Hartmann Report

So much money is sloshing around in our political system that honest politicians are buried and actual criminals are stepping up. Republicans in the Senate yesterday killed legislation passed through the House that would require “dark money” to be publicly disclosed: not a single Republican voted for it, although every Democrat in attendance did. Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, we learned Wednesday, is going to spend $42 million on the midterm elections, focusing on flipping evangelical Hispanics toward the GOP.

The idea of America as a true “land of opportunity” is anathema to their ideal of a nation of “classes and orders” where every person knows their place and morbidly rich white men are in charge. A new report finds that DeSantis’ Florida will, this 2022-2023 school year, move $1.3 billion in taxpayer money originally destined for public schools to private schools. This will gut the public school budgets across the state by roughly 10 percent. Florida is not unique in this: it’s happening all across the nation. Public education in America is in a crisis and has been for some time. It’s a crisis Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to make worse.

Cults of personality in governance have the Great Leader’s face and sayings splashed all over public places. Think Mao’s China, Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Germany, Kim's North Korea... Donald Trump has built a cult around himself. This is dangerous to America and dangerous to democracy. Cults of personality in governance are broadly incompatible with democracy. They usually erupt in dictatorships where the Great Leader’s face and sayings are splashed all over public places. Think Mao’s China, Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Germany, Kim’s North Korea. On a smaller scale and in a different context, we see how destructive such personality cults can be with the deaths around Jim Jones’ Jonestown, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, and Charles Manson’s Family. This is what Donald Trump aspires to.

Voting for Republicans is, tragically, voting against America -- It’s really just that simple. Last week a very reasonable sounding fellow called into my show and said, essentially, “I voted twice for Trump and would again. Why do you think I’m a threat to America?” We ended up debating tax policy and I never did fully answer his question (I’m a sucker for “reasonable”), so here’s my shot at it. *Trump and the GOP are endorsing Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement Theory” that argues, in most of its various iterations, that wealthy international Jews (“George Soros”) are collaborating with Black and Hispanic people to replace white people at all levels of society.

Republicans simply don’t believe that protecting the people of America is a legitimate function of government & they’re strengthened in that belief by far-right billionaires’ money showered on them. Editorials in America’s major newspapers are shocked — shocked, I tell you! — that DeSantis and Abbott would exploit asylum-seekers to rack up votes from their racist base. Whatever happened to government being the power that helped people, they want to know? But it was entirely predictable. Even, recently, by actual medical scientists.

Arizona changed its law after 1886 so that the word person would include nonliving as well as living legal entities: "'Person' includes a corporation, company, partnership, firm, association or society, as well as a natural person." Many states have varying definitions of person depending on the part of law at issue. For example, there was a 1998 U.S. Supreme Court case in which a large part of the argument had to do with whether the Federal Trade Commission had the authority, under California law, to act as a person in enforcing a judgment against a telemarketer.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Judge "Loose" Cannon breaks the law and lies for her patron, Donald Trump. — Trump has a long history of using confidential information and intelligence to blackmail or extort other people and institutions, according to new reporting from ProPublica. — Trump openly reaches out to Qanon. — DeSantis and Abbott are using asylum-seeking families as political pawns to help them both win their gubernatorial races this fall and, for DeSantis, position him to run for the GOP nomination for president in 2024. — Speaking Of DeSantis, his emphasis on racist memes and themes appears to be working. — Greg Abbott appears to be hiding the deaths and disabilities of Texas women caused by his 6-week abortion ban. — In Good News, Republicans appear to have lost their midterm lead, while youth voter registration is exploding. Crazy Alert! Russian troops in Ukraine could use some special instruction in how to quickly flee dangerous situations, and who better than Josh Hawley to teach them?

Abbott and DeSantis should be looking at jail time or serious civil fines for engaging in this heartless, racist sport. They came off the buses and planes hoping for a promised new life, a home, and paying work. They brought their children, on their best behavior, excited to meet American kids and enroll in school. Hungry from the long trip, they were wondering what their first meal would be like in their new homes in their new country. Instead, they faced Fox “News” cameras and hack “reporters” shouting questions at them in a language they didn’t understand. Blinking back tears, they asked in Spanish what they’d done wrong.

It’s hard to underestimate the damage to our nation done by Donald Trump along with the propaganda and social media efforts of Russia and, perhaps, other autocratic nations. It’s time to tell the truth about Trump: he’s been an agent of organized crime and foreign governments for decades. And he’s continuing his work for Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and MBS — undermining Americans’ faith in democracy — to this day. Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey. Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

Purging Democratic voters from the rolls has now gone nationwide, at least in states where voting is controlled by Republicans. Get ready. If you’re a Democratic voter, there’s a chance you’ll show up to vote this November and discover you can’t because you’re no longer registered. Millions will be blindsided this way, and it could turn elections toward Republicans across the nation. America hates GOP policies of banning abortion, gifting the morbidly rich with trillions in tax cuts, denying climate change and blocking any remedies to it, and filling our cities with guns. So, Republicans know, the only way they can win in many places is to simply prevent people from voting.