What's Goin' On?

I am very deeply into prepping my class for the "We the People" State competition. I know they are going to do MRHS proud. My class and I have been getting into the high stress & anxiety mode that seems to happen every year before competition. On top of all of this I'm now worried about snow. But as John Lennon once said, "You know it's gonna be, all right."

I've barely kept up with the news lately, BUT I HAVE A COUPLE OF THINGS TO RECOMMEND TO MY WE THE PEOPLE CLASS! The U.S. is heavily involved in the court martial trial of the guy they are saying is the ring leader of the Abu Ghraib torture ring. The details are sickening and it remains hard for me to believe that this was just a "bunch of bad apples" that went nuts on some prisoners. Juxtaposed with the details of the 2002 torture memo associated with our Attorney General nominee, Alberto Gonzalez, it is kind of hard to think anything else. I just read a great editorial that points out that all of this, including more bad news from Guantanamo Bay makes the future of human rights in the United States look pretty bad. He does a great job of detailing the growth of due process rights from the time of the Magna Carta to the present.

ANOTHER ARTICLE MY WE THE PEOPLE CLASS SHOULD READ is on federalism. A Stanford Law professor wrote a piece called "The New Blue Federalism" and he makes a convincing case that liberals don't talk about the benefits of federalism enough, but that government at the state and local level is a great "labratory for democracy" and social progress. Not all of the answers have to come in the form of federal laws. (Liberals have had most of their big successes there since the New Deal.) Anyway it is a good read.

Sorry I haven't included any conservative writers this time around, but, well, ah, I've been too busy to read material from "Red America". (HEY! Maybe if we keep this "red" symbolism going we can somehow transfer the symbolism of communism to it and paint the Republicans as neo-commies! Just a thought for the partisan left....)