A Little Fun About Last Year
You may or may not want to show this to your students, but it is extremely amusing and "Uncle Jay" is quite talented. If you do show it, there are a ton of great government issues in this short clip.

Inaugural Activities
Check back in a few days as I have lots of things coming for the new Congress and president. For now, go here and here for some activities you can do with your students surrounding the inauguration. (photo from CBS News)

Electoral College Back to 1789
This site has electoral college votes and maps back to the beginning.

TruthDig
Perhaps I am behind the times as I just found out about this site, Truthdig, as it has been nominated for a Weblog Award for best political coverage. To borrow from the wikipedia site citation, it "is a Web magazine that provides a mix of long-form articles, interviews, and blog-like commentary on current events (as well as cartoons and video), delivered from a progressive point-of-view. The site is built around major "digs" led by authorities in their fields, who write multi-faceted pieces about contemporary, often controversial, topics. Articles on Truthdig are open for comments, and the participants in the discussion tend to be somewhat left-leaning." What I like is that it gives more depth, and is referred to as a webmagazine.

The Official Electoral College Count/Daschle Hearing
The bottom video is the official counting of the electoral college votes done in the House of Representatives. Go here to see a long version of Tom Daschle's hearing from today which includes both Senators Kennedy and Johnson back from considerable health concerns.

Swearing in of the 111th House
Above is Cheney calling in new senators (including Joe Biden (D-DE) who has yet to officially resign) and swearing them in. Here is video of Pelosi (D-CA) calling Bush to tell him about their swearing in process. Also today is the day the Congress will count the electoral votes.

Israel- Palestine Summary To Date
Go here to see the map above enlarged and also a very concise summary, day by day of what is going on the Middle East right now. (photo from New York Times). Also go here for an interactive summary of the problem since the inception of Israel. Finally if you go here, there are a number of links that will help you explain the situation. The site by Larry Farzanno is an amazing one if you also do US history.

Cartoons of the Week and of the Year
This is a great site as it has a weekly update of cartoons as well as the best ones of 2008. Even more it has some of the newer type cartoons that move. Also go here weekly for the best of the week cartoons. I found this resource here on a site call Free Technology for Teachers which is an amazing resource for new technology ideas.

Watch CBS Videos Online
A Look Back at Obama
Above is the show that ran tonight on 60 Minutes. It is broken into three sections: the first looks back at him when he started to run and wasn't taken seriously by the a lot of people (remember he was 20 points down to Clinton in October 2007), the primaries, the victory and a look ahead. Go here to see the individual videos or above to see the entire presentation.

Student News on CNN
This page might prove helpful in your government class. Go there for daily updates for your classes. Up top is their year in review. There are also quizzes, lesson plans, maps, and information sheets on selected topics in the news.

Mini Government Movies by NBC
NBC News has created a free, educational website called iCue which is AMAZING. I will be showing a lot of these to my students as they are 2-3 minutes on almost every major point you will touch on this year. It is set up following the standard US government outline and then subdivided into 10-15 videos a page. You can use a link directly to a specific page (from your PowerPoint or blog) or e-mail yourself a specific video and get the link for that one (there is no other way to get it). I really think http://www.howstuffworks.com/ is great, but this is a step up as it is both better quality and nice and short. There is also a page on the 2008 election.

The Presidents - PBS
This is a great feature (among others) on the PBS website. Get biographies of Roosevelt, Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and H.W. Bush all on video from this site. You can download from this site for FREE until 1/20/09.

Electoral College
Lest we forget, Obama is not the president-elect until the electoral ballots are counted by the new Congress in January as this article points out. Click here to see a slide show which includes a close up of an actual ballot. Here is an earlier post on how the electoral college works as shown by a short video. (Photo from the New York Times)

Origins of the Economic Mess
Still trying to figure out the economic problems in the US. Go here for an in depth article on what went wrong and here for an interactive graphic (see above). Also go here for the first article in this series. Of course you can go to an earlier post we put here for some easy to understand videos.

A different Map of the Election

This is the south’s 2008 presidential vote (in red and blue) overlaid by an 1860 map of cotton production (dots). More at Creative Class.