Author: Thom Hartmann

Former-slave-state Missouri Senator Josh Hawley doesn’t want America’s White children to be exposed to the simple reality that slavery was not only legal at the founding of our country but was, in several places, written into our Constitution. And that the rest of America subsidized the slave-owners’ states and continues to subsidize them to this day. Hawley, of course, is the guy who gave a fist-salute to the armed White Supremacist traitors who stormed the US Capitol on January 6th to assassinate Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi. He hopes to ride his White supremacy shtick to the White...

Democrats must stop giving in to grifter bullies. If you don’t take on bullies, they keep going further and further until either they win or you fight back and defeat them. The best political example of this writ large was Hitler. He pushed around most of Europe and they kept giving in or trying to appease him, thinking at some point he’d have gotten enough. Neville Chamberlain thought he could negotiate with a bully and came back from his meetings with Hitler believing he’d achieved “peace in our time.” But, of course, you can never actually negotiate with a...

You would think we have a right to vote, rather than just a privilege that Republican-controlled states could take away in dozens of different ways. After all, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution references “the right to vote at any election” and even says that any state that violates that right shall lose members of its congressional delegation as punishment. The 19th Amendment references “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…” The 24th Amendment starts, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…” The 26th Amendment is all about, “The right of citizens of...

Parasites attach themselves to your body and suck your blood to feed themselves. Most, like ticks and mosquitos, while they may provide food for birds, bats and other animals, seem to provide no direct benefit at all to humans. That “no benefit” equation goes double for the latest parasites who have attached themselves to the backs of Americans and are rapidly draining us of our economic blood: health insurance companies. There is quite literally no reason for these corporations to exist, at least when it comes to providing for the health needs of 99 percent of Americans. Virtually every...

Prior to 1965, the only American president to have both promoted and presided over a multiracial democracy was Ulysses Grant, the former general in Lincoln’s army who became president when impeached Southern slaveowner Andrew Johnson’s term expired on March 4, 1869. Grant (and Johnson, but grudgingly) saw freed African Americans not only voting but taking political office by the hundreds. It lasted until the day Grant left office, when the Tilden/Hayes election “compromise” of 1876 ended the period known as Radical Reconstruction the following year. During this brief time, more than 600 African Americans were elected to state legislatures...