Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Trump Hiring Armed Guards To Steal Your Ballot?
The Postal Service is putting more armed private security guards inside mail facilities, and the people who know the mail best say it smells like a takeover. Raw Story reviewed internal communications showing USPS is deploying contracted armed officers at 18 mail facilities this month. The postal police union says it’s been notified of roughly 39,000 work hours a week for 972 full-time armed guards across 54 facilities. That’s tens of millions in new labor costs at an agency that just posted $2 billion in quarterly losses.
Here’s the context. The Supreme Court ruled last month that states may count late mail ballots postmarked by Election Day. Trump lost that one. So he’s leaning on a federal judge to unfreeze his executive order handing the Postal Service power to decide who gets to vote by mail. Meanwhile, the real postal police, the officers with 1,440 hours of training, have been benched. Their replacements? Guards who in 15 states need no firearms training at all.
Frank Albergo, who leads the postal police union, calls this a test case for privatizing the Postal Service, and says almost nobody is pushing back. Notre Dame’s James O’Rourke put it plainly. “This is a flat-out attempt to steal the next election.”
Are We Torturing People on Huger Strikes Inside American Detention Camps?
A document from ICE’s Health Service Corps, reviewed by The Guardian, confirms for the first time that the Trump administration has forcibly treated a hunger striker in immigration detention. It covers the first quarter of fiscal year 2026. It says one patient who began refusing food between October and December of last year was “subject to force feeding, hydration, or forced urinary catheterization.”
Understand what those words mean. Force feeding means a tube shoved up your nose and down your throat while guards hold you down. Forced catheterization means a tube pushed into your urethra. The American and World Medical Associations have called force feeding a violation of medical ethics for decades. United Nations human rights experts call it cruel and degrading. Plenty of doctors just call it torture.
That same document says 7 people were on hunger strike as of February, and ICE has budgeted about 169,000 dollars for outside medical care of hunger strikers this year.
People stop eating when every other door has been slammed shut. It’s the last protest available to somebody with no lawyer, no hearing, and no way out. It should not be that our government’s answer is a tube and torture.
Where On Earth Is Mitch McConnell?
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear sent a blunt letter to Senator Mitch McConnell. Speak to your constituents and show you can still do the job, or resign the seat. Speak or resign. Beshear copied Senate Majority Leader John Thune and asked him to investigate whether McConnell is capable of serving at all.
It’s been more than 40 days since the 84-year-old McConnell has been seen anywhere but in photographs released by his own office. He fell at his home in June. He’s retiring anyway when his term ends in January 2027. The Congressional physician’s office says he’s been through strenuous physical therapy and that his childhood polio is a significant factor in his mobility. McConnell says he’s still working hard to get back to a full schedule.
This is Beshear’s second letter. He wrote that when you run for office, you willingly give up much of your personal privacy. That’s the deal, and everybody knows it.
“Kentuckians are just asking you to be honest,” Beshear wrote.
He’s right. 4.5 million Kentuckians get two votes in the Senate. And now they’ve got one, and they don’t know why.
Big Gas Knew, And Big Gas Lied
Bill McKibben has a piece out today arguing it’s time to make gas a dirty word. His case is simple. So called natural gas isn’t a bridge fuel. It’s a climate pollutant that’s getting more expensive, it’s wrecking people’s lungs, and the industry wants to lock us into it for decades.
He’s writing on the heels of a report from the Center for Climate Integrity. Researchers dug up internal documents showing gas companies knew about methane’s climate damage as far back as 1968, when a study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute tied atmospheric methane to oil fields and leaking gas pipes. Methane traps roughly 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over its first 20 years.
The industry, the report says, “manufactured the myth of clean natural gas.”
They even helped steer a 1996 methane study co-funded by the EPA. Internal notes show EPA officials admitting they didn’t have the expertise to check the industry’s numbers.
So it looks like they sold us a lie. We built our homes and our power grid around it. And now they want us paying off their pipelines for another 40 years.
Putin Slams The Door On Everybody Who Says Stop
Russians vote in September for all 450 seats in the State Duma. The Kremlin has decided that anyone who breathes a word against the war in Ukraine won’t be on that ballot. The Washington Post reports a fresh crackdown on antiwar voices. What makes it jarring is that for a few weeks this spring, it looked like Moscow was cracking a window open to let some frustration out.
Boris Nadezhdin was the most prominent antiwar politician left standing. He tried to run as an independent. The justice ministry labeled him a foreign agent. Police hauled him in over a social media post. A court fined him for displaying extremist symbols, which turned out to be a photograph of the late Alexei Navalny. Both rulings disqualify him, he’s barred from leaving the country, and last week he quit opposition politics altogether.
“They are silencing me, forcing me out of politics,” Nadezhdin said.
Ukraine’s drones are landing deep inside Russia and ordinary Russians are furious. Zelensky meets Trump at the White House today. Watch what a dictator does when he’s losing the argument. Argument gets banned.
Geeky Science! Did Empires Erase 70,000 Human Languages?
A study published last week in the journal Science reconstructed how many languages humans have spoken across the past 12,000 years, and the answer is staggering. Around 2,000 years ago, humanity may have been speaking somewhere between 20,000 and 75,000 different languages. Today we’re down to about 7,500.
Researchers from Harvard, Yale, and the Max Planck Institute built their model using data from 171 hunter-gatherer societies, then traced population estimates forward. Language diversity climbed for most of the Holocene, peaked, and then fell off a cliff.
Here’s the part that surprised everybody. The collapse didn’t begin with European colonialism. It began centuries earlier, when big states and multinational empires rolled over independent communities and imposed their own tongues. Colonialism just poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning.
Nearly half the languages left today are endangered, and at least four die every year. But Yale’s Claire Bowern says the story isn’t finished. “It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct.”
And that’s the way it is, Today, Tuesday, July 28th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
