[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
Did you guys follow all of the appointment controversies? You don’t think Bush compromised with Democrats to get people appointed? Last I checked, Harriet Miers isn’t a member of the Supreme Court.
[/QUOTE]
Do YOU follow appointment controversies? Miers’s nomination was killed by the extreme right wing of the Republican party. The Democrats had nithing to do with it.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
As much as Bush is maligned for ignoring outside input, I can point to dozens of examples of him making compromises, often times it was with forces in his own party, but he’s done it nonetheless.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, and Hitler liked puppies. Jesus, Martin. Compromise if you must, but don’t compromise by poisoning your mother instead of shooting her. The only thing Bush has compromised in this instance is our security.
[QUOTE=silenus]
Jeez, this’ll teach me to go to bed early. To address some noted questions and concerns, with attribution when I think of it:
straight man - If you can’t see the link with American Government, then I fear for you. Olbermann’s little tirade is the core of American Government. I still like to believe that it is government “by the people,” and when the people get pissed off, they have a right to speak out about it. You know, that whole “Freedom of Speech” and “Redress of Grievences” thing. Olbermann neatly wrapped up a number of issues that have been building in the country, and barring any major events or ideological shift between now and September, his rant will be just as valid. To your second question, I haven’t detailed out the lesson completely, but I was thinking something about “Having watched the video in class, present, in a well-structured essay, your support of or dissent from the opinions presented. Defend your answer, citing relevant data as necessary. 50 points, due Monday. Class discussion to follow.” I figure I can get a couple of weeks easy out of this, in various places in the curriculum. I know it will spark a number of dicussions at the dinner table. (Not mine, theirs.)
[/QUOTE]
I do expect you to make some statement as to how it is relevant to your class; you can start by enumerating the “issues” and how their discussion would improve your students’ understanding of American government. More importantly, Olbermann is a really bad choice for such an assignment (and why on earth would you take a week on it?), in particular when you agree with him. Remember, his “rant” is extremely ideological and moralistic, and I sincerely doubt that you would give it a high mark if a student were to hand it in – maybe IB is different, but I doubt it. Were I your student, I would be immediately concerned about your ability to put aside your beliefs in discussion and, more importantly, grading papers*. Some of your conservative students will simply roll their eyes and give you a paper of agreement. If you have any students like me (that is, pissy ones – this is AP, yes?), they will temporarily convert to über-Republican to blast Olbermann to pieces. The liberal students will roll their eyes and wonder why you’re wasting their time – or laugh at you making their conservative classmates squirm. Ultimately, Martin Hyde has it right; showing one extremely partisan, non-intellectual, moralistic “rant” won’t teach your class much. At the beginning of the year, it will only set a bad tone for the entire school year.
*I do not wish to state that you would grade papers by ideology; merely that you would make it appear so. The appearance is, unfortunately, every bit as destructive as the actual act.
[QUOTE=buttonjockey308]
Keith Olbermann may have been right in every single thing he said, but the truth is, none of it TRULY matters until he, or anyone else, can dig in, find actual PROOF of this jackass breaking the god damn LAW.
[/QUOTE]
Not necessary. “High crimes and misdemeanors” means whatever Congress wants it to mean. Andrew Johnson was impeached (and, had even one senator voted differently, would have been convicted and deposed) for actions not constituting crimes in the usual sense.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
Read a history of the SCOTUS, I’m not hear to educate people on things that are blindingly obvious.
[/QUOTE]
I’ll just sum this up for our viewers back home, “I’m ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!! There’s no way I could possibly be wrong, and you’re dumb if you think otherwise!”
Pot, meet kettle.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Not necessary. “High crimes and misdemeanors” means whatever Congress wants it to mean. Andrew Johnson was impeached (and, had even one senator voted differently, would have been convicted and deposed) for actions not constituting crimes in the usual sense.
[/QUOTE]
…which very nearly toppled American democracy as we know it. Olbermann quite rightly calls for resignation, rather than impeachment (which is more plausible); impeachment would do far worse damage to American democracy than Bush could ever even dream of doing. “High crimes and misdemeanors” clearly demands an actual illegality – and a serious one, at that. If Congress only prosecutes the crimes of presidents who it dislikes, or even worse, simply impeaches a president for general suckitude, the executive branch as we know it ceases to exist; the president becomes more like Elizabeth II than like Gordon Brown.
[QUOTE=straight man]
…which very nearly toppled American democracy as we know it. Olbermann quite rightly calls for resignation, rather than impeachment (which is more plausible); impeachment would do far worse damage to American democracy than Bush could ever even dream of doing. “High crimes and misdemeanors” clearly demands an actual illegality – and a serious one, at that. If Congress only prosecutes the crimes of presidents who it dislikes, or even worse, simply impeaches a president for general suckitude, the executive branch as we know it ceases to exist; the president becomes more like Elizabeth II than like Gordon Brown.
[/QUOTE]
No, the president becomes more like Gordon Brown, who can be removed at any time by a vote of no confidence. What’s wrong with that?
[QUOTE=buttonjockey308]
Keith Olbermann may have been right in every single thing he said, but the truth is, none of it TRULY matters until he, or anyone else, can dig in, find actual PROOF of this jackass breaking the god damn LAW.
[/QUOTE]
You mean like authorizing illegal wiretaps, ordering a flunky to leak the name of a covert agent, firing people from the government because they wouldn’t toe the party line, or allowing the use of torture as a means of interrogation? Yeah, I bet if any of those things had been done, this Administration would have been tossed out on it’s ear. :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=straight man]
I do expect you to make some statement as to how it is relevant to your class; you can start by enumerating the “issues” and how their discussion would improve your students’ understanding of American government.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, it will take some set up, that’s for sure. I’ll probably have them read a variety of editorials beforehand, or put together a packet of readings as a handout for the assignment.
Not all at once. But as it unfolds over the course of the school year we can revisit it as necessary. I hope it continues to haunt the Administration for a long time. 
(This is AP, no. I teach AP European History, but regular AmGovt/Econ.)
Good for them. Both sides will have to defend their stance, so if the “uber-Republicans” want to try to get kiss-ass, it’s ok with me. They still have to defend their answer, and the application of lips to ass doesn’t make it onto the grading rubric anywhere I can find. When the ones that defend their positions adequately get the higher grades, and the ones that just parrot what they think I want to hear don’t, it will indicate to even the most burnt-out senior that my class deals with both sides of the issues, and that they had better be able to articulate and defend their positions if they expect a decent grade. No matter what side of the issue they might be on. Hell, I play “The American President” in class, and I disagree with just about every position Andrew Shepard stands for. They get propaganda from both ends of the spectrum. If you can’t tell when your own peole are lying to you, how do you expect to be able to tell when the other people are?
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
No, the president becomes more like Gordon Brown, who can be removed at any time by a vote of no confidence. What’s wrong with that?
[/QUOTE]
Never mind what’s “wrong with that”, it topples democracy as we know it.
Actually, okay, here’s what’s wrong with it: British government is legislature-centred; all the power is vested in the legislative branch (in this case, Parliament.) The government is designed around this situation, in that the PM is the leader of the ruling party. American democracy, by contrast, relies heavily on the notion of balance of power; that is, the three branches can all reign in the other, a situation that is inefficient but extremely stable. Though I am not an American, I would be very sad to see that system undermined to the point of termination, as such an impeachment would accomplish.
Just to clarify: do I suspect correctly that you thought the near-impeachment of Clinton was frivolous? If so, why?
[QUOTE=jayjay]
Well, yes, that’s true. He’s actually done worse than make it legal. He’s simply ignored its illegality and gone ahead and done it anyway.
[/QUOTE]
Last I checked ignoring the illegality of something doesn’t make it legal. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Bush gutted the intelligence teams that were actively working to find al Qaida and stop the Taliban in Afghanistan in order to transfer most of them to Iraq where they are unable to deal with the overwhelmingly larger numbers of disparate groups in that unnecessary war while the Taliban has spent the last four years in resurgence in Afghanistan.
Your SCOTUS claims are open to debate, of course.
Bush has no more “overseen” the resurgence of the economy than Clinton “oversaw” the boom of the 90s. The economy was already pretty strong and it is more likely that his long-term cuts (with his incredble debt) will force some future president to re-institute something similar to Cinton’s “greatest tax increase in history” in order to prevent the debt from struggling with Capital thus eventually crippling the economy.
Bush actually did nothing to promote the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and his hacks have done everything they can to maintain the fiefdoms it was intended to reduce. What he has done is watch over a Congress forcing a lot of local departments to take on unfunded mandates to handle problems for which they have never been trained or funded while the reports from oversight groups and inspectors general indicate that there is no more cooperation (except on paper) than there has ever been among actual law enforcement groups–and particularly among intelligence groups.
[/QUOTE]
I pretty much disagree with your analysis on all accounts, but I’m not of the opinion that either of us are necessarily factual right, so I’m not going to debate it point by point. Bush has done a lot of things I agree with, I’ve outlined those things. For the record I still agree with the decision to invade Iraq and don’t really plan on changing my mind on that anytime soon, either. My only real reason for coming in to this thread was to point out that it’s ludicrous to claim that Bush is a bad President is as true as 2 + 2 = 4, that’s just stupid.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Any power can be abused. An exercise of a given power need not be unlawful to be abusive.
[/QUOTE]
I disagree. I don’t think one can abuse a power which is by its very nature completely under your discretion.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Do YOU follow appointment controversies? Miers’s nomination was killed by the extreme right wing of the Republican party. The Democrats had nithing to do with it.
[/QUOTE]
You were obviously asleep or out to lunch during the Miers nomination if you don’t think Democrats opposed it.
[QUOTE=if6was9]
I’ll just sum this up for our viewers back home, “I’m ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!! There’s no way I could possibly be wrong, and you’re dumb if you think otherwise!”
Pot, meet kettle.
[/QUOTE]
That’s not even a remotely apt comparison. I was responding to a point someone made that was completely devoid of substance, basically someone saying “What liberal SCOTUS?!?!” The idea that the SCOTUS was predominantly liberal for many years is not an idea that is exactly foreign or unknown. I was not making the point that tdn was stupid if he disagreed with that (which is what you were doing, saying anyone who doesn’t think exactly the way you thinks is an idiot), but simply saying that if he didn’t at least know about the idea that the SCOTUS has been perceived as leftist for some time then he’s pretty ignorant of history. My point wasn’t that he was stupid if he didn’t agree with that assessment, but that if he had never heard the argument before I wasn’t going to spell it out for him because it’s an extremely common argument.
[QUOTE=straight man]
Just to clarify: do I suspect correctly that you thought the near-impeachment of Clinton was frivolous? If so, why?
[/QUOTE]
It was not a near impachment; it was a real impeachment.
It was frivolous because it was the result of a five year attempt to find absolutely anything with which to bring him down and eventually came to the point of Congressional vote only after the investigating prosecutor colluded with lawyers of a civil trial to bring him to testify on a point that should have been deferred until his term of office expired. (No, it wasn’t “a blowjob” It was false testimony in a deposition. However, that deposition was the result of a $43 million witch hunt that turned up not one violation of any law for which it was convened. And it was inspired and driven by simple personal animosity, not any attempt to accomplish the enforcement of law.)
[QUOTE=straight man]
Never mind what’s “wrong with that”, it topples democracy as we know it.
Actually, okay, here’s what’s wrong with it: British government is legislature-centred; all the power is vested in the legislative branch (in this case, Parliament.) The government is designed around this situation, in that the PM is the leader of the ruling party. American democracy, by contrast, relies heavily on the notion of balance of power; that is, the three branches can all reign in the other, a situation that is inefficient but extremely stable. Though I am not an American, I would be very sad to see that system undermined to the point of termination, as such an impeachment would accomplish.
[/quote]
The British system has also seen vast, gradual growth in executive power – something Brown is trying to remedy, as discussed in this thread. And we could use some of that here, either by constitutional amendment or precedent-setting impeachment. The power of the American presidency vis-a-vis Congress has grown dangerously, and much more, I’m sure, than the Framers envisioned.
[QUOTE=straight man]
Just to clarify: do I suspect correctly that you thought the near-impeachment of Clinton was frivolous? If so, why?
[/QUOTE]
It was frivolous because the investigation that led to it was frivolous. Starr couldn’t find anything in the Whitewater affair for which Bill could be blamed, so he used things he had turned up along the way, regarding his sex life – a matter essentially harmless to the body politic. Clinton should not have lied about it, certainly, but he should not have had to answer questions about it, even more certainly.
It was not a “near-impeachment,” BTW. Clinton was impeached, by the House, and tried in the Senate, but not convicted.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
You were obviously asleep or out to lunch during the Miers nomination if you don’t think Democrats opposed it.
[/QUOTE]
They may not have approved, but you are the one who held up her withdrawn nomination as the result of Democratic interaction with Bush. The Democrats never even had a chance to register their disapproval other than in the typical microphone-in-the-face harrumphing of “We’ll have to examine this closely” way of pre-hearing news interviews.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
That’s not even a remotely apt comparison. I was responding to a point someone made that was completely devoid of substance, basically someone saying “What liberal SCOTUS?!?!” The idea that the SCOTUS was predominantly liberal for many years is not an idea that is exactly foreign or unknown.
[/QUOTE]
But it was a thing of the past long before W took office. (Else he could not have taken office. 
) Your statement that “he’s put some very qualified individuals on the Supreme Court who will role back the liberal leftist bullshit we’d been subjected to from the SCOTUS for decades” is not preposterous but it is giving W too much credit. Remember also that his first choice for O’Connor’s seat was Harriet Miers, who was not qualified, as parties all across the political spectrum agreed.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
My only real reason for coming in to this thread was to point out that it’s ludicrous to claim that Bush is a bad President is as true as 2 + 2 = 4, that’s just stupid.
[/QUOTE]
Wasn’t it Orwell who suggested that a person could be systematically deluded into believing that 2 + 2 = 5?