Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille

“Behind the battles over ideas and policy proposals, at its core, democratic politics is about buying votes. Sometimes, vote-buying is overtly a cash for ballots arrangement. But in the United States, votes have more often been purchased with the promise of ‘free’ goods and services, paid for through taxes or, increasingly, by running up debt, and justified by empty verbiage about the public good that the scheme will allegedly promote. That makes President Donald Trump’s promise of $5,000 ‘dividend’ payments to Americans if his party wins the midterms a jarring return to the open corruption of the politics of the past—or of other country’s present experiences.” (09/16/26)

https://reason.com/2026/09/16/trumps-5000-dividends-are-a-brazen-vote-buying-scheme/

Source: Fox News
by Trace Gallagher

“During the first-ever Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas last week, there was a lot of talk about ‘the common sense revolution’. It was familiar territory to me because every night on my evening newscast, ‘Fox News @ Night’, we join the common sense revolution — you could say we started the common sense revolution more than four years ago. We like to call it ‘The Fox News @ Night Common Sense Department.’ Common sense gives us a chance to take a deeper and sometimes snarkier take on one of the day’s big topics. The goal of the Common Sense Department is not to accuse Americans of not having common sense, but to remind Americans that we share a great deal of common sense. And when somebody or some group steps outside the boundaries of what we consider societal norms, we love to point out exactly why those boundaries exist.” (09/16/26)

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trace-gallagher-common-sense-alive-america-listen

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Daniel Nuccio

“Knowing what’s in your food or whether what you’re about to eat comports with a medically prescribed diet can be difficult. There’s no reason why the government should make it harder. But that’s exactly what the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration are doing when they prohibit companies from conveying information about FODMAP content on food labels. Although not inherently harmful to most people, FODMAPs are a broad category of short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols believed to trigger gastrointestinal symptoms in individuals living with irritable bowel syndrome and possibly several other functional gastrointestinal disorders. … as one US company learned, even if one of the world’s leading FODMAP research facilities tells you your food is low in FODMAPs, this isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can just put on a label in the United States.” (09/16/26)

https://brownstone.org/articles/food-labeling-should-not-be-this-hard/

Source: Common Dreams
by Pamela Shifman

“‘How can I be of service?’ That was the phone message Gloria Steinem kept leaving at the office of the African National Congress Parliamentary Women’s Caucus in Cape Town, South Africa in 1997. I had arrived in the country a year earlier, working as a young staffer for some of the first women elected to lead South Africa’s new democracy. When they asked if I wanted to call that American woman back, I jumped at the chance. Soon Gloria was on her way to Cape Town, and I was assigned to pick her up at the airport. As this global icon (something she hated to be called) stepped into my rusted car, the first thing I remember is asking her to keep her head near the window as exhaust crept in through a hole in the floor. (She didn’t flinch.)” (09/16/26)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gloria-steinem-hope-a-holic

Source: Mindset Shifts
by Barry Brownstein

“Holly [Mathnerd] warns that social media magnifies tribal hatred. Having written many essays on the horrors of tribalism, I think she is spot on. We can go further. We won’t get to the roots of tribal hatred if we don’t assess cause and effect. Our inner decision to cherish our tribal beast creates the demand to express our hatred on social media. No matter what political or social side we are on, Holly’s observation applies: ‘You cannot defend the individual by changing which collective gets put in the defendant’s chair.'” (09/16/26)

https://mindsetshifts.substack.com/p/is-tribalism-the-worst-idea-in-history