Author: Thom Hartmann

Kevin McCarthy has a keen new idea about what he thinks he can get out of Democrats in Congress in exchange for Republicans authorizing the government to pay the trillions in debt that Donald Trump racked up in his four years in office. In exchange for lifting the so-called debt ceiling, McCarthy wants Biden and congressional Democrats to throw millions of families off food stamps (SNAP) and end even the possibility of any help to low-income young people unable to pay off student loans. He claims this is because the federal government can’t afford to help out students or hungry Americans....

Fox “News” has settled with Dominion, paying them about three-quarter-billion dollars and admitting that they lied. But nobody died at Dominion. Nobody’s life and family were turned upside-down at Dominion by being thrown into prison for sedition and insurrection. Nobody at Dominion was hospitalized or committed suicide because of the injuries they received at the hands of an angry mob Fox helped incite. While Dominion had a strong legal case against Fox for lying on the air and harming their business, the families of Ashli Babbitt, Anthony Antonio, three dead and over 140 injured police officers, and patriotic Americans...

Today’s Republican Party, intentionally or unwittingly, is following a script. Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first they came for the queer people. A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books...

How would you like a side of liver cancer with those fries? Testicular cancer with your chicken sandwich? Childhood obesity with your kid’s meal? These were the findings of a 2022 analysis of wrappers performed by Consumer Reports while looking for chemicals called PFASs in packaging for fast food products sold across America. PFAS is an acronym for Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, a family of over 12,000 chemicals that was first discovered in 1938 by a 27-year-old chemist named Roy Plunkett. By combining fluorine with carbon, he invented chemicals that resisted water, oils, grease, and even heat: they seemed both inert...

Following the January 6th insurrection and coup attempt, news organizations have documented hundreds of thousands of Republicans across America leaving their party by going to the effort of changing their party registration. Most, like Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, say it is because of the hate. Particularly since the rise of Trump in 2015, but certainly dating back to Trump’s 2008 Birther conspiracy theory — and with the seeds planted in Richard Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy — hate has become the rotted core of the GOP. Hate of queer people; hate of college professors; hate of Black people; hate of immigrants; hate...

As MAGA Republicans rudely interrupted the president’s State of the Union speech by shouting, “secure the border,” it is important to remember what happened when Republicans were in charge of securing the border. Their “big new idea” was to forcibly separate children from their parents and put bewildered and terrified youngsters in cages for the world to see. And then they trafficked and disposed of those children, as if dumping the trash, in a way that “lost” thousands of them. Last week the Biden administration announced that, so far, they’ve managed to reunite 2,926 of the 3,924 children brutally torn from...