Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Do Americans Still Trust That Their Votes Will Count?
Gallup and the Kettering Foundation just asked nearly 24,000 Americans how they feel about November, and the answer should stop concern you. Sixty-seven percent are worried politicians will pressure election officials into changing results. Eighty percent fear political leaders will do things they know are probably illegal. Seventy-eight percent worry about anonymous megadonors buying outcomes. Seventy-seven percent worry about gerrymandering, which has already redrawn the map for these midterms. And four in ten Americans say they’re afraid of being confronted, followed, or recorded while they vote. This isn’t one party’s paranoia. Fifty-six percent of Republicans and 77% of Democrats share that same fear about pressure on election officials. Nearly three-quarters of us are worried about more than one piece of the process. Axios put it plainly, saying Americans are worried “about their vote being safe.” When people stop believing the count is honest, the losing side stops accepting the result. That’s how republics come apart. We finally agree on something, and what we agree on is that we’re scared of November. This is more than a poll, it’s a warning light.
Will Democrats Stand By While Trump Punishes States That Voted Against Him?
Now we know why the lights are going out in blue America. Last October the Energy Department killed eight billion dollars in funding for 223 energy projects. Secretary Chris Wright swore up and down it was about performance. It wasn’t. In a court filing this month, the administration’s own lawyers admitted the grants were pulled based solely on politics, targeting states Kamala Harris won that also have two Democratic senators. So this week Senators Martin Heinrich and Patty Murray and 37 of their colleagues sent a letter to Wright and budget director Russ Vought demanding every dollar be restored. They called it “an attack on the rule of law.” They’re right. Once a president starts punishing Americans for how they voted, no business, no worker, and no town can trust that federal law applies to them fairly anymore. These were projects already approved and paid for by Congress, projects that would have cut electricity prices and put people to work. Your electric bill just became a loyalty test.
Will the FCC Get Away With Muzzling the Evening News?
ABC filed a blistering 119-page complaint yesterday accusing Trump’s FCC chairman Brendan Carr of attempted censorship. Eight ABC stations, on the air for decades, are facing the loss of their broadcast licenses. The network says the Commission has spent eighteen months hunting for a pretext and hasn’t found one, because those stations plainly meet the legal standard for renewal. This started when Carr threatened ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel joke and Disney briefly benched him. It escalated in April when Carr pulled the licenses up for early review after two right wing pressure groups demanded it. And this month Trump himself called for ABC and NBC to lose their licenses because they wouldn’t air his speech about election fraud. ABC says the goal is “a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely.” That’s not regulation. That’s a government deciding what you’re allowed to know. And every newsroom in America is watching to see if it works.
Who Pays When Congress Rips Away Your Insurance?
The bills are coming due, and hospitals are the ones holding them. The New York Times reports that emergency rooms and clinics across the country are seeing a flood of uninsured patients, up roughly 20% at some systems. Why? Because the Republican Congress let the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of last year. Enrollment has dropped by about three million people. Those folks didn’t stop getting sick. They just stopped being covered when they do. Roughly 30 million Americans now have no coverage at all. HCA, the biggest for-profit chain in the country, is projecting a $400 million hit. Laura Kaiser, who runs the Catholic hospital system SSM Health, said this. “We’re really crushing people who are desperately trying to pay their bills.” And to cover those losses, hospitals will raise prices on everybody else, including your job’s insurance plan. Here’s the kicker. Today is Medicare’s 61st birthday. Lyndon Johnson signed it on this date in 1965 with Harry Truman sitting right beside him. Writing in Common Dreams, Nancy Altman argues Republicans want to dismantle that program too, and that Democrats shouldn’t just defend it, they should expand it to every single American. Sixty-one years ago we proved guaranteed healthcare works, and it works because everybody’s in it. We just keep refusing to finish the job.
Crazy Alert! Would You Eat Anything RFK Jr Cooks?
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior is launching a cooking show. It’s called The Real Food Show, it’s going up on his YouTube channel, and it promises healthy family meals for about five dollars a serving. Which is quite a trick, given that food prices have jumped 33% in seven years, the steepest run-up in five decades. He’s got Fox News regular Andrew Gruel and Robert Irvine on board making crispy salmon cakes. And while promoting it, Kennedy assured America he’ll eat absolutely anything. His words. “I don’t have a gag reflex.” Now remember, this is the man who told reporters he keeps a freezer full of roadkill he’s been picking up his whole life. His campaign explained the dead animals are for his falcons. His wife says he eats steak and sauerkraut for breakfast and brings his own sauerkraut to restaurants. Measles cases just hit a record high on his watch. But sure, let’s talk recipes. Nothing says public health like a cabinet secretary bragging he can keep it down.
Geeky Science!
Researchers in Germany, working at the universities of Bonn, Freiburg, and Hildesheim, published a study in Nature Communications mapping out something remarkable. When you hammer your muscles with a hard workout, tiny structures deep inside the fibers get torn up. Your muscle has a cleanup crew that goes to work on it. A protein called BAG3 organizes the whole operation, tagging the broken pieces and hauling them off for recycling. The surprise was finding a protein called PLIN5 in the mix, one scientists thought only handled fat storage. Here’s the part that matters for the rest of us. After six weeks of resistance training, that same brutal workout did noticeably less damage. The crew got better at its job. But after just three weeks off, most of that protection was gone. Fair warning, the core analysis followed only six men, and some of the protein work was done in mouse cells. Still, the message is hard to miss. Your body will build you a repair crew, but it lays them off fast. Three weeks on the couch and you’re starting over. So go move something heavy today.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, July 30, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
