Hartmann Report

Slander campaigns like this must instead be hit head-on with outrage and ferocity... House Republicans have revived the infamous Swiftboat lie strategy that helped defeat John Kerry in 2004. In essence, it involves relentlessly lying about a candidate and smearing his or her name and reputation in the hopes it’ll shave a few points off their popularity with independent voters. While virtually 100 percent of the men who served with Kerry in Vietnam spoke glowingly of his service, a group who did not serve with him made up lies and exaggerations. Kerry and those who served with him tried to get the truth out, but, as Mark Twain is often credited as saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

Can we reverse Citizens United and other decisions that have handed America over to our oligarchs? Will it start with a solid progressive Democratic majority in Congress? Rightwing billionaires have seized control of our Supreme Court and, through that, pretty much other every other aspect of American political and economic life. For example, Heidi Przybyla reported this week on Politico that the wife of Clarence Thomas — the deciding vote on the Supreme Court with their 2010 Citizens United decision — was ready and waiting for that decision. Just a few weeks before it was handed down, she set up a corporation to take full advantage of it. Citizens United, of course, finished the job the Court had started in the 1970s when Lewis Powell wrote the decision in Bellotti that initially and partly legalized corporations buying and owning their very own politicians. Those decisions overturned more than a hundred years of good-government anti-bribery legislation, handing control of much of American politics over to the morbidly rich.

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost... Today is 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have a war against Iraq, followed by their illegal invasion of Afghanistan just a bit more than a year earlier. Yet the media today (so far, anyway) is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies. Given the costs of both these wars — and the current possibility of our being drawn deeper into conflict in both Ukraine and Taiwan — it’s an important moment to discuss our history of wars, both illegal and unnecessary, and those that are arguably essential to the survival of democracy in the world.

"The results are clear. Gun deaths are a problem amenable to reduction like any other public health problem. International differences in rates between countries show this. The United States has the worst record of gun deaths of any [developed] nation, exceeded only by that in chaotic nations with massive law and order problems." —Simon Chapman, professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health and lead author of a peer-reviewed study on the impact of Australia’s 1996 gun-control laws

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why wasn't Lindsey Graham indicted? — Did Elon Musk meddle in the war in Ukraine to help Putin? — Republicans are attacking Biden for what Trump did. Will their voters fall for it? (Is the sky blue?) And, Republicans think they now have a Biden impeachment narrative that could work: just make something up! — Was Chuck Grassley in on January 6th? — Fani Willis crushes Gym Jordan and all but calls him a moron. — Is the GOP re-branding the "pro-life" term because it's just not working? And how go their efforts to ban birth control? — The Saudis and Putin are gambling on a Trump win — and are already trying to manipulate the 2024 election. — Good Climate News! Biden cancelled the last of Trump's Arctic Refuge oil leases. — Crazy Alert! Republicans in Wisconsin want to tell you what beer to buy. So much for their BS "freedom agenda."

The GOP has become the party of Putin, bin Salman, and Orbán, rejecting George Washington’s warning about partisanship replacing patriotism and, increasingly, rejecting the very idea of democracy... “[I]t is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of our national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned, and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.” — George Washington Farewell Address September 17, 1796

The Court itself has been corrupted by a handful of morbidly rich “friends” whose affiliated groups are constantly bringing cases or amicus briefs to the Court. Congress needs to act... Senator Sheldon Whitehouse just filed an ethics complaint about corruption in the Supreme Court. Weirdly, he had to file it with Chief Justice John Roberts himself (this is sort of like complaining to George Santos that George Santos is corrupt) because, as Whitehouse noted in his complaint: “I write to you in your capacity both as Chief Justice and as Chair of the Judicial Conference because, unlike every other federal court, the Supreme Court has no formal process for receiving or investigating such complaints…” His complaint was sparked, in part, by Sam Alito (arguably the second-most corrupt justice) being recently quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying: “No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.” In that, Alito is choosing to completely ignore Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution.

Nearly every generation since this nation’s founding has seen forward progress toward the ideals that our Founders, and Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and other American leaders have declared. Until Now... Nations don’t just exist geographically; they also exist psychologically. Every nation has a story it tells itself about who and what it and its people are, how it came to be and the core values that brought that about, and its ultimate goals as it works toward its highest purpose. For most of American history, the story we told ourselves about America was that we were a good and decent people who were striving to achieve a government that drew its legitimacy from “the consent of the governed” and championed the values of the Enlightenment. Clearly we didn’t always live up to those standards: from slavery to the Native American genocide to our support for foreign dictators and overthrow of democratic republics, we’ve come from a pretty grim start and made a lot of terrible mistakes. But always, at the core of the American ideal, was that goal, that ideal, that we are dedicated to expanding human freedom and possibility for all.

Nobody in America should be without a home, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable… San Diego recently banned tent camping in the city; the homeless just moved to a riverbed just outside town. West Palm Beach Florida has banned feeding homeless people; the penalty is a $500 fine and 60 days in the town jail. In Maryland, some school districts are trying to get around federal law that requires educating the children of homeless people. Nashville is making a good-faith effort to help some of their homeless, but the need is overwhelming them. Denver mayor Mike Johnson is trying to create micro-communities for homeless people, but getting pushback from residents. The same thing is happening here in Portland. Forty-two years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from a problem to a crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — the prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is helping cause it.

“Wait a minute!” I can hear you saying. “Cutting taxes on rich people makes them richer, but cutting taxes on working class people cuts their pay? WTF?!?” It’s labor day, so let’s look at the radically different ways income tax cuts or increases affect working class people versus the morbidly rich. Over the past 40 years, Republicans have pulled off an incredible magic trick. They’ve convinced average working people that tax cuts benefit them when in fact the opposite is true. It all boils down to two simple principles, which are — unfortunately — a mystery to most Americans and ignored in both our political and media discussions of income taxes. 1. Income tax cuts for the morbidly rich raise a nation’s debt but do nothing else.