Thom Hartmann: Greetings my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers in peace, freedom and the American way. Well big news last night in the elections. In fact our cheesy news alert, we’re going to kick off the show with it, courtesy of Andy Borowitz, BorowitzReport.com.

“Canadian immigration officials have reported a huge increase in the number of requests for Canadian citizenship in the past 24 hours. With over 55 million such inquiries pouring in since late Tuesday night. Of those 55 million requests well over 99.99% of them came from US citizens, with a particularly large number coming from residents of Florida and Kentucky. Canadian foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon said that he was flabbergasted by the 55 million plus requests for Canadian citizenship, adding that it’s difficult to pinpoint the precise reasons for the staggering increase. ‘My only theory,’ he said, ‘is that after the 2010 winter olympics the sport of curling is finally starting to catch on.’

”He cautioned however that it’s impossible to know exactly what is sparking this sudden interest in America’s frozen neighbor to the north. ‘People who are answering our immigration hotline say it is hard to understand because many of the American callers are sobbing uncontrollably.’ In other news, responding to last night’s election returns, representative John Boehner, the Republican from Ohio, told reporters, ‘I’m so stoked I just turned the tanning bed up to 11!’ Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin struck a more somber note, saying that despite several key victories it was a tough night for tea party voters because it involved so much math.” Yes. Thank you Andy Borowitz.

There is a, there are numerous silver linings in this gray cloud. And this if anything is absolutely not a time to give up, but rather a time to get energized, to get out there and get started. As I’ve said so often, voting is a civil obligation. It’s like jury duty, only more fun. But, well I suppose it depends on the jury you’re on. But, whole bunch of weird things just came to mind. But anyway. It’s a civil obligation. But the really important work starts the day after the vote. Now frankly I have a couple of carry-aways, take-homes from last night that I would like to share with you. I talked about them last night on our live television coverage on Free Speech TV. And with Amy Goodman and Laura Flanders and Mark Rosen and, there are, there’s a series of them. But and David Siroto. But the, in fact, let me just go through a couple.

Number one: 1906. 1906 was the last year in the United states when it was legal on an unlimited basis for corporations to pour money into support of or defeating the candidacies of political candidates. In 1905 Teddy Roosevelt in his state of the union address, which was eerily echoed this year by President Obama’s state of the union address when he called out justices Roberts and Alito and Thomas and Kennedy and Scalia for their 5 to 4 decision giving corporations the rights of human beings and the right to free speech. In 1904 Teddy Roosevelt, or in 1905 rather, in his state of the union address, he just came right out and he said there should be a complete ban on corporations giving money to politicians and political processes. Period. In fact he said the only time that a corporation should be able to spend money on politics is if they’re spending money for lawyers defending themselves. That’s it.

And a senator by the name of Tillman, my recollection is he was from Pennsylvania, I don’t have the sheet in front of me, but a senator, this senator Tillman said, good idea, Teddy, we’ll do it. And in 1906 the Tillman Act passed congress and January 5, 1907 was signed into law by President Teddy Roosevelt, and the Tillman Act explicitly said it is a felony for a corporation to give money to political campaigns and if any officer or director of that corporation was found to have participated in that process, that person went to prison for a year. Now there were a lot of echoes around the country, echoes of the Tillman Act around the country.

One was down in Texas which is what Tom DeLay is being prosecuted for right now. Basically selling his vote, one of the most corrupt politicians in American history in my opinion. Tom DeLay is the guy who had his staffers in his office working on inside information. He had, they had, the Republicans had carved this loop hole in the Securities and Exchange Commission laws that said that if Martha Stewart trades on inside information, she goes to prison. If anybody in America trades stock on inside information, they go to prison. But if you’re the member of a congressional staff or a congressman or woman yourself, and you buy stock options or stock based on knowledge that a piece of legislation is going to be coming up or is going to pass, and knowledge that is not yet public, if you trade on that stock, there is no law against that, you are absolutely exempted from those laws. And Tom DeLay had guys in his office who were doing day trading who you know were making their congressional you know salaries of you know 30 to 100 thousand bucks, whatever it was, from you know being lowly staffers to chiefs of staff. He had these guys doing day trading making hundreds of thousands of dollars. So anyhow. You know, it’s the Republican way.

So anyhow, from 1907 until January of this year it was against he law for corporations to overtly participate. Now they found a million ways around it. You know Reagan started loosening up the laws on lobbyists, we went from 300 lobbyists when he came into office to 36 thousand now. But now they don’t even need lobbyists, because of Citizen’s United. They just go out and they say oh let’s find some wackadoodle and buy them into office.

Here’s the thing to remember. This election from the point of view of Tom Donahue at the Chamber of Commerce, from the point of view of Karl Rove, from the point of view of Frank Luntz, from the point of view of the strategists in the Republican party and the transnational corporations that own the Republican party, this election was a test. This is a test. This is not an actual election, this is merely… what they were testing was how crazy a candidate can we get, how malleable a candidate can we get, how stupid a candidate can we get, there were a couple. How self involved. You know it didn’t work out so well for Christine O’Donnell, for example. How self-involved and fame-seeking a candidate can we get? What kind of advertising works the best to take down an incumbent. How far can we push the lies before they blow back on us? How important is it to keep the outside money secret? What kind of damage was done?

For example when Peter DeFazio figured out that Art Robinson, his wackadoodle, right wing, survivalist camp living, end public education, radiation is good for you so let’s make it into home insulation for every home in America and therefore solve our nuclear waste problem. When that guy, when Peter DeFazio figured out that that guy was being funded by two Wall Street billionaires, hedge fund billionaires, what kind of damage did that do? The Republicans are doing a very thorough careful analysis of this. This has been the case throughout the last couple of months. How do we buy elections. Because if they just came out and said you know we want to privatize social security, we want to do away with Medicare, we want to turn Wall Street over to the Wall Street bankers, no regulations, and we want to ship all the jobs overseas, nobody would vote for them!

So in a very real way this is the end of the Republican party and the rise of the new plutocracy, the new corporate party that calls itself the Republican party.

**Commercials**

Thom Hartmann: Well the Republican crazy train, it’s running down the road. Welcome back, Thom Hartmann here with you. I’m telling, there’s, by the way, Bennett. Colorado was just called for Michael Bennett, the democrat. Isn’t that great? If you can’t get through on our telephone lines, 866-987-THOM, 866-745-CONS, either one, you can post over at our blog. Do you agree with me that this might be the end of the Republican party? I think that the blue dogs took a bit of a bite yesterday too. I have a, I confess to a certain ambivalence there. I want the democrats to have a majority, on the other hand I know that there were several things that got sabotaged, by blue dogs, and so you know. I would never wish a democrat to lose a race, period. And I’d like to see more progressives in the party.

But I don’t think that, you know, I’ve said very often. There’s a very, very fine line between being the wind behind their back, between being the encouragement, between being the pressure, and being the circular firing squad. And we need to be the wind behind their back. The president is going to be speaking in, I guess about 30, 45 minutes, something like that. It is 12:21 eastern time right now and I think he’s speaking at 1. And Talk Radio News is of course right next door to us, we’re relatively sharing office space. We’ll see if we can get some information from that, maybe one of their reporters on about that, about what he has to say. But the early word is that what he is going to say, maybe his notes have been released, is can’t we just all get along. So we may have this spectacle of the president of the United States playing Rodney King. I don’t know. We’ll see, we’ll see.

And prop, was it prop 19 in California, was that the number, pot? Yeah. Down, lost by 8 points. Now one of the things that, last night when I was on this panel at Free Speech TV, at Busboys and Poets restaurant here in Washington DC we had a satellite uplink truck and we were broadcasting live. Me, Mark, Amy Goodman and Laura Flanders in New York, David Sirota in Denver. And from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. And we had a number of guests on the show.

And one of the guests that we had was a woman who is with the campus progress, I think it’s called. And it’s the Center for American Progress’s outreach to college campuses. And she was pointing out that a lot of young people are feeling, I don’t want to put words in her mouth, so this is not a quote. This is my carry-away from my conversation with her. That a lot of young people felt that they were voting for serious rapid and dramatic change, and perhaps it’s political naivete, or perhaps its that the president didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Is her name Sarah? Yeah. Sarah is in fact going to be on our TV show tonight, on RT TV.

And but you know, the bottom line was that they weren’t showing up. I mean the numbers that we saw showed that the youth vote didn’t turn out last night the way it did in two years ago. Now that’s not unusual. First of all a lot of people are, you know they’re looking for a job, they’re working, they don’t have time, they just had a kid, they’ve got, you know they’ve got, they’re just insanely busy. I have to say for myself, I mean there was a period of time in my life which was mostly my 30s and early 40s where I was fairly non-political because I was busting my butt trying to make enough money to support a household and put three kids through school.

So you know that said I think that that probably is the major thing that accounts for the fact that you see a lot of political activity in people who are not yet married, or who are not yet really seriously in the job market, and college students, and you see a lot of political activity in people who are well established in their professions. You typically in their 50s, or even retired. And why elderly people are very politically active. I mean the most likely group to vote are people over 60, over 65. I mean the older people get, until they reach the point where they become physically or mentally limited by their age, the older people get the more likely they are to vote, to be a large cohort of voters. So there’s that.

But I also think that the president did himself a disservice when he went on MTV a couple of days ago and people asked him tough, young people asked him tough questions. Why didn’t you repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? And he’s like well you’ve got to understand process and how things work, and they didn’t want to know about that. They wanted to know why didn’t you do it. And he could have said you know Republicans wouldn’t let us. Or we couldn’t make it happen. Or the military freaked out and I didn’t want to, I mean he could have just given a straight answer and he didn’t.

So this, I believe, I know, that the generation that’s coming up now, the people in their 20s, the people in their 30s, the people in their teens, the generation that’s coming up now. When they’re my age and they’re the people in power, we’re talking just 10, 20 years from now. You are going to see green energy. You are going to see gays having equal civil rights as everybody else. You are going to see the, you know African Americans and other minority groups having civil rights. You are going to see, I believe, the reformation of religious fundamentalism. You’re going to see more tolerance. You’re going to see a world that works better.

I have so much optimism about this younger generation. And the future course of this country. And that generation thought, when they were voting for Obama, that he was one of them. You know, like I said he was the nations Rorschach test. And so far over the last two years, instead, he’s been governing it more or less, I mean he’s doing an okay job, but he’s been governing basically like Bill Clinton. As a compromiser. And this morning, Paul Begala, one of Bill Clinton’s biggest advisors, is coming right out and saying hey he needs to compromise more. I don’t think so. I think he needs to kick ass.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.