Hartmann Report

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.

The racist Trumpsters who want a second civil war call this an “acceleration,” & hope they can create enough chaos that they can finally fulfill their fantasies about fighting in a noble civil war… America is under assault, and, in the 9th year since Trump burst on the political scene, it’s happening so often now that it’s becoming normalized. This is a very real danger to the survival of our republic. And they’re getting more brazen: this past weekend a group of mask-clad Nazis marched through downtown Nashville complete with swastikas and racist chants. The media treated it like “just another day.” Republicans who run Texas are in open defiance of the US Supreme Court and the federal government over who has legal responsibility for enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our borders. It’s the most significant challenge to federal authority since the Nullification Crisis of 1832 that led us straight toward the Civil War. And, indeed, it’s stirring up pro-new-civil war rhetoric among the racist base of the GOP.

It's time to again tax the rich, be they individuals or giant corporations, to restore the American middle class and return our nation to the vitality that, before the Reagan Revolution, was normal... Most Americans have a radically incomplete understanding of how taxes work. As a result, changes to the tax code made by Republicans in the years since the Reagan Revolution have done real damage both to the American economy, working class people, and to the vibrancy and viability of our towns and communities. Just like the debates around raising personal income tax rates are demagogued by rich people and their shills, there's a world of misinformation around the issue of raising corporate income taxes. Most of these myths promoted by the morbidly rich exploit the fact that only a tiny fraction of Americans have ever run a business or taken a business course in college, and so most Americans don't have a clue how corporate income taxes work.

Bork was Richard Nixon’s solicitor general and acting attorney general and had a substantial impact on the thinking in the Reagan White House—so much so that Reagan rewarded his years of hard work on behalf of America’s monopolists with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in the DC Circuit, frequently a launching pad for the Supreme Court. In the years following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, as numerous “conservative” and “free market” think tanks and publications grew in power and funding, Bork’s ideas gained wide circulation in circles of governance, business, and the law. In 1977, in the case of Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, the Supreme Court took up Bork’s idea and, for the first time in a big way, embraced the “welfare of the consumer” and “demonstrable economic effect” doctrines that Bork had been promoting for over a decade.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump was fined $364 million in his second major fraud conviction. — Trump's "owner," Vladimir Putin, murdered Alexei Navalny. — The FBI blows up the latest Republican scam to impeach Biden. — Geeky Science: Is this the future of Covid? — Russian arms production worries Europe's war planners while the Baltic states ready for an invasion. — Does America have MAGA fatigue? — Crazy Alert! Republicans in Utah want the 10 Commandments to be taught as "American History" to young children in public schools. — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert! ADHD: How to Remember Names. — Trump wants to turn the RNC into his own personal slush fund.

It shouldn't surprise us when we learn Republicans are willing to set aside their deep-seated hatred of trans people in exchange for a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser... Remember when Republicans lost their minds because Anheuser-Busch hired transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote their diet beer brand, Bud Lite? Trump is now telling them to back off, because an Anheuser-Busch lobbyist named Jeff Miller is throwing a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser for him next month in Washington, DC.

The NRA, GOP and SCOTUS have made the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights into such a suicide pact, drenching our nation with our own children's blood. "The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons, and to authorize this Court to use the common-law process of case-by-case judicial lawmaking to define the contours of acceptable gun control policy. Absent compelling evidence that is nowhere to be found in the Court's opinion, I could not possibly conclude that the Framers made such a choice." -- Justice John Paul Stevens' dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v Heller.

During the January 6th attack, militia members were glued to Trump’s Twitter feed, anxiously awaiting Trump’s proclamation of the Insurrection Act and instant deputization of them. When Senator Tommy Tuberville was meeting with the Trump family and team the night of January 5th in the DC Trump Hotel, plans had already been laid for the Proud Boys and other fascist street gangs to seize control of the Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory. The key would be invoking the Insurrection Act, a basket of laws dating from 1792 to 1874 that’s been used a bit over two dozen times, the first by George Washington and the most recent by President George HW Bush in response to the riots that erupted around the police beating of Rodney King.

America is now the most unequal society in the developed world. Our billionaires are the richest, and our poor people are the poorest of any functioning democracy on Earth… Every now and then we all get those moments of shocking clarity and insight that give us a new perspective on reality. Mine came over the weekend when I was watching the political shows on cable TV. This one had to do with the stunned realization of how we’ve normalized the damage that corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have done to our country by legalizing political bribery. An ad came on for a company that buys life insurance policies. The senior citizen in the ad says something to the effect of, “We learned that we could sell our policy when a friend did so to pay their medical bills.”