Hartmann Report

Will Trump & the RNC repudiate authoritarianism and instead embrace bipartisanship and world peace? Or are they going to continue driving the GOP down the fascist road? Historian Douglas Brinkley told the story on CNN Sunday morning about how after President Ronald Reagan was shot, when he woke up in the hospital, he told a friend nearby that the experience had transformed him, that he was now going to dedicate his life to peace. Not only did he not once blame the shooting on Democrats; Reagan instead largely followed through on that promise.

The founders and framers thought they could prevent somebody like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. They were wrong, and we’re still paying the price. It’s often said that the Electoral College was brought into being to perpetuate or protect the institution of slavery, and, indeed, during the first half-century of America it gave the slave states several presidents who otherwise wouldn’t have been elected. Most of the pro-slave-state bias of the Electoral College, however, was a function of the Three-Fifths Compromise (which, until the 1870s, gave slave states more members in the House of Representatives than called for by the size of their voting public) and the decision to give each state two US senators. But, according to the framers of the Constitution themselves, the real reason for the Electoral College was to prevent a foreign power from placing their stooge in the White House.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Finally: The New York Times Editorial Board Calls for Republicans To Reject Trump. — Trump Snubs McConnell's Warning, Rolls Out Red Carpet for Authoritarian. — Election Bombshell: RNC Uses Fake Electors to Crown Trump! — Clarence Thomas' all-expense paid visit to Putin? Wait what? — Voter Suppression Alert: House Republicans Pass Controversial SAVE Act! — Inflation Takes a Dip: June's 0.1% Drop Fuels Hopes for Rate Cuts. — Urgent Warning: Southern US Experiencing Unprecedented Sea-Level Rise! — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert! Workaholic Hunters Need to Schedule Time with Friends

AOC's resolution shines a light on the misconduct of Thomas and Alito. It's a bold step towards cleansing the Supreme Court of corruption… Article III of the Constitution, which defines the roles and powers of the court system, says: "The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour…" Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is taking the Framers at their word; this week she introduced articles of impeachment against both Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

"Look at my entire Deep State target list," Raiklin said. "That is the beginning. This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?" Get ready: Trump and his neofascist MAGA movement may soon be coming for you. They're already explicitly gunning for journalists like me who write for Raw Story (which, along with The New Republic, Daily Kos, Alternet, Common Dreams and others, regularly publish my articles), CNN, The Washington Post, and Reuters, according to an astonishing new investigative report published yesterday at Raw Story. Trump's self-described "Secretary of Retribution," Ivan Raiklin, already reportedly has a hit list of 350 "deep state" individuals he says they intend to try to assassinate by tricking police into attacking their homes with SWAT teams.

From the founding of our republic, protecting the power of the press to call out anti-democratic behavior has been a firewall, protecting our form of government. It is their job. Donald Trump and many of his supporters have explicitly promised to overturn American democracy, using Viktor Orbán's "illiberal democracy" Hungarian model — where the press is controlled, political opposition sidelined or imprisoned, and oligarchs run the government — as their model. But you rarely hear that from our media.

The billionaires and polluters who bribed SCOTUS Republicans just legalized poisoning our children and grandchildren... In 1904, O. Henry coined the phrase “banana republic” to describe a country where the government supports big business for the exclusive benefit of the morbidly rich. A government of, by, and for what that generation called the “fatcats” or the “robber barons.” The banana republic-ication of America just kicked into high gear, and, curiously, there’s been a virtual mainstream media blackout about it.

So, to answer the question about why Trump is polling better than Biden regardless of the realities in the fact-based world: “It’s the media, stupid.” Watching and reading American media, a certain bias becomes immediately evident: stories proliferate about pundits and a handful of Democrats calling for President Biden to drop out of the race, but they are almost never “balanced” by pointing out the massively larger number of Republicans (many now “former” or “never Trump” Republicans, but Republicans nonetheless) who are calling for Trump to drop out or be defeated. Why would this be?

As the drama of writing the Constitution for a new nation was going on during the summer of 1787 in Independence Hall in Philadelphia (then the home of the Pennsylvania Legislature), a different kind of drama was playing out in the streets of that city. It was, according to the newspapers of the day and the letters sent home from delegates to the Convention, a brutally hot, muggy, mosquito-infested summer in Philadelphia. This was during a time when the mechanisms of weather were largely unknown, and superstition was thickly merged with Christianity. Thus, on May 5, when a boy of about five years died of an apparent heatstroke, an elderly woman in town was accused of being the witch who’d cast a spell upon him.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The double standard — Louise and I are traveling and, over the past few days, have visited Sweden, Estonia, and Latvia — Wisdom School alert: How a Bacteria Almost Destroyed All Life on Earth — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert: ADHD: The Perception of Time