Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Iran Ready To Bring This War To Europe?
Iran is looking at hitting Europe. The Financial Times reported Wednesday, citing two people close to the Iranian government, that Iranian forces have assessed strikes on American military assets in southeastern Europe if Donald Trump escalates this war. Bulgaria’s on the list. It approved the use of its Bezmer air base by American refueling aircraft last month. Cyprus is on the list too, where a British air base was hit by a drone back in March. Iranian planners have separately looked at cutting the subsea fiber optic cables running through the Strait of Hormuz. The Revolutionary Guard already warned Britain that any base used to attack Iran becomes a legitimate target. In July, Iran struck an American base in Jordan and killed three of our service members. Sidharth Kaushal at the Royal United Services Institute says the missile threat to Europe is “real, but limited.” Medium range Iranian missiles can reach southern Europe, but they lose accuracy the farther they fly. Trump said Tuesday there aren’t any talks going on. So here’s where we are. A war nobody voted for is creeping toward NATO’s doorstep, and the people who’ll pay for it never got a say in starting it.
Sanders Says The Establishment Is Losing The Argument
Bernie Sanders has a message for the Democratic establishment. Stop telling Americans what to believe and start listening to what they actually want. Writing this week, Sanders argues progressives are winning primaries all over this country for a simple reason. Their ideas are popular. Look at the numbers. A new YouGov poll shows 64% of Americans back a Medicare for All single-payer system. A CBS YouGov survey taken the 12-14 August found 90% of Democratic voters want their party to make passing Medicare for All a priority. Only 10% said don’t bother. Data for Progress found 65% support among likely voters, including 71% of independents and 49% of Republicans. A Yale study says the Sanders bill would save more than 114,000 lives a year and a trillion dollars. Sanders put it plainly. “They’re right. Let’s do it.” Meanwhile House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said last week he doesn’t support the bill. When ninety percent of your own voters want something and leadership says no, the fringe isn’t the base. It’s the people running the party.
Can A Democratic Socialist Win Michigan?
Abdul El-Sayed just opened a seven-point lead in Michigan. A Susquehanna poll of likely voters, released Wednesday and taken on the seventeenth, has El-Sayed at 46% and Republican Mike Rogers at 39%. That’s a big swing. Other recent polling told a different story. Fox News had Rogers up fifty-one to forty-seven. TechnoMetrica, polling for the League of American Workers, had El-Sayed ahead by three. An EPIC MRA survey in late July had Rogers up four, inside the margin of error. El-Sayed won his primary after beating Congresswoman Haley Stevens and surviving a $30 million AIPAC ad campaign aimed at burying him. CNN’s Harry Enten has been warning Democrats about him, pointing out his favorability sits thirteen points underwater while Democratic candidates in Iowa, Maine, and Ohio are all above water. “This is all about Abdul El-Sayed being a weak candidate,” Enten said. Rogers has Trump’s endorsement. Michigan’s about to answer the question the whole party is fighting over. Can a candidate who runs against billionaires win a swing state when the money comes for him?
MAGA Rebels Plot To Hijack The Republican Party
Trump took over the Republican Party from the outside. Now some of his own people want to use that playbook against him. Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center on March 17, less than three weeks into the Iran war. In his resignation letter he wrote about eleven combat deployments and about losing his wife, killed by a suicide bomber while serving in Syria. He told USA Today the antiwar right could hijack the GOP the way Trump did. Last month Kent sat down at Tucker Carlson’s house in Maine with Congressman Thomas Massie and former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene posted a photo afterward and said the movement had begun. They kicked around a third party, then balked at the cost of getting on the ballot in 50 states. Nobody in the room wanted to be the candidate. Kent says Vice President JD Vance will carry a credibility problem into 2028 after serving in an administration that launched the war Trump campaigned against. “There’s no military solution,” Kent said. Eighteen American service members have died. Trump’s approval sits at 33%. Opposition to this war isn’t left or right anymore. It’s most of the country.
Why Are Troops Costing More Than Cops And Catching Fewer Criminals?
Reuters went through the court records in Washington DC, and what they found should make you angry. There are roughly 4,500 National Guard soldiers deployed in the capital right now. The city has 3,200 police officers. The soldiers outnumber the cops. Since they showed up last August, they’ve been mentioned in about 1.3% of the criminal cases filed in DC Superior Court. Reuters found 217 cases involving the Guard. In 62 of them, soldiers stopped somebody on their own, mostly for shoplifting or hopping a subway turnstile. In dozens of cases the soldiers weren’t making arrests at all. They were the victims. The Pentagon calls the mission “presence patrols.” Troops can’t even make an arrest. They can only detain you and wait for a real cop. The tab runs about $1.65 million a day, more than the entire DC police budget, and the administration told Congress it’ll keep this going through 2029 at a cost of $.4 billion. That’s not public safety. That’s a show stage built with your money.
Who Fights The Fire When Nobody’s Left To Send?
Federal firefighters are begging somebody to listen. They say the Forest Service is running exhausted skeleton crews while telling the public everything’s fine. The agency says it had 11,816 wildland firefighters on board in July, 104% of its hiring goal. Then, in the same breath, it admits that number still isn’t enough to meet the need. A survey this spring by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and the federal employees union drew 825 responses. Three out of four firefighters said they’d thought about quitting in the past year. Burnout. Low pay. No life outside the fire line. The number of elite hotshot crews available has dropped by about 15%. More than a 100 fires are burning across 15 states. Seven point three million acres have burned this year, the most on record through the 18th of August. The national coordinating center said last week it can’t supply every fire, and warned there’s “no immediate relief anticipated.” We cut the people who run toward the fire. Now the fire’s winning.
And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, August 19th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
