Recent comments
ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World
Thom Hartmann has written a dozen books covering ADD / ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.
Join Thom for his new twice-weekly email newsletters on ADHD, whether it affects you or a member of your family.
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
The lesson of the fable, "The Grasshopper and The Ant" is missed by most. The Ant is a member of a socialized community. The Grasshopper is on his own, regardless of his attitude. Society is proved to be superior. The Ant, having only a limited specialty, is nothing without her community.
I still remember Jack Welch in his retirement inteview w/ Babba WaWa bragging that now GE only dumps "a few teaspoons" of BCB's into the Hudson as opposed to "tons".
"Juvenile Court To Try Shooting Defendant" - headline from leftwingwacko.com
"Watchdog Groups Call for Criminal Charges Against U.S. Chamber of Commerce Director Don Blankenship for Homicide"
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/watchdog-groups-call-for-criminal-charges-against-us-chamber-of-commerce-director-don-blankenship-for-homicide-90602334.html
Hey Thom,
Last weekend a Coffee Party Meeting finally came to my hometown. I joined and I liked what was said there. The main message at the meeting was about Civil Discourse. If we are to make the change we all really can believe in then a consolidation of We The People, the "Radical Middle", is imperative.
OK Thom,
You've been advocating that it is imperative to keep the presidency in Democratic hands precisely because of the coming Supreme Court vacancies. If you are now saying that Obama will probably show the same spinelessness that was evidenced in the health care debate in his choice for the court, what is the point of trying to provide cover for him?
The deaths go on overseas, and the American workforce is under continuing assault. We've been given the continued reign of Bernanke and Gates. Change? Where?
Thom,
I'm hoping that, since President Obama considered the "Citizens United" ruling significant enough to criticize during the SotU, he recognizes the Rightward tilt of the Court and recognizes the need to shift the balance.
Let's hope.
new blog up...
Tax the Richest
An ad for this website ran on a local MN channel this week:
http://www.taxtherichest.com/
Dirty Business down in Coal Creek...
War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan
by Robert Dreyfuss
War crimes, massacres, and, as Al Jazeera properly calls it, "collateral murder," are all part of the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
The release last week of the Wikileaks video, thirty-eight grisly minutes long, of US airmen casually slaughtering a dozen Iraqis in 2007 -- including two Reuters newsmen -- puts it into focus not because it shows us something we didn't know, but because we can watch it unfold in real time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned down from above in a hellish rain of fire.
The events in Iraq, nearly three years old, were repeated this week in Afghanistan, when trigger-happy US soldiers slaughtered five Afghans cruising along on a huge, comfortable civilian bus near Kandahar.
As the New York Times reports:
"American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, killing and wounding civilians, and igniting angry anti-American demonstrations in a city where winning over Afghan support is pivotal to the war effort."
The Kandahar incident is only one of many, of course. Over the past year, dozens of Afghans have similarly died in checkpoint and roadside killings. Not one, not a single one, of these murders involved hostile forces. In other words, when the smoke and dust cleared, in all of the cases over the past year the bodies recovered were those of innocents.
The war crimes continue. For all the hoopla about change, the carnage goes on.
Also over the weekend, CNN aired a segment on the Massey mine tragedy. A federal mine inspector told a CNN reporter point-blank that closing the mine despite all its safety deficiencies would have been worse than enforcing safety regulations. When given an opportunity to modify his statement, in which the CNN reporter led him with the observation that he detected “frustration,” the inspector denied this, saying he thought everything had been done to insure safety (despite the thousands of violations over the recent past), and he was merely sorry that such accidents happen, and that they will continue to occur even if safety enforcement was a priority. No doubt he got his job from a Bush appointee….
…..and a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC has no power to enforce net-neutrality against powerful communications companies who would block or slowing content that it might regard as politically harmful; China already does this. It isn’t hard to see communications companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, in league with other business behemoths and right-wing politicians, controlling what information that is available on the internet, even by subtle means such as feeding “undesirable” outlets through slow lines that make it difficult or impossible to access that information.
Mark K: Stupidity and arrogance as a combo are typically more fit for satire and black comedy than serious dialogue, but apparently someone forgot to tell that to Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, their carnival barker Sean Hannity, and their foolish fans. I can imagine them as some kind of creepy cross-pollination between Hans and Franz and the Vancome Lady (VL: “I’ve lost every job I’ve ever had.” TV producer: “Then you’ll be perfect at Fox.”). Palin’s ridiculously inane comment that Obama’s nuclear weapons reduction pact is like a kid on the playground saying “'punch me in the face, I'm not going to retaliate” demonstrates her utter deficiency in reflection and reason; we need a president with a cool head in a crisis, not a power-mad moron with an itchy finger. We need a president who understands the dangers inherent in the use of nuclear weapons, one who understands that ultimately the safety of the world rests on the eventual destruction of all nuclear stockpiles—not a president who moves without thinking, like a “barracuda.”
After Obama derided Palin’s statement after George Stephanopoulos forced him to address her comments, Obama was again criticized on Fox as having the illusion of intelligence because he had a lot of “smart” people to tell him about nuclear weapons and arms control. What is particularly frustrating about these accusations is that Obama does, in fact, have some competence in these matters, and this was never pointed out by the media. Ever heard of the Lugar-Obama Initiative? Since 2005, Obama worked with Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican, on weapons non-proliferation and interdiction, as well as funding U.S. assistance to help safeguard or destroy Russian stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, particularly those in former Soviet states. Palin’s personal knowledge of the nuclear issue, of course, is derived from the “fact” that she can see all those nukes from her back porch somewhere in Alaska.
Speaking of Hannity, Mike Malloy yesterday pointed out in his inimitable way that the talentless blowhard and good friend Oliver North are using dead and wounded soldiers to promote their political agenda through their so-called “Freedom Alliance” college tuition charity. Very little of the millions of dollars that have been raised has actually gone to soldiers’ children, and usually in the $1-2,000 range, which these days is practically nothing. Most of the money, it has been reported, has gone to “expense,” meaning that while he claims he hasn’t been paid “one dime,” it seems that a lot of the money has been used for Hannity and company's billionaire-style travel and accommodations expenses. The man is utterly without shame or integrity.
Whatever happened to banishment? It might be useful. If no country would take our refuse, there's always Antarctica - by agreement no country can claim the land.
No, Barack Obama is not the second coming of Pol Pot. However, he is far too much the continuation of GWB for my liking. The comments of Bob Gates concerning the WikiLeaks released video of a US helicopter gunship mowing down Iraqi civilians in a war that was based on lies, serve to show that where the US crimes are concerned, nothing has changed.
War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan
by Robert Dreyfuss
War crimes, massacres, and, as Al Jazeera properly calls it, "collateral murder," are all part of the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
The release last week of the Wikileaks video, thirty-eight grisly minutes long, of US airmen casually slaughtering a dozen Iraqis in 2007 -- including two Reuters newsmen -- puts it into focus not because it shows us something we didn't know, but because we can watch it unfold in real time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned down from above in a hellish rain of fire.
The events in Iraq, nearly three years old, were repeated this week in Afghanistan, when trigger-happy US soldiers slaughtered five Afghans cruising along on a huge, comfortable civilian bus near Kandahar.
As the New York Times reports:
"American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, killing and wounding civilians, and igniting angry anti-American demonstrations in a city where winning over Afghan support is pivotal to the war effort."
The Kandahar incident is only one of many, of course. Over the past year, dozens of Afghans have similarly died in checkpoint and roadside killings. Not one, not a single one, of these murders involved hostile forces. In other words, when the smoke and dust cleared, in all of the cases over the past year the bodies recovered were those of innocents.
The poor get the needle, the rich get the Betty Ford Clinic.
Molly Ivins commented on the people who were "too rich to go to jail." She's reaching from beyond the grave to point a finger at Blankenship.
re: Limbautomies and Beckerwoods: I was telling my friend Dave about these names we made up Fri., and when i said 'Beck", he immediately came up with "Beckerwoods". Great minds think I like.
New blog?
Happy tuesday....
Check out Reine Eisler essay on the need for a new economy. .
Today's conventional economic models are and always have been incomplete, and therefore their failures are built-in...
http://www.alternet.org/vision/146173/roadmap_to_a_new_economics%3A_beyo...
[excerpt]
Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism
We can all be leaders in building a social and economic system that really meets human needs.
April 13, 2010
...
a truly new economic system, we need a broader definition of human capacity development than a purely economic one. Which brings us back to the children and to our human capacities for caring, empathy, consciousness, and creativity.
When children are the starting point for a new economic paradigm, the first step is to go beyond the tired debate of capitalism versus socialism and all the other old isms. Both capitalist and socialist theory ignore a fundamental truth: the real wealth of nations -- and the world -- consists of the contributions of people and nature.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx ignored the vital importance of nature's life-sustaining activities. For them, nature exists to be exploited, period. As for the life-sustaining activities of caring for people starting in childhood, they considered this merely "reproductive" labor, and not part of their "productive" economic equation.
In other words, their focus was on the market -- for Smith to extol it and for Marx to excoriate it. Neither included in his economic model the life-sustaining sectors, without which there would be no market economy: the household economy, the natural economy, and the volunteer economy.
The first step toward building a truly new economics is a full-spectrum economic model that includes these sectors and gives real visibility and value to the most essential human work: the work of caring for people and for our natural environment.
The move to this comprehensive economic model in turn requires understanding something else ignored in conventional economic discussions. This is that economic systems don't arise in a vacuum: they are influenced by, and in turn influence, the larger cultural system in which they are embedded.
[end excerpt]
The Death of Print Media is due to Lack of Content & Functional Illiteracy - Michael Moore.
http://fora.tv/2009/09/17/Filmmaker_Michael_Moore_on_Capitalism_A_Love_Story#chapter_07
The above link is a good 10 minute talk about how dumb our society has become any why. I like his explaination of "Liberals" as being moderates and "Progressives" as being more to the left.
To Karl and Christine: Thanks!
Reason and Passion... Awesome!
Over the weekend, I was involved in a conversation with a few friends in which one topic was "who would be the best SCOTUS nominee that Obama could NEVER get approved by the Senate. I had the nominee that ended the conversation in near hysterical giggling by all participants -
ELLIOT SPITZER! ;-)
"Watchdog Groups Call for Criminal Charges Against U.S. Chamber of Commerce Director Don Blankenship for Homicide"
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/watchdog-groups-call-for-criminal-charges-against-us-chamber-of-commerce-director-don-blankenship-for-homicide-90602334.html
I would love to see Dennis Kacenth as the supreme court nominee the republicans will be hysterical love it. I think he would be a great pick for the country he would stand up to the republicans and the radical supreme court.
Corporate Values Justices versus American Values Justices - Everyone on the Hartmann show needs to stop framing the supreme court justices as either Progressive/Liberal/Left or Conservative/Right and start using Corporate Values Justices versus American Values Justices and nominees.