Hartmann Report

Republicans are dropping their Two Santas bomb right onto President Joe Biden’s head. It worked against Clinton & Obama and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again? As the Fitch credit rating service puts the United States on “watch” for a possible downgrade and Democrats dither about the 14th Amendment, Republicans just declared the House of Representatives in a break because, from their point of view, there really is no crisis. In fact, from the GOP’s perspective, it’s all going according to plan.

Today’s climate crisis dwarfs the 1940s threat of Nazism, the 9/11 attack, or the massive bank robberies that took place during the Reagan & Bush administrations. It threatens all life on earth… If somebody had set your house on fire, killing your child and pets, and then your city demanded that you give that somebody hundreds of dollars a year for the next decade, how would you feel? That’s pretty much the situation of families across America who’ve lost their homes, family members, and livelihoods to wildfires, floods, extreme heat and cold, mile-wide tornadoes, bomb cyclones, heat domes, hurricanes, and drought caused by today’s climate emergency, but nonetheless have to pay taxes that subsidize the fossil fuel industry executives who helped caused it all.

This Court is out of control, and if Durbin, Schumer, and Biden don’t get together and do something about it now, there may not be another chance… Clarence and Ginni Thomas want to stay on the Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo gravy trains (among others), and Crow’s lawyers are essentially claiming Thomas has every right to continue to act like a corrupt third-world autocrat who’s accountable to nobody, not even the voters and citizens of the United States or — more importantly — the very Congress that created the Supreme Court in the first place.

There is a solution and we need your help. Do it for the planet, for your children and grandchildren, and to prevent Putin and MBS from teaming up with the GOP again to screw Democrats in 2024… Russia and Saudi Arabia — or, more specifically, Putin and MBS — are desperate for Donald Trump or another autocrat like him to take the White House in 2024. America’s largest fossil fuel company executives share their goal, as we saw in the run-up to the 2022 election when gas prices topped $5/gallon. Putin, of course, wants a compliant American president who will look the other way as he continues his attempted rape of Ukraine, his infiltration of Moldova and Georgia, and his plans to take Poland and the Baltic states back into the Russian empire. Like with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, he’s eager to have more allies willing to help him make the world safer for billionaire autocrats. Mohammad Bin Salman was so pleased with the top-secret intelligence that Jared Kushner is alleged to have given him — that let him stage a successful coup to take over Saudi Arabia and its trillions in wealth — that he gave the Trump family billions and continues to subsidize Donald Trump himself by laundering what appears to be hundreds of millions of dollars through the LIV golf tournaments at Trump properties.

Our country has been poisoned, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote, America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation: tag, you’re it! This past weekend The New York Times busted Ron DeSantis for traveling around the country on the private jets of morbidly rich rightwingers, often in ways that prevent the public from ever finding out who’s showering these gifts upon him presumably in expectation of future government favors. Our country has been poisoned, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation. It’s taken 50 years, but we’re now at the point of maximum crisis. First came the poison of big money corrupting politics.

The Myth of the Well-Armed Cowboy. Leave Your Revolvers at Police Headquarters, and Get a Check. —Signs posted throughout Wichita, Kansas, in 1873 and typical of other Wild West towns of the era

The Best of the Rest of the News. — No Labels is a group almost entirely funded by dark money, generally supporting what I consider the most corporate-sold-out politicians and policies. — Can Democrats count on Zoomers and Millennials? — China agrees with DeSantis and other Republican governors: library books should not contain “unhealthy ideas.” What’s unhealthy? Whatever the dictator decides. — Speaking of China, have they given DeSantis another idea? — Can Gerrymandering get worse? — Have you been arguing with machines on social media, thinking they’re humans? — Is the EPA finally waking up from the Trump disaster? — Geeky Science! Why our modern lifestyLe is leading to brain shrinkage & what can be done. — Crazy Alert! Jesse Watters wants you to be afraid of black people not white supremacists. — Video of the Day: A bit of humanity hits the war in Ukraine.

He was so ignorant of sex & reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse. Here's how he could shut down every abortion facility in America… You’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.

Hamilton and the other Framers envisioned a Supreme Court that was immune to public opinion, the arguments of presidents and senators, and great wealth alike - but today's GOP has a different plan… We have, today, the most extreme Supreme Court since the early 1930s, and it didn't just get that way through Republican appointments. Breaking two centuries of tradition, wealthy GOP donors are now using money, gifts, and other enticements to keep the Court in line. In this, they're exploiting the lifetime tenure given federal judges by the Constitution. If a billionaire or industry can suck up to and build a relationship with a Supreme Court justice early enough in their career, they can be confident of decades of decisions that favor them and their interests, as we've seen most shockingly in the case of Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas. This is the exact opposite of the intention of the Framers of the Constitution.

Next year may be the last chance to reclaim the values of democracy, pluralism & egalitarianism that have animated this country since her founding. Nobody can say they weren’t warned about the stakes… “Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre A former employee of Rudy Giuliani, who was hired to help him drum up business for his law firm, has sworn under oath and penalty of perjury that he told her one of the “business opportunities” she could exploit was to sell pardons to felons for $2 million each. Giuliani, she alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday, told her he’d be splitting the money with Trump 50/50. It’s an echo of a mostly-forgotten story in The New York Times from over two years ago: the $2 million figure matches what John Kiriakou told reporters and the FBI (which appears not to have followed up) that Giuliani quoted him as the cost to buy a pardon from Trump. (Kiriakou turned the offer down, noting that he didn’t have $2 million even if he were inclined, which he wasn’t.)