Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Eighty Days In A Cage While Homan Whines About Milk
Salah Sarsour is the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque. He’s a Palestinian American who’s lived in this country for more than thirty years, a legal permanent resident with no criminal record. In March, more than ten ICE agents pulled him over while he was driving and hauled him away. The government called him a foreign policy threat. His lawyers say the real reason was simple. He spoke up for Palestinian rights. Sarsour spent more than eighty days locked up. He has diabetes, and he lost over thirty pounds while his blood sugar got checked just once a month. A federal judge finally ordered him released, ruling he had a substantial First Amendment claim. Sarsour said the treatment brought back memories of an Israeli military jail. “For eighty days, I haven’t been able to step outside and breathe fresh air,” he said. Now compare that to border czar Tom Homan. This week he stood outside the White House and complained that he can’t buy a quart of milk without a security detail. A man loses thirty pounds in a cage for speaking his mind, and the guy running the machine is crying about grocery shopping.
Is The Government Hunting Reporters’ Phone Records Now?
The Trump administration is going after the New York Times, and not just the reporters. The Justice Department subpoenaed the phone records of several Times journalists and even their relatives. We’re talking about the spouses of two reporters and one reporter’s mother. Their crime? They wrote about the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One and reported that the Secret Service warned Trump the plane wasn’t safe enough. Now the government wants to unmask their confidential sources. The Times is fighting back in court, calling the subpoenas abusive and improper. “We are going to court to defend our journalists’ rights to report freely,” the paper’s top lawyer said. Remember, last year Pam Bondi scrapped the rule that protected reporters from exactly this. When the government starts hunting the phone records of a journalist’s mother, that’s not law enforcement. That’s intimidation.
Is Rubio Building The Case To Invade Cuba?
The State Department just dropped a one hundred page report titled Cuba, The Capital of Twenty-First Century Communism. It claims Cuba has spent seven decades infiltrating our government and recruiting American activists. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime champion of regime change, called Cuba the leading sponsor of radical leftism in America. Critics aren’t buying it. Free speech groups call the whole thing McCarthyite. They say it revives Cold War conspiracy theories and even cites the old House Un-American Activities Committee to smear activists as foreign agents. One watchdog said the report is “designed to justify both domestic repression and regime change in Cuba.” So this isn’t really about Cuba. It’s about giving Trump a permission slip, both to crack down on dissent at home and maybe to send in the military abroad.
Why Did Trump’s Envoy Party With The Tate Brothers?
Andrew and Tristan Tate are sitting in federal detention in Miami. British prosecutors just hit them with fifty-nine charges between them, including rape, human trafficking, and crimes involving images of children. Seven women, offenses spanning years. US Marshals grabbed them on a sealed warrant. But here’s the part that should stop you cold. Just four days before the arrest, Trump’s special envoy Paolo Zampolli threw the brothers a garden party in Washington, near the White House. This is the same Zampolli who admitted on camera he knew Jeffrey Epstein had young girls around him. And the Tates’ own lawyer is bragging that their power to sway the next election is “unmatched.” Here’s the catch. The final call on whether they get extradited belongs to one man, Marco Rubio. Watch what he does.
Your Favorite Brands Are Bankrolling The ICE Machine
Ever wonder who’s paying the politicians who keep handing ICE more power? A new investigation followed the money. More than one hundred forty members of Congress sponsored bills expanding ICE. And the corporate cash flowed right to them. The number one consumer brand backing them was Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which cut five hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars to sixty-three of them. Right behind it, Home Depot, Walmart, Toyota, and Google, all writing big checks. Here’s what stings. Back in Trump’s first term, some of these same companies signed letters defending immigrant kids. This time around, not one of them has said a word against the raids. They found out cruelty is profitable, and they decided to cash in.
Geeky Science Alert. Is Your Bug Spray Breeding Super Mosquitoes?
And finally, a warning from the backyard. Scientists at North Carolina State spent nine years tracking the Asian tiger mosquito, the little monster that spreads dengue and Zika. They tested nearly twenty-seven hundred of them. And they found something spooky. A mutation that lets these bugs shrug off common bug spray showed up in one neighborhood in twenty eighteen and spread across the whole county by twenty twenty-three. The culprit? All of us. When everybody sprays their own yard with no coordination, the weak mosquitoes die and the tough ones survive to breed. So every time you fog your patio, you might be building a stronger bug. The mosquitoes are evolving, and your garden is the gym.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, July twenty-first, twenty twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
