Hartmann Report

The best of the rest of the news. — Almost two weeks before January 6th, apparently in anticipation of that attempt to hang Mike Pence and assassinate Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump told the top official in the Justice Department to declare that the 2020 election was marred by corrupt voter fraud, which he and his Republican allies were alleging happened in largely-Black parts of Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Phoenix. If they’d done that publicly, then he and his Republican buddies — he named Congressman Jim Jordan and Senator Ron Johnson — could overturn Joe Biden’s electoral college win in Congress.

Emperor Nero, it’s said, fiddled while Rome burned; If you don’t want our politicians to continue to follow his example while the world burns, get politically active now. We are standing in an extinction event. Many of us started noticing it when the insects began to vanish in large numbers right after the turn of the century.

Things seem bleak, but it’s that very bleakness that history tells us produces movements to overthrow psychopathic oligarchs. Thom Hartmann 1 hr ago 7 Image by Brigitte makes custom works from your photos, thanks a lot from Pixabay Share Democrats thought they’d come up with a solution, or at least a good start toward a solution, to the crisis of climate change — one that would also create millions of good paying jobs to revive the American middle class after the Covid shock. It was all in their $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill. And then came the headline: Kyrsten Sinema Just Threw an Unexpected Wrench Into Biden's Infrastructure Plans, quoting the Democratic senator saying, “I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion.”

More Americans are seeing through the “freedom” scam & are leaving the Party in droves. How will they market voter suppression as their latest twist on “freedom”? You know they'll try... A restaurant in California is now requiring proof that you are not vaccinated before they will serve you because, the owner told the Los Angeles Times, “we chose to fire another missile of defiance to further make our point in defense of American liberty and freedom.” Republicans are running a scam about “freedom” and they’ve been pushing it for a very, very long time. Sadly, people are still buying it.

White supremacy, racism & the rest of America subsidizing Red states weren’t just realities in 1787: they’re alive and well today & Hawley and his white supremacist buddies want to keep it that way. Former-slave-state Missouri Senator Josh Hawley doesn’t want America’s white children to be exposed to the simple reality that slavery was not only legal at the founding of our country but was, in several places, written into our Constitution. And that the rest of America subsidized the slave-owners’ states and continues to subsidize them to this day.

America has a bully problem, and we’re not going to solve it by giving in; today’s Democrats need to take a lesson from FDR & LBJ and take on the bullies so they can get things done for Americans. Democrats must stop giving in to grifter bullies. If you don’t take on bullies, they keep going further and further until either they win or you fight back and defeat them. The best political example of this writ large was Hitler. He pushed around most of Europe and they kept giving in or trying to appease him, thinking at some point he’d have gotten enough. Neville Chamberlain thought he could negotiate with a bully and came back from his meetings with Hitler believing he’d achieved “peace in our time.” But, of course, you can never actually negotiate with a bully: you can only contain or defeat them. Which is what FDR, Churchill and Stalin ended up having to do.

The best of the rest of the news. — “But it was just theater!” Counties that went along with Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him are now discovering (as they were warned) that when they turned their voting machines and ballots over to unqualified, uncertified Republican-affiliated hustlers for “audits,” their equipment would lose its certification and must be replaced. Now they’re facing huge bills to replace their voting infrastructure, while also facing possible prosecution should Merrick Garland’s Justice Department ever decide to finally start holding Republicans accountable for their crimes. (It’s a clear and felonious violation of federal law to hand over ballots or machines within 22 months after a federal election.) Nonetheless, even more Republicans around the country are trying to repeat the stunt in an effort to further erode faith and confidence in American democracy so when, in 2022 and 2024, they start using their new “election integrity” laws to throw out huge numbers of ballots from mostly-Black districts people will think it’s normal.

If one of Trump’s larger crimes involved leaning on Anthony Kennedy to resign & greasing the skids for a pliable stooge in Brett Kavanaugh, Americans & Congress have an absolute right to know. During the confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh, over 4500 tips about sexual assault, gambling and other issues came into the FBI, including several now known to have come from highly credible sources. Instead of investigating them, we learned this week, Chris Wray’s FBI handed them over to the Trump White House…where they died.

The only way to deal with parasites is to remove them from their host. It’s time to expand Medicare to all Americans so we can dislodge these healthcare parasites from our body politic. Parasites attach themselves to your body and suck your blood to feed themselves. Most, like ticks and mosquitos, while they may provide food for birds, bats and other animals, seem to provide no direct benefit at all to humans. That “no benefit” equation goes double for the latest parasites who have attached themselves to the backs of Americans and are rapidly draining us of our economic blood: health insurance companies.

If we're not going to be a force for good in the world, it’s time for us to close down our foreign military bases & operations & spend some time & money rebuilding this country, gutted by Reaganomics. America needs to define a consistent, honest and public position on foreign aid and foreign interventions. If we fail to do so, we’ll continue to produce disasters that have long-term consequences not only for the countries with whom we’ve interfered but also here in the US.