Thom Hartmann posted some of his thoughts about the election, and they are well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed his reporting on Trump’s friendship with Putin in 2016, which refutes Trump’s constant claim that he was exonerated by the Muelker Report. He wasn’t.

I also appreciated his sharp takedown of The New York Times for repeatedly running negative stores about Biden in its front page.

Here’s a part of what he wrote:

— How 2016 WAS stolen — with help from Russia! Bette Midler recently asked on X, “Can you imagine what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had claimed the election was stolen?” That simple tweet has sent the right-wing-o-sphere into a paroxysm of hysteria. But the more we learn about what happened in 2016, the clearer it is that without Putin’s intervention — from hacking Hillary’s emails to spending millions of dollars and investing hundreds of thousands of man-hours on social media — Clinton would have easily won the election. As Frank Vyan Walton writes over on Daily Kos:
“Don Jr. met personally with a Russia lawyer in order to get dirt on the Hillary campaign. They were told by Russian operatives about the GRU hack of the DNC emails system months before it came out. Trump said ‘Russia if you’re listening…’ Trump kept working on the Trump Tower Russia project until mid-2016 and lied about it, while secretly in negotiations with Dmitri Peskov. Paul Manafort gave internal polling data to a GRU operative, Konstantin Kilimnick. Carter Page was told about the sale of 19.5% of Rosneft stock even though it was a sanctioned company and he couldn’t legally profit from that. Roger Stone was in contact with a Russian operative, Guccifer 2.0, and arranged for Wikileaks to release the Podesta emails in order to distract from the Access Hollywood tape. Michael Flynn suggested Trump would drop sanctions on Russia if they didn’t react to Obama expelling their diplomats for…. wait for it… interfering with the election. Five members of Trump’s entourage — Papadopoulos, Stone, Flynn, Van Der Zwaan and Cohen —  were prosecuted and convicted for lying under oath about their contacts with Russia.  They all did time, the cases were proven.” There’s more over at Frank’s Kos article, which is well worth the read. 

— Is Putin trying to move his border into the Baltics? You Betcha! Russia has a small slice of land bordering the Baltic Sea that’s a Russian territory called Kaliningrad. This week the Russian Ministry of Defense, in a move reminiscent of China’s encroachment on Taiwan’s territorial waters, put Europe on notice that they intend to declare part of that sea as Russian territory, an extension of Kalainingrad’s territorial waters. The leaders of the Baltic states are freaked out, as Putin moves the world, one step at a time, closer to the possibility of World War III. 

— Here’s a poll that I’ll bet won’t show up on the front page of the New York Times. The Times admitted yesterday that the “Biden is losing” polls they’ve been trumpeting for months in an effort to force the president to do a sit-down interview with the paper’s owner/publisher have been based on phony information. Instead of polling exclusively “likely voters” based on their having voted in the 2020 election, they’ve been polling Democratic voters who didn’t bother to vote last time and probably won’t this time. In fact, as D. Earl Stephens reports at his excellent Substack newsletter Enough Already, the more likely somebody is not to vote this year, the more likely they are to say they’ll vote for Trump. Even worse, a new Navigator Research poll finds that 58% of Americans want our government to crack down on corporate price gouging and 53% want the feds to do something about the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs. These are all strong Democratic and Biden issues, but don’t expect to see this poll on the front page of the Times; that’s reserved for the latest Trumpy news. 

— Speaking of polls, do you know what that money Michael Cohen confessed to “stealing” from Trump was for? It was $20K out of a paper bag with $50,000 cash in it that was paid to online services company RedFinch to juice an online poll about Trump. Seriously. They were apparently paid to post thousands or hundreds of thousands of phony online votes to swing the 2016 poll to make Trump look more popular as a businessman than he really was. It reminds me that when he came down the escalator in 2015, the crowd waiting for him was a group of actors paid $50/hour to hold Trump signs and cheer. Why aren’t our media reporting this? And how many polls today are Trump paying to juice?