Hartmann Report

Will Jack Smith & the Department of Justice do battle against Ginni Thomas & a group of people who are openly working to manipulate our system to the benefit of Trump and his fascist cronies? Now that Republicans on the Supreme Court have forced a pause in Donald Trump's federal trial for trying to overthrow the government of the United States and install himself as dictator for life, Jack Smith and his team may have a little time on their hands. Respectfully, I'd suggest this may be a great time to dust off his identification of Trump's six main co-conspirators and roll out indictments against each of them. None were president so, even if Trump did have "total immunity for life," they are all vulnerable to immediate prosecution.

SCOTUS introduced what will be at least a 130-day delay in Trump's trial. They won't even hear arguments until April 22. Democracy be damned... At least four members of the most corrupt Supreme Court in American history have decided to help Trump delay his trial for trying to overthrow the government of the United States. Just like in 2000, when five Republicans on the Court ignored Al Gore's probable (later found to be definite) win in Florida to put Bush in the White House, today's Court is doing as much as they can to help Trump win this November. In a hail-Mary attempt to push his trials beyond the election, hoping he'd win with Putin's help and could then pardon himself and gut the DOJ, Trump's attorneys filed a claim that his efforts to overturn the 2020 election were "official acts" and that all presidents have "absolute immunity" while in office and for the rest of their lives thereafter.

How much more damage are we willing to take? Garland and the DOJ need to get some answers and share them with the American people soon… "When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he's like the 12-year old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. 'My hero!' It's really creepy." —Malcolm Turnbull, 29th Prime Minister of Australia Donald Trump needs money. Apparently, many of the documents Trump stole from the White House are still missing. Including the binder with raw intelligence about American spies in Moscow. Are they his "get out of jail free" card?

Economic crises represent social and political transition points, times of great difficulty but also times of great opportunity: We now stand at the edge of one those rare windows in time... America is recovering from an economic crisis and Russia and China seem hell-bent on pushing us into what may become a world war. We've been here three times before in the history of our country, and each one has heralded major changes in the nature and structure of our government. As we watch corporations pour increasingly large amounts of money into politics, it's a good time to reevaluate their role in governance and society. At the top of that list is the doctrine created out of whole cloth by the US Supreme Court in the late 19th century called "Corporate Personhood." It has become one of the most destructive forces in American politics. In 1776, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published and the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed. This was no coincidence: both were broadly embraced reactions, in part, to a widespread economic depression that had begun in the previous decade.

Here's what I'm hearing Republicans are planning in the event Joe Biden wins re-election & Democrats hold the Senate and take the House this November… Back on March 13, 2020 — almost exactly four years ago — I wrote an article that was published at alternet.org laying out how Republicans were then, ten months before January 6th, planning to partially repeat the debacle of the election of 1876 by having Vice President Pence refuse to certify swing state votes and thus throw the election to the House to keep Trump in office, no matter how the election went. When I published the article ten months before January 6th, I received concerned and even alarmed communications from several Democratic strategists and a few elected officials who basically said they didn't think there was any way Trump would try such an audacious move and, if he did, he wouldn't get away with it. But I was right and that was exactly what Trump had up his sleeve. We saw it play out on January 6th. The only thing that stopped him was Pence's unwillingness to go along with stealing an election. Now I'm hearing a new story from those same GOP insiders (as well as other commentators) about Trump's schemes for 2024.

No matter how much Robert Bork and his colleagues say they’re “pro-business,” what they’re actually advocating is helpful only to a very small class of very large businesses and the very wealthy people who own them or their stock. Small and medium-sized businesses, entrepreneurs, workers, communities, and start-ups are badly damaged by the focus of antitrust law being kept entirely on prices that consumers pay. Bork—and indeed his entire class of Chicago School economists—was always focused on the interests of straight, white, wealthy men to the exclusion of women, communities of color, and people who were not the “makers” and “job creators” of their lore. Consistent with that focus, whether applied to micro- or macroeconomics, to regulating pollution or monopolies, to their complaints about “anti-war hippies” “urban dwellers,” or “women’s libbers,” Bork and his friends managed to insert into the political and economic bloodstream of our nation the cancer-causing virus of “greed is good” ideology. Its impact has been devastating.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why are conservatives calling for the end of American democracy? — Biden imposes more than 500 new Russia sanctions after Navalny’s death. — Texas says to hell with the kids and to hell with the grocers who’d provide their food. — Is a Fukushima or Chernobyl-style meltdown the next way Russia intends to kneecap Ukraine? — Florida surgeon general defies science amid measles outbreak. — Texas Republicans nearly killed another woman this week. — Alabama Justice Parker, who ruled embryos are children, wants preachers running America. — Tennessee Republicans vote affirmatively to force 8- to 12-year-old girls to carry rape-caused pregnancies to term. — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert: Vindicated! ADHD is an Evolutionary Success! — Geeky Science! Tart cherries can help reduce inflammation and pain. — Do conservatives want to end recreational sex?

They don't care that democracy, here and around the world, is hanging by a thread… "Useful idiots" doesn't begin to describe the treason weasel twins, Comer and Jordan, who are enthusiastically promoting zombie lies Russia came up with in 2016 to help Trump win the White House. They're mainstreaming political poison directly into the bloodstream of our body politic. Purely for political profit. Vladimir Putin always knew he couldn't beat America militarily, so his next best option was to infiltrate our political systems and seize control of the GOP. It increasingly looks like he's pulled it off, right down to blocking US aid to Ukraine for over a year.

How Putin seized control of the Republican Party… There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy. Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.

If a Republican is elected to the White House, you can expect all that caution to go out the window: every woman of reproductive age in America will have a target on her back — or her uterus… Right now, they're laying low. They're waiting for a Republican president to institute a national ban on abortion so they can start their jeremiads against women seeking abortions. In the meantime, they're getting ready. "They," of course, are the religious anti-abortion freaks in the GOP who want to punish "loose women" who seek abortions. Longer term, they also want to target women seeking birth control who, instead of being in the workplace or college, Republicans believe should be at home barefoot, pregnant, and in full-out tradwife mode.