Hartmann Report

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The GOP's latest “Biden scandal” collapses into another clown-show, but the damage has already been done. — You must both support and vote for the criminal! — Why is Georgia delaying software updates on hack-vulnerable voting machines? — Why is the FBI going after pro-choice abortion rights activists? — Is the PGA-LIV golf pact dead or dying? — Sneaky Billionaire Alert! So-called “grassroots” parents groups demanding schools purge themselves of books about Black or queer people are pulling down big bucks from morbidly rich rightwingers. — Which women would Jesus ban from the ministry? — Crazy Alert! Suicide bombers are the best role model for Christians? — There’s a new must-see movie about Russian atrocities during the Ukraine war: The Eastern Front. — Finally, RIP Daniel Ellsberg.

Money in politics is a lot like Oxycontin, and the people who pass it out are often just as cynical, sociopathic, and deadly as the Sackler family… Historians and futurists tell us that we are moving into a new era, a Fourth Turning. It certainly feels that way. But the people who have been in charge —who we seek to replace — particularly George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and the Republican Congresses associated with them — have so rigged the game that it’s going to be a real challenge to dislodge the corrupt systems they’ve put into place. From think tanks to PACs to online publications to newspapers to talk-radio hosts to television networks to paid online trolls and Wikipedia editors there is a vast conservative ecosystem that will do everything it can to destroy any genuine, practical and achievable effort to reform America. Even though most are working class people, they think of themselves as Republicans and thus eagerly take $15 or $20 an hour for the task of screwing their neighbors. The worst thing for America, they’ll tell you, would be a level playing field, rather than one that’s so very tilted toward the morbidly rich.

Democracy is based on the will of the people & that is a function of the information to which citizens have access - Can America rescue our nation’s currently polluted streams of information and news? How can a democratic republic balance the need for a free and independent press with the pressure of fascism-loving billionaires buying and controlling large chunks of that sector? Recovering from three years of pandemic, our middle class staggered by 42 years of Reagan’s neoliberalism, rejecting the efforts of Republican neofascists in the mold of Trump, America appears poised on the edge of an egalitarian and small-d democratic renaissance. Observers of the cycles of history agree.

Does Trump’s goal appear to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia?” If Trump shared American secrets with Putin, our intelligence agencies are not going to call a press conference to let us all know. Similarly, short of a trial for treason, it’s extremely unlikely such an allegation — even if true — will show up in a court of law. Lawyers, judges, and juries just don’t have the security clearances necessary, so the documents brought to court are almost certainly not among the very most sensitive: they’re just enough to get a conviction.

Is the GOP Plan to Be Content With a "Red States" Fascist Empire? Increasingly, the Republican Party is consolidating its power in a minority of states and turning them into little laboratories of neo-fascism. This is tough on people in those states — particularly people who are Black, queer, or female — but what is its larger impact on America? “Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton famously noted, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This is the great danger at the state level for both American political parties as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into its mire of regionalism, violence, racism, homophobia, misogyny, gun deaths, pollution, and victimhood, led by corrupt politicians like Trump, DeSantis, Kemp, and Abbott.

If we continue to allow violence (like January 6th) and violent rhetoric to spread through the American body politic, we stand a very real chance of losing our republic. Sunday morning we all woke up to the news that an explosion and fire beneath I-95 in Philadelphia had snarled traffic for miles, disrupting both travel and commerce. My first thought went to Congressman Clay Higgins' (R-Putin) tweet days earlier calling for armed America-haters to: "1/50K know your bridges."

Yes, we do defend our office as we do defend our homes. This is a constitutional right everybody has, and nothing’s funny about that. The only reason they get mad at the Black Panther Party when you do it is for the simple reason that we’re political. —Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was murdered in his sleep by the Chicago police and the FBI, December 4, 1969

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Donald Trump has been indicted for stealing top-secret national security documents from you and me — our government — and endangering the security of America and the world by leaving them around where random spies and bad guys could access them. — Trump's jealousy for the way Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley was heroically portrayed in the media caused him to share secrets with others merely to impress them. — "Scary as hell." That's how an expert in the modern white supremacist militia movement described the tweet from Louisiana Republican Congressman Clay Higgins that seems to tell armed militia members to prepare for civil war if Trump is convicted and sent to jail. — Geeky Science! They knew the earth would burn, but they wanted the money. — Picture of the Week! Trump's Snidely Whiplash moment — and does that look like the white power sign that Snidely's flashing for the camera?

Is The Supreme Court Buckling To Reality? In a decision that shocked most observers, the Supreme Court this week ruled that an Alabama Republican gerrymander was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John Roberts and Bret Kavanaugh joined the Court’s three Democratic appointees in upholding the principle that “packing and cracking” congressional districts along racial lines was illegal. What happened?

As Trump faces the music for a small slice of his crimes against our nation & our democracy, let’s not forget that he’s not the first. He was carrying on a GOP tradition stretching back to 1968… Every day that goes by appears to bring us closer to a Trump indictment on serious felony charges, most likely including violations of the Espionage Act; there’s considerable speculation that it may come as early as today. Most Americans view Donald Trump as an aberration, a one-off, the exception. He’s our first “criminal president” they think, the first to have committed crimes to get into office, while in office, or both. Most Americans, in this regard, are wrong, and it’s a tragic statement about both the way we teach American history in our schools and the way our corporate media deals with past presidential crimes. If previous Republican presidents had been held to account for their crimes the way it appears Trump is about to be, Trump may well have not been as brazen in everything from his violations of the Hatch Act to the Espionage Act to his explicitly asking Vladimir Putin to intervene in the 2016 election.