A New Nominee

Samuel Alito: Another Nominee, Another Fight- Who is Judge Samuel Alito? Here is a news article outlining the possible fight ahead of the president to get this justice confirmed. Extra credit to those who can supply information on Judge Alito through 3:03 Thursday (before end of the quarter)

Thanks Mr. Thompson

Exciting Last Couple of Days

Let's try these links to the articles I had posted over the weekend. Hope you all had a happy Halloween!!

Lots of excitement in DC as the current administration tries to do damage control over the events of the past few days. Here are a few articles to keep you up to date on the recent events in our nation's capital.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/29/AR2005102900916.html - an excellent article that incorporates plenty of discussion concerning liberals and conservatives around the failed nomination of Hariet Miers.

Miers's Letter to Pres. Bush - Harriet Mier's letter to Pres. Bush withdrawing her name for consideration as Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102802306.html - a short article with the details of the indictment handed down against VP Cheney's Chief of Staff. Kind of makes you wonder what a "Chief of Staff" does.
Look it up and post it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/29/AR2005102901223.html- a fourth article citing polls conducted on how Americans feel about the ethics of the current administration. Since we are studying the Influences on US Government, it will be interesting to see if the current views held by the American public towards our government causes a shake up in our President's "inner circle" for the remainder of his term.

I didn't have much success with responses to my last blog. Impress me with your comments this time.
Mr. Thompson

Five Regions

Joel Barker, JM Alum and futurist, has this survey:Five Regions of the Future. Enter JM2005 and he'll aggregate the data for us. Take the survey, post your results as a comment, please.

Results for E. Decker
Super 33Limits 72Local 75Nature 67Human 75

Your highest score shows which region you currently have the most affinity for. A score over 50 in any region is a high score. Some people will have more than one high score. Multiple scores over 50 indicate a general optimism toward technology. Any score over 70 indicates a strong preference for that region. Multiple scores under 50 indicate a lack of comfort with the technology in general.What we are trying to capture in this short assessment are your intuitive feelings toward different technologies. The goal of this book is to take you from intuition to understanding by showing you the five-regions pattern, which consists of explicit sets of technologies arranged in an entirely new way.

Editorial #1 George Will-Iraq's Constitution

Use the link below to access an editorial by George Will on the recent vote on the Iraqi constitution. Please feel free to comment on his thoughts. Please continue to keep them brief.
Thanks, Mr. Thompson

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/17/AR2005101701145.html

Tempest Pre-Reading due 10.19.05

POST your response as a comment, please.

Freedom of Speech

James Madison in Federalist No. 10 wrote about how to solve differences between factions, ". . .one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests."

Ideally, the same will apply here. We would rather not censor speech, but submit it to the populace to respond. So, take the responsibility to advocate positions thoughtfully. Be warned about responding too personally -- this is not the forum for such items, as they can not be objectively discussed without strong emotions.

Beowulf/Grendel debriefing

Any final thoughts? Please share!

Political Parties

For those of you who like to read ahead or aren't quite sure whether you would like to live in a red state or blue state (unfortunately those are the only 2 colors currently available) here are a few websites to whet your appetite.

http://www.democrats.org/

http://www.rnc.org/

http://www.politics1.com/parties.htm

This should give you something to talk about around the ol' lunch table. I look forward to some interesting sharing of political ideology and philosophy over the next few weeks.

Mr. Thompson

Leviathan in Louisiana

Hey, it's been a while since we posted something for you nighthawks to read. I referenced this article in class way back when and never actually posted it. Well here it is now. As Heather said to me one day in class....it's nice to see stuff we haved learned about in class show up in the current news. (I'm not quoting her word for word as Heather never uses the word "stuff")

Anyways, for those of you that are missing our unit on philosophers, here's a chance to reminisce about the man who once said "covenants without the sword...."!!

Seriously, it is a George Will article from Newsweek shortly after Katrina. Great article and I will give credit for those who want to comment on Will's statement right below the headline about "Katrina's lingering reverberations".

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9014028/

Mr. Thompson

Senior Bill of Rights "Dissent" Assignment

From The Progressive, yesterday. Comments welcome. Previous Beowulf Ex-cred still available.

Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush Photo, Secret Service Investigates Him
Matthew RothschildOctober 4, 2005

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.
But that’s what happened on September 20.
Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”
According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

continued. . .

Who is Harriet Miers?

This should be an interesting confirmation process.

The Conservative Republicans are criticizing the nomination as not being conservative enough.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat) actually asked the president to consider Ms. Miers as a candidate for the court.

However, not unlike Judge Roberts, she has almost no record that would give people any insight into how she would rule as member of the court.

The following link to CNN gives you access to who she is and some of the initial reactions to her nomination http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/04/miers/index.html.

Extra credit for information on who Harriet Miers is. Please keep this info political and phiulosophical. For EG. she has never been married but that won't get you any credit

Beowulf Links

a few really nice supplementary material links. Sure you can just use CliffNotes or SparkNotes to get the story summary, theme, -yawn- and character guides, but why not explore a bit more and find some peachy-keen information?

Link One (why recreate what is already great?)

More background info

Extra-credit for the first forty-seven responses posing either A) a significant tidbit of Beowulf trivia - but it must be as interesting as the fact that Anne Hathaway was 8 years older than Shakespeare when they married (and probably preggy!) or B) theme driven astounding revelation, ie: Grendel represents man's sinfulness.

Enjoy!

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