Hartmann Report

— Putin’s Mein Kampf: he had to invade Ukraine to stop the gays. — Poland is the next country Russia plans to invade? — What is America going to do about its white Supremacist problem? — Democrats honor Blue Slips while Republicans don’t! — Ronnie DeSantis’ higher education legislation has been released and it’s shocking. — The Washington Post is reporting that Elon Musk’s Twitter, after unbanning Nazis and white supremacists, is now selling “blue check” validation logos to Russian propaganda outlets, including one he amplified by responding to. — Trump returns to the scene of (one of) his crime(s). — In “Strange But Not Surprising News,” if a fetus is a person then isn’t imprisoning a pregnant women illegally detaining an otherwise innocent fetus? — Crazy Alerts! Trump’s favorite white supremacist and dinner date at Mar-A-Lardo is having a sad about being put on the federal No Fly List.

The GOP’s deepest brand is white, straight, authoritarian, wealthy & religiously fundamentalist. Their vulnerability is these can be re-cast as bigoted, homophobic, fascistic, greedy & hypocritical… Institutionally, Republicans know how to brand, or at least did until recently. Democrats don’t appear to, and haven’t for decades. The result is that Republicans have established a 40-year-long stable and largely consistent brand (at least until recently) while — because Democrats haven’t invested in their own brand — the GOP has also succeeded in branding Democrats. So, what is branding, how does it work, and why should progressive Democrats take it seriously as soon as possible?

Republicans have figured out how to have it both ways. They get cheap labor for their big business buddies, while stoking the hate and fear of their white racist base. Kevin McCarthy just came back from a press trip to our southern border, full of talk about how bad the Biden administration is doing with asylum and immigration. Today, another group of House Republicans are “holding a hearing” at the Mexican border. If you watch Fox “News” you know all about it. Republicans have figured out how to have it both ways. They get cheap labor for their big business buddies, while stoking the hate and fear of their white racist base, claiming that Democrats are responsible for increasing numbers of undocumented or “illegal” immigrants living and working in the United States.

They’re enthusiastically letting people die: low income working people have to put off medical care or, like Charlene Dill, cut their medications in half to be able to buy food for their kids... In his State of the Union address, President Biden noted: “So, some of my Republican friends want to take the economy hostage — I get it — unless I agree to their economic plans. All of you at home should know what those plans are. “Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans — some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s a majority —” At which point Republicans in the audience started shouting, booing, stomping their feet, and yelling, “Liar!”

And, if so, what about the hundreds of other Republican politicians and news sites who went along with and echoed Trump’s lies, knowing full well they were not true? ... The “You can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre” exception to the First Amendment’s free speech protection usually applies to safety, to the potential or actual loss of life, and is — with justification — a very high bar to prove. “Actual malice” and “reckless endangerment” requirements for successful criminal prosecutions lift the bar even a bit higher.

Jimmy Carter was the finest president of my lifetime, perhaps one of the four best presidents in American history behind Roosevelt, Lincoln & Washington. When he passes, America will be the poorer... It’s Presidents’ Day, so I wanted to share a few things you may not know about my favorite president. Jimmy Carter has always been one of my heroes, and not just because he was the only president willing to come on my radio program and speak bluntly about the Supreme Court and American oligarchs (among other things). — He was one of those rare Christians in political life who actually lived the values Jesus taught.

Part III: How Not to Fail. The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were. —John F. Kennedy

The Best of the Rest of the News — How the Senate is fine-tuning anti-democracy minority rule. — Senator John Fetterman’s brave admission of his clinical depression and hospitalization for it will almost certainly save many Americans’ lives. — Did rogue mostly Israeli contractors help put Trump into office and push Brexit on the British people on behalf of Russian and/or American billionaires? — Women in Kentucky who order abortion pills through the mail or travel to other states to end their pregnancies may one day soon be facing imprisonment and lethan injection for murder if a new bill becomes law. — Why does Rite Aid employ pharmacists who refuse to give Covid booster shots? — Will the Michigan GOP survive the ongoing assault by religious zealots, gun nuts, racist and homophobic bigots, and openly Nazi followers of the Confederate “lost cause” mythology? — It’s the John Brown Gun Clubs to the rescue of drag shows! — Geeky Science! Can preventing dementia and cognitive impairment just be a few thousand steps away? — Crazy Alert! Ann Coulter welcomes Nikki Haley — the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants — to the 2024 presidential race with the classic racist slur, “Go back to your country.”

Big Pharma is buying off members of Congress to encourage an end to “March-in” and block any efforts to regulate the cost of drugs or let Medicare negotiate prices. In his State of the Union address, President Biden called out insulin, a treatment for diabetes that was developed over 100 years ago and, he said, costs about $10 a vial to make. Americans can pay over $1,000 for that $10 vial. While he was successful at getting insulin costs capped at $35 per month for Medicare recipients, “Problem Solver” corporate sellout Democrats in the House and Kirsten Sinema in the Senate — along with every single Republican — blocked his efforts to extend that to all Americans with diabetes. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s hard to overstate how much damage these corrupt rulings by Republicans on the Court — from Buckley and Bellotti in 1976/1978 to Citizens United in 2010 — have done to American democracy. I took a couple of flights this past weekend that reminded me again of the damage Republicans on the Supreme Court did to America when they legalized political bribery. The good news is that there are numerous things Congress can do to undo the Court’s bizarre doctrine that money is the same thing as free speech and corporations have Bill of Rights freedoms and protections as “persons.” Neither of these “rights to bribe” by the morbidly rich and corporations were recognized in the early years of our republic. Even today we’re unique among advanced democracies in holding these Supreme Court-created doctrines which underpin much if not most of today’s political corruption.