Above: the front page of The Huffington Post as of 3:25 PM EST.

Below: my first piece for HuffPo, on Michael Bloomberg’s Super PAC and the scourge of outside campaign spending. (I’ve written previously about this here and here.)

At the time, many progressives cheered the appearance of Independence USA as a welcome response to the deluge of money then flooding the airwaves from conservative activists. After the Illinois special election results, the applause is likely to grow louder. But the degradation of campaign finance laws, a development that has facilitated the proliferation of organizations like Bloomberg’s, is an unqualified blight on democracy. Liberals may have triumphed in this round, but the true message of Robin Kelly’s victory is that no political candidate is immune to the scourge of outside (and outsized) spending.