Hartmann Report

The American media needs to call this movement what it is, fascism, and demand accountability and answers from the thousands of Republican politicians nationwide who refuse to repudiate it... Reporters for TPM obtained text messages between Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (formerly a Tea Party congressman) and 34 Republican members of Congress advocating stragegies to end democracy in America by keeping Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election. For example, South Carolina’s Republican Congressman Ralph Norman texted Meadows... pushing to end the American experiment in much the same way Robert E. Lee tried to do in 1861.

When the media discovered most of the people dying from Covid were Black or Hispanic, not White people - It hit conservative media and Donald Trump like a lightning bolt. The most unreported story of the pandemic, the one that seems destined to be overlooked as histories are being written, is what Trump did when he learned the Covid coronavirus was largely killing Black people and mostly sparing Whites. The moment he came to that realization he completely altered the US response to the pandemic, leading to the unnecessary death of 300,000 to 400,000 Americans.

Sunday book excerpt: The Hidden History of the War on Voting. Part III: Solutions. The Electoral College is a disaster for a democracy.  —Donald J. Trump. If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair. —Shirley Chisholm, America’s first black woman elected to US Congress

The Best of the Rest of the News — Did Kyrsten Sinema switch from Democrat to Independent to become a well-paid lobbyist? — Jack Smith is not messing around... — Trump wasn't that bad...other than when he was — German police break up a Qanon/Trump-inspired plot to overthrow their government — What have the Kushners done? — A decade ago, anti-government terrorist gangs in Haiti shot up electrical substations in three cities — Oregon's state epidemiologist is pleading for all to wear masks right now. — Geeky Science! How insanely destructive sugar is to the body.

We need to reverse Trump’s Internet sellout and time is running out. You’ve probably never heard of Gigi Sohn, but America needs her and we need her now. This is a call to immediate action to restore Net Neutrality and stop a tiny slice of corporate America from spying on us and our lives. Donald Trump’s first year in office was a big boon for the predatory companies that bring the internet into our homes and onto our cell phones, commonly referred to as Internet Service Providers or ISPs.

I don’t know the names of the men who poisoned & killed my father & my brother, but I know where they worked and why they did it. Odds are these killers will never see the inside of a jail cell. If you live in New York State and lie to that government about your income to reduce your taxes, you go to prison. If you’re criminally convicted of 17 counts of such lies — such tax fraud — you could spend a long time in prison. But The Trump Organization, a New York corporation that was just convicted of 17 criminal counts of tax fraud, not only won’t “go to jail” but also won’t even be dissolved for its crimes.

Leaving millions to starve & freeze to death is nothing less than complicity in the genocidal war crime Russia is currently committing - hopefully President Biden has the courage President Truman did. This is not the first time Russia has tried freezing and starving people to death to get them to submit. They’ve done it at least twice before, once successfully in 1932 and once unsuccessfully in 1949.

Bigots are switching to “creative expression” instead of religion as the club they’ll use to beat down public accommodation laws. The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they’re undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find. Now they’re going after the right of gays and lesbians who want to get married to shop for a website, or pretty much anything else that requires “creative” effort.

All these rich and powerful men think they’re “secret geniuses”; once they’ve concluded the “truth” of their own infallibility, they stop listening to those whose opinions contradict their own. It was a mistake a flock of geese wouldn’t make. It was a mistake nature and evolution have designed against in all animal life. But a small group of humans keep making it over and over again, and our Supreme Court has made the situation far, far worse. There’s a reason Donald Trump just came out against the United States Constitution, and it’s not because he’s simply a fascist or that the guy he paid to show up for his classes in prep school and college didn’t fill him in on civics.

Sunday book excerpt: The Hidden History of the War on Voting. For over a century, most states used biometrics to verify voter identity. Signatures done in front of a witness are nearly impossible to fake (unlike IDs, which can be easily faked). Polling place workers would compare the original registration signature with the signature of the person signing in to vote, and if they didn’t match, the worker would disqualify the voter. When the Motor Voter Act was passed in 1993, not a single state required proof of citizenship to vote, and there was no national problem of voter fraud. The threat of a few years in jail is more than enough to discourage even the most ardent partisan from trying to double-vote or fraudulently vote.