(1/26) On April 18, Bob Woodward recorded Jared Kushner saying that Trump had taken control away from the doctors and was going to open the country back up. Why then? What was happening right around that time?

More from Thom Hartmann

1/ How do we prevent the next grifter-in-chief and stop Congress from enabling criminals in government?

2/ Trump and McConnell are both pushing pardons. Trump wants pardons for his criminal cronies, enablers, and children. McConnell wants pardons for meat packing plants and corporate criminals.

3/ Although past presidents have had family members working for them - Attorney General Bobby Kennedy is a famous example - none have ever had to pardon their family members for criminal activity in the White House. Until Trump.

4/ Trump’s family of grifters have been extracting money from our government and the American people since day one, starting with the inaugural fund scandal. Just since he lost the election. Trump has raised over $170, million: the grift continues!

5/ Trump has sold out our country and our values. He’s given top-secret information to foreign adversaries, embraced dictators and autocrats around the world, and enthusiastically damaged our relationships with allies. It’s almost as if he’s working for a foreign government.

Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann

1/ Mitch McConnell wants to let corporations kill you without consequence. (THREAD)

2/ Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans without any consequence.

3/ Mitch took you and me hostage back in May, when the House of Representatives passed the HEROES act that would have funded state and local governments and provided unemployed workers with an ongoing weekly payment.

4/ Mitch refused to even allow the Senate to discuss the HEROES Act until or unless the legislation also legalized corporations killing their workers and customers. To this day, he refuses to let it even be discussed in the Senate.

5/ We’ve seen companies fire people for refusing to take their lives in their hands, executives organize betting pools on which employees are going to die first, and companies lying openly to their workers and customers about the dangers of COVID-19.

Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann

1/ When will America wake up to the evil that has seized the Republican Party?

2/ We’ve seen it around the world and throughout history: when a political party or government exists solely to serve the very wealthy, and begins to lose power, they inevitably turn to authoritarianism and police violence.

3/ We saw this in Florida when Gov. Ron DeSantis sent State police with guns drawn to intimidate the family of whistleblower Rebekah Jones, who he’d earlier fired for refusing to lie about Florida coronavirus statistics and is publishing a daily “Florida coronavirus dashboard.“

4/ We see it with Donald Trump committing a felony for which you or I would immediately go to prison, trying to tamper with the outcome of a legitimate election by threats, intimidation, and offering bribes to government officials.

5/ We see it in Michigan where the Macomb County GOP seems to share an address with the group that showed up, armed, to threaten and intimidate the Secretary of State and her four-year-old son as they were preparing to watch “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”

Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann

1/ We must stop Republicans from helping Trump “poison the wells“ and “salt the fields“ of America.

2/ Donald Trump‘s treason extends far beyond his efforts to damage Americans belief in our form of government, our elected democratic republic, that Trump’s oligarch buddies in Saudi Arabia, Russia and China also regularly disparage.

3/ Trump’s also actively damaging the ability of the incoming Biden administration to aid Americans during the Trump Depression, and to get the virus in check. In this, he has help from Steve Mnuchin and Mitch McConnell.

4/ While McConnell refuses to even allow a conversation in the Senate about the HEROS Act that already passed the House and would put money in unemployed Americans’ pockets, Mnuchin wants the Fed to return the CARES Act money that they’re leveraging to sustain the stock market.

5/ As Senator Ron Wyden said, “As the economy backslides amid skyrocketing Covid-19 cases, Secretary Mnuchin is engaged in economic sabotage, and trying to tie the Biden administration's hands.”

Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann

1/ Rebuilding trust in democracy and our American government requires both holding seditious Republicans accountable and restoring the protective functions of government. Here’s what Democrats must do and why. (THREAD)

2/ The reason tens of millions of Americans don’t believe Joe Biden won the election is a 40-year betrayal of the American public’s trust by Republican politicians, grifters, and con artists exploiting the once-good name of Lincoln‘s Party.

3/ Science, religion, and conspiracy theories are all, essentially the same thing: systems or attempts to explain the unknown, to make sense out of things beyond our senses or immediate, touchable reality. Thus, our vulnerability to con artists like Trump.

4/ It’s impossible for any individual to know or understand everything. We believe electrons make our computers work, but for all but a few scientists who’ve actually seen and measured electrons, it’s only a belief. We must trust their word.

5/ This is why trust is central to science, and why scientific norms and institutions require multiple layers and dimensions of confirmation before things are asserted as true or even probable.

More from Politics

Noah Smith
@Noahpinion

1/Politics thread time.

To me, the most important aspect of the 2018 midterms wasn't even about partisan control, but about democracy and voting rights. That's the real battle.

2/The good news: It's now an issue that everyone's talking about, and that everyone cares about.

3/More good news: Florida's proposition to give felons voting rights won. But it didn't just win - it won with substantial support from Republican voters.

That suggests there is still SOME grassroots support for democracy that transcends

4/Yet more good news: Michigan made it easier to vote. Again, by plebiscite, showing broad support for voting rights as an

5/OK, now the bad news.

We seem to have accepted electoral dysfunction in Florida as a permanent thing. The 2000 election has never really

Bad ballot design led to a lot of undervotes for Bill Nelson in Broward Co., possibly even enough to cost him his Senate seat. They do appear to be real undervotes, though, instead of tabulation errors. He doesn't really seem to have a path to victory. https://t.co/utUhY2KTaR
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 16, 2018

David Rothkopf
@djrothkopf

Trump on climate: I don't believe it. Trump on Khashoggi: I don't believe it. Trump on Russia: I don't believe it. Idiocy? A canny game? Doesn't really matter as much as the underlying intellectual autocracy. In this administration only one opinion matters.

It's an assault on facts and reason. It's an assault on good governance. It's an assault on the bureaucracies that are being discounted. It's an assault on science and history. But it is also an assault on one of the underpinnings of democracy.

We live in a system that is grounded on the idea of collaborative government. Leaders may have a final word but even then, there are typically checks and balances. Hopefully, in this case, such checks and balances may work. But they also are being tested.

The president's position that he is smarter than all the world's scientists, than the entire intelligence community, than experts who have studied any issue all their lives, is, of course, asinine. But his belief that government turns solely on his opinion, is monarchic.

Louis XIV reportedly said, "L'etat est moi." That he was the state. Trump asserting that he knows better than all, discounts all advice, that his brain is enough to chart the course for America alone, is essentially saying the same thing.

Edwin Hayward
@uk_domain_names

Ok, it's high time to look at the REAL effects of Brexit. As the Tories implode & Labour sits on its hands, companies are executing contingency plans, shifting jobs & assets, slashing investments, or redomiciling (accounting exercise). Happening NOW, not in a fantasy future. 1/95

Barden Corporation is closing down its Plymouth factory after 51 years, putting 400 jobs at risk, as its parent company Schaeffler shifts production to various sites outside the UK due to Brexit.

8 health providers have warned of medicine shortages in the event of a no-deal Brexit: "we do not believe that the current medicine supply plans will suffice, and we will have widespread shortages if we do not respond urgently."

Pfizer - $100 million on Brexit prep: "Pfizer’s preparations are well advanced to make the changes necessary to meet EU legal requirements after the U.K. is no longer a member state, especially in the regulatory, manufacturing and supply chain areas."

The Government has spent £4.2 billion pounds on Brexit preparations (£2.2 billion in previous Budgets, plus an additional £2 billion in the most recent Budget.)

Parker Molloy
@ParkerMolloy

I told you they’d bring this up

Right-wing media have essentially convinced themselves that Trump never said "very fine people." They're lying. https://t.co/5960NPMYLJ
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) February 11, 2021

I was wondering why that tweet had so many stupid replies. And now I see

The Fine People Hoaxers are trying hard to keep you from reading the actual FULL transcript because then you would see how the hoax was pulled off with devious editing. https://t.co/PQLj0DWuPj
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 11, 2021

Seriously, this was “the night before.” If you’re at the march where they’re changing “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil,” you’re not a “very fine person.” Full stop.

Trump defense talking about how the then-president was praising the peaceful protests at Charlottesville that occurred "the night before" the violence on Saturday. That was the night where the torch-bearing crowd chanted "Jews will not replace us." pic.twitter.com/HCKS6Q9LBY
— Anthony Zurcher (@awzurcher) February 12, 2021

There are 3 important moments in that transcript.

1.) When someone asked Trump about a statement *he had already made* about there being blame on “both sides,” he said the “fine people” line.

2. Trump does clarify! “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally “

Okay!

Then adds that there were “many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

David Roberts
@drvolts

Strongly endorse everything in this @OsitaNwanevu piece. One of the key mistakes I see among Dems, both online & in the real world, is thinking that people believe right-wing nonsense because they are unintelligent or uneducated.

In the area I know best, climate change, it's been found repeatedly that climate denialists & skeptics have, on average, MORE higher education than those who accept the science. They know MORE about climate science. They have, on average, HIGHER verbal intelligence.

What they do is adopt the conclusion that best serves their social tribe and then use their intelligence & education to build a case for it. It's called "motivated reasoning" & everyone is subject to it, very much including the smartest people.

I'm increasingly interested in the idea of "personal moats" in the context of careers.

Moats should be:

- Hard to learn and hard to do (but perhaps easier for you)
- Skills that are rare and valuable
- Legible
- Compounding over time
- Unique to your own talents & interests https://t.co/bB3k1YcH5b
— Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg) November 22, 2018

2/ Like a company moat, you want to build career capital while you sleep.

As Andrew Chen noted:

People talk about \u201cpassive income\u201d a lot but not about \u201cpassive social capital\u201d or \u201cpassive networking\u201d or \u201cpassive knowledge gaining\u201d but that\u2019s what you can architect if you have a thing and it grows over time without intensive constant effort to sustain it
— Andrew Chen (@andrewchen) November 22, 2018

3/ You don’t want to build a competitive advantage that is fleeting or that will get commoditized

Things that might get commoditized over time (some longer than

Things that look like moats but likely aren\u2019t or may fade:

- Proprietary networks
- Being something other than one of the best at any tournament style-game
- Many "awards"
- Twitter followers or general reach without "respect"
- Anything that depends on information asymmetry https://t.co/abjxesVIh9
— Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg) November 22, 2018

4/ Before the arrival of recorded music, what used to be scarce was the actual music itself — required an in-person artist.

After recorded music, the music itself became abundant and what became scarce was curation, distribution, and self space.

5/ Similarly, in careers, what used to be (more) scarce were things like ideas, money, and exclusive relationships.

In the internet economy, what has become scarce are things like specific knowledge, rare & valuable skills, and great reputations.