Hartmann Report

GOP lawmakers are running from their own voters — Democrats should take their place! Republicans have a new strategy to deal with town halls that are going poorly: Run and hide. Democrats have a great opportunity here. Congressman Mark Pocan has been doing it for years. Representative Ro Khanna is doing three of them this coming month. Bernie Sanders is doing it, too. We should all be reaching out to our members of the House and Senate to ask them to do the same. I'm talking about elected Democrats traveling to Red districts (House members) or Red states (Senators) to hold town halls in those places where Republicans refuse to show their faces.

By Greg Palast for The Hartmann Report Greg Palast is a forensic economist and recipient of the Global Editors Award for Data Journalism. Watch Palast's latest film, "Vigilantes Inc: America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen," produced by George DiCaprio and Martin Sheen. You can ignore Trump slyly hinting to the Lord's chosen that he just might call off the next election. "Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians." But don't ignore this: Trump won't be calling off the election because he doesn't have to. The Fix for 26 is already in. The Republican plan is to win next year's election this year. Yes, the voting will be bent, jacked and hammered this year, 2025, one year before the official voting. Because this is the year of The Great Purge. And if The Great Purge doesn't do the trick, Republicans are ramping up other vote suppression tactics they rolled out to win 2024, including a private army of MAGA-nauts who challenged over a million voters' ballots in 2024 and plan on way more by the 2026 midterm.

Gerrymandering, voter purges, and signature rejections aren't fair—but they're legal. Why are Democrats refusing to use them? Imagine that the NFL made a rule change that allowed every team to have an extra three men on the field during the game — but half of the NFL teams, protesting the new rule as "wrong" and "too much of a deviation from fairness and norms" refused to add the three players to their own lineups. Who'd be winning almost every game? Who'd be going to the Superbowl?

History warns us: When authoritarians seize power, they often light the match themselves... Get ready. The resistance to billionaires running our government is growing. Bernie Sanders is touring the Red State Midwest and drawing massive crowds. Federal workers are pissed. Republican politicians are in hiding, refusing to do town halls even when their constituents demand them or try to set them up.

Vote by mail can overcome the physical hurdle of getting voters to polling places, but we can also make polling places more available to voters than just during polling hours on a Tuesday in November. Extending early voting helps to address the time constraints that voters in the real world face. Real voters have families, children, jobs, and other pressing demands that make it difficult to drop everything on a Tuesday in November to stand in line potentially for hours. Even after standing in line for hours, many legitimate voters have been told they are not properly registered and offered a provisional ballot to cast—which may or may not be counted.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The most horrifying news story of the day — Republicans are really in love with Nazi Hitler salutes! — Trump is about to seize control of the Post Office. Is this all about voting by mail? — Remember Trump's and Vance's lies about Haitians in Springfield eating cats and dogs? They're now planning to deport them, many to a certain death. — 'We're going back': Proud Boys and Oath Keepers plan presser at Capitol they stormed; is there anything wrong with cop killers returning to the scene of their crime? — Missouri Republican wants to "register" pregnant women he says are "at risk of seeking abortion." — Can we all be like Chris Kluwe? — You need to have a bird flu plan for your cats or they will most likely die.

Will any Republican in today's House or Senate — the bodies the Founders created — find even a fraction of the courage of the men who founded this nation? Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger asks a question no current Republican politician appears willing to say out loud for fear that Musk, Trump, or other rightwing billionaires will use the corrupt Citizens United decision to blow them out of the water politically with a multimillion-dollar primary challenge: "[A]s I watch the behavior of our political leaders, the comments of an ever-increasingly unhinged Trump, and the growing indifference of many Americans toward our role in the world, I have to ask a painful question: Are we now the bad guys?" It's a helluva question. Our nation's Founders overthrew a king in 1776, and paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared. The signers wrote in the Declaration, "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor," and it was a simple statement of fact. The day they signed that document, each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the ruler who controlled their lands and their homes.

The right's jihad against DEI isn't about fairness; it's about losing privilege and control… Trump and his white male supremacist buddies in government and rightwing media have been playing our legacy media and the American people for suckers. And it's working. "Big Balls" and his openly racist buddies at DOGE have been, according to reports in the media, scouring federal agencies for "illegal DEI" programs. Meanwhile, rightwing radio hosts are speculating whether the Delta Airlines crash in Toronto this week was the result of a female or Black "DEI hire" pilot flying the plane because Delta has refused to kill off its own DEI programs. The explicit and implicit message Trump, Musk, and their goon squad have been promoting is that when a woman or Black, disabled, or Hispanic man is hired they are inherently inferior in their intellect and capabilities to the white man from whom that job was taken. It's an evil lie.

Why is Trump bending the knee to Putin? What if Putin owns Trump? I mean, seriously, what the hell is up with this? The BBC reported yesterday that Trump gave Russia everything they want with regard to Ukraine, rewarding Putin's invasion of a sovereign European nation, and even took steps to help rebuild Russia's economy that sanctions and the war damaged

Why are Republican leaders echoing Hitler's symbology and rhetoric — and getting away with it? One of the enduring mysteries in today's American political life is why so many Republican politicians and their friends are adopting or promoting openly Nazi symbols, iconography, and slogans. Is it a shout-out to the hardcore racists and haters that make up the GOP's base, all just a performance to get enough votes to win elections? Or a proclamation that the end-goal of Republican governance is the destruction of American democracy, perhaps in deference to Vladimir Putin? How about it's being a bizarre attempt at trolling people old or well-educated enough to remember or know what Nazism inevitably leads to? And why are America's mainstream media so unwilling to even report on, much less discuss, all the Nazi and neo-Nazi references surrounding Trump and today's captive Republicans?