Hartmann Report

True patriots love their country & work to make the nation better. Demagogues & rightwing billionaires just try to pit us against each other and tear our republic apart while enriching themselves. Republicans and the Australian billionaires who own and run Fox “News” have a mighty strange idea of what it means to love and respect one’s country. The network has spent years hosting white Republicans claiming “patriotism” to trash-talk Black athletes protesting racism in America, and they’re at it again.

America needs to solve it's parasitic billionaire problem or our democracy will continue to crash & burn. America has to reinvent our understanding of economics after 40 years of living under a tax-cutting, austerity-imposing, Republican-promoted trickle-down Reaganomics scam and return to a Keynesian system that still works in those countries like Norway, New Zealand or Denmark that never adopted “austerity.”

How do you fight white supremacist “conservatives” who are willing to use racism, lies and threats of violence to reach their goals? Swanson Foods-fortune heir and trustfund-baby Tucker Carlson, who says he spent his college years “mostly drunk,” is attacking Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley for saying that the military should understand the true history — including the racial history — of the country they’re willing to die to defend. Milley, who holds a Masters Degree in International Relations (one of his two MAs) from Columbia University and has served his country for almost 40 years, is, Carlson said on his Fox “News” program, “not just a pig — he's stupid.”

The best of the rest of the news this week. The most under-reported big story of the week is a blockbuster in The New York Times about how Eric Prince and other wealthy rightwingers paid infiltrators to sabotage the Democratic Party in Wyoming and the region. Nobody knows how many other states’ Democratic parties have been similarly infiltrated or what other sabatoge efforts are underway as the GOP moves closer and closer to becoming a full-blown fascistic party.

Biden, Schumer and the so-called “Problem Solvers” in the Democratic caucus need to wake the hell up: When you negotiate with GOP terrorist-lovers & enhance their credibility you will lose every time. There’s an old saw that says, “You don’t negotiate with terrorists.” It’s corollary is, “And you don’t give terrorists credibility by appearing to negotiate with them or treating them as if they’re serious about reforming themselves.” Somebody needs to tell the Democrats, and quickly.

Will the next few months become a “Great Awakening” for America or a “Great Dying” for Trump followers? J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, “The burned hand teaches best. After that, advice about fire goes to the heart.” It’s a painful truth that people in red states, and red counties in blue and purple states, are about to learn. Here comes Donald Trump’s Final Massacre.

364,000 votes in jeopardy from little-noticed provision of SB 202. By Thom and Greg Palast.

It’s time for the Biden administration to put someone in Merrick Garland’s position who will fight for our republic and the rule of law. Raping women and then slandering them, beating protesters, and trying to overthrow the government are not normal parts of the job of President of the United States. But for reasons that seem entirely bizarre, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice is operating as if they are.

So if we can’t regulate the “news” or even stop foreign trolls from stirring up Americans, how can we activate the “immune system” of democracy? America is now in the midst of a “truth crisis” that threats to tear us apart and end the American Experiment in democratic governance; Finland is implementing a solution to “fake news” that we should seriously consider.

Enough is enough. President Biden must reverse Trump’s executive order and direct the IRS to enforce the so-called “Johnson Amendment”. A group of rightwing American Catholic bishops are trying to withhold one of that church’s most sacred rituals – communion or the Eucharist – from President Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, because he and his political party favor a woman having the right to choose abortion and birth control.