Author: Thom Hartmann

Why don’t we have gun control? It is because our Supreme Court, or, more correctly, five Republicans on our Supreme Court, legalized bribery. Not the bribery of store clerks or bank tellers or people who work for airlines. You go to jail for that. Not the bribery of judges or police or people who work in government offices. That’s still very much a crime. Not even international bribery; if your company does business overseas and you execute a bribe to conduct that business, you can still go to prison here in the United States. The Supreme Court legalized bribery...

Civil society requires that its citizens feel safe in public spaces; destroy that generalized sense of safety and you will radically warp public opinion to the Right, which promises safety and “tough on crime,” while producing a whole new generation of safe-space destroyers. Our most fragile members of society are our children, which is why when shooters go after schools it disrupts society at its most fundamental level. Right behind schools are celebratory events (Vegas shooter, yesterday’s Trump supporter), stores/theaters, and places of worship. If a malignant actor — say, Putin — wanted to truly disrupt American society, all...

We recently learned from the January 6th hearings that Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson tried to hand a phony slate of electoral votes from Michigan and Wisconsin to Vice President Mike Pence just before the election was certified on January 6. How did a corrupt senator even find himself in a position where he could have handed two pieces of paper to the Vice President that would have changed the outcome of our presidential election? The Electoral College. The Electoral College: Sucks. It causes political strategies that make national elections turn on a handful of states, which increase the...

Democrats are gearing up for policy battles in the House and Senate over “gun safety.” They should also be preparing for a decades-long war over “gun control.” In 1977, Harlan Carter and a group of his friends staged a coup within the senior ranks of the NRA, flipping it from a gun-safety-oriented sportsman’s club into a “no compromise” (Carter’s phrase) lobbying and PR group for the gun industry. Carter was the perfect man for the job of filling America with guns, championing the slaughter of schoolchildren, and amping us up to around 45,000 gun deaths a year — more...