Author: Thom Hartmann

According to a popular meme, comedian Noel Casler asked, “How come everything the Republican Party stands for involves other people dying?” He then went on to note GOP support for assault weapons, opposition to masks and vaccines, opposition to saving the environment, and their all-out war on Obamacare and Medicare-for-All. Casler may have just been being glib, doing the written equivalent of a standup routine, but his question deserves a serious answer, so we should examine the evidence. It is undeniably true that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of: spousal abuse, obesity, smoking, teen pregnancy, sexually...

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...