Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did Trump Just Hand Iran Everything It Wanted?
After months of a brutal war, President Trump says he’s finally got a deal with Iran. And when you read the fine print, it sure looks like Tehran walked off with the prize. The Strait of Hormuz reopens with no tolls. The American blockade comes down. There’s a sixty-day ceasefire. And twenty-four billion dollars in frozen Iranian money gets released, half of it before talks even start. The hard nuclear questions get kicked down the road. Iran’s missiles and its proxy armies aren’t even in the deal. Experts say Iran offered Trump a better nuclear deal before the war than this one. Trump’s out there calling it, quote, a great deal. He started a war, he sidelined our allies, and Iran came out ahead. When you go to war and the other side gets the better end, that’s not victory. That’s a defeat dressed up for the cameras.
Was Trump & JD Vance Ready to Cancel a Constitutional Right?
Secret White House memos just surfaced, and they’re chilling. Last year, top aide Stephen Miller pushed hard to suspend habeas corpus, the right that lets you challenge your own arrest in court. The goal was to speed up deportations and get around the judges slowing them down. A White House lawyer named Will Scharf wrote a confidential memo warning it would blow up in their faces. He reminded them that denying habeas was, quote, a key grievance of the American Revolution. When that stalled, they started eyeing the Insurrection Act instead. Vice President Vance argued for using it to crush protests in Minnesota. Think about that. The people you elected sat in a room and debated suspending one of the oldest rights we have.
Who Decides Who Gets Federal Money?
Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director and an architect of Project 2025, has a new plan. Under his proposed rule, political appointees would personally review every federal grant before it goes out. We’re talking about more than a trillion dollars that Congress already approved. Scientists, public health groups, and disaster agencies are sounding the alarm. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro put it plainly. The test, she says, will be, quote, are you sufficiently loyal to the president? Fail that test and you could lose disaster relief, research into cures, even your local Head Start. More than three hundred organizations have begged Vought to back off. This isn’t budgeting. It’s a loyalty machine for handing out your tax dollars, and Congress controls that purse, not one man.
Surprise. They’re Coming for the People Who Register Voters
On Thursday, FBI agents raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. It’s a grassroots group that’s been registering voters since two thousand seven. Agents seized documents and computers, then fanned out to the homes of staff and volunteers, pressing them for information. The supposed reason is an investigation into voter fraud, the same fraud that study after study shows barely exists. And this is happening in a swing state with hot races for governor and Senate this fall. Board member Prentiss Haney says investigators have no evidence of any wrongdoing. Let’s be clear about what this is. Registering people to vote is not a crime. Using the FBI to scare them off is the real threat to democracy. When the government starts treating voter drives like crime scenes, every one of us should be worried.
Floating Solar Panels Save Water and Cut Your Bills
Here’s some good news out of Southern Oregon. The state just switched on its first floating solar array, more than seventeen hundred panels sitting right on top of a Medford irrigation reservoir. They’ll power about sixty homes plus the irrigation district and the city. And because the panels shade the water, they’ll stop more than one and a half million gallons from evaporating each year. It’s a community solar project, so renters and lower-income folks can subscribe and save as much as forty percent on their power bills. Project leader Julie O’Shea says it’s, helping people save money on energy bills. One smart idea, cleaner power, cheaper bills, and water saved in a drought. That’s what government can do when it works for people.
You Turn Back Your Heart Twenty Years
Here’s some hope you can act on. Researchers at the University of Texas put sixty-one out-of-shape, middle-aged adults on a structured exercise program for two years. The result was stunning. Their hearts got younger by about twenty years. Fifty-somethings ended up with the heart of a thirty-year-old. They worked out four days a week, mixing easy days with hard ones. Heart disease is still the number one killer in this country, so this matters. There’s one catch. The researchers found that if you wait until sixty-five to start, your heart can’t fully bounce back. So the message is simple. Don’t wait. Your heart will thank you, and it’s never too early to start moving.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, June 15th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
