The right to vote is more important then owning property or guns
This week, Georgia passed the most restrictive voter suppression legislation since Jim Crow. In actuality, the Georgia legislature proves that Jim Crow never completely ended. It’s alive and well today, in part, and its principal proponent is the GOP.
The two bills end automatic voter registration, ban drop boxes for absentee ballots and radically curtail mail-in voting. They also make illegal “Souls to the Polls” on some weekends, a tradition that has led to about 10 times more African Americans than white people voting on Georgia Sundays near Election Day.
And Georgia is just the first among many Republican-controlled states…
Greg Abbot thinks he can get away with murder because Trump did — At least so far…
Normally when over a half-million people die from something entirely preventable somebody is held accountable. So far, that hasn’t happened in the United States.
In Taiwan, population 24 million, 10 people have died of Covid in the 14 months since the beginning of the pandemic. Ten.
In Vietnam, population 97 million, it’s 35; Thailand, population 70 million, has seen 85 people die, while Australia, at 25 million people, has lost 909 people to the disease.
South Korea, with a population of 51 million, has seen 1634 people die and Canada, with 38 million people has lost 22,000. (Stats here.)
Those…
More & more Americans are figuring out their feigned-outrage 4o-year scam
Now that “conservative ideas” have been so badly discredited, Republicans are resorting back to Big Lie and faux outrage techniques to try to hold their base together.
Back in 1981, when Republican strategist Lee Atwater was advising Reagan, he pointed out that using the N-word post-1965 was counterproductive.
But, he told a group of GOP activists, “Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites… ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing and…
Cranking up the culture wars won’t stop the destruction of our democracy…but it might win elections
So, while the Senate was debating Joe Manchin’s proposal to cut back unemployment benefits to Americans whacked by the coronavirus, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was reading Dr. Seuss out loud.
And he chose to read “Green Eggs and Ham,” an uncontroversial Seuss classic, instead of the six Seuss books that the family’s foundation pulled from circulation because they portray Black and Chinese people in racist ways.
Why would McCarthy do this? It turns out that Republicans and rightwing media are frantically engaging in culture wars with Dr. Seuss and Mr. …
If we don’t stop Republican obstruction democracy is doomed
HR1, the For The People Act, is probably the most consequential piece of legislation of the century. Consequential, at least, in the positive sense: with GOP voter suppression efforts spreading across the country, the future of both the Democratic Party and democracy itself is on the line.
As First Lady Michelle Obama said, “I urge the Senate to follow suit and pass this bill as soon as possible — because there is nothing more important to the health and future of our democracy than safeguarding the right to vote.”
This bill…
Americans “have got to know” if our last president conspired to commit treason and murder to end American democracy
Did Donald Trump and some of the people around him conspire to have others murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House in order to hold power and conceal his crimes for another four years?
Time and evidence will eventually prove or disapprove that question, but the evidence before us right now is pretty grim.
About a week after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he fired his Secretary of Defense and replaced him with a reliable toady, Christopher Miller. …
At this critical moment there is something you can do
It’s no coincidence that in this same month that Republican state legislatures have introduced over 250 proposed laws to make it harder for people to vote, Arizona Republicans are also standing before the US Supreme Court trying to make voting more complicated, as well.
There’s a long and largely hidden history here.
It was in Arizona back in the 1960s that Republican operative and local lawyer William Rehnquist helped launch Operation Eagle Eye, a program where large, physically intimidating Republican lawyers would show up at polling places heavily frequented by Hispanic and Native American voters and loudly challenge their right…
History shows that unions are the most powerful way to build a healthy and vibrant middle-class
Joe Biden just took a remarkable step toward restoring the American middle class: he openly defended the right of workers in Alabama to unionize their Amazon facility.
“Today and over the next few days and weeks, workers in Alabama, and all across America, are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Biden said, adding, “There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda…”
In doing so, Joe Biden becomes the first Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson to openly side with workers trying to unionize against a specific major corporation.
Biden also, the day he…
If Biden & Harris don’t act now, the window will close
It looks like President Joe Biden is going to cave on the $15 an hour minimum wage. And it looks like Chuck Schumer is going to cave on ending the filibuster.
While these are disappointing failures to progressives because of the harm they’ll do to working people, they’re also extraordinarily dangerous to the future of American democracy.
These failures will add to the skepticism of the American people that government, as we have it today, can never work on their behalf, and thus increase their willingness to accept replacing democracy with a Trump-style strongman oligarchy.
The simple fact is that…
The terrorism we feared after 9/11 has now come to America but it came from within — it’s time to crush it
It’s time for American media to tell the truth about what’s happening in the GOP: As the Republican Party continues to embrace Donald Trump and his white supremacist fascist ideology, that party is making the transition into a full-blown domestic-terror-supporting organization.
No American political party should ever condone terrorists within its ranks. Prior to the 1960s, the Democratic Party allowed racist terrorists from the Klan into its ranks, even electing some to the House and Senate. Since then, the GOP has picked up the white supremacist vote. …
Thom Hartmann
America’s #1 progressive talk show host & NY Times bestselling author. Thom’s writings now appear at HartmannReport.com.
