Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Trump’s Iran War Drains $1,200 From Every American Household
Six months into Donald Trump’s war with Iran, we finally have a price tag for regular people. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, figures the typical American household has paid an extra $1,200 since the shooting started in February. New Yorker columnist John Cassidy pulled the numbers together, and he says even that’s conservative. He called the figure a rough sketch of “the magnitude of Trump’s folly.” Here’s where your money went. Gas is up more than a dollar a gallon. Diesel is up by half. Brown University’s energy tracker says those two things alone have cost Americans $93 billion, better than $700 a household. Oil and fertilizer climbed, so groceries climbed. Inflation went from 2.4 percent in February to 3.4 percent today, and that killed the interest rate cuts everybody was counting on. Your car loan costs more because of this war. Meanwhile the Pentagon can’t keep its story straight. Hegseth told the Senate it’s cost $37.5 billion. NBC News reported internal Pentagon numbers between $80 billion and $100 billion. Somebody’s covering that gap, and it isn’t the defense contractors.
Why Is Hegseth Mocking Canadian Teenagers While His Army Falls Apart?
Monday night, hours after his Army secretary walked out the door, the Secretary of Defense got on social media and posted a photo he’d lifted off the Instagram page of a cadet camp in Vernon, British Columbia. It showed a smiling teenage girl receiving a medal from her instructor. His entire caption was a Canadian flag and the words “this is real.” By Tuesday it had over five million views. Canada’s cadet program is for kids aged 12 to 18. They aren’t soldiers. The instructor isn’t on combat duty. The Secretary of Defense of the United States body shamed a high school kid in front of millions of followers. Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman and an Air National Guard officer, said plainly that these are children. Alberta’s Shannon Phillips brought up the 158 Canadians who died fighting alongside Americans in Afghanistan and told him, “Have some respect, you absolute lowlife.” And look at the backdrop. The Army has 450,000 active duty soldiers, no confirmed civilian secretary, and fewer generals than at any point in recent memory. The man running it is posting memes taking cheap shots about children.
Wyden and Jayapal Demand Answers on Trump’s Secret Spy Program
Two members of Congress want a federal investigation into how this administration has been spying on Americans. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington have asked the Government Accountability Office to examine Homeland Security’s use of administrative summonses, a customs tool, to seize phone records and online data belonging to journalists, nonprofits and labor unions. No judge signs off. Nobody tells the target. The case that set this off involves Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Homeland Security Investigations pulled six months of her phone records. Then agents went to Google demanding information on the YouTube accounts of Fort and Don Lemon. A judge had already rejected a warrant for that same material twice, ruling the journalists deserved a chance to fight it in court. So the government simply walked around the judge. Every one of these summonses instructs the company receiving it to keep quiet. Big tech firms with lawyers sometimes ignore that. Telecoms, banks and pharmacies just comply. AT&T and CVS have told Congress that’s precisely why they never notified their own customers. When the government can read your records and nobody’s permitted to tell you, the Fourth Amendment is decoration.
Can Carney Make Trump Stop Throwing Shade and Start Talking?
Canada’s had enough. Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in front of reporters in Ottawa Tuesday morning and told the Trump administration to grow up. Talks can resume, he said, when the Americans “start being serious about having those discussions.” Negotiations collapsed August 21st after Ottawa called the American demands unacceptable. Trump answered with 50% tariffs on roughly $28 billion in Canadian goods, everything from beer and cheese to hockey equipment, piled on top of existing duties on steel, aluminum, lumber and cars. Canada hits back September 8th, dollar for dollar, on $27.6 billion of American products, and Ottawa’s putting up another $7.5 billion to protect its own workers. Carney says Washington wanted Canadian industry either turned into subsidiaries of American companies or wound down entirely. Since the talks died, Trump has declared Lake Ontario should be renamed Lake America and posted an AI meme of Canadian geese wearing his hairstyle. Scott Bessent went on television and joked about Canada’s submarines. Carney said that’s beneath their office. Monday, Canadian voters handed his Liberals all three special elections, including a seat conservatives had held for eight years. Bullying our closest ally is uniting them, not breaking them.
Why Did the CDC Erase Two Measles Deaths From the National Count?
Now here’s the one that ought to make you furious. On August 25th, Pennsylvania’s health department confirmed two measles deaths in Lancaster County. Both people were unvaccinated. They’re the first measles deaths in that state in 35 years, and the state health secretary, a pediatrician with three decades of experience, personally reviewed the investigation. The CDC won’t count them. New CDC director Erica Schwartz made the decision to leave both deaths out of the national tally, according to officials who spoke to the Washington Post anonymously because they’re afraid of being fired. So the CDC’s own website still shows zero measles deaths in the United States this year, with an asterisk saying the agency is reviewing the circumstances. Understand what just happened. States have always made these determinations. That’s the system. A former CDC chief medical officer called the move “highly unusual.” And it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Robert F. Kennedy Junior went on a Fox News town hall and referred to the so called measles deaths in Lancaster County. He suggested online the whole thing might have been invented by a staffer working for Governor Josh Shapiro. We’re at 2,903 cases across 45 states, the worst outbreak in more than three decades. In November, international health officials decide whether America still qualifies as measles free. And Washington’s response is to hold the death count at zero. That isn’t public health. That’s public relations with a body count, and children are paying for it.
Librarians Face Bomb Threats as Censorship Hits a Breaking Point
PEN America released a report today called Out of Circulation, and it finds America’s public libraries at a breaking point. Not school libraries. Public ones. The place your grandmother gets her large print mysteries. The report documents bomb threats, organized protests, and a physical assault on a librarian that shut down story hours in New York, Massachusetts and Nevada. It counts nearly 23,000 book bans in school libraries since 2021, and now 51% of every attempted ban in this country targets a public library. Idaho passed a law in March letting city councils hire and fire library directors, a power that belonged to library boards. Alabama tried to let officials remove board members without cause. In Arkansas, one librarian’s manager set aside bail money, because a state law could put her in jail for a year for handing a kid the wrong book. A federal appeals court let that law take effect in July. Kasey Meehan of PEN America says libraries are “increasingly censorship battlegrounds.” A library card is one of the last things in America that’s free and open to everybody. That’s exactly why they’re coming for it.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
