Hartmann Report

Before considering the details of how Republicans have, for the past 40-plus years, waged a war against the right to vote for all but wealthy white people (and why Democrats did the same before the GOP picked up the mantle in the 1960s), it’s important to understand why each party historically has worked to manipulate the electorate to its own favor. The Democratic Party’s antipathy toward voting had roots deep in the 19th century, in the years following the Civil War. That war, and the subsequent 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution pushed through by Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans, gave pretty much all adult men, regardless of race, the right to vote. Thomas Jefferson had founded the Democratic Party (it was then called the Democratic Republican Party, but the “Republican” part was dropped in the late 1820s and early 1830s), and throughout the 19th century that party (as opposed to the Whigs and the Republicans) was closely associated with support for slavery.

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If Democrats survive the onslaught that's coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic... Get ready: massive pools of dark rightwing money are soon going to clobber us. Will Democracy survive this onslaught by the morbidly rich? Democrats are giddy right now; the substantial lead that Trump had held over Biden for months has largely vanished as the match-up has changed to Harris and Walz. In the ten polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics since Biden's withdrawal, Trump has lost 3 points and only leads by one. In the DailyKos/Civiqs poll Harris leads Trump 49/45, Reuters puts the race at 43/42, and Morning Consult has it at 47/46. Trump is blustering in ways that indicate he thinks he's losing (yesterday's presser at his shabby golf motel was particularly pathetic), while JD Vance's poll numbers are in the toilet…or the couch…and showing no indication of recovery any day soon. That said, other lessons from this and recent past years should keep Democrats from easing up or becoming overconfident. The official beginning of the election season is still almost a month away, and the big money pledged by rightwing and neofascist billionaires hasn't even shown up yet.

They must go to court to take away your gun, but they can take away your vote without even informing you... Last week I documented how in Georgia both Governor and former Secretary of State Brian Kemp and current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have been actively purging millions of Georgians, particularly Black voters, from voter rolls for years. How Kemp purged over 100,000 Georgia voters and then "beat" Stacy Abrams by about 50,000. A similar scheme has been underway in Ohio ever since Republicans took over that state, and also operates in most other Red states that have large Blue cities. The purges that started in a big way under Republicans in Ohio gained both notoriety and lawsuits, one going all the way to the Supreme Court. They did, however, produce a significant blowback: people got pissed off when they showed up to vote and were told that they'd been removed from the voting rolls by the Republican administration of their state. So, Republicans in Texas have come up with a new twist that's designed to avoid directly confronting and angering voters. You could call it "passive aggressive vote suppression."

Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox "News" poison that is now so widely imitated across the rightwing ecosystem, embracing the hearts and minds of millions... All across America families are in mourning: their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the rightwing hate and rage machine. Jen Senko produced a movie — The Brainwashing of My Dad — about losing her own father to Fox "News"; it was also made into a book of the same title. She's been a guest on my show a few times and her story is one replicated across America millions of times: her father — a totally normal Midwestern guy — began watching Fox "News" when he retired and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate. Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad's TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch's infamous hate machine had thrown him into. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is America's intervention against the mind poison Trump, Fox "News," and rightwing hate radio have infected our nation with.

It's not Bill Barr's first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who committed crimes that rise to the level of treason against America... The Washington Post reported last week that there's very good reason to believe that Egypt's dictator, Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, organized a $10 million cash bribe to Donald Trump when he was most desperate for the same amount of money during the 2016 election. American intelligence reported that el-Sisi ordered $10 million in $100 bills be taken from a bank in Egypt — representing a large chunk of that country's entire US dollar foreign reserves — and have them transported, possibly, to Donald Trump.

The result was that science, culture, and human rights — and even the exploration of any religious doctrine not authorized by Church authorities — were frozen for a "dark" thousand years… Want a repeat of the Dark Ages? Just put religion in charge of government. Donald Trump and JD Vance, who recently converted to Catholicism, are the political leaders of a movement to convert America's form of governance from a secular democratic republic into a fundamentalist white Christian ethnostate. In this, they're joined by the six Catholic Republican justices on the Supreme Court who've already imposed their church's religious doctrine on the rest of us with their Dobbs decision. Trump's doing this to bring in the fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic vote; Vance is apparently a true believer. In both cases they threaten to throw America into a new Dark Age resembling, in a worst case scenario, the rule of the mullahs who replaced Iran's secular democracy with a theocratic state. It's useful to look at what happened to Europe when, around the 6th century, the newly formed Catholic Church took over most of that continent and ruled it with an iron fist for at least nine centuries, an era we refer to as "the Dark Ages."

Looking back, although about half of the founders were practicing their own form of voter suppression as slaveholders, most held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It’s hard to imagine that they’d ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley v. Valeo case and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United v. FEC). In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read it in his Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy that was run of, by, and for the rich.24 He said in a 1788 speech that there were “two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons, and the rights of property.”25 He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. “Give all power to property,” he said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”

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He hasn't grown or developed new routines; he's just daily reliving his old hits, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days... I hear it frequently on my radio/TV program: Americans are baffled about what's happened to Donald Trump. He used to seem so formidable, a very real threat to American democracy, the pal of dictators around the world. Now even Putin is dissing him, cutting the very prisoner deal with President Biden that Trump said a few weeks ago the Russian dictator would only do with him. He's gone, in the minds of many Americans, from being a danger to being merely weird. What happened? The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career. He hasn't grown or developed new routines; he's just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days.