Thom Hartmann, Independent Media Institute

Most recently, 100 mph winds swept grass-fires through Colorado, leaving thousands homeless. It was 116 degrees here in Portland last summer, as wildfires and drought ravage the West. The Gulf Coast, South and Eastern Seaboard are now annually torn apart by superstorms, while the Midwest faces mile-wide tornadoes never before seen with this ferocity and frequency.

Climate change has gone from the theoretical to slapping us in the face.

From drought and fires that killed hundreds in California, to massive tornadoes ripping apart Kentucky, to sea-level rise and flooding cities, America is being hammered and Americans are dying. Right now....

The Founders of this nation, and the Framers who wrote our Constitution, created (as Ben Franklin famously said) a constitutional republic: a government “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed” through citizens’ (then white men) right to vote.

They referred to this as “republicanism” because it was based on the Greek and Roman republics (then thousands of years in the past but still remembered and idealized), and when put into law they called it “a Republican Form of Government.”

Today that form of government is in crisis in America, as that core right to vote that defines republicanism is under attack by Republican legislators in red states across our nation....

Our democracy is in a crisis, with many thoughtful and not-prone-to-hysteria commentators wondering out loud if the Republican embrace of Trumpism has gone so far that it may take the entire country over the edge.

A brilliant recent analysis is Thomas Edsall’s article in yesterday’s New York Times, How to Tell When Your Country Is Past the Point of No Return, bookended by Barton Gellman’s shocking piece in The Atlantic, Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.

Both deal with the immediate crisis brought to us by the six years that Trump has dominated the American political scene and his takeover of the Republican Party. ...

There was a time when Democrats called their party “the Party of Freedom.”

Largely because of the horrors of the Republican Great Depression, Americans realized that, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “Necessitous men are not free men.”

You can’t disentangle economics from liberty. Which is why Democrats have proclaimed since the 1930s that:...

The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict sent a shudder through America as terrorists and vigilantes celebrated: One right-winger called for wholesale slaughter of Democrats, saying on Telegram, "The left won't stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood."

On Facebook, right-wing sites celebrating the verdict were the most popular nationwide by a factor of nine to one.

The parents of Anthony Huber, shot dead by Rittenhouse as Huber tried to disarm him, put out a public statement that said, in part:...