Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Trump Sending Election Cops Into Blue America?
The Justice Department says it’s deploying election monitors to fifteen jurisdictions across six states for the rest of this summer’s primaries. Four of those states are deeply Democratic, and the other two are battlegrounds. We’re talking Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia. Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon announced it on social media and on a conservative radio show, reading off the targets one by one, from Boston to Maricopa to Detroit to Fairfax County. She called it business as usual and said “the more eyes on elections, in my opinion, the better.” But this lands as Trump keeps pushing baseless claims of massive voter fraud, a vote-by-mail ban, and voter ID rules even his own party won’t back. His DOJ has also started threatening to criminally prosecute local election officials who don’t purge their voter rolls the way Washington wants. California Governor Gavin Newsom fired back this week by making ballot seizure a felony. When federal agents start hovering over blue-city polling places right before the midterms, that isn’t oversight. That’s intimidation, and it’s aimed at the very people who count your vote.
Should Pete Hegseth Be Impeached for a Massacre?
Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari is reviving her push to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and this time it’s over the school. Back on February twenty-eighth, a United States strike hit a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, and more than a hundred and sixty-five people were killed, most of them children. Trump first blamed Iran. Then he shrugged and said he didn’t think it was us. Now fears of a cover-up are growing while the Pentagon sits on its own investigation. Ansari, the daughter of Iranian immigrants, filed six articles of impeachment back in the spring, charging Hegseth with unauthorized war and the targeting of civilians. She’s not letting it go, and she’s calling the whole thing an abomination. “Children were murdered in the first days of Trump’s illegal, pointless war,” she said. That war has already killed thousands, rattled global oil markets, and dragged us into another open-ended fight nobody voted for. Remember, only Congress can declare war, not a president acting alone and not a war secretary carrying out his orders. The measure won’t pass a Republican House. But when American bombs kill kids in a classroom and nobody in power will answer for it, that’s not a mistake. That’s a country losing its conscience.
Did Spain Just Tell Trump to Back Off?
Spain isn’t blinking. After Trump threatened a trade embargo and called Spain a terrible partner, the country’s health minister, Monica Garcia, hit back hard. The fight blew up around the NATO summit, where Trump went after Spain for refusing to bend to his demands and for defending a world where nations cooperate instead of getting shoved around. Garcia said Spain accepts neither blackmail nor threats because it’s a sovereign, democratic country that stands for peace and works with its neighbors. “Trump is confusing diplomacy with bullying,” she said. Think about what it takes for a longtime American ally to say that out loud, on the record, with the cameras rolling. For eighty years, smaller nations mostly swallowed hard and went along with Washington. Now they’re naming the bullying for exactly what it is, and Spain’s own prime minister has stood behind her. When the world stops respecting the United States and starts pushing back against it, the damage to American standing outlasts any one president and any one trade fight.
Faster Buses Could Give New Yorkers Two Days Back
Here’s a story about government actually working for working people. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul rolled out a plan to speed up the city’s buses by twenty percent along fifty of the slowest, most crowded routes. New Yorkers take nearly three million bus trips a day, and yet their buses crawl at about eight miles an hour, the slowest of any big city in the country. The plan brings dedicated bus lanes, smarter traffic signals that hold a green light for an approaching bus, and all-door boarding by twenty twenty-seven. Five brand-new rapid corridors are coming to Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Riders could save up to six minutes a trip. Do that twice a day, five days a week, and Mamdani says you get more than two days of your life back every single year. “Above all, it means time returned to New Yorkers who don’t have nearly enough of it,” he said. That’s what it looks like when leaders treat your time as something worth protecting instead of something to waste.
Are Americans Falling Out of Love With Capitalism?
A new Wall Street Journal and NORC survey says the country is souring on the system itself. Just under half of Americans now say capitalism is working well, down from sixty percent about a decade ago. Only thirty-five percent are even fairly sure this country still offers a real shot at a good job and the old American dream. And faith in democracy is even shakier. Just twelve percent say our democracy is working very or extremely well, and a measly sixteen percent believe average citizens have any real influence over politics at all. Older and more conservative folks are the ones still holding onto some optimism. Younger Americans and everybody else are losing it fast, and this survey landed the same week the country marked its two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Here’s why that matters. When working people stop believing that either the economy or the government is on their side, that vacuum doesn’t stay empty for long. Somebody always steps in to fill it, promising to burn it all down, and history says it usually isn’t a friend of the little guy.
How Long Should a Movie Really Be?
And finally, America has spoken, and America is tired of sitting still. A new survey of two thousand adults pegged the perfect movie at just eighty-eight minutes, down from ninety-two two years ago. Only one in ten wants a film that runs two hours or longer, and a tiny three percent will sit past two and a half. It splits neatly by age. Boomers will stay for ninety-three minutes, Gen X taps out at eighty-nine, millennials at eighty-six, and Gen Z is done at eighty-two. Meanwhile Hollywood is marching the other direction. Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey clocks in at a hundred and seventy-two minutes. Think about that one. Odysseus needed ten years to get home from Troy, and now Nolan is going to make you feel every single mile of it. Folks asked for eighty-eight minutes, and Hollywood handed them the scenic route, a bathroom-buster, and a chariot ride through your entire evening. Somewhere out there, a guy just wants to be home for bedtime.
And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, July eighth, two thousand twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
