Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did Trump Just Empty America’s Missile Arsenal?
Three sources tell Reuters the United States has burned through virtually all of its precision surface-to-surface missiles after nearly six months of war with Iran. We’re talking about ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles, the weapons that hit targets accurately from a safe distance. They cost more than $1 million apiece. They’re the same missiles Ukraine used to strike inside Russia. A fourth source says Central Command has been quietly restocking from stockpiles overseas, and the White House denies it. Trump insists America has “far more munitions than anyone in the world.” Last Saturday the Washington Post reported a top general in Europe told the Pentagon he doesn’t have the forces to protect Israel. Trump started this war on February 28. Now it appears that he didn’t count the ammunition first.
Who Staged That Fake Invasion Of Spain?
On July 31, JD Vance posted a Fox News clip to 4.79 million viewers. Young men scaling fences, labeled as migrants storming the border of northern Spain. It wasn’t northern Spain. It was Ceuta, a Spanish city in North Africa, and there’s a hard border between Ceuta and Europe. Nobody in that video was reaching the mainland. That didn’t stop Nigel Farage or Germany’s Alice Weidel from warning the migrants were headed their way. Vance blamed “radical left-wing globalist policies.” What actually happened is that roughly 60,000 Moroccans saw a TikTok video falsely claiming the border was open. By Sunday, almost all of them had gone home. The Ceuta morgue held 88 bodies. Not one of these politicians mentioned the dead. Fear travels faster than a correction. They know it
Is Your Ballot Now A Political Hostage?
Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi wants Postmaster General David Steiner gone. In a letter Monday to Steiner and the USPS board of governors, the Illinois Democrat wrote that under Steiner the Postal Service has become “a partisan instrument of voter suppression.” Here’s why. Trump signed an executive order in March telling the Postal Service to stop delivering mail ballots in any state that won’t hand over its voter rolls to be checked against a federal citizenship list. Steiner told the Senate he’d do exactly that. Federal courts have now twice ruled the order unconstitutional, and 23 states plus the District of Columbia sued. Steiner won’t answer Congress in writing and refused to testify voluntarily. An institution that’s delivered mail without regard to party for over 200 years is being turned into a weapon against voters.
Spokane Burns While Big Oil Banks Billions
Three fires ignited outside Spokane last Saturday afternoon. By Monday they’d torched more than 8,000 acres, destroyed at least 700 homes and businesses, and forced 65,000 people out of their houses. Containment was 0%. Senator Maria Cantwell called it the top fire in the nation. Mayor Lisa Brown called it the worst natural disaster the region has ever faced. Governor Bob Ferguson declared a statewide emergency and asked FEMA for help. Across Washington, more than 250,000 acres are burning, and smoke from 50 large uncontained fires is now fouling the air in Portland, Seattle, Boise and Salt Lake City. Here’s the part that ought to make you furious. Chevron just booked $12.1 billion in quarterly profit. Exxon booked $14.5 billion, juiced by the oil price spike from Trump’s Iran war. And on Monday, while Spokane was still smoldering, the Interior Department proposed gutting the Arctic offshore drilling safeguards written after Deepwater Horizon, calling them an unnecessary regulatory burden. Clémence Dubois of 350.org said the industry “may not have struck the match.” Did it just spend 50 years soaking the kindling?
Why Does Trump Keep Doing Putin’s Bidding?
Writer Greg Olear reran his case this week that Donald Trump has functioned as a Kremlin asset for decades, and it reads worse now than when he wrote it. The United States voted with Russia, North Korea and Belarus against a UN motion condemning the invasion of Ukraine. Trump sent Marco Rubio to negotiate Ukraine’s future without Ukraine in the room. He called Zelenskyy a dictator and blamed Kyiv for being invaded. The Senate Intelligence Committee found Trump’s own campaign chairman handed polling data to Russian intelligence. Paul Manafort pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States. A former Soviet intelligence officer claims Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987, though nobody has proven it. Olear says Trump has tied America to a “petty, cruel, genocidal tyrant.” We don’t need a codename to see whose side he’s on.
ICE Is Serving Detainees Water Full Of Worms
Carlitos Ricardo Parias has spent months locked inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, run for profit by the GEO Group. He kept telling his family the water was filthy. Then he filled a plastic bottle from the communal jug and held it up on a video call. You can see things swimming in it. About 80 men share a pair of 10-gallon containers. A federal judge ordered ICE just two weeks ago to give detainees round-the-clock access to clean drinking water. So this is what compliance looks like. Homeland Security denies there’s any problem, saying the water comes from the city and staff drink it too. Parias was shot by an ICE agent in October, then jailed by the agency that shot him. His attorney put it plainly. “No one would give that kind of water to their dog or cat.”
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, August 4, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann
