Author: Thom Hartmann

With the Republican Party turning to Trumpism, and the Democratic Party returning to their progressive roots, will we have an honest debate this election year in our media? “What you see is what you get” is an old cliche, but it has endured all these centuries because there was so much truth in it. “Don’t listen to what people say, instead look at what they do” is another truism we can apply to inform us about today’s politics. The past forty years have seen three Republican and three Democratic presidencies, and the modern priorities and values of each Party...

Christopher Sheats wanted no part of the insanity the rich people in the rest of his state were ginning up. The wealthiest plantation owners of Alabama had hatched a scheme to join up with the fabulously rich planters of several nearby states and try to take down the government of the United States. They had the money to make it happen, controlled most of the political power in the state, and had already required thousands of Alabama’s young men to prepare their slave patrol militias for a much larger war against their own nation. But Sheats was from the...

Donald Trump is now telling us that having Mike Pence overturn the electoral college result would have been “perfectly legal.” He is dead wrong, both factually and conceptually, and his admission should lead him straight to a jail cell. The electoral college was not put in place so that a president and vice president could randomly choose to extend their own power forever. If anything, it was the opposite. America’s Founders and Framers thought they could use the Electoral College to prevent somebody like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. Unfortunately, they were wrong, and now we are paying...

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....