Source: CounterPunch
by Naomi Brockwell

“Late on the night of September 30, with the Senate about to leave town for a month, a bipartisan group of senators asked their colleagues to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) by unanimous consent. A single objection from Senator Rand Paul that thwarted the bill. For now. KOSA ostensibly aims to protect children by making platforms legally responsible for harms to minors. This sounds like something nobody could oppose, but it is a Trojan horse. If politicians really wanted to protect children, they would push for devices built specifically for kids and ask nothing of adults. Instead, KOSA is a step towards forcing everyone on the internet to verify their real identity, until we can’t read a digital book, watch a YouTube video, or chat with a friend without first proving exactly who we are.” (10/16/26)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/10/16/digital-id-will-change-the-internet-forever/

Source: Common Dreams
by Kirk Freudenburg

“I happen to live in a state where MAGA enthusiasms are relatively subdued, and where Republicans skew toward old-school conservatism rather than Q-Anon crazy. The old Prescott Bush world of Connecticut. The state’s senators and the representative of my congressional district do an ‘admirable enough’ job representing my interests and advocating for good causes, giving me just enough to complain about, but not too much. Given the times we live in, and with the midterms looming large, I rather wish I could cast a ballot in a state that where my vote might make a bigger difference; a state where senators and congressional representatives have gotten away with far too much, often for far too long. Mind you, I don’t want to live in such a place, I just want to vote there.” (10/17/26)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/7-tests-for-lawmakers

Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

“When a congressman tried to stop her from recording a press conference, student journalist Cat Murphy stood her ground. The congressman, U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, mistakenly claimed that Maryland’s all-party consent law allowed him to ask Murphy to turn off her cameras, even going so far as to ask the police to intervene, but the law didn’t actually apply in that context. Murphy knew this and asserted her First Amendment right to continue documenting the event. … The interaction between Harris and Murphy occurred during a public press gaggle, in which a public official invited reporters to ask questions and multiple cameras were plainly recording. As a result, this conversation is not the type Maryland’s recording law was meant to protect, and Murphy was right to stand her ground.” (10/16/26)

https://www.fire.org/news/after-congressman-challenged-student-reporters-right-record-heres-what-journalists-should-know

Source: The Bleeding Heart Libertarian
by Matt Zwolinski

“The idea that the just price is the market price isn’t new. The medieval Scholastics held a version of it. But the tradition never had a good account of why the market price should carry moral weight, and once economists showed that prices are set by impersonal supply and demand, the whole idea of a ‘just price’ came to look like a confusion. My paper tries to take the dynamic character of markets seriously, and to make it the cornerstone of a new theory of the just price. In essence, my claim is that the competitive market process, when it is operating, confers a presumption of justice on the prices it produces.” (10/16/26)

https://bleedingheartlibertarian.substack.com/p/a-new-theory-of-the-just-price

Source: Persuasion
by Damon Linker

“The midterm elections are now less than three weeks away—and I think we’ve seen more than enough to conclude that, short of a systemic polling error on a scale surpassing anything we have seen before, Republicans are going to get their asses kicked. … Assuming that’s how things play out and the Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, what will that mean for the short- and medium-term future of the country? The short answer, I’m afraid, is not much. The political fact of our time is that ours is a populist era.” (10/16/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/not-to-be-a-pessimist-but-these-midterms