Hartmann Report

Our country has been poisoned, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote, America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation: tag, you’re it! This past weekend The New York Times busted Ron DeSantis for traveling around the country on the private jets of morbidly rich rightwingers, often in ways that prevent the public from ever finding out who’s showering these gifts upon him presumably in expectation of future government favors. Our country has been poisoned, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation. It’s taken 50 years, but we’re now at the point of maximum crisis. First came the poison of big money corrupting politics.

The Myth of the Well-Armed Cowboy. Leave Your Revolvers at Police Headquarters, and Get a Check. —Signs posted throughout Wichita, Kansas, in 1873 and typical of other Wild West towns of the era

The Best of the Rest of the News. — No Labels is a group almost entirely funded by dark money, generally supporting what I consider the most corporate-sold-out politicians and policies. — Can Democrats count on Zoomers and Millennials? — China agrees with DeSantis and other Republican governors: library books should not contain “unhealthy ideas.” What’s unhealthy? Whatever the dictator decides. — Speaking of China, have they given DeSantis another idea? — Can Gerrymandering get worse? — Have you been arguing with machines on social media, thinking they’re humans? — Is the EPA finally waking up from the Trump disaster? — Geeky Science! Why our modern lifestyLe is leading to brain shrinkage & what can be done. — Crazy Alert! Jesse Watters wants you to be afraid of black people not white supremacists. — Video of the Day: A bit of humanity hits the war in Ukraine.

He was so ignorant of sex & reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse. Here's how he could shut down every abortion facility in America… You’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.

Hamilton and the other Framers envisioned a Supreme Court that was immune to public opinion, the arguments of presidents and senators, and great wealth alike - but today's GOP has a different plan… We have, today, the most extreme Supreme Court since the early 1930s, and it didn't just get that way through Republican appointments. Breaking two centuries of tradition, wealthy GOP donors are now using money, gifts, and other enticements to keep the Court in line. In this, they're exploiting the lifetime tenure given federal judges by the Constitution. If a billionaire or industry can suck up to and build a relationship with a Supreme Court justice early enough in their career, they can be confident of decades of decisions that favor them and their interests, as we've seen most shockingly in the case of Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas. This is the exact opposite of the intention of the Framers of the Constitution.

Next year may be the last chance to reclaim the values of democracy, pluralism & egalitarianism that have animated this country since her founding. Nobody can say they weren’t warned about the stakes… “Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre A former employee of Rudy Giuliani, who was hired to help him drum up business for his law firm, has sworn under oath and penalty of perjury that he told her one of the “business opportunities” she could exploit was to sell pardons to felons for $2 million each. Giuliani, she alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday, told her he’d be splitting the money with Trump 50/50. It’s an echo of a mostly-forgotten story in The New York Times from over two years ago: the $2 million figure matches what John Kiriakou told reporters and the FBI (which appears not to have followed up) that Giuliani quoted him as the cost to buy a pardon from Trump. (Kiriakou turned the offer down, noting that he didn’t have $2 million even if he were inclined, which he wasn’t.)

Apparently John Durham’s "imagination" couldn’t extend to the possibility that Trump has been a Russian asset for at least 30 years and continues to be one to this day. Why? Imagine you’re in the FBI overseeing national security and a candidate for President for the United States hired to run his campaign a man who’d: — taken $66 million from Russian intelligence services via Putin-friendly oligarchs, — helped Russia install their own puppet government in Ukraine in 2010, — was paid $1 million a year to help the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), solidify his relationship with Moscow, — forced his party to remove references in their platform to defending Ukrainian democracy... Imagine that candidate had visited Moscow with his Soviet-citizen wife — whose father was a Soviet agent — and been groomed all the way back in 1987 by Russian intelligence (then Soviet intelligence, the KGB) to run for president.

The billionaire funders of GOP politicians could end this all in a single day — by refusing to further fund any politician who continues to embrace guns, dystopian rhetoric, insurrection, and hate... Republicans are promoting death again, this time with DeSantis signing into law a bill that eliminates legal liability for doctors and other medical professionals (including EMTs) if they choose to let you die at the scene or on the operating table, or simply turn you away to let you die alone, because of their “moral, ethical, and religious convictions.” The law says: “[T]hat health care providers and health care payors have the right to opt out of participation in or payment for certain health care services on the basis of conscience-based objections” and “prohibits discrimination or adverse action against health care providers who decline to participate in a health care service on the basis of conscience-based objection…” What started out as a slavery-, wife-beating-, and lynching-celebrating death cult fringe in the Southern Democratic Party — a group that called themselves Dixiecrats — has now fully taken over the GOP.

How Fears of Abolition Shaped the Second Amendment. "Give me liberty or give me death." —Patrick Henry. Article 1, Section 8, of the proposed Constitution had southern slave owners concerned about the future of their economy.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Was the CNN Trump town hall the worst hour on TV ever — Does America have collective PTSD from Trump’s hate and lies? — Texas wants 5-year-olds to know they shouldn’t “covet another man’s wife” and to replace school counselors with uncertified, unlicensed, state-paid “pastors” to give children “spiritual counseling.” — Geeky Science: The threat from climate change just went way up. — Will Turkey’s turn toward fascism roll back this weekend? After Brazil and Mexico electing south- and central-American versions of a progressive, is the world turning back to sanity? — Russia is building a village for American conservatives who hate gays and love white supremacy. — Would ending anonymity help clean up social media? — Good news: Illinois is bucking the GOP trend of hating on queer people, moving toward gender inclusivity instead. — Crazy Alert! Couple attacked for buying Bud Light?