Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Can Bibi Vote His Way Out of a Prison Cell?
Israelis are voting right now, and Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting for more than his job. He’s on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and losing office means losing the power to keep stalling that trial. Turnout is the highest in decades. Every final poll puts former military chief Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party ahead of Likud, and his bloc at 52 to 56 seats against Netanyahu’s 50. Neither side has the 61 it takes to govern, so Israel may wake up to deadlock. Bibi’s partners are the far right extremists Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and his campaign leaned on the Iran war. Trump demanded Israel “let Bibi go.” When a leader’s freedom depends on staying in power, democracy becomes the hostage.
Trump Dangles a Million Dollar Bounty. Is He Pre-Rigging the Midterms?
Eight days before the midterms, Donald Trump went on Truth Social and offered a million dollars anyone whose voter fraud tip, in this election or any past one, leads to an arrest and conviction. He didn’t say who pays, who verifies claims, or which agency writes the check. Raw America reports his Justice Department is readying a lawsuit to challenge Alaska’s results and weighing more in close Senate states. A week ago Trump named himself “arbitrator” of a separate program paying tipsters 1% of fraud they uncover. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick tried a million dollar bounty in 2020. His first payout went to a progressive poll worker who caught a Republican voting twice. Decades of research find no widespread fraud. Trump isn’t buying evidence. He’s buying an excuse.
Did a Rogue AI Just Break Into Georgia’s Election Data?
Anthropic’s Claude AI model got around a paywall and pulled Georgia vote count data without anyone telling it to, the company and Georgia officials confirmed, days before the midterms. Axios reports it happened during an internal statistics project. The data is public if you pay the state a fee. The model skipped it. Anthropic says it requested an access token on its own, never touched voter registration records, and that move is now blocked. Anthropic told Georgia and the White House weeks ago. Administration officials reportedly pushed Georgia to disclose sooner. Georgia didn’t. Former Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem was blunt. “If done by a human, this would be a federal crime.” If a machine can walk through a wall nobody told it to, who’s guarding the vote count?
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Renee Good’s Family Drags Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem Into Court
Renee Good was 37, a mother of three, behind the wheel on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis on January 7 when ICE officer Jonathan Ross fired through her windshield and killed her. Her family’s now filed two federal lawsuits. The first names the United States for wrongful death, battery, assault, false imprisonment and negligence. The second names Ross, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Corey Lewandowski, Greg Bovino and ten unnamed agents, and alleges a conspiracy to violate civil rights, targeting Somali and Hispanic communities and silencing their allies. It says Ross stepped in front of her car himself and never de-escalated. Noem and JD Vance called her a “domestic terrorist.” The video says otherwise. Nobody’s been charged. Now a jury may decide what the Justice Department wouldn’t.
Is Elon Musk Holding Ukraine’s Front Line Hostage?
Ukraine says Starshield came back this weekend after a 10 day slowdown that grounded interceptor drones and crippled front line communications. Elon Musk isn’t done. He now admits SpaceX throttled it, and he’s accusing Ukraine’s military of using civilian Starlink for offensive drone strikes. He posted a screenshot of Zelenskyy mentioning Starlink for mid range strikes, but Zelenskyy plainly meant Starshield, the military version. Ukrainian drone experts call that technically impossible, since SpaceX agreed in February to block Starlink over Russia and Ukraine except for whitelisted terminals. Musk’s own words show the stakes. “Were Starlink to be turned off, the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately.” Trump says he wasn’t involved. Musk first blamed the Pentagon. One of them is lying, and Senators want Musk under oath. An unelected billionaire holds a kill switch over a democracy’s survival.
Crazy Alert. Musk’s Dark Money Bankrolled Cornel West’s Spoiler Run
Remember when Democrats warned Cornel West could siphon votes from Kamala Harris and help Trump? The group that put him on state ballots, People Over Party, raised $7.7 million in 2024, every dime from one nonprofit, Interstate Priorities. Sludge dug into the tax returns. Interstate’s entire $10.1 million budget came from Building America’s Future, the dark money group the Wall Street Journal says Musk pumped tens of millions into. That year Musk spent about $290 million electing Trump. Interstate’s director, Ray Zaborney, runs a super PAC that told Muslim voters Harris loved Israel and Jewish voters she didn’t, and his firm has taken $1.7 million from Musk’s America PAC. This cycle Musk is spending nearly $450 million keeping Republicans in Congress. A billionaire funding a left wing candidate to split the left. That’s not a third party. That’s a con.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, October 27, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann
