The Rot of Citizens United Is Universal
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on June 7th, 2012 11:08 pm by HL
The Rot of Citizens United Is Universal
Charles Pierce, Esquire
It is a capital mistake to study the corrosive effect of the utterly corrupt Citizens United decision only in the context of the presidential contest, or in the context of other highly visible individual races, like the one for a U.S. Senate seat or last night's Wisconsin recall. The rot in the system is poisonous, general, and spreading. (And have I mentioned really how utterly stupid it is to have an elected judiciary, especially in the current cash-soaked political atmosphere? It is the second-worst idea ever behind the Balanced Budget Amendment, aka The Stupidest Fking Idea…
The Unions’ Biggest Loss Was in California
Andrew Rotherham, Time
Bad news for teachers and other public-sector employees: America is more than ready to cut your pensions and benefits. While most politicos had been focusing this week on the Wisconsin recall, an election 2,100 miles away in San Jose, Calif., may be a bigger harbinger of the kind of austerity voters are developing a taste for. In this city of about a million residents an hour south of San Francisco, voters on Tuesday approved arguably the country’s boldest pension cuts.
Obama, Post-Post-Partisanship
Steve Erickson, American Prospect
Over the past month or two, as the president’s political position has continued to erode and he becomes more vulnerable, an extraordinary and vaguely preposterous conversation has taken shape. Variations on it have been advanced by everyone from former presidents chatting with Hollywood moguls on news cable TV to esteemed Sunday-morning newspaper columnists picking their way through the racial bric-à-brac of the presidential psyche. In a way, it’s the corollary of the birther discussion at the other end of the spectrum, which is to say that it’s a…
Ann Romney Begins Campaign Push for Her Husband
Erin McPike, RCP
Ann Romney plunged into solo general-election campaigning this week with a pair of public events in Florida, finally following the lead of Michelle Obama, who has been zipping around the country on her own for months as her husband's surrogate-in-chief.Mrs. Romney is an experienced campaigner, to be sure, and held plenty of her own events when husband Mitt was campaigning for the presidency in 2007 and 2008. She did so again in this cycle's primary, but this week marks the first time she's been on her own for public political events since Rick Santorum ended his presidential…