Hartmann Report

Back in 1896 & 1929 people didn’t need a detailed multi-decade, multi-country analysis of Horse & Sparrow to know it was bad news: the Great Panic & the Republican Great Depression convinced everybody. Kevin McCarthy’s House Republicans, in their demand that Democrats gut Social Security and education monies to give more trillions in tax breaks to billionaires, are once again trying the Reaganomics hustle. Only this time with a twist. Boomers and many Gen Xers remember how the media swooned for Art Laffer’s napkin in the 1980s, and then President Reagan turned it into a movement to cut taxes on billionaires because, he lied, it would make average working-class people richer. What most don’t remember — because none of us were alive back in the 1920s or 1890s — is that Laffer and Reagan hadn’t come up with anything novel.

"A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar". — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Budgets reflect policy priorities, and the GOP is now telling us what they're really all about: hunger for poor people, low taxes for billionaires, and to hell with students in debt. — If you agree that "God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society" then you're in alignment with 54 percent of all Republicans, according to a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute in association with the Brookings Institution. — First they came for American history, now they're coming for science. — Should the new GOP "Fair Tax" should be renamed the "Billionaire Wel-Fair Tax?" — Railroad companies paid off Republican politicians for the Trump administration to block safety rules before the Ohio 150-car train derailment and fireball explosion. — Saudis sentence an American to 19 years in a hellhole prison over a tweet. — In Good News — The Church of England is considering the question: must God be a man?

We're facing the early warning signs of a possible new pandemic perhaps more deadly than Covid, all because Trump chose to politicize the Covid pandemic in a racist fit. Trump’s no longer president, but he and his racism could still be responsible for millions more American deaths from a new pandemic disease. How and why? I’ll explain in just a moment, but first let’s look at the disease itself. One reason egg prices are so high right now is because a new strain of bird flu — H5N1 — has popped up among egg-laying chickens. The disease has a shocking mortality rate, leading to the death (both from disease and from euthanizing flocks to stop its spread) of almost 60 million domesticated birds in the US alone, so far.

For the moment, the only defense women have against these noble liars is knowledge of what they are and how they work. Pass it on. Plato (in The Republic) was the father of the “noble lie,” a tale told to people “for their own good and that of society” even though it was utterly untrue. Almost twenty-five-hundred years later, the noble lie lives on in some Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs).

This time we have an opportunity to make right a crime committed in the immediate past while all the co-conspirators and perpetrators are still alive. Well, it was a hell of a State of the Union speech. Throughout it, multiple Republicans rudely interrupted the president by shouting, “Secure the border!” It’s important to remember what happened when Republicans were in charge of securing the border: their “big new idea” was to forcibly separate children from their parents and put bewildered and terrified youngsters in cages for the world to see.

America didn’t ask for a homegrown rightwing terror movement, but now that it’s here we need to take it seriously. They thought that by “completely destroying Baltimore” — shooting up five power substations to blackout the city — they’d so upset white people in America that Trump’s racist base would rise up, begin the Second Civil War, and start slaughtering Black people, Hispanics, and Jews. Instead, Sarah Clendaniel, 27, and Brandon Russell, 34, a co-founder of the white supremacist neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, are in federal custody awaiting arraignment.

Will Republican extremism and hate for the New Deal — programs that have become absolutely essential to our even having a robust middle class — become grist for the media mill? Sometimes a little socialism is a very good thing. But don’t tell Mike Pence or the billionaires who bankroll him and his GOP colleagues. Or, for that matter, the 109 Democrats who were suckered into joining every single Republican in the House of Representatives to vote for a resolution saying that: “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.”

"Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776." —Susan B. Anthony "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." —Timothy Leary

— A young man with a UnitedHealthcare health insurance policy who had ulcerative colitis in a bad way. The company worked very, very hard to deny him care. — Rep. Ilhan Omar was booted off her committee while pro-Hitler GOPers go on committees - what? — How Biden owned Kevin McCarthy. — The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that courts can’t take guns away from men who are under restraining orders for beating and threatening to kill their wives. — You can get away with voting fraud if you’re a Republican. — republicans in the House of Representatives vote to end Covid precautions as a study finds Covid is the third leading cause of death among children. — Crazy Alert! Tucker is claiming NBC is pushing for the genocide of white people. — Geeky Science! Coffee doesn’t “give” you energy: it just borrows it from the future.