Hartmann Report

This may be our last chance to avoid Ben Franklin’s warning that we have “a republic, if you can keep it” -- It may also be our best chance to revive democracy in America and, by example, the world... Donald Trump and the Republican Party are working to end democracy, what (ironically) the Founders called “a republican form of government,” here in the United States. One of the hottest topics in the news today is Barton Gellman’s article in The Atlantic that posits an overthrow of the American political system by a determined group of neofascist Republicans (my phrase, not his) intent on taking full control of the American government by corrupting the election of 2024. It’s a brilliant article and everybody should read it. This is not a new idea, however.

If you want to know who Republicans in Congress value, look at who they protect and who they let die. By any reasonable standard, America has taken a very wrong and and very tragic path. Our children are dying from gun violence: why don’t Republicans in Congress give them the same concern we do our police and soldiers, who also face gunfire?

For Americans, freedom is not only a sacred right and duty, but it’s also the ultimate political marketing tool…and it’s past time for Democrats to take it back and claim it as their own. There was a time when Democrats called their party “the Party of Freedom.” Largely because of the horrors of the Republican Great Depression, Americans realized that, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “Necessitous men are not free men.” You can’t disentangle economics from liberty.

In it's corrupt Heller decision, SCOTUS decided for the first time in American history that every citizen has a personal right to own a gun: a decision that helped the Michigan shooter get a gun...

— Get ready for a show worthy of the Watergate hearings, if the January 6th Treason House Select Committee's Vice Chair Liz Cheney's tease is credible. — Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis is moving toward creating his own private praetorian guard. — Former self-confessed traitor and felon Michael Flynn is leading a new charge in America, taking the gospel of authoritarianism and theocracy on a road show to white evangelical churches across America. — Books and classes teaching the history of the Civil Rights movement in America, as well as any discussion of HIV/AIDS, gay marriage, and LGBTQ rights, will probably have vanished from Texas schools by next week. — Does Trump get excited about the possibility of killing people? — Missouri Republican Governor Mike Parsons ordered his health department to conduct a solid, scientific study to determine if mask-wearing was actually an effective method to mitigate the spread of Covid. It was, so he deep-sixed the study. — Conservatives on the Supreme Court appear to be laying the ground to wholesale strip Americans of rights if or when we get an authoritarian president. — Apparently a family in Michigan took Rep. Madison Cawthorn's (R-NC) advice to heart: their child murdered 4 of his schoolmates this week with a semiautomatic weapon of war. — Crazy Alert! Is Biden responsible for the Santa Shortage? — In Good News: A top deputy to Robert Mueller noted in his book that the investigators had memorialized the things they found and conclusions they came to about Trump and his involvement with Russian oligarchs and organized crime in a special "alternative Mueller Report." — In More Good News: Nevada plans to put a $55/month surcharge on the health insurance premiums of state employees who refuse to get vaccinated.

Let the Trumpies and Maskholes argue it out on social media and in their chatrooms, but keep them the hell out of our stores, bars, restaurants and theaters. Enough is enough! The German Parliament just mandated that all workers in healthcare settings must be fully vaccinated to maintain their employment, a rule already in place in Greece, France, and Italy. They will also be deciding soon whether to extend a mandatory lockdown to all unvaccinated Germans across the entire nation.

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.