Playoff baseball is the best form of knockout sport there is. 

Georgian election is a week today. Media coverage previewing it will tell us that Georgians are almost exclusively concerned about Russia, the EU and Nato. They’re not.   Georgian Dream (GD) is in government. They are extremely shit. They are increasingly unpopular yet still the most popular party. Most of their votes are grudging. Either better-the-devil-you-know votes or anti-UNM votes. UNM were the government from 2003 until 2012. They were George Bush’s pet project and they were ruinous for Georgia. Despite being despised by a majority of Georgians, they stagger on like a zombie, kept afloat by emigrant oligarchs and foreign interests. Some dipshit Lithuanian MEP read out a letter from UNM’s leader (Saakashvili) recently in the European parliament. UNM remain the second party via the votes of the Tbilisi middle class. This makes it impossible for an anti-GD coalition to be formed because the other opposition parties know most anti-GD voters hate UNM even more. So the current set up of UNM as the second party and Georgian Dream as the incumbents is mutually beneficial to both. As explained in this interview: https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-dream-lincoln-mitchell-interview/33027818.html   The most galling aspect of media coverage on Georgia is that some of the narratives we’re fed are actually US exports to Georgia. Christina Pushaw was director of Ron DeSantis’ recent presidential campaign. She came up with the “groomers” smear against LGBT people among a litany of other shite. Pushaw was campaign director for UNM in the last Georgian election. She was the loudest promoter of the “Russian” attack line against GD. Unrelated to GD, she also claimed the small Black Lives Matter movement in Georgia were “Russian agents”. Pushaw was in Georgia to begin with because young Republican Party-aligned American graduates flooded into Georgia in the 2000s. Conservative US think tanks and the Bush administration set up vast networks of NGOs in Tbilisi. Pushaw went to work for one and later founded her own there. This is partly why the GD government are so paranoid about NGOs working for UNM and therefore enacted their recent foreign agents law. Ironically, Pushaw herself is actually registered as a foreign agent (for Georgia) in USA now, where there's a similar foreign agents law. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/14/christina-pushaw-ron-desantis-georgia-00118242

Wordle 1,218 6/6 🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜ 🟨🟩⬜🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩   

Top, top bantz.

I see Trump is currently on a podcast with The Brothers of Insurrection  Never meet your heroes and all that.