#83 STORM DEVASTATION CREATING HAVOC AND DEATH

The worker had been washing kitchen equipment behind Golden Corral, a popular restaurant in Sanford, N.C., when he spotted a giant black funnel cloud bearing down. It was one of more than 90 tornadoes — what one meteorologist described as a “family” of them — that hit the state on Saturday.

He ran to Ms. Rodriguez, who walked out the back door. She dodged a piece of flying wood, and then she saw it: a dark funnel cloud thick with wood and metal only a couple of blocks away.

About 140 people were eating in her restaurant, many of them in front of the thick plate-glass windows that run the length of the place.

“All I could think is that I have to get them away from the glass because I knew it would just cut them in half,” she said in an interview on Sunday. “I thought, where can I put them? Then I yelled: ‘Tornado! Everyone to my kitchen!’ ”

People packed into the meat cooler and behind the stoves. Others jammed into the restrooms. Then they waited. After five minutes, Ms. Rodriguez said, the darkness lifted and she peeked out the back door.

The tornado, she said, had bounced up, skipped the Golden Corral and made a sharp turn, setting down on top of a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center a few hundred feet away.

“I could see the roof was just gone and all of the Lowe’s stuff flying up in the air,” Ms. Rodriguez said.

The Lowe’s store in Sanford, a town of about 29,000 in the center of the state, was essentially demolished. But an estimated 70 customers were saved when another fast-thinking manager herded customers and his staff into a windowless storeroom.

The storm killed at least two people in the Sanford area and injured several more, according to Sheriff Tracy Carter of Lee County.

A string of tornadoes that began Thursday night in Oklahoma left of a trail of death and millions of dollars in damage from the middle of America to the Eastern Seaboard. But they reached their zenith on Saturday night in North Carolina.

Officials said the storms killed at least 43 people and injured hundreds more. No damage estimates were immediately available, but they will most certainly run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Although April and May are the worst time for tornadoes in the South, this storm system, which had its roots in the Pacific Ocean, was unusual for its size and duration, officials said. The storm would calm itself a bit at night and then gain renewed strength with the day’s heat, said Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It brought flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms laced with giant balls of hail to Oklahoma on Thursday, killing two elderly sisters, before moving east through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Virginia.

The effects from the storms could be felt as far as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the New York City area on Saturday night, when furious wind-driven rains covered roadways and produced isolated flooding.

When the system hit North Carolina on Saturday night, it spawned a record 92 tornadoes in the state, killing at least 22 people and injuring more than 80 others. At least 14 deaths were in Bertie and Hertford Counties, in a rural northeast corner of the state where cotton, tobacco, peanuts, corn and soybeans anchor the economy.

“Normally the storms that hit here are pretty severe but smaller in size,” said Cal Bryant, the editor of The Roanoke-Chowan News Herald, which serves a part of North Carolina that was most severely hit. “Now they are thinking it may have been one big tornado. They’re trying to find where it stopped, and they haven’t got there yet.”

Mr. Bryant, who spent Sunday with survivors in Bertie County, said rescue crews were going house to house looking for dead or injured residents and assessing damage. At least 60 houses, some of them mobile homes, were destroyed, and he expected the count to go higher.

Scott Sharp, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Raleigh, said the devastation was due to “a family of tornadoes” that were part of the same thunderstorm system, with one rotating updraft cropping up after another had dissipated.

Multimedia

Photographs

Tornadoes Roar Through North Carolina

Map

Tornadoes: 3 Days, 14 States

Related

• The Lede Blog: More Video of Tornadoes and Damage (April 17, 2011)

Still, the storm was not as bad as something meteorologists call “Super Tuesday,” when a string of tornadoes in February 2008 claimed 56 lives, said Mr. Carbin of NOAA. But it was unusual in that all of the weather stemmed from one huge storm.

But for many of the states that lay in the path of this system, including North Carolina, which had not seen such severe weather since the early 1990s, it was a storm that will most likely takes months to recover from.

Gov. Bev Perdue of North Carolina, like governors in three other Southern states, declared a state of emergency on Sunday. Twelve teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were expected to arrive in North Carolina by Monday. The agency is also sending teams to Mississippi and Alabama, said Rachel Racusen, a FEMA spokeswoman.

In Raleigh, a city of 400,000, major avenues downtown were blocked by fallen trees. Buildings were flattened in at least eight areas of Wake County, said Sarah Williamson-Baker, a spokeswoman for the county.

Three siblings, who ranged in age from 2 to 5, were killed in a mobile home park in Raleigh when a tree fell on their home. The three were in a bathtub, according to a local news report.

The tornado seemed to make a direct cut through the area, Ms. Williamson-Baker said.

“There’s many places where there’s little left of buildings, and then in other places nearby, there’s almost no damage,” she said.

Elizabeth Strauch, 41, lives in the Cranberry Ridge subdivision in Wilson, N.C. Her house was destroyed. When she heard the tornado, she ran to a closet with her cat and some personal belongings.

“What I thought was a tree falling down on the house was my roof falling down and the attic falling through,” she said. She opened the door of her closet, pushed back the debris and ran to her neighbors. The whole thing lasted about three minutes.

“I thought I was going to die,” Ms. Strauch said. “I was hysterical.”

Near Raleigh, dormitories and classrooms at Shaw University, the oldest historically black university in the South, were so damaged that classes were canceled for the rest of the semester.

“After an assessment by experts, I will determine if summer school can be held on campus or will be available only online,” the university president, Irma McClaurin, said in a statement. “I think we are blessed that despite tremendous structural damages to dormitories and the Willie Gary Student Union that not one single person (student, faculty, staff or community members) was injured. We can all give thanks for that.”

In Sanford, many were grateful, too. John Douglas, 42, a contractor, was inside a tractor supply store when the tornado ripped the roof from the building.

He and a friend jumped on top of his daughter Abby, 9, as part of the ceiling fell on top of them. He suffered a few minor scrapes and bruises, but they all walked away otherwise unhurt.

“Everything was flying around inside the store. You could see the sky through the roof,” Mr. Douglas said. “We just prayed to the Lord to help us through this.”

Around the parts of the Southern states that were hardest hit, volunteers began organizing food drives and fund-raisers. Many people were connecting through Facebook and Twitter, and others were simply showing up to see how they might help.

In Sanford, the Salvation Army thrift store opened its doors at 3 p.m. and two hours later had already accepted about 400 bags of clothes and household goods, said Derek Oley, 29, the manager. They will start supplying food to people Monday.

“This community is just so awesome right now,” Mr. Oley said. “People are just coming out from everywhere to help out.”

#82 YOU CANNOT HAVE SERIOUS TALK ABOUT THE DEBT UNLESS YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS THE RIGHT TO LEGALLY PRINT MONEY - AND SO, THEY CAN PRINT THEIR WAY OUT OF DEBT

Amid Din, Serious Talk on Debt

By JOHN HARWOOD

Let’s have an adult conversation about the federal budget — because Washington has started one.

No, seriously.

It’s hard to hear through the clamor surrounding rival approaches to the budget by President Obama and House Republicans. Because the din was linked to the volatile debate over raising the debt limit, it sounded like a typical partisan brawl with an atypical ability to destabilize financial markets and the economic recovery.

But listen closely, and you can hear something different: moves by Republicans and Democrats to decouple what they must resolve within the next two months from what they’ll battle over for the next two years.

Consider the reaction of Representative Paul D. Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, after Mr. Obama’s speech excoriated Mr. Ryan’s proposal as an attempt to take money from older people with health problems and give it to millionaires.

“It definitely poisons the well on a comprehensive solution to our budget problem,” Mr. Ryan said on CNBC. The picture the president painted of his budget, Mr. Ryan added, was that “basically it’s un-American.”

Yet Mr. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, went on to separate the impact of Mr. Obama’s words on long-term budget negotiation from their impact on the short-term challenge of persuading Congress to raise the federal debt limit.

“As far as the debt limit, we’re just going to have to forget about the president for now,” Mr. Ryan said. “He’s out campaigning, giving us this kind of demagoguery and this kind of rhetoric.

“We’re going to have to work with our colleagues, Democrat colleagues here in Congress, act like adults, and try and get a solution to that particular problem. Which we intend on doing.”

In today’s Washington, that’s the sound of the White House and Congress working together.

Blending Approaches

Decoupling short-term challenges from long-term battles over debt and deficits won’t be easy. The issues overlap; the ideologies behind the two parties’ approaches hardly overlap at all.

Republicans see the long-term solution as a fundamental diminution of the role of government, foremost in the entitlement programs of Medicare,Medicaid and Social Security.

Democrats aim to preserve the essential character of those huge programs. They would pare deficits by combining less-consequential spending cuts withtax increases, particularly on the most affluent Americans.

Given the nation’s political divisions, enacting a solution will almost certainly require a blend of both approaches. That’s what the Senate’s bipartisan “Gang of Six” is trying to negotiate.

Even if the six succeed, however, 10 times as many of their colleagues must agree to move anything through the Senate. So odds tilt strongly against passage of substantive changes in taxes or entitlements until after Mr. Obama and his Republican adversaries place their alternatives in front of voters in the 2012 presidential campaign.

Yet House Republicans insist on immediate steps toward a long-term solution — as their price for raising the debt limit, which both sides acknowledge must happen before Washington’s authority to borrow runs out around July 8. Those more limited steps are the subject of negotiations that Mr. Obama initiated with Republicans, even as he blistered their budget.

Signals of Agreement

Already, both sides have backed similar long-term goals of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, the level advanced by Mr. Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission. They’ll haggle over budget process “triggers” intended to force the government to hit numerical targets.

Still unclear is what policy disputes must be settled in an agreement to smooth the path for raising the debt limit. In addition to the familiar “tax reform” euphemism to avoid Republican opposition to tax hikes, Mr. Obama has offered a new one: “reduce spending in the tax code.”

But public comments by Republican leaders as well as their private discussions with Mr. Obama have signaled mutual commitment to an agreement allowing a debt limit increase to pass Congress. RepresentativeJohn A. Boehner signaled as much last November, even before he took the speaker’s gavel, when he said “we’re going to have to deal with it as adults.”

Passage last Thursday of the 2011 budget agreement provided a template for cooperation. That morning, the House Republican whip, Kevin McCarthy, informed his Democratic counterpart, Steny H. Hoyer, that because of conservative defections, the deal needed Democratic votes. The 81 votes Democrats provided let it pass easily.

What leaders don’t want to replicate is the brinksmanship that left the federal government within an hour of shutting down. On the debt limit, suspense itself could produce the falling confidence and rising interest rates that business and government both want to avoid.

“Everybody agrees that a countdown clock will be harmful,” Mr. Hoyer said in an interview.

In a White House meeting last week with Mr. Obama and Congressional leaders from both parties, Mr. Hoyer offered an idea to keep one from starting: pass a debt limit increase by June 8, a full month ahead of the deadline.

Republican leaders didn’t commit. But “nobody said, ‘No, we can’t do it,’ ” Mr. Hoyer said.

#81 I REALLY THINK THE SO CALLED "THREAT" OF INFLATION (AS DESCRIBED HERE IN CHINA) IS WAY OVER-HYPED. HYPER-INFLATION, ON THE OTHER HAND, CAN DO SOME REAL DAMAGE

Inflation in China Poses Big Threat to Global Trade

By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — As the United States and Europe struggle to get their economies rolling again, China is having the opposite problem: figuring out how to keep its revved-up growth engine from generating runaway inflation.

The latest sign that things were moving too fast came on Sunday, when China’s central bank ordered the biggest banks to set aside more cash reserves.

The move essentially reduces the amount of money available for loans, and is an attempt to cool down the economy. It follows the government announcement on Friday that China’s economy was growing at an annual rate of 9.7 percent, by far the strongest performance by any of the world’s biggest economies.

Because China is now the world’s second largest economy, after the United States, and because the country has been a leading source of global growth during the last two years, money problems here can reverberate from Wal-Mart to Wall Street and the world beyond.

High inflation endangers China’s status as the low-cost workshop for the world. And if the government’s efforts to fight inflation cause the economy to stumble, that will cloud the outlook for international businesses — whether multinationals like General Electric or copper miners in Chile — that have been counting on China for growth.

Inside China, inflation also poses a threat to social stability, a particular worry for Beijing, especially since authoritarian governments in North Africa and the Middle East have become the focus of popular uprisings.

“China’s inflation is a big concern, and actual numbers are worse than officially reported,” said Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

She says Beijing is engaged in an economic tug of war, trying to encourage sustainable growth while struggling to control inflation.

Food prices are soaring, and the government said on Friday that the consumer price index in March had risen 5.4 percent, its sharpest increase in nearly three years. Hoping to tame inflation, in the last six months Beijing has tightened restrictions on bank lending and raised interest rates on loans (to discourage borrowing) and deposits (to encourage savings).

The decision on Sunday to raise the capital reserve ratio for banks, to 20.5 percent of their cash, was the fourth such increase this year.

The government has also increased agricultural subsidies to curb food prices, and tried to forbid some Chinese companies from raising consumer prices. These efforts stand in contrast to those in the United States, where inflation is low (the underlying annual inflation rate was 1.2 percent last month) and where the debate centers on how much to stimulate the economy given the size of the deficit. Inflation is also running low in Europe, where some countries are imposing harsh austerity measures to pare their budget gaps.

But analysts say the results of this economic management have been mixed. Growth has begun to moderate from its torrid pace of about 10 percent annual growth but inflation has become worse.

For example, housing prices continue to climb even though Beijing has long promised to curb the property market and to spend billions of dollars over the next few years on affordable housing.

The average apartment in central Shanghai now costs more than $500,000. Even in second-tier cities like Chengdu, in central China, the price of a typical home costs about 25 times the average annual income of residents.

Analysts say too much of the country’s growth continues to be tied to inflationary spending on real estate development and government investment in roads, railways and other multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.

In the first quarter of 2011, fixed asset investment — a broad measure of building activity — jumped 25 percent from the period a year earlier, and real estate investment soared 37 percent, the government said on Friday.

Some of the inflationary factors, like global commodity and food prices, may be beyond Beijing’s ability to influence. Gasoline prices have also jumped sharply, in line with global oil prices. As the world’s largest car market, China’s demand for fuel is soaring, and gasoline prices are close to $4.50 a gallon, up from $3.82 a gallon in late 2009.

Rising food prices, meanwhile, are showing up in various ways — including higher prices at fast-food chains, like Master Kong, which in January raised the price of its popular instant noodles by about 10 percent.

China’s current supercharged boom began in early 2009, during the global financial crisis, when Beijing moved aggressively to increase growth with a $586 billion stimulus package and record lending by state-run banks.

The loose monetary policy, and big investments in local government projects, did revive economic growth. But even at the time there were already concerns about soaring property prices, undisciplined bank lending and the huge debts being amassed by local governments.

The fear among some experts is that the bubble will eventually burst, leading to a wave of nonperforming loans at the big state-owned Chinese banks, which have been the main financiers of the nation’s phenomenal growth dating to the economic reforms in the 1980s.

Some economists have begun to argue that high inflation may be around for some time. Here again, the tug of war is evident.

To encourage the growth of a consumer market that will help meet the Chinese people’s demand to share the nation’s wealth, Beijing and many municipal governments have required employers to raise wages.

The government has raised minimum wages in the hope of reducing the big income gap between the rich and the poor, and the urban and rural. But higher wages drive up the costs of production, leading to higher prices. Some experts say rising wages may be an unavoidable inflationary force for years to come.

“China is moving into a new era, a new norm,” said Dong Tao, an economist at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong. “In the previous decade, inflation was about 1.8 percent a year; in the next decade, it may be closer to 5 percent.”

The implications of such a shift are huge, not just for domestic consumers but perhaps even more so for exports. As wages and production costs rise, coastal factories are demanding higher prices for the goods they ship overseas. That means Americans, Europeans and other buyers will have to pay more for those goods or seek lower-cost suppliers elsewhere. In some cases, retailers are bidding for goods at prices the exporters consider too low.

“I hear that many Chinese exporters are rejecting orders from Wal-Mart and other Western retailers,” Mr. Tao said. “I’ve been covering the Chinese economy for a long time, and I’ve never heard that before.”

Many analysts say the government is going to have to do even more to slow the economy, through measures like placing additional restrictions on lending and continuing to raise interest rates, the textbook methods of fighting inflation by tightening the nation’s money supply.

But the mixed results so far do not inspire widespread confidence. In fact, some experts say that despite the Communist Party’s efforts to manage the economy by committee, the absence of a top autonomous central banker — Beijing has no equivalent of the United States Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke — means no one actually has a hand on the growth throttle.

“The roots of inflation were laid down after the financial crisis, with the stimulus policy,” said Zhang Weiying, a professor of economics at Peking University.

After a big stimulus, stamping out inflation is not easy, Professor Zhang said. “It may take a long time.”

Citizens like Wang Jianren, 56, a retiree in Shanghai, a bustling city of 20 million, say that over the years China has benefited from its rapid economic growth. But like so many here, he complains that inflation is beginning to erode those gains.

“Prices have gone up a lot,” Mr. Wang said at an indoor vegetable market on Friday. “Unstable prices make people nervous and make society unstable. In this sense, our generation even has some nostalgia for Mao’s era.”

Xu Yan contributed research from Shanghai.

#80 MOST POORLY CONSIDERED HEADLINE ONE CAN IMAGINE (OR MAYBE NOT!!) OBAMA IS GOING TO SELL HIS "DEFIDEIT REDUCTION" PLAN

President Heads West to Sell 

His Deficit Plan

By MARK LANDLER and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — After weeks of tussling and political gamesmanship in Congress over federal spending, President Obama will take his message on the road this week, traveling to the West Coast to promote his deficit-cutting plan.

It is the first campaign-style tour for Mr. Obama since he emerged from the sidelines of the deficit debate last week with a speech calling for a mix of long-term spending cuts, tax increases and changes to entitlement-benefit programs.

With its emphasis on cutting the budget, the speech had elements to appease moderates and independents who have been drawn to the calls from freshman Republicans in Congress to rein in government spending. But at the same time, the address was a nod to the liberal wing in his party, with its progressive notes about the government’s responsibility to provide a safety net to its citizens.

The 44-minute speech seemed to win over at least some leading liberal figures — a big first step toward shoring up and energizing his party’s base at the outset of a re-election campaign that will inevitably require him to play to the middle and, potentially, draw renewed ire from the left.

“Undoubtedly, he rediscovered his voice,” said Robert B. Reich, the chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Hopefully, this will be his campaign voice.”

The trip, with stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Reno, Nev., is also Mr. Obama’s first since the unofficial start of his re-election campaign in Chicago last week.

While he faces a fractured and late-starting field of Republican challengers, some political clouds hang over him, too.

In the latest Gallup tracking poll, Mr. Obama’s approval rating was 41 percent, tied with the lowest level of his presidency. Among Democrats, his approval was 77 percent, four percentage points below his average rating in 2011 and seven points below his average rating since he became president.

It is hard to say whether Mr. Obama’s deficit plan dampened his ratings, since the interviews were conducted on April 12 and 14, before and after the speech. But they clearly reflect worries about the economy and pessimism that the White House will find common ground with the Republicans.

Mr. Reich, who was labor secretary in the Clinton administration, said Mr. Obama’s pledge to defend health care and Social Security would resonate with older voters, who deserted the Democratic Party in the last midterm elections. Democrats, he said, will also respond to Mr. Obama’s vow to raise taxes for higher-income Americans when the Bush administration’s tax cuts finally expire in 2012.

“His language had a kind of ‘read my lips’ quality that will make it hard to retreat from,” Mr. Reich said. “The question remains whether he has closed the enthusiasm gap. I don’t think one speech will do it.”

Mr. Obama acknowledged as much on Thursday, speaking to 2,300 young supporters at Navy Pier in Chicago.

“I know there are times where some of you have felt frustrated because we’ve had to compromise with the Republicans on some issues,” he said. “There have been times people are frustrated because we didn’t get everything done in the first two years. There have been times where I felt the same way you do.”

But Mr. Obama implored the crowd not to lose heart, declaring that the vision of America he laid out in his fiscal speech — one in which “we are connected to one another; that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper” — would animate his campaign and drive the debate in the 2012 election.

If Mr. Obama sticks to that message, it will cheer other Democratic constituencies, not least the labor movement. Unions were dismayed by the budget deal the White House struck with House Republicans in December to extend the Bush tax cuts, even though it also extended unemployment insurance.

But union officials said Mr. Obama won them back last week. “The rhetoric of the speech was fabulous,” said Thea Lee, the chief economist of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “It was a strong speech; it was a principled speech.”

Ms. Lee said there was still uncertainty about parts of Mr. Obama’s plan, notably how it would affect taxes. The White House said it could generate $1 trillion in savings from “tax expenditures” — closing loopholes on deductions for charitable donations, interest payments on home mortgages and the like.

For frustrated Democrats, perhaps the only thing better than Mr. Obama’s feisty speech last week about cutting the deficit were the even feistier remarks he made about the Republicans the next evening, at an intimate dinner with campaign contributors in a chic Chicago restaurant.

Speaking into a microphone that he thought was off, Mr. Obama bragged about how he had faced down House Republicans during budget talks. “You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We’ll have that debate,” Mr. Obama said, recalling a testy exchange with an aide to Speaker John A. Boehner. “You’re not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we’re stupid?”

The White House said later that Mr. Obama did not regret that his private remarks had been picked up by reporters. And why should he, Democratic loyalists asked.

After a period in which the party faithful fretted that Mr. Obama was giving up too much to the Republicans, those supporters were thrilled to see him come out swinging.

“He needs to be combative,” Mr. Reich said. “The Republicans have been combative since he became president.”

#79 THIS IS NOT ENTIRELY TRUE - SOME BECOME JUDGES AS A WAY TO GIVE BACK TO THE COMMUNITY AND ARE NOT IN IT FOR THE $$$

YOU GET THE JUDGES YOU PAY FOR

By ERWIN CHEMERINSKY and JAMES J. SAMPLE

LEGAL elites must come to terms with a reality driven by the grass-roots electorate: judicial elections are here to stay. Given this reality, we should focus on balancing important First Amendment rights to financially support campaigns with due process concerns about fair trials.

An ugly, expensive campaign for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is but the latest example of what is now common in judicial elections: millions of dollars in misleading television ads, subsidized by lobbies that have cases before the bench.

In 39 states, at least some judges are elected. Voters rarely know much, if anything, about the candidates, making illusory the democratic benefits of such elections. Ideally, judges should decide cases based on the law, not to please the voters. But, as Justice Otto Kaus of the California Supreme Court once remarked about the effect of politics on judges’ decisions: “You cannot forget the fact that you have a crocodile in your bathtub. You keep wondering whether you’re letting yourself be influenced, and you do not know.”

The need to run multimillion-dollar campaigns to win election to the court in much of the country renders the crocodile ever more menacing.

For more than a quarter of a century, voters have rejected efforts to move from an elective to an appointive bench. Last year, despite a campaign led by Sandra Day O’Connor, Nevada voters became the latest to reject such a change.

Scholars, judges and advocates who find intellectual comfort in seeking to eliminate judicial elections are indulging a luxury that America’s courts can no longer afford. Instead they should focus on incremental changes to what Justice O’Connor bluntly calls the “wrong” of “cash in the courtroom.”

More than 7 in 10 Americans believe campaign cash influences judicial decisions. Nearly half of state court judges agree. Never before has there been so much cash in the courts. Measured only by direct contributions to candidates for state high courts, campaign fund-raising more than doubled in a decade.

But this is only part of the financial story. Nationally, in 2008, for the first time, noncandidate groups outspent the candidates on the ballot.

Perhaps most tellingly, a study of 29 campaigns in the 10 costliest judicial election states over the last decade revealed the extraordinary comparative power of “super spenders” in court races. The top five spenders in each of the elections laid out an average of $473,000.

In 2009, the United States Supreme Court dealt with this issue, holding that due process is violated when a judge participates in a case involving a party that spent a great deal of money on the judge’s election effort. The case before the court involved a West Virginia Supreme Court decision overturning a jury verdict that awarded a $50 million judgment against Massey Coal Company.

One of the justices in the majority of that 3 to 2 decision, Brent D. Benjamin, had been elected after Massey Coal’s chief executive spent $3 million on his campaign. The United States Supreme Court held, 5 to 4, that due process was violated because of the lack of an impartial decision-maker. The court made clear, however, that campaign spending requires the disqualification of a judge only rarely.

A year later, the high court held, in the Citizens United case, that corporations and unions have the First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money in election campaigns. In light of these two decisions, corporate and union officials must engage in a perverse guessing game: they want to spend enough to get their candidate for the bench elected, but not so much as to require the judge’s disqualification if the campaign is successful.

Rigorous recusal rules are an important step, but merely disqualifying a judge on occasion is insufficient. The most obvious solution is to limit spending in judicial races. States with elected judges should restrict how much can be contributed to a candidate for judicial office or even spent to get someone elected.

That solution has long been assumed to be off the table, though, because the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that while the government can limit the amount that a person gives directly to a candidate, it cannot restrict how much a person spends on his or her own to get the candidate elected. Nevertheless, large expenditures to get a candidate elected to the bench undermine both the appearance and reality of impartial justice.

The Supreme Court’s 2009 decision properly focused on the $3 million in campaign expenditures, not the $1,000 that was directly contributed. In the legislative and executive offices, it is accepted that special-interest lobbying and campaign spending can influence votes; but that is anathema to our most basic notions of fair judging.

Thus, the Supreme Court should hold that the compelling interest in ensuring impartial judges is sufficient to permit restrictions on campaign spending that would be unconstitutional for nonjudicial elections.

States should restrict contributions and expenditures in judicial races to preserve impartiality. Such restrictions are the only way to balance the right to spend to get candidates elected, and the due process right to fair trials.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. James J. Sample is an associate professor of law at Hofstra.

#78 SHORT ANSWER: BECAUSE YOU CAN GET AN MBA ONLINE IN 9 MONTHS FOR A WHOLE LOT CHEAPER

Why Look Down on a Business Degree?

Introduction

Arielle Retting for The New York TimesStudents working on a group project for a marketing research class at Radford University.

Business-related fields account for slightly over 20 percent of all undergraduate degrees in the United States, the most popular field of study. But the quality of that education is facing growing scrutiny and criticism, as detailed in an article by David Glenn in the Education Life section of The Times as part of a joint project with The Chronicle of Higher Education. A recent studyfound that undergraduate business majors study less than other students, and lag behind in assessments of critical thinking and writing skills -- scoring lower than students in education and communications, and well behind liberal arts majors.

Is it worth majoring in business, particularly in the so-called softer fields like marketing and human resources?