Regulators into Lobbyists

Here is an article that talks about how lobbying firms are recruiting bureaucrats to be lobbyists since they know about how to understand a number of new regulations.

US Supreme Court Wrap-Up

The NewYorkTimes is geared to start charging in January for its online edition and items such as today's on the court are why I will probably be paying. Today there is an article on the court as well as tremendous graphics. Here is a graphic on the ideology of the courts' members and here is a 360 on the inside of the court.

Google Translator

Sorry to hit the Google items back to back, but I have a lot of ESOL students (esp. during the summer when I teach online). When I showed them Google Translate they were overjoyed. If kids are having difficulty with their textbook, they can copy and paste it (assuming it is online as my students have) into the text box. Or I have them write the essays in their native language and then translate it into English.

Court Cases on Google Scholar
Now if you go to Google Scholar you will be able to get court case information, but there is more "Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role."

CSPAN Continues To Be Incredible
You can already get (and crop) everything that C-Span has on its network, but they just created a US Constitution page with videos to explain all parts of it. It is a dynamic page and they will continue to add to it.

Tiny Url For E-Mail To Text

If you ever have a long url and want to shorten it (say for a text), you can go here and it will be done for you. So what would you use this for? Well most of my students do not like e-mail. If you go here I have links for how to input their cell phone into an e-mail database. Then you could send them an e-mail message with the "tiny url" of your blog post and the kids could get the message (since texts can only be 140 characters long).

AP US Government Course Online
Okay, so this is a shameless plug (!), but after ten years as an AP grader (and twelve years teaching it at both high school and college) I believe I have mastered what it takes to do well on the AP exam as 25% of my students earned a perfect "5" on the AP exam last year (and for those who like stats, it was in a school w. 64% minorities and 27% free and reduced lunch - in fact I was pretty psyched that my minority - white gap was nil). So I have (along w. my co-blogger, Frank Franz) created a completely online AP US Government class that uses tons of online links, projects and video. The course is very cheap to take and you can do it with no textbook (or perhaps the Barron's AP US Government study guide). So if your school doesn't have enough kids for a class or your district won't teach AP Gov in the brick and mortar setting, this might be the alternative with the new company Zulama.

Book TV: Sarah Binder - Politics or Principle: Filibustering in the U.S...

History of the Filibuster

I am somewhat biased here as Sarah Binder (videoed above) was my dissertation chair. But, this is quite an interesting short (6 minutes) history of the filibuster.

Supreme Court Information

As we watch the Elena Kagan hearings, here are some sites to help you teach the US Supreme Court. First off the Chief Justice always writes a year end report which, among other things, talks about the number of cases appealed to the Court each year and how many were given certiorari. It is a very short document that your students could easily digest.

SCOTUS Blog is another great resource. Here is a link they put together yesterday on year end statistics, graphs, etc. (including how often each judge voted w. each other, the number of 9-0 decisions (more on this than any other) and much more.

Sunday Morning Talk Shows on Hulu

If you want to show your students a portion of the Sunday morning talk shows, look no further than Hulu . Above is one example with the entire show of "This Week."

Great Tech Resources
The booklet above is a short list (Google, Wikispaces, Skype, Titan Pad, Wordle, Blogger and more) and descriptions of items you can find on the Internet. I found it here. You can see a much longer list on my Twitter feed of "kenhalla". If you click on the book, you can turn the pages and the booklet will grow in size.

New NYTimes Using Cell Phones
The New York Times poll that came out yesterday has a nice explanation of how it reaches people with unlisted (aren't they all) cell phones which are now necessary to conduct a reliable poll. I use polls to explain how and why politicians need to craft their language. Also, it is a great way to show how they can be biased (as in the NYTimes asking should we look into alternative fuels). Here is the entire poll.

Politico.com Weekly Sunday Morning Wrap-up
Politico.com as a weekly wrap-up of the Sunday morning talk shows. This might not add too much to your government class, but it does make for a mention with discussing the media as well as elite's influence on elections. Above is the one from today.

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Publisher Software from YUDU

US Government Reading List
Our AP US history teacher came up with the list above which is a rather comprehensive list of US government books. He uses it as a final AP US project. It also could serve as a AP Government summer assignment.

Wordle

When I was at the AP Reading last week, a number of people had never heard of Wordle so here goes. You can take a written document, put it in Wordle and it will create a picture cloud which you can then use, as I have to compare articles. For example, the one on top is from the conservative Washington Times and the bottom one from the Washington Post. Coincidently today, Larry Ferlazzo has a tweet from this blog on using word clouds in the classroom.