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The U.S. Supreme Court returns to the campaign finance fray on Tuesday, hearing arguments in a case that could undercut most of the remaining rules that limit big money in politics.

It's been three years since the court's landmark Citizens United ruling, which let loose a new flood of campaign cash into the political process. In that 2010 case, a narrow conservative court majority upset a century-long legal understanding and declared for the first time that corporations are people entitled to spend unlimited amounts on candidate elections. Those independent expenditure limitations were one pillar of the campaign finance law.

On Tuesday, the second pillar — contributions to candidates — is before the court. The justices will hear arguments on one aspect of contributions: the aggregate limits on contributions to candidates and political parties.

Campaign Contribution Limits

The case was brought by Shaun McCutcheon, a successful Alabama businessman whose real love is conservative politics. In the 2012 election season, McCutcheon gave roughly $33,000 to 16 Republican congressional candidates and a similar amount to Republican Party committees. He wanted to give more, but a federal law caps the aggregate amounts that individuals can give to candidates and political parties. In 2012, those caps were roughly $46,000 for candidates and $70,000 for party committees.

Of course, McCutcheon could spend any amount he wants to by giving to independent groups that have proliferated since Citizens United. These groups raise millions of dollars to spend on candidate elections, but they do so independently and are not supposed to coordinate with the candidate campaigns. McCutcheon, however, doesn't want to give to independent groups; he wants to give directly to candidates and the Republican Party.

As he said in an interview with NPR, "It's just that sometimes it's more advantageous for the donor to donate directly to the campaign."

Just What Do The Limits Prevent?

That advantage is at the heart of the issue before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. In 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress enacted the laws that still form the basic structure for campaign finance regulations. Part of that structure is the aggregate cap, which is intended to prevent circumventing limits on the amount that single donors can pour into campaigns.

The Supreme Court upheld an earlier version of the caps in 1976, and since then it has drawn a consistent line between expenditure limits on the one hand and contribution limits on the other. The distinction is based on the notion that large contributions to candidates pose the threat of "the actuality" and the "appearance" of corruption.

Law

Despite Shutdown, Supreme Court Opens Its Doors For New Term

Thanks to the federal government's partial shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics skipped its monthly Big Reveal at 8:30 a.m. Friday.

There was no September employment report.

Without access to the BLS numbers, data junkies were left to scrounge around for lesser reports. Maybe if they could suck in enough small hits of other statistics, they could feel that old familiar rush?

Nope. Nothing can replace that BLS high.

"You do miss it," said Harry Holzer, Georgetown professor and former chief economist for the Labor Department. "I watch it closely. It's the single best number to explain what's going on" in the U.S. labor market, he said.

The BLS report surveys both employers and households. Also, it comes out monthly, rather than quarterly. Holzer said that frequency provides enough snapshots of wages and hours to create a kind of flowing documentary about jobs.

So here we are — with no new picture to advance the story.

But instead of dwelling on what we don't have, let's think of this as "Faux Friday" — a day offering plenty of data, just not from the BLS. Simply lower your standards, pop open a near-beer and let's go over the almost-important data that we did get this week:

— ADP's payroll report showed a gain of 166,000 private sector jobs for September — in line with what employers had been adding all summer.

— Initial claims for unemployment benefits increased by 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 308,000 last week. That number, based on state data, was somewhat better than the expected 314,000 new claims.

— PNC Financial Services Group Inc.'s Autumn Outlook survey of small and medium-size businesses showed 16 percent intend to add full-time employees during the next six months, while 8 percent plan to cut workers.

— The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas said companies announced plans for 40,289 layoffs in September, down 20 percent from August.

— Glassdoor, an online site for jobs, released its quarterly Employment Confidence Survey, conducted online by Harris Interactive. That showed only 15 percent of employees are afraid of being laid off, the lowest percentage since the fourth quarter of 2008.

The Government Shutdown

Without Key Jobs Data, Markets And Economists Left Guessing

Iran has arrested four people who it says were intent on sabotaging facilities in its nuclear program. The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran says the four are now being questioned.

"Some time ago, a number of people were arrested in one of the (nuclear) facilities when they were involved in planning activities," Ali Akbar Salehi said Sunday, according to Iran's state-run Tasnim News Agency.

Before their arrest, the suspects' activities had been monitored, Salehi said. He added that their interrogation is now under way.

"We let them do their activity to some extent, so that they would be arrested at the right time," he said, according to Tasnim.

He added that Iranian authorities had also identified "a number of other sabotage plots."

As for who Iran might hold responsible for the alleged plot, the AP reports that Salehi told the semi-official Fars news agency, "Hostile countries are not interested in finding [a] way out of [the] current situation and they are trying to block agreement on the nuclear case though acts of sabotage."

Decoding the possible meaning of that statement, the AP says, "In Iranian official terminology, hostile countries are usually a reference to Israel and the United States. But the attempts at historic diplomacy ... with Washington suggested the term was aimed at Israel."

Salehi also said that Iran has taken steps to protect itself from cyber attacks such as the Stuxnet virus, which struck the country's uranium enrichment facilities in 2010.

"We have carried out the necessary measures in this field, and since the outbreak of the Stuxnet virus, the Atomic Energy Organization has embarked on countering such malwares," he said, according to Tasnim. "To this end computer protection systems were upgraded, and we also separated the systems that were connected to the Internet."

The U.K.'s Oxford Internet Institute has put together an interesting illustration of the most popular websites around the world. Not surprising, Google and Facebook dominate the globe.

We're not quite sure what the data mean, if anything, but you can be the judge.

The institute, using data from the Web analytics site Alexa, crunched the numbers and came up with this: In North America and Europe, parts of South America, South Asia and Southeast Asia, Google is tops. But Facebook predominates in much of Latin America. North Africa is Facebook territory, but Internet users in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa are first and foremost Googling. Search engines in China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex) predominate in those countries. Japan is another outlier with Yahoo! Japan.

Even so, as the Oxford Internet Institute notes:

"The power of Google on the Internet becomes starkly evident if we also look at the second most visited website in every country. Among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (currently owned by Google)."