Hartmann Report

In Johnson, the GOP have found the perfect embodiment of their deplorable basket of hatreds - the only “loves” are rightwing billionaires, the fossil fuel industry & of course Trump’s buddy, Putin... The election of Louisiana’s Mike Johnson as House Speaker proves the premise that all the GOP has left are Donald Trump and hate. As Congressman Jamie Raskin told reporters yesterday: “Donald Trump has cemented his control over the Republican conference in the House of Representatives. He has a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Even as he faces 91 criminal charges and several of his election lawyers have pleaded guilty now to election-related offenses, one of his enablers on January 6 has just become the speaker of the House Representatives.” Johnson’s hate of Democrats is so deep that he led a Trump-backed effort in the House to get Republicans to back a lawsuit by 18 Republican state attorneys general to overturn Biden’s election as president.

It’s so dramatic & so shocking that scientists — typically not prone to hyperbole — published in the journal BioScience: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory...” Sometime in the past year, this tiny planet we live on in an obscure corner of our Milky Way galaxy went through some sort of tipping point, a “state change” of sorts, and now things are different from how they’ve been at any other time in the 300,000 year history of the human race. Nobody knows for sure what that change or tipping point is.

Republican-aligned rightwing billionaires are gleeful at the prospect of further government dysfunction gutting social programs while Putin, Xi & the leaders of Hamas are reveling in the chaos... Eleven Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent letters to the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director asking for a briefing on how the Chinese government is manipulating Republicans amidst the Speaker debate to keep America enfeebled in anticipation of a possible invasion of Taiwan. The letter explicitly asked for information about how: “[O]ur foreign adversaries are leveraging current political dysfunction in the U.S. House of Representatives to discredit democracy globally in their efforts to promote an alternative authoritarian model of governance internationally, enhance their ability to form economic and national security alliances, and harm our standing with strategic partners.” As an old hippie peacenik it pains me to say it but America, Europe, and the democracies of Asia are preparing for an all-out world war.

Voters who believe in democracy, a free press & a public education committed to honest inquiry & intellectual integrity must also step up and let their reps how important these things are to them… For far too many years, Americans have made the mistake of assuming that our republican democracy will be safe as long as we elect competent and well-intentioned politicians as leaders. Sadly, that’s like thinking your surgeon, who is very good at what she does, will do a wonderful job even though the hospital can no longer provide her with sterile instruments or running water.

Government is the agency that we collectively create (at least we do in a democratic republic) to manage the natural monopolies that we all use, share, and/or need: the atmosphere, water and waterways, septic and waste, public roads and skyways, police and fire, and, most broadly, the entire infrastructure of commerce and the public good. The whole idea of government grew out of ancient families, tribes, and clans, who worked together to protect the youngest, eldest, and weakest members of then-hunter-gatherer communities.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — How many American will face “climate gentrification” and what will be done? — Why the GOP Can’t Unite: Is it because Trump is like the Don Corleone of the Republican Party and still in control? — If only the framers of the Constitution had had a thesaurus, then Trump couldn't run for president. — Wisconsin Republicans hold hostage pay raises for university staff unless they end diversity programs: the GOP is saying, “If you not racist, we won’t pay you.” — Here comes net neutrality! — What will be the impact of Mortgage rates hitting 8%? — Geeky Science! ADHD: Can You Overcome Procrastination? — Crazy Alert! MAGA pastor whines about handicapped parking & says wheelchair-bound people should just walk or go to a different church....

Are Republicans warming up the jail cells they want to put American women into who have the temerity to continue using birth control after the GOP’s bans take effect? Last year, all three candidates in the Republican race for Michigan Attorney General proudly confirmed that they believed the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v Connecticut was “wrongly decided” on privacy grounds and that it was an infringement on a state’s right to imprison women, regardless of marital status, who use birth control. Yes, birth control. Each described himself as a “Christian” and implied his opposition to Griswold was grounded in his religious faith.

The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have a national, single-payer healthcare system… Former Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton is struggling to pay her medical bills and has opened up a GoFundMe page to collect donations. How can this be happening in the wealthiest nation in the world? America is the only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right, the only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare, and the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, continuously enslaved and legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race. These things are connected.

If it weren’t for the ability to bribe politicians and school board members, we’d have honest science textbooks in Red states; instead, their children are being criminally dumbed down & misinformed… The fossil fuel industry has not just bought US senators and members of congress; it’s even buying school board and state board of education members. And, in some states, they’re demanding books or course instruction materials that explicitly lie — or at least confuse students — about the connection between fossil fuels and our climate emergency. You can thank Clarence Thomas, the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in American history, for this one. After years of wining-and-dining from billionaires who would really, really like to be able to buy their very own politicians, in 2010 Thomas was the tie-breaking vote to legalize political bribery in the Citizens United decision, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

Why right wing crises face incompetence or cynical exploitation. Bush and “heckofajob Brownie”; Netanyahu and Gaza; Trump and Covid, or his cynically tossing paper towels at hurricane victims.. Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go. “All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.” She then quotes a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who speaks of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they’d chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister: “We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in. … We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there.” What happened? Instead of taking seriously now-confirmed warnings about a coming Hamas attack shared by Egyptian and, apparently, US intelligence, the prime minister was instead occupied by “months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”