Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Do Americans Even Know What They’re Celebrating This Fourth?
As the nation throws itself a two hundred and fiftieth birthday party, a brand new poll from the Cato Institute and Morning Consult finds nearly half of us can’t say what we’re actually celebrating. Forty-six percent didn’t know the two hundred and fiftieth marks the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Among Gen Z, that number jumps to sixty-one percent.
Even with all that fog, eighty-six percent say they’re grateful to be American, and seventy percent still believe our founding principles matter today. Yet fifty-seven percent say the country’s drifted away from those principles, and fifty-six percent worry America could stop being free within fifty years.
And listen to what they fear most. Corruption. Politicians ignoring the Constitution. The rich grabbing too much power. Fifty-eight percent said no political party should ever be trusted with too much power. As the pollsters put it,
“Americans are more constitutionally cautious than the political climate suggests.”
People aren’t asleep. They feel the ground shifting under them, even when they can’t name the date on the cake.
Did Trump’s Shell Company Pocket a Hundred Million in Public Money?
Speaking of that birthday party, here’s who’s cashing in on it. Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee, led by Congressman Jared Huffman, just dropped a fifty-five page report accusing a Trump White House outfit called Freedom 250 of corruption and self-enrichment they say may add up to criminal fraud.
Back in 2016, Congress created a nonpartisan commission called America Two Fifty to run the celebration. According to the report, Trump officials tried to bend it to glorify the president, and when it wouldn’t bend, they built a replacement they controlled. Huffman didn’t mince words.
“They siphoned off at least a hundred million into this shell company.”
They tucked it inside a trusted charity, the National Park Foundation, for cover, then handed themselves no-bid contracts. And here’s the part that stinks. Whistleblowers say donors who wanted to give to the real commission were quietly handed the shell company’s bank account instead. Huffman says that has the hallmarks of wire fraud. Freedom 250 calls the report a partisan smear.
So while they wave the flag and light the fireworks, follow the money. It’s running straight into private pockets.
Trump’s Meme Coin Craters as Nearly Three-Quarters of a Million Lose Their Shirts
Here’s another way the powerful separate you from your money. CNN reports that the president’s own meme coin, the one called Trump, has lost ninety-eight percent of its value. Ninety-eight percent. And more than seven hundred forty thousand ordinary people who bought in have lost money.
Now guess who made out fine. Fifty-eight big players cleared profits over ten million dollars each, and the coin has funneled more than six hundred thirty-five million into Trump’s accounts. Every time somebody trades it, the Trump side takes a cut, even as it collapses toward zero.
One woman told Reuters she put two thousand dollars of her savings in because, in her words,
“If Trump put his name behind it, it must be legitimate.”
Her stake is now worth less than a hundred twenty bucks. A machinist in Indiana sank forty thousand dollars into Trump family tokens and lost about thirty-two thousand. He still doesn’t blame the family.
That’s the con in a nutshell. The house wins, and the folks who trusted the name are left holding nothing.
Is Trump’s Voter Suppression Bill Finally Dead?
Some good news for a change. Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina says the SAVE America Act, the president’s number one legislative priority, is dead. His word. Dead.
The bill would force people to show proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote. Critics call it the most restrictive voting law Congress has ever considered. The Brennan Center estimates twenty-one million Americans don’t have those citizenship documents handy. Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer calls it Jim Crow Two Point Zero.
Tillis was one of four Republicans, along with Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell, who blocked an effort to jam it through on a simple majority. The parliamentarian ruled it can’t ride the budget process, and it can’t reach sixty votes. Even if it passed, Tillis says there’s no time and no money to set it up in fifty states before the November third election.
“Unless they get to sixty votes, they know it’s dead. All this is theater.”
For millions of working people, students, and married women who’ve changed their names, this fight decides whether their vote counts. It isn’t over. But today, the wall held.
Why Are We Paying to Lock Up Grandmothers?
Now a story about who we punish and what it costs us. New reporting points to a wave of research showing that shortening sentences for women could save taxpayers real money with virtually no rise in violent crime. A March report from a UC Berkeley law clinic and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners calls the continued lockup of elderly women unjustified, costly, and inhumane.
California holds about three thousand six hundred people in its women’s prisons, and roughly one in five is over the age of fifty. These are people the researchers say pose almost no threat to anyone. Yet the state spends a fortune caring for aging bodies behind bars, in places that speed up illness and decline. And the data backs it up. People convicted of violent offenses actually have the lowest rates of returning to crime. The bigger picture is simple. We’re pouring public money into cages that make us no safer, when it could go to schools, to care, and to the living.
Is Setting Your Thermostat to Seventy-Eight Now Communism?
And finally, file this under you can’t make it up. It hit triple digits in New York this week. So Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked folks, just asked, to set their AC to seventy-eight, turn off what they’re not using, and ease the strain on the grid so the power stays on and people don’t die in the heat.
Standard stuff. Every utility in America says it. But MAGA world lost its mind. Ted Cruz sneered,
“In a first-world country, you could turn on the A/C.”
There’s just one problem. Cruz’s own Texas grid operator tells Texans to set their thermostats to exactly seventy-eight during heat waves. Same number. And this is the fellow who fled to Cancun during a deadly Texas freeze and blamed his little daughters when he got caught.
But wait, there’s more. Vivek Ramaswamy declared it socialism and demanded more coal, which does nothing when the problem is the grid, not the fuel. Nikki Haley chirped, welcome to socialism. And podcaster Dave Portnoy cried, seventy-eight degrees, welcome to communism. One Republican even told folks to go move to Europe, where, she claimed, they don’t even have air conditioning.
So there it is. A polite request to save the grid and save lives is now, apparently, a Marxist plot. Turns out common sense is the scariest thing in the world to people who’ve got nothing else to sell.
And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, July third, twenty twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
