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n2doc's JournalConstitutional amendment required to undo Citizens United, Senate panel told
No Republicans on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee attended the hearing, which heard testimony from lawmakers opposed to the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling and constitutional scholars.
By Warren Richey, Staff writer / July 24, 2012
It will take a constitutional amendment to reverse the flood of independent money inundating American elections in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee was told on Tuesday.
New laws alone will not be enough to counter the impact of the 2010 high court decision establishing that corporations have a First Amendment right to make independent political expenditures during election season, witnesses told the panel.
The hearing of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights arises in a particularly heated election season in which new political spending enabled by Citizens United has played a prominent role. The hearing was chaired by Sen. Richard Durbin (D) of Illinois and was entirely a production of Democratic members of the Senate.
more
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2012/0724/Constitutional-amendment-required-to-undo-Citizens-United-Senate-panel-told
...or...replacing some of the repubs on the Supreme court....
How Mary Kay Cosmetics Sells Women on “Having It All”
By Virginia Sole-Smith
Feminists have long been blamed for making women want to “have it all”: the supportive spouse, the beloved children, the high-powered career. When Anne-Marie Slaughter published her treatise in The Atlantic last month on why even the highest-powered of women don’t yet have all of it, this mindset prevailed again. “I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause,” she wrote. “I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. . . . Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).” In fighting for equal pay and seats at the boardroom table, Slaughter seemed to be suggesting, feminists had failed women. We should have been fighting to break down corporate hierarchies and change the relationship between work and family life.
As I recount in “The Pink Pyramid Scheme,” a conservative Christian entrepreneur named Mary Kay Ash claimed to be doing just these things in 1963—long before the power-suited conception of feminism with which Slaughter came of age—by signing up Texas housewives to sell Beauty by Mary Kay using the tagline “Enriching Women’s Lives.” “I wasn’t interested in the dollars-and-cents part of any business,” Ash wrote in her 1995 self-help book, called—of course—You Can Have It All: Lifetime Wisdom from America’s Foremost Woman Entrepreneur. “My interest in 1963 was in offering women opportunities that didn’t exist anywhere else.”
Ash knew from experience that traditional jobs weren’t working for women. As a divorced mother of three, she had built a career in the direct-sales industry, but she’d watched promotions go to male colleagues while she was told to “stop thinking like a woman.” So she wanted her company to be different. From the beginning, Mary Kay ladies could, in theory at least, set their hours around their children’s school days and form business connections among friends and neighbors instead of trying to crack old-boy networks.
To read Ash’s writings on the dilemmas women faced fifty years ago is to realize how little things have changed, despite the fact that far more women now work than stay home.11. Almost 71 percent of mothers with children under age 18 were working or looking for work last year. But despite her grasp of workplace inequality, Ash was no feminist. Beauty By Mary Kay launched the same year The Feminine Mystique was published, and Ash was the anti-Friedan, reassuring housewives that they could earn pocket money without threatening their breadwinner husbands. “Although my late husband, Mel, was very supportive of my career,” Ash wrote, “he let me know that beginning at seven each evening, I was to be Mrs. Mel Ash—period. Starting then, it was his time.”
more
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/07/hbc-90008718
Paul Krugman- They Didn't Build That
A few thoughts related to the fake controversy over Obama’s “you didn’t build that”:
First, sure enough, the self-reliant businessman featured in Romney’s ads was the beneficiary of large government loans and contracts. This doesn’t make him a bad guy; pretending that he did it all himself does.
And as many others have pointed out, what does it say about Romney’s campaign that to run against a sitting president, one with a three and a half year track record, they have to lie about what he said to find a point of attack?
On a slightly more elevated note, Matt Yglesias has some fun with a prominent libertarian, Peter Thiel, who looks at the contrast between rapid progress in information technology and less rapid progress in “stuff” and blames .. the government.
In a way, I’m reluctant to make too much fun of Thiel because at least he points to something that I notice a lot. If you look at what futurists were predicting 40 or 45 years ago, they somewhat underpredicted progress in IT (except for the artificial intelligence thing), but wildly overpredicted progress in dealing with the material world. Weren’t we supposed to have underwater cities, commercial space flight, and flying cars by now?
more
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/they-didnt-build-that/
The sound of America's Infrastructure falling apart
DOT chief: Deteriorating roads could lead to more freak accidents
By JOEL MORENO, KOMO-TV
Updated 12:29 a.m., Tuesday, July 24, 2012
SEATTLE -- A piece of deteriorating I-5 pavement shot through the air and hit a car this weekend, and the state's transportation chief says it might not be the last time we see such a freak accident.
Henry Jessop and his family were headed down I-5 near Northgate on Saturday when a brick-sized concrete panel came off the road, crashed through car's windshield and hit Jessop.
"The rock hit me so hard in the chest, it literally took my breath away," Jessop said.
Secretary of Transportation Paula Hammond said road crews built much of the interstate in the 1960s, and more than 50 years of heavy use has taken its toll. Hammond said the agency doesn't have the staff or cash to fix everything that's falling apart, and the statewide to-do list just keeps getting bigger.
"As our transportation system has more wear and tear on it, and as we go longer without revenue dollars to just take care of the system that we have, we're unfortunately going to see more of this kind of thing," she said.
Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/komo/article/DOT-chief-Deteriorating-roads-could-lead-to-more-3729575.php
Tuesday Toon Roundup 2- The rest
Prison
Terrorists
Bachmann
Newz
Voting
HCR
Rights
RIP
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