Author: Thom Hartmann

It is important now, in light of both world events and the way the Republican party has been captured by a small group of rightwing billionaires and White Supremacists, to introduce Americans to an 18th century word that is new to most people alive today, at least in the context of partisan politics. That word is: faction. The crises caused by faction were a big deal at the founding of our republic. Faction was a matter of conversation among average people. It was the same when the South was seized by an oligarchic faction of plantation owners and turned...

“During the 2000 presidential election, Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore, a Supreme Court case that settled a recount dispute in Florida between former vice president Al Gore and George W. Bush, who later became president. At the time of that decision, Ginni Thomas had been working for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which was helping staff the Bush’ then-prospective administration.” – Jon Skolnik In 1969, Richard Nixon and congressional Republicans took down the Supreme Court’s most liberal member, Abe Fortas, threatening to send his wife to prison. There is a lesson here for today’s Democrats...

The United States needs a national elections system run by professionals with complete transparency and not vulnerable to politics: Canada did this 102 years ago and we should take a lesson from their successes to create an Americanized version. With almost 40 percent of all the mail-in ballot requests coming out of heavily-Democratic Houston being rejected because of the GOP’s latest anti-voter law — and over a dozen other Republican-controlled states following suit with the newest thing in election suppression — by the end of this year’s election it should be obvious to all Americans that we need to...

Most people would think that if their freeway was clogged up every rush hour, adding an extra lane would reduce the congestion. They would be wrong. And an uprising against Oregon state government plans to widen the I-5 freeway here in Portland may end up changing how cities around the country decide to use the hundreds of billions of dollars in highway funds coming to them from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. A recent study of 100 US cities found that — between 1993 and 2017 — billions were spent to expand highway systems’ capacities by 42 percent,...