KENNETH P. VOGEL, - Politico
Stephan: The language is small government but this is dog whistle for dismantlement of regulatory oversight. This is all financed by the uber-rich and their corporate manifestations, and the outcome of this trend, if it is not stopped, will be the completion of the transformation of American democracy into a corporatocracy. The forms will remain, but the substance will be completely different than what the Founders envisioned.
Not satisfied by the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that opened the floodgates to corporate-sponsored election ads, conservative opponents of campaign finance regulations have opened up a series of new legal fronts in their effort to eliminate the remaining laws restricting the flow of money into politics.
They have taken to Congress, state legislatures and the lower courts to target almost every type of regulation on the books: disclosure requirements, bans on foreign and corporate contributions and – in a pair of cases the Supreme Court will consider this month – party spending limits and public financing of campaigns.
The sustained assault, combined with the Supreme Court’s rightward tilt on the issue, has some advocates for reducing the role of money in politics fretting about the possibility of an irreversible shift in the way campaigns are regulated and funded that would favor Republicans and corporate interests in the 2012 presidential race and beyond.
‘We’ve already passed the danger point, and if you put all (the challenges) together, we could lose almost all of what we’ve had historically as campaign finance reform,
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JOHN MARKOFF, - The New York Times
Stephan: Law schools are reporting a decrease in applications, and graduating young lawyers are, increasingly, finding themselves with 6 figure debt and per hour assistant incomes.
People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t,
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Stephan: Let us hope that commonsense prevails. But when placed against corporate special interests the track record for commonsense is not good.
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said the crisis at the stricken Japanese nuclear complex could hinder industry efforts to build the first new U.S. reactors in decades.
Bingaman – in an interview with Bloomberg’s ‘Political Capital with Al Hunt
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KAREN GROS, - Baton Rouge Examiner
Stephan: The latest report I can find is that this is not coming from the Deepwater Horizon leak site. If we poured just a fraction of the money we pour into war into the Green Transition none of this need happen.
A new sheen of oil is being reported approximately 30 miles off the coast of Louisiana and is currently being investigated by the United States Coast Guard. The new slick of oil was reported to be about 100 miles long and located 30 miles off the coast of Louisiana.
The new slick of oil was first spotted on Friday, March 18, 2011 by a helicopter pilot. Several boat captains have confirmed that they have encountered the slick of oil and said that it is indeed fresh oil because of the odor and the way it caused eye irritation.
The exact location of the oil sheen reported in the Gulf of Mexico is between the coast of Louisiana, about 30 miles offshore and north of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill site. This area is still recovering from the Deepwater Horizon disaster from April of 2010 with oil still being cleaned from the coastline of Louisiana. Additional oil will cause more problems for an already troubled coastline.
The oil sheen is suspected of coming from the Matterhorn field which includes a deepwater drilling rig, Matterhorn Seastar that is owned by W&T Technology. The oil is suspected from […]
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Stephan: Here is some actual data concerning a trend often spoken of.
Common in popular culture these days is when you ask a grown woman if she ever kissed a girl, you often get the response, ‘Well once…in college.’ Today, a national study has found that women with their college degrees actually were less likely to have kissed a girl than their only-high-school-diploma-having counterparts.
For years, sex researchers, campus women’s centers and the media have viewed college as a place where young women explore their sexuality, test boundaries, and, often, have their first, and only lesbian relationship.
Based on 13,500 responses, almost 10% of women ages 22 to 44 with a bachelor’s degree said they had had a same-sex experience, compared with 15% of those with no high school diploma. Women with a high school diploma or some college, but no degree, fell in between. Six percent of college educated women reported oral sex with a same-sex partner, compared with 13% who did not complete high school.
Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force told the Los Angeles Times in their coverage:
‘It’s like a Rubik’s cube of sexuality, where you turn it a different way, and the factors don’t fit together. It may be that the […]
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