Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Who Watches the Watchdog When Trump Owns Him?
Donald Trump just planted Project 2025 author Dennis Kirk inside the Interior Department’s watchdog office. Kirk co-wrote a chapter of the Heritage Foundation blueprint calling for decentralizing and privatizing the federal government as much as possible. Now he sits inside the Office of Inspector General, the one place that investigates waste, fraud, and corruption at Interior.
Congressman Jared Huffman, who broke the news, calls him “a fake and fraudulent watchdog.” Huffman says everything this political puppet does will serve Donald Trump.
Trump fired Interior’s real inspector general, Mark Greenblatt, within days of taking office last year, part of a purge of more than a dozen watchdogs. Greenblatt now warns that dropping a political operative into an oversight office wrecks public trust.
And the timing stinks. Interior’s watchdog has been sitting on congressional requests to investigate the agency’s number three official over financial ties to a Nevada lithium mine, and a former offshore oil lobbyist now running policy at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Trump wants his own man inside the one place his cronies still fear. When the guards work for the thieves, nothing gets guarded.
Can Thirty Million Dollars Buy the Same Seat Twice?
AIPAC set more than $30 million on fire trying to stop Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. It didn’t work. El-Sayed beat Congresswoman Haley Stevens Tuesday night in the most expensive Democratic primary in American history.
Now AIPAC’s going back for round two. The New York Times reported Wednesday that AIPAC is weighing a major financial campaign to boost the Republican nominee, former Congressman Mike Rogers. AIPAC said publicly that its members remain determined to see voters reject El-Sayed in November.
They’ve got the cash. AIPAC’s super PAC had over $80 million on hand in June, funded partly by right-wing billionaires like Paul Singer and Haim Saban.
Progressives aren’t flinching. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thanked AIPAC for proving it doesn’t belong in Democratic primaries, then told them she’d see them in November. Congressman Chris Deluzio said AIPAC is now threatening to hand Republicans a Senate seat that could decide control of the chamber.
El-Sayed’s own message was simpler. “I’m happy to burn your money for you,” he said. A foreign policy lobby just told Michigan Democrats it would rather have a Republican senator. Voters heard that loud and clear.
Khanna Hands Communities a Weapon Against the Data Center Boom
Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley. He just introduced what he calls a Data Center Bill of Rights. It’s nonbinding. Khanna wants communities empowered to block data centers within 2,500 feet of homes, schools, daycares, hospitals, and nursing homes. He wants states to keep the right to impose moratoriums. He wants independent assessments of every center’s water use, power demand, and pollution. He wants guarantees your utility bill won’t climb. And he wants these companies paying their fair share of taxes.
Right now developers cut deals with state and local officials behind nondisclosure agreements. The public learns who owns it and what it costs long after it’s too late to fight.
Khanna says the hyperscalers are “losing the country.” He’s right. A Gallup poll in May found more than seven in ten Americans oppose a data center near them. Three quarters of Democrats, and nearly two thirds of Republicans.
This is one of the few fights where working people across the political spectrum agree. The AI boom is coming for your water, your power grid, and your farmland. The only question is whether or not you get a vote.
The Strongest El Niño in History Is Headed Our Way? Here’s What Happens...
Something big is building in the Pacific. El Niño formed in June, and the forecasts keep getting more extreme. Berkeley Earth found a 90% chance this one pushes tropical Pacific temperatures past anything recorded in roughly a 150 years of observation. NOAA gives it an 81% chance of reaching very strong status, though the agency is more cautious about the record talk.
One forecaster told Yahoo News the potential to climb three or 4 four degrees Celsius above normal is “becoming increasingly likely.” That would beat the record holders from 1997 and 2015.
Here’s what it means where you live. A strong El Niño shoves the Pacific jet stream south. That soaks the southern tier of the country. California, the Southwest, Texas, the Gulf Coast, and up through the Southeast can expect a wetter, stormier winter with real flood risk. The Sierra Nevada and the southern Rockies could pile up serious snowpack.
The northern tier gets the opposite. Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana face the strongest warm signal on the map, paired with below normal precipitation and thin mountain snow. That’s bad news for water supply next summer and for wildfire season after that. Alaska warms and dries too. Atlantic hurricane activity usually drops during El Niño while the eastern Pacific picks up.
Now add the part that makes this different. Climate scientist Daniel Swain points out we’ve never had an El Niño this strong sitting on top of a planet already this hot. He warns of unprecedented flood, drought, and fire extremes, and says another global temperature record is likely.
And we’re walking into it with a federal government busy gutting the agencies that forecast disasters and the ones that clean up afterward.
Trump Guts the Rulebook That Made Head Start Work
The Trump administration announced Thursday it wants to throw out most of the regulations governing Head Start, the preschool program serving about seven hundred thousand of the poorest children in America, including kids who are homeless, in foster care, or disabled.
Head Start runs on more than a hundred pages of rules. Low staff to student ratios. Research backed curriculum. Medical and dental screenings. Parent coaching. Wraparound services built to pull whole families out of poverty. The proposal tosses nearly all of it and tells 1,600 operators to follow state childcare licensing rules instead.
State rules are far weaker. In Mississippi, a Head Start teacher can handle four 2-year-olds. State licensing lets one adult supervise a dozen.
Assistant Secretary Alex Adams says federal mandates “hinder local decision making” and drive up costs. He estimates $22 billion in savings. Robert Kennedy Junior praised the program his uncle helped launch, then backed dismantling the standards that made it work.
Khari Garvin, who ran Head Start under Biden, says the model was built as a strategy to move families out of poverty. The public gets 60 days to comment. Use them.
How Did a Parasite Sicken One in Every Thousand Michiganders?
The largest cyclosporiasis outbreak ever recorded in this country has now killed two people in Michigan. More than 11,500 cases have turned up there in three months. Michigan has about ten million residents. That’s roughly one in every thousand, and health officials say the real number runs higher because mild cases never get tested.
Nationwide, the CDC has identified more than 22,000 suspected cases across 45 states, with nearly 500 hospitalizations in the states tied to this outbreak, including a 193 in Michigan.
The source is contaminated iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms in central Mexico, served at Taco Bell locations. It was recalled July 17. Both Michigan deaths involved people with serious underlying conditions who got sick before that recall.
Robert Kennedy Junior said last month the outbreak is “under control.” Thousands of new cases have been reported nationwide since.
Cyclospora is a microscopic parasite spread through contaminated food and water. It causes severe diarrhea and dangerous dehydration. It’s preventable with real inspection and real oversight. Trump keeps cutting the agencies that catch this stuff before it reaches your plate. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, August 6, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
