Hartmann Report

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Was the CNN Trump town hall the worst hour on TV ever — Does America have collective PTSD from Trump’s hate and lies? — Texas wants 5-year-olds to know they shouldn’t “covet another man’s wife” and to replace school counselors with uncertified, unlicensed, state-paid “pastors” to give children “spiritual counseling.” — Geeky Science: The threat from climate change just went way up. — Will Turkey’s turn toward fascism roll back this weekend? After Brazil and Mexico electing south- and central-American versions of a progressive, is the world turning back to sanity? — Russia is building a village for American conservatives who hate gays and love white supremacy. — Would ending anonymity help clean up social media? — Good news: Illinois is bucking the GOP trend of hating on queer people, moving toward gender inclusivity instead. — Crazy Alert! Couple attacked for buying Bud Light?

Fulfilling Bannon’s and Trump’s promise to dismantle — or eviscerate — most of America’s regulatory agencies, leaving us all subject to the tender mercies of the country’s billionaires & CEOs… Republicans on the Supreme Court are, it appears, planning to gut most of America’s regulatory agencies, in what could be the most consequential re-write of the protective “deep state” since it was largely created during the New Deal in the 1930s.

As long as Trump — or someone who shares his fascistic worldview — heads the Republican Party, this country will continue to be in crisis. Since Trump’s arrival on the scene, this cancer has spread… On CNN last night Donald Trump doubled down on his lies in support of the white supremacist haters convicted of violently killing one police officer and sending 140 others to the hospital on January 6th. This shouldn’t surprise us. He’s getting ready to repeat January 6th after the 2024 election, and in the meantime is encouraging more hate crimes and violence against Americans whose skin isn’t white, are queer, or simply support the basic values this nation has claimed and worked toward since its founding. A new report from the Leadership Conference Education Fund documents how hate crimes have more than doubled in the United States since Donald Trump entered politics in 2015, a spike that follows an initial eruption that coincided with the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008. “Hate crimes,” as in “violence.”

The Senate is profoundly anti-democratic (a crisis amplified by the filibuster), and adding two or three states will only partially correct that, but it’s still a big step toward a More Perfect Union. Three republican presidents added new states, in every case to hold onto a Republican Senate. Lincoln did it. Grant did it. Harrison did it. If he gets reelected in 2024, Biden must do it and Democrats need to prepare the ground now. Recently, Mitch McConnell was on TV telling wealthy donors to a fundraiser in Kentucky, "We've got a 50-50 Senate right now. We've got a 50-50 nation."... This is the GOP's favorite meme — if you listen to the news, particularly the political-leaning shows, you will hear it frequently — and it's a complete lie.

It's time to call them what they are. There's nothing noble about mass murder... Imagine how the GOP would react if there was a religious sect within the country that kept blowing themselves up to kill as many Americans as possible. Like in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel. If they were brown-skinned Muslims — or lefty leftovers from the Weather Underground — strapping on suicide vests and exploding themselves in schools, malls, or places of worship, you can easily anticipate the Republican reaction.

We've done it before... Steven Spainhouer's son worked at one of the stores in the Allen, Texas shopping mall chosen by America's most recent mass shooter (as of Saturday: there were seven this weekend). He arrived at the mall just after the neo-nazi murderer had slaughtered several people, sometimes ripping their bodies and faces into an indistinguishable mass of flesh with his military style ammunition... All because a white supremacist with a "Right Wing Death Squad" patch — commonly worn by Proud Boys — across his chest decided to shoot up a Texas shopping center with a mass-market version of the rifle the Army developed in the 1960s for hunting people in Vietnam.

How Europe’s History of Mercenaries and Military Coups Shaped the Second Amendment. "That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." —George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Did Clarence Thomas take a bribe via his wife to gut the Voting Rights Act? — "No Dogs or Chinese!" — Did Trump sell those stolen top-secret documents to the Saudis in exchange for the nearly $3 billion that country has given his family since he left the White House? — Texas is forcing physicians to create phony "abortion complications" reports for a statewide database, and doctors in the state are furious. — CNN says, "We don't need no stinkin' cop's opinions!" — Is the banking crisis deepening or is this a power play by big banks? — Next up in the Republican War on Women™: no-fault divorce. — Pigeon Alert! Almost fifty years ago, I learned from a street performer in New York City that pigeons are actually robotic spies from the planet Xenu, but now US scientists think they can fool them.

For 20 years, Hungary was a functioning democracy; today, it’s a corrupt neofascist oligarchy. Europeans refer to it as “soft fascism” - Orban succeeded in pulling off what Donald Trump tried… People watch with their mouths agape, trying to understand the scandal of Donald Trump leading a criminal insurrection to hold onto power even though he’d lost the election; of Supreme Court justices on the take; of political figures putting into law religious doctrine about the role of women in society. They’re astonished by a media industry that seems to be a captive of the billionaire neofascist class. They can’t figure out why extraordinarily wealthy people spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year stirring people up to hate each other. They don’t understand why the morbidly rich are leading a campaign to destroy public schools, end Social Security, and prevent people from voting. Why are these people so committed to propagating ideas and doing things that seem so antithetical to historic American standards of government and ethical behavior? Of democracy itself?

The only way Republicans can hold onto power is with their phony proclamations of “voter fraud” as the excuse to restrict the franchise to white people through restrictions, purges, and intimidation. Two years ago, Texas Republicans set out to rig the 2022 election, passing into law Senate Bill 1 over the objection of Democratic legislators who left the state to try to block its passage... This follows a decade of similar attempts to suppress the vote of anybody who isn’t white and middle aged/middle class. As the Texas Civil Rights Project noted, in just the first 4 years after corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2013, Texas Republicans closed 1,173 polling places in counties — predominantly Black and Hispanic — that had previously been protected from manipulation by the VRA.