Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Gloria Steinem passed today
Gloria Steinem, the indefatigable feminist and journalist whose activism revolutionized the personal and professional lives of women, has died. She was 92. She was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. Steinem passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her, according to a post on her official Instagram page. It did not give a cause of death. Steinem cofounded Ms. Magazine and spent more than half a century as the face of the American women’s movement, fighting for reproductive rights and equal pay. Hillary Clinton said Steinem pushed open doors not just for herself, but for literally millions of women behind her. At a moment when women’s rights are under attack all over again, the best way to honor Gloria Steinem isn’t just to remember her. It’s to organize, the same way she did. God-Speed to you Gloria, you will be missed.
Is Trump secretly spying on journalists and labor unions?
Senator Ron Wyden and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal are demanding an investigation into federal agencies’ use of subpoena power to surveil Americans, calling it institutionalized in brazen abuses of authority. Wyden and Jayapal sent their request to the Government Accountability Office. They want the government watchdog to look into the Trump administration’s use of obscure legal powers to secretly collect records on journalists, nonprofits, and unions without judicial oversight. The Guardian reported this week that Homeland Security Investigations used administrative summonses to secretly obtain six months’ worth of telephone records for a Minneapolis journalist. Privacy experts say the demands for silence attached to these subpoenas aren’t even legally binding, and companies can ignore them. These lawmakers say recipients have a First Amendment right to tell their customers the government came knocking. When federal agencies can quietly vacuum up your phone records and threaten silence on top of it, that’s not law enforcement. That’s a surveillance state built for political payback.
Why is Texas closing 92 polling places right before the midterms?
Republicans on the Tarrant County Commissioners Court voted to slash Election Day polling sites by roughly 30%, leaving the county with 224 sites to serve 1.3 million voters. The NAACP and the ACLU of Texas said the cuts would hit voters of color hardest, since many of the closures are in majority minority areas of Fort Worth and Arlington. Voting rights advocates called the closures the latest chapter in Texas’s long history of suppression. Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico fought the plan, warning “the most powerful people in this country don’t want us to vote easily.” The three Republicans on the commission voted for the cuts. The two Democrats voted against it. This comes as Texas has also suspended more than a million voter registrations statewide. Longer lines and fewer polling places aren’t accidents. They’re a strategy, one our media has been letting slide for years.
Has CBS News become a Trump propaganda outlet?
Journalist Parker Molloy says CBS ran a hit piece on Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed this week, dredging up old tweets where he compared COVID deaths to the scale of September 11th. The story was tagged First on CBS, but it leaned heavily on a December 2025 piece from the right-wing Washington Free Beacon, which had already tried and failed to make the same tweets a scandal. The National Republican Senatorial Committee wasted no time celebrating the CBS story. Molloy points out CBS’s own reporter made the identical COVID comparison back in 2020, and so did Trump’s own surgeon general. The double standard only kicked in once a Muslim Democrat said it. Under editor Bari Weiss, CBS News keeps finding new ways to do the GOP’s opposition research for free.
Why do only red states get Trump’s disaster money?
Late Tuesday, over the course of an hour, Trump used social media to announce seven disaster relief approvals, for states including Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, South Dakota, and North Dakota. Every announcement came wrapped in praise for a Republican candidate on this November’s ballot. Meanwhile Trump denied disaster relief requests from Rhode Island, Vermont, Illinois, and Maryland, all states he lost. Rhode Island’s congressional delegation says Trump has politicized disaster assistance and made it far harder for blue states to get funding than red ones. When federal disaster aid depends on how your state voted, that’s not emergency management anymore. That’s extortion with a hurricane attached.
Will Trump ever answer for selling pardons?
House Judiciary Democrats released a report this week called “Pardons, Inc.,” documenting what they call a pay-to-play clemency operation running out of the Trump White House. The report includes a detailed spreadsheet. The report says Trump turned the pardon power into a marketplace for insider influence and personal enrichment, where wealthy criminals hire Trump insiders, pour money into his political operation, and the doors of the White House swing open. Democrats say Trump let convicted fraudsters keep close to 1$.7 billion in stolen funds combined. Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht got a pardon on Trump’s first full day back in office, along with forgiveness of more than 1$83 million in forfeitures. This is what happens when accountability has a price tag, and only the people who can pay it get to walk free.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, September 3rd, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
