Source: Washington Monthly
by Bill Scher

“Whatever happens in Illinois and elsewhere this primary season, the risks to democracy are clear. In multi-candidate primaries that can be won by small pluralities, special interest groups can misrepresent themselves, spend lavishly, and watch their preferred candidates, who are not representative of their party’s voters, eke out narrow wins. That could not only damage a party’s short-term prospects but also threaten its integrity in the long term.” (03/17/26)

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/03/17/crypto-aipac-corrupting-democratic-primaries/

Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson

“At what point must we be frank about the fact that Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb author who died last week at the age of 93, was not simply wrong about almost everything he ever wrote or said or thought, but positively and culpably dishonest? If ever there were an intellectual grave that deserves pissing on posthaste, it is Paul Ehrlich’s. So let us commence. Ehrlich was an intellectual fraud, something he had in common with many of the celebrated pseudoscientists, quacks, and cranks who became intellectual heroes to our era’s progressives, from Sigmund Freud to Noam Chomsky, Rachel Carson, Margaret Sanger, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until about five minutes ago. (Right-wingers don’t go around reading books by crackpots — they put them into the Cabinet.)” (03/17/26)

https://archive.is/gLhO3

Source: Liberal Currents
by Dennis Lytton

“Trump’s use of the constitution’s plenary grant of pardon authority to him — from all the J6’ers, to his cronies and friends, to implicit promises to administration thugs high and low — has been without precedent in scale to be sure. But the history of the pardon clause has always been fraught. Increasingly in the last few generations its abuses — from Clinton’s Marc Rich to Bush’s Iran Contra plotters — have become prominent. Amendments may require Republican members of Congress to get on board, but they do not require the president. Pardon reform, especially if it does not have a particular partisan valence, could be a low hanging fruit for the 120th Congress to address through that mechanism.” (03/17/26)

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/amend-and-reform-the-pardon-clause-of-the-constitution-in-2027/

Source: Persuasion
by Leonora Barclay

“Don’t helicopter parent your kids. It may cause them to make a dramatic break later in life.” (03/17/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-theory-about-the-estrangement-crisis

Source: Isonomia Quarterly
by Paul Poenicke

“Equality under the law and global federalism — two of Hayek’s most cogent ideals — are consequential from numerous perspectives and justified by many strong arguments. A dozen phrases pass through the mind — ‘The best arguments persuade,’ ‘The truth will out,’ ‘Survival of the fittest beliefs,’ ‘Truth emerges from the marketplace of ideas’ — to accost reality. Unfortunately, society is not a truth table, where the input of truth entails the output of further truths. Truth tables are constructs of logic, and reality is not beholden to the results of formal logic and its apparatuses.” (03/17/26)

https://isonomiamag.substack.com/p/incorrigible-rudeness-the-strategy