Hartmann Report

Cars taught us how to deal with things that can kill people. The discussion about guns in America generally falls into two polar opposite positions: don’t regulate guns at all, or ban large parts of the spectrum of guns and heavily regulate ownership of the rest. But there’s a third position, entirely outside of that spectrum, which every actual “free market“ conservative in America should embrace, and liberals should be down with as well.

The filibuster is not just helping authoritarians damage democracy; it's endangering all life on planet Earth, including the future of the human species Most of the discussion around ending the Republican Party‘s ability to block any kind of progress in America by using the filibuster has centered on the success or failure of individual Biden-era policies.

This naked assault on Democracy sets the stage for other GOP-controlled states to do the same. In light of what Georgia’s legislature and Governor Brian Kemp just did to crush democracy in that state, you will want to read what a brilliant reporter wrote in the 1950s about how the Nazis took over Germany. It illustrates what the GOP is doing with vivid detail. The Nazis corrupted the political system and took it over, bit by bit, gradually drawing the people along with them, and packing the courts with partisans in a way that was shockingly banal and totally resonant with today.

Did you really think turning America over to billionaire oligarchs and giant corporations would make a better world? Dear Republican voter: When Ted Nugent, the NRA and the GOP told you that more guns would make America a less violent society, what did you expect? Did you really think that suddenly every American would become a fast-draw marksman and vigilante justice would take us back to some happy Wild West movie fantasy?

Americans are disconnected from the real carnage these weapons of war produce. Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever. Emmett Till was kidnapped by two white Mississippi men, brutally tortured, murdered and his mangled body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any consequence.)

American mass murders are a remnant of our slave patrols; RBG was right that Heller was wrongly decided and needs to be overturned. Another mass gun murder just happened in America, the seventh in 7 days, and already “Second Amendment legislators” are offering the 2021 version of thoughts and prayers. Lauren Boebert just tweeted, “May God be with them.” Standing in front of her wall of assault weapons, most likely. And, of course, today on rightwing talk radio and Fox News they’ve already begun lengthy bloviation about the Second Amendment. So, let’s just clear a few things up.

Biden and Congress must unpack our courts and free women and working people. The American Taliban is having its moment, and billionaire groups are riding its energy toward larger and larger profits and control of government. In the process, it’s all showing how dark-money right-wing groups have corrupted our Courts. On CNN this past weekend, Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson told Dana Bash that the main reason he signed an anti-abortion law that would put women in prison for getting abortions, even if they were the victims of rape or incest, was because he wanted it to go to the Supreme Court.

It takes a month in Georgia to register to vote, but you can buy a gun for a mass murder in 10 minutes. The Massage Parlor murders in Georgia remind us that guns, the South, and racially motivated murders have a long history. As I lay out in detail in my book The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment was written the way it was, at the time it was, to guarantee that Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia could maintain their state-based militias, which they explicitly referred to as “Slave Patrols.”

And we may have no protection. Probably the most under-reported story of the week, and perhaps of the year, was a comment that Dr. Anthony Fauci made in response to harassment from Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul.

The Colorado GOP has a new outrage Back in 2000, Mike Pence’s family business — before it went bankrupt, sticking the state with a $20 million toxic waste cleanup bill — was called Tobacco Road; it was a local Indiana chain of convenience stores specializing in selling cigarettes. That’s probably why in 2000 Mike Pence wrote an op-ed saying that cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Whenever it came up later in campaigns, though, he’d change the subject and talk about abortion instead. Now Republicans in Colorado are trying the same little trick only this time with meat.