It's not just social media giving violent white supremacists a pass

— The fossil fuel industry is apparently paying off Republicans — in a practice legalized by Republicans on the Supreme Court — to make sure Congress never passes legislation to hold them accountable for all the death and destruction they’ve caused by lying about climate change for the past 50 years. Here, for example, are the biggest recipients of their largesse, according to OpenSecrets: Romney, Mitt (R-UT) $8,291,262; Cornyn, John (R-TX) $4,678,062; Cruz, Ted (R-TX) $4,138,421; McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) $2,852,107; McCarthy, Kevin (R-CA) $2,581,832; Hutchison, Kay Bailey (R-TX) $2,332,021; Inhofe, James M (R-OK) $2,320,139; Pearce, Steve (R-NM) $2,236,714; Barton, Joe (R-TX) $2,211,987; Brady, Kevin (R-TX) $2,087,396; Scalise, Steve (R-LA) $1,847,013; Murkowski, Lisa (R-AK) $1,792,602. If you haven’t yet noticed the trend, just check out the party affiliation of each…

— Convicted Felon Trump now has the “Scarlet F”: Our first felon President. There was a time that many of us remember when America — for all our faults, history, and stupid international meddling — was seen around the world as a beacon of morality and the staunchest defender of democratic values. Now, we’re the laughingstock — or the terror — of the developed world, since a grifting adjudicated sexual abuser, Putin lackey, and chronic liar is about to become president again. Alexander Hamilton warned us, but our media was far too busy fluffing Trump’s ego and sanewashing his BS to remind us that our first Secretary of the Treasury and the main author of the Federalist Papers wrote, in 1792:

“Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy... When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’” (Emphasis added)

And “directing the whirlwind” of racial hate, fear, and bigotry — as I regularly point out here on Hartmann Report— is exactly what Trump thinks he can do to reverse the Civil Rights movement and the New Deal, "(I’m skeptical he can pull it off.) The Founders — and FDR and LBJ — must be rolling in their graves

— It's not just social media that's giving violent white supremacists a pass... Without telling us, so far as I can tell, Bloomberg is reporting that the FBI (and the DHS more generally) stopped seriously monitoring and infiltrating violent white supremacist groups two years ago, around the time they were being trashed for such investigations by sedition-, Putin-, and Trump-loving Republicans in the House. The pressure seems to have worked.

“In 2022, DHS closed its Disinformation Governance Board, designed to offer best practices in countering viral conspiracies,” reports Bloomberg, adding that, “DHS also recently shuttered a unit that swept the internet for threatening materials in public posts, social media messages and online forums…”

Putin’s internet trolls, operating with huge budgets and the resources of the Russian state behind them, have since become a major force on the top social media sites, and both X and Meta are no longer suppressing their lies and attacks on democracy. Is it fossil fuel billionaires or social media billionaires who are the greatest threat to the future of world peace and democracy? Hard to choose…

— Greedy insurer interrupts cancer surgery in shocking mid-procedure call... Dr. Elisabeth Potter was in the middle of surgery on a breast cancer patient when a nurse ran into the operating theater to say that UnitedHealthcare was on the phone demanding to speak with her. She interrupted the surgery, leaving the unconscious patient whose chest was cut open on the table, to take the call. Here’s her story in her own words, as she told it on Instagram and later confirmed with Newsweek:

“So, I scrubbed out of my case and I called UnitedHealthcare, and the gentleman said he needed some information about her. Wanted to know her diagnosis and whether her inpatient stay should be justified. And I was like, ‘Do you understand this? She's asleep right now and she has breast cancer?’ And the gentleman said, ‘Actually, I don’t — that’s a different department that would know that information.’ And I was like, ‘Well, she does need to stay overnight tonight, and you have all the information with you because I got approval for this surgery, and I need to go back and be with my patient now.’ But, yeah, it’s out of control. Insurance is out of control. I have no other words.”

I can think of a few words: Parasitic, theft, malefic, heinous, flagitious, depraved, monstrous, Mephistophelean, godless, loathsome, psychopathic, cruel, sadistic, maleficent, and vile for a start… Feel free to add your adjectives in the comments below.

— Indiana Republicans want to threaten rape victims with felonies if they try to get an abortion. Over at her brilliant “Abortion Every Day” substack newsletter, Jessica Valenti tells us that Indiana State Senator Mike Young has proposed legislation that would subject a woman in that state to 2.5 years in prison if she were to claim rape to get an abortion (about the only way to get an abortion in Indiana, unless your life is in danger) and then can’t subsequently prove to the satisfaction of the state’s GOP that she was actually raped. The bill also makes it a crime to possess the abortion drug mifepristone, evoking the possibility of midnight raids with Indiana police kicking in the doors of women who Indiana Republicans think may have purchased the drug from an online telehealth physician. Freedumb!!

— Wondering why Trump is on a jeremiad against Panama? Some suggest his rant was timed to coincide with Jimmy Carter’s funeral to give right-wing media an excuse to trash Carter’s signing the Panama Canal Treaty that Nixon first started negotiating. But consider this story from Newsweek titled “Trump Organization Accused of Tax Evasion in Panama.” Just like the way he scammed New York State out of tax dollars (for which he was adjudicated and sentenced last year) his failed hotel in Panama hadn’t been paying its taxes either. Trump’s involved in a huge lawsuit down there right now, and some speculate that toppling the Panamanian government might work out well for his personal interests. Keep an eye on this one!

— James Carville suggests Jeff Bezos is trying to buy Trump via Melania. Amazon has just announced that they’re going to spend $40 million on a documentary about Melania Trump, who got her legal status in the US with a “genius visa” that’s typically reserved for the world’s top scientists and Nobel Prize winners. (There are only around 3,000 issued every year.) Carville, who was himself the subject of a recent Netflix documentary, implies that this number stinks of a payoff:

“This is something I’m going to claim some expertise in, the subject of documentaries because I’ve been the subject of two and I’ve been the subject of a recent one… You can produce a world class documentary for $2 million. I know it. You couldn’t spend $40 million on a documentary if you tried 10 times harder to do it, so where’s the money going? Well, we know where the money is going.”

Why? Well, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 state attorneys general are suing Amazon for allegedly maintaining a monopoly through anticompetitive practices, and Bezos apparently hates unions and might want help stopping them in his warehouses…

— Crazy Alert! Greenlanders really hate Trump, so Don Jr. had to hire homeless people to make it look like somebody was welcoming him. Danish Radio (which once loaned me a studio for two weeks to do my show: great people!) is reporting that after having Greenlanders give him the finger in the airport and post “Yankee go home” on Facebook, Don Jr. had to hire a few local “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people to pretend to be Trump supporters for his recent stunt visiting that country. As one local, Tom Amtof of the town of Nuuk, told DR News: “All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful.” Yeah, distasteful. Again, there are other words…

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