Author: Thom Hartmann

The Republican Party has lost all its legitimacy because, in the past few decades, it has become a white supremacist version of what Father of the Constitution James Madison called a “faction.” Loosely, a “faction“ is a “special interest” group of people who are willing to damage the interests of other people just to gain their own benefit. And, as Madison warned us, factions destroy democracies. Here is how it is playing out right now, as a Trump-inspired faction continues to consolidate their control over the larger Republican Party, dragging it deeper and deeper into the swamp of racism...

Republicans have been committing election fraud right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.” Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the 60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: they’re part of a larger election fraud program the GOP has used to suppress the vote for sixty years now. This election year Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is raising the stakes: he’s planning to put together a force of “election police” under his personal command to travel the state intimidating voters while pretending to look for...

Does it, as the old African saying goes, take a village to raise a child? According to Ron Johnson, the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, the answer is “no.” “I’ve never really felt it was society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children,” Johnson said while trying to lay his hands on some of the $403,733 that Kwik Trip’s executives and employees coughed up in the last election cycle – most went to the RNC. Johnson added that it was not just his philosophy that rich people’s tax dollars should not help children in poverty get decent nutrition or housing....

Crime is up and people are noticing. Which means it will get political, and fast. Republicans are planning to make crime a big issue this fall for the elections: Newt Gingrich just pointed out on Fox how well it worked for Glen Youngkin in Virginia and they see it as a template for November. It is a scheme rich with irony. On the other hand it will probably work for them: Democrats need to get ready now. So where is this crimewave coming from? Part of it, no doubt, is associated with people being out of work or out...

Many Americans have already watched the original and brilliant film on Netflix, “Don’t Look Up!” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, written and produced by Adam McKay and David Sirota. It is being lauded as a metaphor for how we’re dealing with climate change in the face of petrobillionaire- and corporate-funded disinformation campaigns, but it’s so much more than that: “Conservatives” on the Supreme Court don’t want Americans to look up at how they legalized political bribery with their 1970s Buckley and Bellotti and 2010 Citizens United decisions that have turned politicians into shills for the same billionaires and...

“Conservative” columnists in America are bemoaning how coarse, violent, and Third-World-ish the United States has become in the past 40 years. David Brooks, for example, comes right out and says “America is falling apart at the seams.” In that, he is largely quoting data from Matt Iglesias’ substack newsletter Slow Boring, where he wrote: “You’re seeing more killing, which is a subset of the increase in shooting, which in turn is a subset of the large increase in gun-carrying. But traffic deaths are also up. Unruly passenger incidents on airplanes have surged. Schools report more discipline and student safety...