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Claim: Penn. mailed ballots without secrecy envelope will get tossed. Fact check: True

naked ballots, vote by mail, Pennsylvania
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"The Caucus concludes that the only way to be certain that no fraud has taken place is to reject all naked ballots." — The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Ruling, Page 48

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last week that officials must throw out so-called "naked ballots" — mail-in ballots returned without the inner secrecy envelopes that separates voters' identities from how they vote. This is a change from how mail-in ballots have been counted in the past, including in this year's primary election, and could affect tens of thousands of general election ballots across the state.

Lisa Deeley, chairwoman of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, sent a letter to Republican legislators, whose party holds a majority in the Legislature, urging they eliminate the requirement for secrecy envelopes for mail-in votes to be counted. She wrote that the court ruling could "set Pennsylvania up to be the subject of significant post-election legal controversy, the likes of which we have not seen since Florida in 2000." Pennsylvania got rid of its requirement for an excuse to vote absentee last year, so this will be the first general election in which many residents likely will be voting by mail. President Trump narrowly won the battleground state in 2016 and former Vice President Joe Biden now holds a 9-point advantage among likely voters in the state, according to NBC/Marist poll conducted earlier this month.


The ruling also extended the deadline for mail ballots to be submitted to up to three days after the election and will allow voters to submit mail ballots through drop boxes. Top Republican legislators filed a stay request to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to reverse the decision to extend the deadline and signaled they will be sending a request to the U.S. Supreme Court to review the legality of the extension.


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Paul Ehrlich was wrong about everything

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Andy Andrews//Getty Images

Paul Ehrlich was wrong about everything

Biologist and author Paul Ehrlich, the most influential Chicken Little of the last century, died at the age of 93 this week. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” launched decades of institutional panic in government, entertainment and journalism.

Ehrlich’s core neo-Malthusian argument was that overpopulation would exhaust the supply of food and natural resources, leading to a cascade of catastrophes around the world. “The Population Bomb” opens with a bold prediction, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

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Bravado Isn’t a Strategy: Why the Iran War Has No Endgame

People clear rubble in a house in the Beryanak District after it was damaged by missile attacks two days before, on March 15, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. The United States and Israel continued their joint attack on Iran that began on February 28. Iran retaliated by firing waves of missiles and drones at Israel, and targeting U.S. allies in the region.

Getty Images, Majid Saeedi

Bravado Isn’t a Strategy: Why the Iran War Has No Endgame

Most of what we have heard from the administration as it pertains to the Iran War is swagger and bro-talk. A few days into the war, the White House released a social media video that combined footage of the bombardment with clips from video games. Not long after, it released a second video, titled “Justice the American Way,” that mixed images of the U.S. military with scenes from movies like Gladiator and Top Gun Maverick.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, War Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted of “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” “They are toast, and they know it,” he said. “This was never meant to be a fair fight... we are punching them while they’re down.”

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A Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadet walks through campus November 7, 2003 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Getty Images, Spencer Platt

Hegseth is Dumbing Down the Military (on Purpose)

One day before the United States began an ill-defined and illegal war of indefinite length with Iran, Pete Hegseth angrily attacked a different enemy: the Ivy League. The Secretary of War denounced Ivy League universities as "woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination” and then eliminated long-standing college fellowship programs with more than a dozen elite colleges, which had historically served as a pipeline for service members to the upper ranks of military leadership. Of the schools now on Hegseth’s "no-fly list," four sit in the top ten of the World’s Top Universities for 2026. So, why does the Secretary of War not want his armed forces to have the best education available? Because he wants a military without a brain.

For a guy obsessed with being the strongest and most lethal force in the world, cutting access to world-class schools is a bizarre gambit. It does reveal Hegseth doesn’t consider intelligence a factor–let alone an asset–in strength or lethality. That tracks. Hegseth alleges the Ivies infect officers with “globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks…” God forbid the tip of the sword of our foreign policy has knowledge of international cooperation and global interconnectedness. The Ivy League has its own issues, but the Pentagon’s claim that they "fail to deliver rigorous education grounded in realism” is almost laughable. I’m a veteran Lieutenant Commander with two Ivy League degrees, both paid for with military tuition assistance, and I promise: it was rigorous. Meanwhile, are Hegseth’s performative politics grounded in reality? Attacking Harvard on social media the eve of initiating a new war with a foreign adversary is disgraceful, and even delusional.

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Are We Prepared for a World Where AI Isn’t at Work?
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Are We Prepared for a World Where AI Isn’t at Work?

Draft an important email without using AI. Write it from scratch — no suggestions, no autocomplete, and no prompt to ChatGPT to compose or revise the email.

Now ask yourself: Did it feel slower? Harder? Slightly uncomfortable?

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