Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did Trump Just Bully Two Republicans Into Killing the Iran War Vote? You Betcha.
Just hours after President Trump berated him in a closed door lunch, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy flipped his vote and helped kill a resolution to rein in the Iran war. Cassidy had backed the measure on Tuesday. Then Trump reportedly called him a lunatic and told him to sit down. Witnesses say it turned into a shouting match. Cassidy, who lost his primary in May and won’t be back next year, said he wouldn’t be bullied. But after a late White House briefing, he voted no. Senator Rand Paul switched to present. The resolution failed forty seven to fifty, with one senator present. It wouldn’t have had the force of law anyway. Still, the message is loud and clear. When Trump throws a tantrum, even a senator on his way out the door folds. So much for that backbone.
Sanders Says New York Just Sent the Whole Country a Message
Bernie Sanders is celebrating a wave of progressive wins in New York’s primaries, and he says the message is pretty clear. Sanders said Americans are sick and tired of status quo politics, a rigged economy, and billionaires buying elections with their super PACs. Progressives Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier all won House primaries running on affordable housing, Medicare for All, stronger unions, and an end to US military support for Israel’s war. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won big too. Democratic socialists swept down ballot races and knocked out four sitting state legislators. Now establishment Democrats in Washington are downplaying it, denying any leftward shift. But voters keep saying otherwise, in New York, in Los Angeles, and in Washington DC. The base is moving. The only question is whether the party bosses are listening. They might want to start.
Why Won’t Netanyahu Leave Lebanon Even for Trump’s Own Deal?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel is staying in Lebanon, no matter what. As long as I am prime minister, he said, we will keep the security zone in southern Lebanon. That’s a problem, because Iran says any peace deal with Trump depends on a ceasefire there. So Netanyahu is openly defying the president who just brokered the agreement. And the cost is staggering. According to the Lebanese health ministry, Israeli attacks have killed about four thousand two hundred people since March. More than one million have been driven from their homes. One journalist put it bluntly. Words are not enough to restrain the Israelis. There have to be real consequences. Trump keeps insisting his deals are works of art. But here’s the truth. A deal one side ignores isn’t a deal at all. It’s a press release with a body count.
Is Trump’s New Mom Website Steering Women to Fake Clinics?
Eleven members of the Senate Democratic caucus are demanding answers about a government website called Moms dot gov. Trump’s Health Department launched it on Mother’s Day, claiming it helps new and expecting mothers. But the senators say it mostly steers women toward two thousand seven hundred fifty so called crisis pregnancy centers. Those are the anti abortion outfits that often pose as clinics, hand out misleading information, and aren’t staffed by licensed doctors. The site even links to a hotline run by a major anti abortion group, raising real privacy concerns about the data women hand over. As the senators put it, Moms dot gov isn’t about women’s health. It’s an attempt to strip away their rights and privacy. This is your tax money, building a website to funnel women away from real care. That’s not pro family. That’s a trap with a friendly logo.
MAGA Pastor Raged Against Gay Books. Now He’s Headed to Prison for Abusing a Child.
Hypocrite alert. An anti LGBTQ MAGA pastor in Ohio spent years warning that gay books and Pride flags were harming children. His name is Silas Shelton, and back in 2023 he stood before a school board demanding the graphic novel Heartstopper be pulled from a book fair. This week a judge sentenced him to fifteen years in prison for sexually abusing a minor girl in his own congregation. The judge handed down the maximum because Shelton showed no remorse and even tried to blame the child. He was first arrested on twelve counts and pleaded guilty to three. He’ll register as a sex offender for the next twenty five years. The loudest voices screaming about protecting kids so often turn out to be the ones hurting them. The flag was never the threat. The man pointing at it was.
Have Pop Songs Really Gotten Meaner Over the Last Sixty Years?
And now a geeky science alert. Researchers in London just confirmed what your grandparents always suspected. Pop music has gotten meaner. A new study in Scientific Reports ran nearly four hundred thousand songs through an AI trained to spot moral themes. Over six decades, lyrics about harm, cheating, and rule breaking climbed sharply, while songs about care, loyalty, and purity faded. In the Billboard hits, cheating jumped about seventy one percent. Harm and degradation rose too. As one researcher noted, popular music has always been a mirror of its time. The scientists are careful. They can’t prove the songs are changing us, or just reflecting us. Probably it runs both ways. But the next time a teenager’s playlist makes you wince, you’ve got the data on your side. The kids aren’t alright. And neither, it seems, is the soundtrack.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, June twenty fifth, two thousand twenty six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
