Thom Hartmann

In response to reports in The Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk personally ordered the deadly slowdown of internet access to Ukraine and that Trump then called and begged him to get it restored, Nobel Prize-winning economist and all-around genius Paul Krugman called yesterday for the United States to nationalize Musk’s Starlink/Starshield array of thousands of satellites providing internet service around the world.

On MS NOW, former Bush speechwriter and columnist (and guest on my show) David Frum echoed the sentiment in an interview with former Bush White House Communications Director Nicolle Wallace. And Matt Stoller — often brilliantly on the monopoly beat — is also writing thoughtfully about what to do about this terrible situation.

Senator Adam Schiff framed the issue when he wrote on Musk’s Nazi-infested social media site:...

Reporters for MS NOW just broke an extremely troubling story: seven people inside and around the FBI reached out to say that they’re afraid that in the next few days they’ll be called upon to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt our election next week.

They all know that federal law makes it a crime for federal law enforcement officers to enter polling places armed (unless there’s an active crime, like a shooting, going on), and it has been that way since 1865, which has them particularly worried about their own possible legal exposure.

Several also noted that what makes this concern particularly cogent and urgent is that they’ve already watched Trump’s and Blanche’s Justice Department use invented claims of “irregularities” to get a judge to sign a warrant that allowed them to march armed agents into Georgia election offices, broadcast on national television, with little blowback and no consequences....

What the hell is going on in the Republican Party?

Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now.

Why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation?...

With virtually no mention or reporting in the corporate press, Republican-run states are again running the voter purge of millions that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2024.

Last week, Reuters published a special report on the ways the Trump administration could “interfere” with the midterms, noting that a lawyer in Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office bragged that his state had “taken a leading role in ensuring its voter registration list is purged…"

Yep, they used the word “purged.” They’re not even bothering with the polite terms anymore....

In three weeks, California voters will have their ballots tallied on Proposition 40 (and 41 and 42, which would negate 40) that will impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets — the wealth — of the state’s 200+ billionaires.

The money will be used to make up for the massive almost-trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid, called Medi-Cal in that state, that hits in January because the Republicans’ Big Beautiful Billionaires’ Bill used it to pay for their trillions in tax cuts for billionaires.

The California Democratic Party has formally endorsed Prop 40 along with the California Nurses Association and the state AFL-CIO, and if the state’s Democratic politicians had backed the tax across the board, odds are very high that it would pass and 42 (which is now polling over 50%) would fail....