Hartmann Report

The GOP Built a Propaganda Empire. Democrats Built a Consultancy Firm. For at least a few decades, Republicans and Democrats have been following two very different strategies when it comes to political messaging. And the GOP is doing it effectively — making big, bold statements — while cautious Democrats are getting wiped out. Republicans are leading public opinion while Democrats are trying to chase it. That does not work. The essence of the problem is that the corporate wing of the Democratic Party tells their politicians and ad people that they need to pay careful attention to public polling and calibrate their positions around "where the public is at." And, of course, don't take positions (like Medicare for All) that would offend donors (insurance companies, in this case). The results are "safe," focus-grouped policies that fail to inspire or move voters. And, even more importantly, don't change public opinion itself.

Undermine democracy. Destroy institutions. Divide the people. Loot the country. Collapse it from the inside out… If Putin wanted to kill America, how would he best do it? Exactly like this: — Install a puppet or ally inside the government; as Lincoln foresaw, a tyrant doesn’t need to invade. He just needs to rise from within. Trump has repeatedly echoed Kremlin talking points, undermined NATO, attacked Ukraine, praised autocrats, and created chaos at home. If Putin picked a candidate, it would be Trump — and the intelligence community has confirmed Russian efforts to help him win in both 2016 and 2020...

The Democratic Party is facing a crisis that it’s experienced only once before in its history: the near-complete loss, for multiple generations, of control of the Senate—and thus the loss of any say in the makeup of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court. Within the next two decades, half of the population of the United States will live in just eight states and be represented by only 16 (out of 100) senators.37 Right now, about two-thirds of the US population lives in just 15 states, represented by only 30 senators (and thus 30 percent of the Senate). There’s history here, and Democrats need to learn from it fast.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — DOGE plans to re-program Social Security. — Are Trump and Putin carving up the planet? — Trump’s message to America: Scam the people, get a pardon. — The resistance in America is alive and doing well: stay engaged! — Bribe the president, get an exemption from pollution rules? — Georgia police jailed another woman for having a miscarriage. — Scientists are alarmed as the Trump administration goes to war against mRNA science. Seriously folks? — Crazy Alert! Tucker Carlson Says He Doesn’t Want to Fly on a Plane with a Vaccinated Pilot: “It’s Too Dangerous.” — Hunter in a Farmer’s World: ADHD: Can You Find Your Positivity Patterns? — Wisdom School: Can Humans Truly Perceive the Future?

How the GOP's war on empathy turned America into a playground for billionaires and psychopaths... "In my work with the defendants [at Nuremberg], I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men." — Captain Gustave Gilbert, the US army psychologist assigned to observe the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

Masked ICE agents are now snatching dissidents off the streets like a scene from Stalin's Russia. This isn't speculative fiction. It's happening right now, in America… This is how it begins. Tuesday night, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was going out to a restaurant to meet friends when masked federal ICE agents dressed in street clothes seized her off a public sidewalk and disappeared her. Her apparent crime was co-authoring an op-ed critical of Trump and Netanyahu. Where is she now? At first, nobody knew. As her attorney told The New York Times: "We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her." Then it was revealed last night — as the video of her kidnapping went viral — that she's been transported to a violent ICE facility in Louisiana. Yeah, that place. Without any legal due process that anybody can identify.

No matter how hard you try, the world won't forget. The lies, the corruption, and the betrayal are etched into history, a stain that will follow your party for generations… Dear Republicans, Here we go again. A large chunk of Trump's cabinet and our national security leaders just endangered our country and our pilots who were flying over Yemen with their arrogance and frank stupidity. Their lies about it were so egregious that Jeffrey Goldberg published the actual transcript in The Atlantic this morning. Only the best people, right?

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight was a 1971 movie starring Robert DeNiro about a mafia family in New York that’s led by a buffoon who surrounds himself with other incompetents and thus seems to always screw everything up. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Trump administration.

And this one ends with either democracy renewed — or democracy erased… We're now at the point where five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have harmed us so severely that our nation is facing an oligarchic takeover, aka a constitutional crisis. Trump is ignoring the courts' orders and threatening the judges' lives so blatantly that even Chief Justice John Roberts has been moved to speak out. The history of America is the history of fits and starts of progress followed by oligarchic backlash leading to periods of pain and stagnation (except for the morbidly rich). Our first eighty years started with the American Revolution against an absolute monarch and the world's largest corporation. But the Founders' idealism was rejected by the Southern oligarchs, who saw the end of slavery as a threat to their wealth and power; they'd already turned the South into a neofascist hellscape and then launched the war against America that Abraham Lincoln won.

Voting is mandatory in Australia and Belgium—so why not here? Many people would loudly proclaim that compulsory voting is an anti-democratic idea, but it seems unlikely that anyone would argue that Australia and Belgium are dictatorships because they fine people who don’t vote. The $20 fine is high enough to make it worthwhile for voters to participate but low enough that it is unlikely to bankrupt someone or be burdensome to enforce. Australia implemented compulsory voting in 1924; the voter turnout in Australia has never been lower than 91 percent.