Hartmann Report

The Best of the Rest of the News. — “Freakout at the highest levels” — 50 Lies Trump Told On The Debate Stage: Team Biden Hits Back. — The Supreme Court just blew up the “Chevron deference.” America will never be the same. — Republicans on the Supreme Court hand a victory to January 6th rioters and Trump. — The Christian Nationalist movement to force religion on our children got a big boost this past week when the governor of Oklahoma mandated that the Christian Bible be taught in that state’s public schools. — ADHD Alert: ADHD: The Perception of Time — Wisdom School Alert! Unlock the Secret to Longevity: Can Intermittent Fasting Add Years to Your Life?

This election is too important to indulge one man's desire to hang onto his office. It literally will define the future of democracy as a form of governance both in America and worldwide… Last night, I ghost-wrote this for the editorial board of Raw Story at their request; they made a few changes and expanded it somewhat as you can see on their site. This morning, I would add that Trump told over 30 massive and consequential lies last night, again demonstrating his lack of fitness for the presidency and CNN's inability to honestly moderate a debate. It's doubtful, though, that anybody in the Republican party will be discussing replacing him today. There are massive possible downsides and upsides to replacing President Biden on the ticket at this late date. The upside is that the publicity and national curiosity around the new candidate could swamp Trump and his BS and reinvigorate the campaign. The downside is that the possible infighting, and the possibility of the Democratic Party picking a weak candidate (including the vice president), could produce the opposite effect and hand the election to Trump.

This lawlessness has gone way too far: the Senate needs to intervene and reassert its authority over the Supreme Court. And they need to do it now… With the leaked Idaho emergency abortion ruling yesterday, it appears the Republicans on the Supreme Court are trying to do the same thing they did with the Mifepristone ruling: move the cases to a non-election-year to avoid hurting GOP candidates. Since it only takes four justices to grant cert and commit the Court to hearing a decision, it's obvious that the most fanatic Catholic anti-abortion freaks on the Court, who wanted to ban Mifepristone and shut down emergency abortions in Idaho, opened the Court's door for these cases to be heard this year. However, once the cases were argued, their more rational Republican colleagues convinced them that such decisions this year would doom Trump's chances in the election, so they punted and shot the cases down based on standing (saying the plaintiffs didn't have a right to sue). In other words, they decided not to decide.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South… Tomorrow is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America. Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

While hate has always been a part of the American landscape, the entrance of Trump onto the American political scene has led to an explosion of hate crimes against racial and religious minorities... She may never be the same. This past weekend, three American citizens were hanging out at their apartment complex swimming pool, a mom and her two children, a little girl, 3, and a boy who was 7 years old. Mom was Muslim, so she wore a modest swimsuit and a hijab. Which infuriated Elizabeth Wolf, a 42-year-old white woman, who, upon arriving at the pool, began loudly berating the young mother, using racial slurs to tell her she wasn't welcome in white America. Wolf then jumped into the pool and grabbed the two children, who were playing in the shallow end, and tried to drown them.

A middle class is not a normal thing, and if a country wants one it must be created by direct government intervention in the marketplace… As we head toward the presidential debate this week, the Republicans' vision for America is becoming clearer by the day. From Trump to Project 2025 to the speeches of multiple Republican senators and members of Congress, you'll frequently hear the phrase "post-constitutional" applied. They refer to a "post-constitutional moment" and a Republican "post-constitutional presidency." But what do they mean by this?

The key to a functioning regulated-capitalist economy is competition; as competition declines, so do innovation, investment, employment, and the wealth of working people. Lacking competition, those people and corporations in the economic top .01% will explode their wealth while everything and everybody else suffers. Since the 1980s, when Reagan began aggressively applying Chicago School neoliberal policies and Robert Bork’s perspective on antitrust, industry after industry, sector after sector, has been interpenetrated and then consumed almost entirely by cancer-like monopolies and oligopolies. Not only have wages and innovation suffered, but the overall economy itself has largely stagnated, relative to the preceding four decades.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — With Religious fascism on the rise… — Is it a “break glass” moment with Judge Cannon? — The Supreme Court has already helped Trump beat his federal rap for trying to overthrow our country and steal the 2020 election. — In Red states, TV weather is getting way too political. — The climate crisis is also an insurance crisis. — Fascist Alert! RFK Jr.’s campaign wants “serious jail time” for CNN’s Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and others. — Crazy Alert! Republican legislator arrested chasing an adult dancer down a public street waving a gun at her at 2:45am - but it gets even weirder than that. — Hunter In a Farmer’s World Alert! ADHD: Practice Keeping On Task — Wisdom School Alert! robert wolff's Ancient Way of Knowing

It is utter BS to justify imposing religious doctrine on impressionable youth: there isn’t that much overlap between the Ten Commandments and American or Louisiana law... “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” —Thomas Jefferson How will the Ten Commandments do anything at all to help Louisiana’s many crises?

In less than a month, Republicans will meet in Milwaukee to crown Donald Trump as their Emperor King and Sun God. But the real powers behind the GOP — the billionaires and their institutions that created Project 2025 as a how-to manual to convert American democracy into something like the old Confederacy — don’t much care about poor old Donald. Sure, they want him to be the nominee because NBC trained him well in the dark art of playing a successful businessman on television. He brings in the rubes like nobody since Huey Long; he’s a singularly brilliant politician, much as Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Mussolini are and were. But he can also be irrational, impulsive, disloyal, dishonest, and unpredictable, qualities that make the men who want to revive the Confederacy to replace our republican form of government wary. They have big plans — far bigger than Trump’s tiny dream of vengeance — and don’t want him screwing things up. Thus, the real action in Milwaukee won’t be the show — though it’ll be a hell of a show — around Trump’s coronation; it’ll be in the back rooms where Trump is told who’s going to be his vice president. That’ll be the guy (it will be a guy) who does the actual heavy lifting in “deconstructing the administrative state,” seizing control of our media, and stripping average Americans of what’s left of their wealth and rights.