Recent comments
Popular blog posts
No blog posts. You can add one!
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.
Thom,
I have a good way for you to illustrate your explanation of taxes and wages.
Many people have at one time or another worked in restaurants. And, as you know, servers in restaurants do not get paid a full minimum wage. This is done why?
Because it is assumed that the server will make up for it and then some in tips.
This is the same principle you're applying to wages and taxes. An employer knows what the tax rate is, knows what you're making and what you're willing to work for. If taxes are higher--or, if tipping were suddenly outlawed--the employer knows he'll have to dish out a higher wage. It sort of works the same way and is a good way to explain your concept.
Thank you. You're my #1 talker.
Brady B. Bonk
One thing that smells fishy is the fact that the Murrah Bldg. target was in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma -- with Oklahoma's governor at the time being an intelligence community alumni, Frank Keating.
And he really wanted the V.P. spot with Bush II in 2000, right?
THOM said let them take their time on the torture thing -- let it get a bit chaotic.
Well, I agree about letting the individual State's attorneys general get in the fracas. That's a good thing.
However, I have a concern I've had since the beginning when I saw on a PBS show (hosted by a rightwinger I assume) who conducted the very first debate I heard on torture, clearly planted by the Bush Crime Family-Lynne&DickCheney et al. It was in the late summer/early autumn of 2004.
Clearly there has been and IS a desire to confuse the public's understanding of an heinous and illegal action -- torture.
If we wait any longer, THOM, and let this illegal torture policy go unprosecuted, how many more "debates" will be conducted to pollute young, impressionable minds? Will torture be the next new WEDGE ISSUE?
I never thought I would see the day where a lobby would keep our first black president from attending a UN anit-racism conference. But I give Bush credit for two things, partially for PETFAR and completely for not allowing Israel to bomb Iran. When Bush is the calm person in the room you have to be worried. So now that the new government is even more right wing, I woner if Israel needs Obama's permission to bomb Iran (and subsequently start WWIII)?
Thom,
You briefly mentioned that torture was used to produce false confessions and create fodder for the terror alerts during the summer and fall of 2004. I haven't heard anyone else in the media discuss this angle.
It seems to me to be ripe for someone to research. Telling someone who doesn't listen to Thom Hartmann that Bush used torture to try to kill Social Security---well---people aren't going to get that. Saying that he tortured to try to find a link between Sadam and Al-quada and to ramp up fear to get re-elected is something most people can understand.
I hear Hannity is saying that he'll agree to be water-boarded for charity. Well, I'll believe he's serious about this if he allows the waterboarding to be done by a combination of Code Pink members, Cindy Sheehan, and mothers who live in Bagdad - i.e. he'll have to worry about whether those doing the waterboarding REALLY want him to survive - let's make the experience a bit more realistic for him so he starts to truly understand the issue for prisoners.
Guess who "Just Said No" to torture
"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
Convention Against Torture
Signed by President Reagan, May 1988
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1079/is_n2137_v88/ai_6742034/pg_2...
Now we may question his sincerity, but the words are right there!
Witness accounts of bones being found inside Abu Ghraib incinerators.
morale was low to begin with—the M.P.s just wanted to know when they were going home—and there was something about living in cells at Abu Ghraib that never felt right. “We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building,” Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. “It was this huge circular thing. We just didn’t know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people, for all we knew—bodies.” Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. “It had bones in it,” he said, and he called it the crematorium. “But hey, you’re at war,” he said.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_gourevitch
Thom, the building that Tim McVeigh blew up in Oklahoma City is not the McMurrah Building, it's the Murrah Building, named after Alfred P. Murrah.
Hi-
Krill oil also has the red "Astaxanthin" . I take it for relieving pms symptoms and its rich in the omega's. Take it 10 days (women) before your cycle but not during. Make sure you get mercury free stuff.
Hi Thom,
Whenever I hear anyone talking about the history of US involvement with torture they always seem to leave out one of the major Cold War chapters: Dan Mitrioni and the CIA's "Public Safety" program to teach Latin American governments "advanced counterinsurgency techniques." Journalist A.J. Langguth wrote a book called "Hidden Terrors" that detail Mitrioni teaching Brazilian and Uuguay police how to torture by demonstrating the application of electric shock to homeless people who were then murdered after their usefulness as human lab rats was done. Mitrioni was eventually kidnaped and then later killed by Uruguayan leftists, but he was just one of a cadre of CIA torture instructors that our government sponsored around the world in the 1960s to train friendly despotic governments how to better terrorize their own people and keep them in line.
DB
I agree with the comment about prosecution of crimes committed especially around the invasion of Iraq, Secret Rendition, illegal wire tapping, etc. However, I just spoke with Thom on the phone on the air on torture, the FBI's responsibility and how does one in this country prosecute the head prosecutors? Yes WE the people need to be active in, suggested by Thom, calling our reps and senetors. But then they go to through the process that leads to the same people. I felt dismissed by this suggestion. I call my Rep. and Senetor. I'm active in my community. I feel frustrated with these broken systems and very little change. I feel frustrated with our media with their quick clip spin. What is the difference really? Accurate information other than real solutions.
Hurrah! For a sane, thoughtful, reasonable and compassionate discussion on drugs. Many kudos to your guest.
On torture: I think what we need to say to the "24" fans is that torture can never be policy for America. If there's that magical situation, where you have someone you truly know has information that could affect American lives, and you have such a grasp on this particular person's psyche that you know they'll respond to torture; well then, you, as an individual, can take the responsibility to break the law and torture them, knowing the consequences, and hope that the good outcome will result in a Presidential pardon. But it can't, it must NOT, ever be policy.
Heard CBS News April 23, 2009- lice can stimulate the immune system!
My memory of Dachau in 1968, as a young American exchange student, was how absolutely normal the setting appeared. I expected a lead in like perhaps Jackson State Prison. Instead, getting off the train/bus from Munich it took a bit to find it. I found myself in a peaceful little village reminiscent of the American mid-west. I immediately understood Hannah Arendt's comment on the banality of evil (Origins of Totalitarianism). We must be far more cautious of this than most would believe. The last 8 years have put us teetering on the edge of the slope. We need to drive home this point with criminal prosecution. While it may not be Nuremburg scale, it is only a matter of degree.
Finally, someone in the media is talking about Schindler's List. Our last 8 years were so like the steps leading to the Reich. The American scientists having to leave our country to go to Britain and Korea to study stem cell research. The governmental departments being told they could not use the words 'polar bear' and 'global warming' on the same document- the spying on Americans and the creation of dossiers. Homeland Security vs the Hinterland. CIA personnel in the professors classes, The no fly list onto which even Senator Kennedy--
It is not so much the imprisonment necessary of our war criminals, but to stop their legacy from being falsified in the historical records.
Remember Bush 41 crying on tv when he spoke how the troops gave themselves up to the Americans because we were the only ones who did not torture? What became of his sadhistic son? Spare the rod and spoil the child- why don't those Republicans discipline their children-they just must abuse them and bully them so they can be tough like John Wayne- I had better stop here.
We have to keep hammering away about prosecuting the Bush admin officials for torture and sooooo many other offenses against our country. While we have access to so much information in our media today, it also gives so many different opinions and BS, many citizens simply tune out and turn it off.
Wakeup, America!
That was the Green Bay Packers. RE John Mc Cain gave the line up as under torture. Did not Israel outlaw water boarding because it produced false results.
HELLO the right, including Bush 43, admits we went to war on faulty intelligence. Yet, HELLO!!!!!!! they keep trying to defend their torture and Media MAtters has Fox news on record of reporting water boarding like a fun little water fight session and were even giggling about it.
Sadhists and masichists- this is what has become of the Reich. Zeig Heil!
Thom,
Is there any hope for the human species? When there is so much sociopathy (on a sliding scale, from a dishonest used car salesman or other dishonest businessman to the sadistic head of a government), this seems to be part of the human psyche (or even, as Jeanine Garofalo claims, is located in the limbic part of the brain, with sadists having a measurably larger limbic section impinging on other brain tissue.)
How can we ameliorate the effects of this vestigial and apparently detrimental brain structure? Or, if there is a different cause we can identify, how can we correct the problem?
If I were a researcher in brain dysfunction, I would study this.
I recall stories about detainee family members being arrested or disappeared in order to pressure prisoners to talk and now, in the torture memos, we have tales of children placed in small boxes with insects. Remember too, Seymour Hersch said there was evidence of rape of women and children and I remember reading (from Amnesty International?) that there were detainee wives and children who are missing to this day.
If we could rationalize torturing "high-value" detainees, how can we rationalize torturing their wives or children?
There is so much more to know about what went on under the Bush regime.
Reihan Salam talked a lot but said NOTHING.
He talked a mile a minute ,similar to people on cocaine or speed, and said nothing at all about the Republican party and how their "values" have drifted.
He is sounds like one of he creatures that hijacked the once great party and uses it for his own best interest.
Like the right wing Christians, they use the solidarity and refusal to admit their mistakes, Republicans to further their own agenda.
Creepy
PIRATE MY FILM IS THE LATEST PROJECT BY MAX KEISER WHEREBY YOU CAN BRING DOWN THE CORPORATE STRANGLEHOLD ON COPYRIGHT LAWS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHoLQcg0LWs&feature=player_embedded
Tom, important to note: "shutting down the internet" is NOT pulling the plug. Whistleblowers would be on notice that any evidence they try to disseminate safely through out the web could be scrubbed. This was even in evidence in the days after 9/11, when sites were taken down hourly.
This initiative is to provide more reliable cover for less obvious ways of suppression and conversion, paralleling what's been done to the various leading media since the 1947 Nat'l Security Act, the media parts of which are still classified, and which allow gov't to secretly influence media with purchases and nat'l security employees acting as producers, advisors, reporters and even ownership (see Bill Casey / ABC and the Rise of Rush Limbaugh http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-libmedia.htm)
As a 25 year veteran of ARPA-Net/Internet, I can tell you with the web it is unbelievably easy to do real-time culling of any particular subject matter you wish, whether it be high crimes in progress, evidence of same, or persecution of "enemies", who could just as well be simply political opponents or the worst-case, whistle-blowers.
The only way to keep the most egregious likely offenders, such as Cheney and subordinates from being prosecuted, is to control the media, which increasingly means controlling the internet. This is why the full-court press by Cheney & Fox for pro-torture, pro-autocratic state, w. the help of plants to assist within each dept. That's the danger.
Thom,
Creative Commons is a legally recognized alternative to the Copyright, meaning that the courts will recognize legal formats that are not created by Congress or a State Legislature. Can we use this crack in the door to create a new corporate form that would solve the issues about corporate personhood?
Chad
I like to see a Bio of Brad O’Leary, education, funding (backers). It's my opion (like noses, everyone has one) that opportunist will say and do, if there is money to be made. Lets uncover the FACTs behide the curtain, what is the true motivation behide the talk.