Hartmann Report

Once the GOP is done with birth control they're coming for gay marriage & ultimately, civil rights laws themselves including the rights to assembly, free-speech & due process. Winter is coming... In about six months, women in thirty Republican-controlled states will probably lose their right to get an abortion. The Supreme Court and the Constitution don't “grant” or “give” Americans rights: they recognize rights and define the extent to which they can be infringed upon by our government, theoretically balancing private rights against the public good.

The GOP chose the classic tactic of tyrants throughout history; lie to the people no matter how many die as a result. They’re doubling down on death as a political strategy, a process Trump began the week of April 7, 2020 (as I documented in damning detail eight months ago). If Meadows’ book is right and Trump was willing to infect then-77-year-old Biden at the debate, we have one more data point in the evil Trump/GOP Death Cult's plan to leverage the Covid pandemic as a political weapon.

The last thing that should happen in America is that a political party would choose to use racial or religious hatred as a primary tool to win elections, inching America ever closer to more bloodshed. What rational country would throw away the genius of their children just because of their skin color? What politician who loves their country would knowingly promote racial and religious hatred? This insanity is what the GOP has descended into. While 82% of Biden voters thought the three murderers of Ahmaud Arbery should be convicted, fewer than a third of Trump voters shared that opinion.

We once celebrated those who pushed back against greed, from Dickens’ Christmas Carol to the Grinch: we must condemn greed and again celebrate community, love & selflessness. As the Omicron variant puts us in its cross-hairs, America is still stuck with a predatory health insurance and healthcare system that’s barely up to the task of meeting our nation’s needs. This new variant apparently emerged from South Africa, which has been unsuccessfully begging the WTO for 14 months for a “TRIPS Waiver” to allow them to manufacture Covid vaccine…which might have prevented this variant from evolving.

I published this book in 2008 to help Democrats with messaging, but it applies to just about every aspect of life...

The Best of the Rest of the News: Find out if your cat is a psychopath like Trump, and explore a modern-day Jules Verne-like expedition to the "Center of the Earth"...

A warning, a call to protect the future, and a prayer for love and decency... On this Thanksgiving weekend, I thought you may find of value a short (less than 5 minutes) collection of my favorite 5 clips from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address at the end of his presidency, as he peacefully handed the reins of American power over to President John F. Kennedy. Although it was given a few months after Thanksgiving, it carries a concern, a warning, a call to protect future generations, and ends with a prayer for peace, understanding, and — from this old warrior who defeated the Nazis and saved the world from fascism in WWII — love.

If Congress wants democracy to survive, it must both roll back Citizens United & regulate Big Tech, forbidding them from allowing foreign governments to pretend to be Americans on social media. Former Assistant Director of the FBI, Frank Figliuzzi, just posted on Twitter: "Divide & conquer: A sample of 32,315 pro-Rittenhouse hashtag tweets, Nov 19-20, showed 29,609 with disabled geolocation. Of those, 17,701 were listed as “foreign”, but a deep scrub revealed most of those were in Russia, China, and the EU. @Tara_Writer @TAPSTRIMEDIA #Rittenhouse". The fact-checking site Snopes looked into similar claims and found massive evidence of foreign-based social media accounts pretending to be Americans while cheerleading Rittenhouse and questioning the viability of America.

We’ve already banned fully-automatic weapons, shoulder-fired missiles & sawed-off shotguns, only used to kill humans -- it’s not a stretch ban Rittenhouse’s AR15 & Russian AK47s to save American lives. Expect the gun control debate in America to really get hot over the next 12 months as Beto O’Rourke runs for governor of Texas. O’Rourke said, when running for president in 2019, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” And it’s entirely time for this debate. America has just a bit more than 4 percent of the world’s population, but, with more guns than people in our country, we have more than 40 percent of all the guns in civilian hands in the world.

All the Republican Party has left, now that they’ve abandoned any pretense over the past 40 years of supporting working people or even basic infrastructure, is hate, fear and death. The Rittenhouse verdict sent a shudder through America as terrorists and vigilantes celebrated: one rightwinger called for wholesale slaughter of Democrats saying on Telegram, “The left won’t stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood.” On Facebook, rightwing sites celebrating the verdict were the most popular nationwide by a factor of 9 to 1.