Thom Hartmann, AlterNet

Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger asks a question no current Republican politician appears willing to say out loud for fear that Musk, Trump, or other rightwing billionaires will use the corrupt Citizens United decision to blow them out of the water politically with a multimillion-dollar primary challenge:

“[A]s I watch the behavior of our political leaders, the comments of an ever-increasingly unhinged Trump, and the growing indifference of many Americans toward our role in the world, I have to ask a painful question: Are we now the bad guys?”

It’s a helluva question.

Our nation’s Founders overthrew a king in 1776, and paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared....

— The most horrifying news story of the day: Ukraine can’t fight the war against Russia without the Starlink Internet system to guide their weaponry and for communication. Yesterday, it was reported that Trump is considering having Musk cut off Starlink to that country to bring them to their knees on behalf of Vladimir Putin.

— Republicans are really in love with Nazi Hitler salutes! First it was Musk, at an event after Trump’s inauguration, throwing a Nazi salute twice. Then, Thursday, Steve Bannon did it at CPAC. They think that they’re “owning the libs” with these and other Nazi references and icons, but there’s nothing funny or cute about normalizing a racist ideology that led to 85 million deaths, massive suffering, and laid waste to most of Europe. Is it time for America to consider the German approach to hate speech, explicitly banning it and providing both civil and criminal penalties for promulgating Nazism?

— Trump is about to seize control of the Post Office. Is this all about voting by mail? Republicans have spent the better part of forty-plus years trying to make it harder to vote, following Paul Weyrich’s famous dictum: “Now many of our Christians … want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people; they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” States with mail-in voting have among the highest levels of voter participation in the country, which is why pretty much every other democracy in the world uses it extensively; this is exactly why Republicans don’t want mail-in voting. When Trump impounded money for the postal service in the 2020 election but Louis DeJoy still got 97% of all ballots delivered within 3 days, it sealed DeJoy’s fate; he was just pushed out as Postmaster General. And now Trump is reportedly planning to bring the Post Office — an American institution since Ben Franklin became our first Postmaster General in 1775 — under his personal control by handing it to billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik to run. Lutnik has been a longtime advocate for privatizing the PO, which would also presumably mean killing off the postal workers’ union and raising rates to cover the for-profit overhead, dividends for rich investors, and millions in salaries for the new CEO and senior executives. The PO could then refuse to transport ballots or otherwise put the fix in to destroy mail-in voting. Keep an eye on this; the unions have already said they’ll sue, and several members of the Postal Board of Governors have echoed those sentiments. But with Trump openly defying court orders right now around USAID and NIH, it’s unlikely he’ll be deterred by legal niceties....

One of the enduring mysteries in today’s American political life is why so many Republican politicians and their friends are adopting or promoting openly Nazi symbols, iconography, and slogans.

Is it a shout-out to the hardcore racists and haters that make up the GOP’s base, or just a performance to get enough votes to win elections? Or a proclamation that the end-goal of Republican governance is the destruction of American democracy, perhaps in deference to Vladimir Putin? How about it’s being a bizarre attempt at trolling people old or well-educated enough to remember or know what Nazism inevitably leads to?

And why are America’s mainstream media so unwilling to even report on, much less discuss, all the Nazi and neo-Nazi references surrounding Trump and today’s captive Republicans?...

The 32-year-old Norwegian considered himself a deep thinker and a big fan of the right-wing and Russian propaganda which argued western civilization was rotting from within because of multiculturalism, empowered women, racial/religious minorities, and liberalism. Putting pen to paper, he wrote:

“When I first started blogging I was concerned with how we could ‘fix the system.’ I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the system cannot be fixed, and perhaps shouldn’t be fixed. Not only does it have too many enemies, it also has too many internal contradictions.
“If we define the ‘system’ as mass immigration from alien cultures, globalism, multiculturalism and suppression of free speech in the name of ‘tolerance,’ then this is going to collapse. It’s inevitable.
“The goal of Western survivalists — and that’s what we are — should not be to ‘fix the system,’ but to be mentally and physically prepared for its collapse, and to develop coherent answers to what went wrong and prepare to implement the necessary remedies when the time comes.
“We need to seize the window of opportunity, and in order to do so, we need to define clearly what we want to achieve.”

After writing over 1500 pages describing how it’s the essential duty of every white man in the world to marginalize or even kill as many non-white non-Christians as possible, Anders Breivik set off a bomb in Oslo’s Government Quarter, killing eight people.

He then drove to Utøya, an island in Tyrifjorden where the Norwegian Social Democratic party’s youth organization, the Workers’ Youth League (AUF), held their summer camp. There he used a semiautomatic rifle to kill another sixty-nine people, most in their teens or early twenties. He shot and wounded another 41 mostly young people, leaving many with life-changing injuries....

So, JD Vance is now saying that he and Trump don’t have to obey federal judges, tweeting, “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” This is how autocrats run things; it’s an extraordinarily dangerous moment.

It was Tuesday, July 17, 1787 and the men writing the Constitution had convened in Philadelphia to debate the separation of powers between the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. They drew their inspiration for that day from French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu, whose 1748 book The Spirit of the Laws had taken the New World and the Framers of the Constitution by storm.

In it, Montesquieu pointed out the absolute necessity of having three relatively co-equal branches of government, each with separate authorities, to prevent any one branch from seizing too much power and ending a nation’s democracy. In The Spirit of Laws, he laid it out unambiguously:...