Hartmann Report

A “donation” of as little as $25,000 can get you “face time” over dinner with a sitting justice of the US Supreme Court. If you think Republican politicians in Congress are corrupt, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Check out how little it costs to purchase access to a Supreme Court justice!

Wealthy partisans aligned with the GOP are going for that Hispanic vote in a big, big way. They intend to use the same tools that have turned state after state reliably red since the 1980s: radio & TV. If you’re a Democratic candidate for office in New Mexico, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Colorado, New Jersey, New York or Illinois, get ready: the ceiling is about to fall in on you.

Dying on your own terms when you’re in miserable pain and just a step short of that eternal portal is, after all, the humane thing to do. The dignified thing to do. If it weren’t for the cops, I’d want Louise to pull the trigger. Jerry and Ellen Gilland were married in 1969, two years before Louise and I tied the knot, them in Florida and us in Detroit. They bounced around Florida for a few years, living in Sorrento, Mount Plymouth, and Orlando before settling in New Smyrna Beach where they lived when Jerry started getting really sick. Really sick as in terminally ill. They tried to handle his illness at home, but around Christmas Jerry started going downhill fast. He told Ellen he couldn’t handle the situation and planned to shoot himself to end it all when things got so bad there was no point in continuing to live, infirm and in pain. After 52 years of marriage, Ellen understood.

Mass shooters and child-killers are celebrating. Meanwhile Republican politicians vow to protect us and our kids from — wait for it — librarians and history teachers. Saturday night 10 people were murdered by a mass shooter in California. It’s the 37th mass shooting this year. We’re 23 days into 2023 and over 2,200+ Americans have already died of gun violence. We’re the only developed country in the world that unconditionally allows civilians to own military-style assault weapons, that allows “open carry,” that lets gun manufacturers openly buy politicians (thanks, SCOTUS).

Four Mistakes. "I fear our mistakes far more than the strategy of our enemies." Thucydides (47–400 b.c.), Pericles’ Funeral Oration.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — We have questions for the media about the debt ceiling — Speaking of questions, why wasn't Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito asked under oath if he was responsible for the Dobbs decision leak? — Would the GOP survive a repeal of Citizens United? — As "macho man" Ron DeSantis says he wants to ban mask mandates by all Florida businesses, a new study shows one in ten people infected with Covid ends up with "long Covid". — And speaking of DeSantis, is his campaign against Black and queer people actually working? — Geeky Science! Strengthening your marriage might be as simple as putting pictures of you and your spouse around the house. — Video of the day: Anti-Abortion protestors get violent when someone with a bullhorn says the quiet part out loud

Has the American public finally wised up to Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santas scam, even if they don’t know the details or the backstory? The media refers to it as a debate around the debt ceiling, but it’s actually far simpler than that. And entirely political. Back in November, a few weeks after House Republicans won the election and seized control of that body, I wrote to you warning that the House Republicans would try the same scam that Ronald Reagan first rolled out in the 1980s. I wrapped the article up with the “hope that Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam.” So far, no soap. I haven’t heard a single mention of Two Santas in the mainstream media, and I’ll bet you haven’t, either. That’s the bad news.

Will we continue to worship great wealth & allow the morbidly rich to manipulate our nation’s political processes to their own ends? Or will we wake up to the danger of this way of thinking? One of the stories out of the Davos Morbidly Rich Support Group meeting in Switzerland yesterday was Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema high-fiving each other, celebrating their success at killing voting rights legislation while preserving massive tax loopholes for banking and fossil fuel industry billionaires. But there was more “high” to that high-five than the media showed. They were literally high, both from the fortunes each has acquired and the billions they were surrounded by onstage. Science shows that acquiring wealth stimulates the pleasure/reward circuits in the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex, just behind the eyes in the front-most part of the brain. Studies that map blood flow and electrical activity in the brain demonstrate that even anticipating money lights up this region, much like what happens when we’re presented with food or sex.

If working people were a bit more desperate about their economic situations, some conservative thinkers & the uber wealthy believe, they’d be less likely to organize, protest, or even vote. Why are America’s plutocrats funding efforts to weaken our democracy and replace it with plutocracy and oligarchy? Is it just about money? Or is there something much deeper that most Americans rarely even consider? An extraordinary investigative report from documented.net tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, and their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit or restrict democracy across the United States.

Why do other countries have extensive and functioning social safety nets and wealthy people who pay their taxes, and we have neither? We’re told by the Declaration of Independence that our nation was formed to provide every citizen with the basics of what government can and should provide: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” The “governed” in today’s America, however, aren’t getting the “happiness” they want or even, frankly, that they need