Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public commons, not the powerful.
SHOULD REPORTERS FACE THE DEATH PENALTY THREATS FROM TRUMP?
The president of the United States spent Sunday calling for journalists to be charged with treason. Treason is punishable by death, or a minimum of five years in federal prison. In a nearly 400-word rant on Truth Social, Trump went after news organizations for reporting that five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were struck during an Iranian missile attack on a Saudi airbase. He called it fake reporting. He singled out the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, calling them enemies who want us to lose the war. Trump also claimed Iran spread an AI-generated image of the USS Abraham Lincoln burning in the ocean. AFP, the international fact-checking agency, confirmed last week that the image was made with artificial intelligence. It was fake. But instead of being furious at Iran for the disinformation, Trump aimed his fire at American journalists who covered it. He also praised FCC Chair Brendan Carr for threatening to strip broadcast licenses from networks he doesn’t like. We have a president who launched a war without a declaration of Congress, is now calling reporters traitors who deserve to die. That’s not a figure of speech. It’s a direct reading of what he posted. Every journalist in America should understand what that means.
IS RUSSIA’S INTERNET BLACKOUT A PREVIEW OF WHAT TRUMP WANTS HERE?
Beginning March 5th, mobile internet went dark across Moscow. Not just social media. Bank card payments failed. ATMs stopped working. People couldn’t hail taxis. Some areas lost phone service entirely. The outages spread from the suburbs into the city center, then hit St. Petersburg. Last February, Putin signed a law giving the FSB, Russia’s main security service, authority to shut down communications nationwide. That law took effect March 3rd. The blackouts followed within days. Russia’s already blocked nearly a million websites. WhatsApp and Telegram are barely functional. Officials are now floating a whitelist internet, where only government-approved sites and services stay online. Muscovites responded by panic-buying walkie-talkies and pagers. Pager sales shot up 73 percent. Walkie-talkie sales up 27 percent. People are carrying road maps because they can’t rely on their phones anymore. The Kremlin calls it a security measure against Ukrainian drone attacks. Human Rights Watch calls it a digital iron curtain. Both of those things can be true at once. And while all of this is unfolding in Russia, Trump and his allies are doing everything they can to control what Americans read, watch, and hear. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to notice the direction of travel.
IS TRUMP OPENLY RUNNING PUTIN’S MEDIA PLAYBOOK?
This past weekend, while the FCC was threatening to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage, Trump posted a graphic on Truth Social bragging that he’s reshaping American media. The graphic listed the wins. NPR defunded. Stephen Colbert gone. Jim Acosta gone. The FCC reformed. CNN under new management. Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and political science professor at Stanford, responded with one word. Wow. He called it scary and said it reminded him of Putin’s early years reshaping Russian media. Garry Kasparov, who lived through Soviet rule and watches authoritarian movements with deep clarity, said fascism doesn’t sneak up on you. This, he said, is the playbook. The Radio Television Digital News Association called Brendan Carr a bully with a briefcase and said what he’s describing is government control of the press. Legal experts point out that broadcast licenses don’t even come up for renewal until 2028, so the threats have limited legal teeth for now. But legal teeth aren’t the only teeth that matter. The intimidation is real, it’s deliberate, and it’s working. Every newsroom in America got the message. Cover this administration favorably, or we’ll come for your license. That is not the First Amendment. That is its opposite.
WHO’S PAYING FOR THIS WAR? YOU ARE. AT $11,500 EVERY SINGLE SECOND.
Senator Elizabeth Warren laid it out plainly this week. Trump’s war in Iran is costing American taxpayers a billion dollars a day. That’s $11,500 every single second. And that’s actually the low estimate. The Pentagon gave Congress a fuller picture this week, and the numbers are worse. Just the first six days of the war cost $11.3 billion, which works out to nearly $21,800 a second, and even that didn’t include many of the major costs, senators were told. The war is on track to be more expensive annually than the budget of any federal agency except the Pentagon itself. Meanwhile, American families are getting crushed at the pump. Gas prices have jumped to $3.63 a gallon nationally, up from $2.94 just a month ago. Cities in Indiana and Ohio have seen increases of more than 50 cents. Texas and Virginia, 65 cents. California is averaging over five dollars statewide, with some stations in Los Angeles charging above eight. Trump says it’s worth it. He’s said recently that gasoline prices going up a little is far less important than his objectives in Iran. But 15 million Americans have lost their healthcare under his policies. He says we can’t afford to lower drug prices. But he’ll spend $11,500 a second bombing another country. Warren said it plainly. These are choices. And working people are the ones paying for them.
SIX YEARS LATER, EPSTEIN’S RANCH FINALLY GETS SEARCHED
For six years, the FBI held a tip that two girls may be buried at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, a 7,600-acre compound with a private airstrip in rural New Mexico, where multiple victims have testified they were trafficked and raped. The feds searched Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, his Palm Beach mansion, his private Caribbean island. They never searched Zorro Ranch. Then in January, the Justice Department released three million pages of sealed Epstein files. Buried in those documents was a 2019 email sent to an Albuquerque radio host. It alleged that two foreign girls were buried in the hills outside the Zorro on orders of Jeffrey and Ghislaine Maxwell. The FBI had that tip for six years and never acted on it. After the file release, New Mexico’s attorney general reopened the criminal investigation. On March 10th, state police conducted the first-ever law enforcement search of the property. Here’s where it gets even stranger. The ranch was sold in 2023 to former Texas Republican state senator Don Huffines, a Trump-endorsed candidate for state comptroller, who immediately started digging up the property with backhoes. No permits requested. He says he wants to turn it into a Christian retreat. New Mexico’s established a bipartisan Truth Commission with subpoena power. Six years. These survivors deserved the truth a long time ago.
CATS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN. SCIENTISTS ARE JUST CATCHING UP.
Scientists say they’ve finally cracked one of nature’s great mysteries: why cats always land on their feet. The secret may lie in their upper thoracic vertebrae, which can rotate a full 360 degrees, letting them spin their front half toward the ground mid-fall, then twist their lower body to match. Cats also appear to have a right-side bias, consistently rotating that direction when dropped. Scientists are still working out the full model. The cats have declined to comment.
And that’s the way it is, Today is Monday, March 16, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann
