.It turns out that clientele was "easily duped conservative," as we learned last week that a Newnan, Georgia-based lender was hawking "patriot notes" to help fuel a movement of "America First patriots."

You just know it's gross when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the Trump administration is going after 'em. Or, as I surmise, maybe they're quashing competition for Trump's ceaseless business empire targeting the same rubes. It's lead to a potential class action lawsuit by some of the conservatives duped by it.

It's also been heavily scrutinized by the staff at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who's followed the money to PACS, the state GOP and a handful of far-right politiicans and even the current governor and lieutenant goernor (like he needs it).

Here's the thing: anyone who's listened to conservative talk radio or watched OANN or Fox News has seen or heard that same kind of icky sales pitch. Hell, I caught a bourbon brand utilizing the deaths of the 13 American servicemembers who died in Kabul as fodder in their pitch on an Atlanta Braves radio commercial campaign. Ick.

On to discuss this and the makeup of the 2026 gubernatorial field is Atlanta-based political consultant Andrew Heaton.

With a 'jungle primary' in late August on the docket for Georgia's 21st state Senate district voters, the lone Democrat on the ballot - Debra Shigley - is not only imminently qualified for the job, she's also putting in the sweat equity in hopes that she can surprise in this red-leaning district.

The special election, necessitated by Brandon Beach taking a Trump cabinet role, is an early barometer on the mood of Georgia voters, post-DOGE; post-"big beautiful bill," too. With Donald eager to distract everyone from the "Epstein files," if ever an opportunity existed to clip a state Senate seat, this might be it.

I spoke at length with Debra about campaigning in this heat, how she sees herself representing this "R+" district if she did win it, what voters there are telling her matter most, and how her experience as a mother, business owner and even a Jewish woman all impact her passion for service.

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Candace Ownes almost gets it; she believes the President isn't on the infamous "Epstein list," but does believe his inner circle may be setting him up for a big fall. She does say the quiet part out loud, though: either Trump thinks his base is stupid or those around think he is. What if she's right on both counts?

Dom Kelly, co-founder, President and CEO at New Disabled South, penned a social media post days ago that caught my attention. In it, he connected the dots between recent Trump administration statements and policy changes that bear out this truism: if you're disabled, you'll *have* to work to receive Medicaid if you're "able-bodied," and they'll let your employer pay you a 'sub-minimum wage' simultaneously.

While some states (including Georgia) won't allow anyone to be paid less than the federal minimum wage, the Trump Department of Labor reversed a Biden administration policy to end to the 14(c) program that allows disabled workers to be paid less than $7.25 an hour in states that will allow it.

On top of that, Brooke Rollins, Trump's secretary of Agriculture, touted the idea that "able-bodied" Medicaid recipients should be out in the fields replacing the migrant workforce ICE is snapping up and detaining.

Put it all together.

Kelly and I discussed this today at good length.

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Prior to that I reviewed notes from the AJC's Politically Georgia Wednesday blog that spelled out some of the cash hauls (and sources of them) for various 2026 gubernatorial combatants and the handful of potential candidates for that and other offices here in Georgia. There's also a notable policy item the new GOP entry - and presumed frontrunner - Burt Jones and the potential candidate in Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have in common. Could it be a matter who which one makes the most noise to push it who'll win that nomination?

Georgia Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones finally made it public: he's running to be the state's next governor, and did so with a well-produce, trope-riddle campaign video that checked off all the rudimentary Republican campaign ad must-haves: a truck, driving from a lovely exurban home, through the wandering highways of rural-esque Georgia, walking the grounds with the entire family in tow, chatting it up with some guy wearing a cowboy hat and walking a horse, etc.

It also included some other disturbing tropes: the absurdly not-at-all female guy running track as a distraight female looks on, for example. Oh, and his big foray into policy: no more income taxes.

That's where the focus went here. Why?

Because A) it never reduces - actually contributes to - inequalities and B) as per "A," is yet aother disproportionate handout to the well-off at the expense of the poor and working class. Plenty of evidence to that.

Burt's okay with that because he has zero concept what it's like being that poor and/or working class Georgian. That's how it goes when you're raised in wealth, attend private schools and don't have to balance going to college with job(s) but can instead walk-on with the football squad then step into the family business.

Georgia state House Rep. Ruwa Romman has been a busy little bee of late, speaking in Philadelphia at a massive "No Kings Day" protest and going door-to-door campaigning the Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdni in that city's primary election season.I caught up with her for a full show conversation about her ascendant profile, along with the intra-party tug-of-war between establishment and progressive Democrats (and the gettable voters just outside the party waiting to embrace it.