NDN Blog

No, it's not Fred Dalton Thompson, it's a pretty good mash-up video chronicling some of the many examples of Congressional GOP corruption.

We love being able to record live television here at NDN and tonight's ABC News 20/20 report on the DC Madam.  Grover Norquist will be watching.  Will you?

That's right, the first GOP Presidential debate was held last night and in comparison to the Democrats' event last week, their views felt pretty outside the mainstream.  The NYT has more.  Maybe the most news-worthy moment was Mayor Giuliani's thoughts on choice: 

Mr. Giuliani, who has said he supports abortion rights, gave conflicting signals on the issue. He joined the other nine in saying he would not be upset if the Supreme Court voted to overturn the decision that legalized abortion. But later he endorsed a woman’s right to make a decision on whether to have an abortion.

“It would be O.K. to repeal,” Mr. Giuliani said. “Or it would be O.K. also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as a precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision.”

Similarly, he said that, while he supported public financing of abortion for poor women in New York, in other states, “people can come to a different decision.”

From the NYT:

The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to extend hate-crime protection to people who are victimized because of their sexuality. But the most immediate effect may be to set up another veto showdown between Democrats and President Bush.

By 237 to 180, the House voted to cover crimes spurred by a victim’s “gender, sexual orientation, gender identity” or disability under the hate-crime designation, which currently applies to people who are attacked because of their race, religion, color or national origin.

“The bill is passed,” Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is gay, announced to applause, most of it from Democrats.

Companion legislation is moving through the Senate. But even assuming that a bill emerges from the full Congress, it will face a veto by President Bush on the grounds that it is “unnecessary and constitutionally questionable,” the White House said. The vote to approve the bill did not come close to the two-thirds needed to override a veto.

The internal investigations unit of the Justice Department has admitted the obvious - under Bush, Rove and Gonzlaez, the DOJ was rapidly being turned into a subsidiary of the Republican Party.  From the NYT:

The Justice Department has begun an internal investigation into whether a former senior adviser to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales improperly tried to fill vacancies for career prosecutors at the agency with Republicans loyal to the Bush administration, department officials said Wednesday.

And Karl Rove is under increasing pressure to share what he knows with Congress:

The Senate committee issued a subpoena to Mr. Gonzales for all Justice Department e-mail about the dismissals involving Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser.

And more details are coming out about the coverup that followed the politically motivated firings of the 8 US Attorneys:

Three of the dismissed prosecutors provided, for the first time, accounts of telephone calls they said they received earlier this year from Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, as Mr. Elston squeezed them to remain silent about the circumstances of their ousters, in an effort to tamp down public scrutiny.

The calls came within weeks after each of them had been dismissed, but before department officials, including Mr. Gonzales, had begun in testimony to cite performance failings as the rationale for their removal.

Paul K. Charlton, the former Arizona prosecutor, said he was left with the impression that Mr. Elston “was offering me a quid pro quo agreement: my silence in exchange for the attorney general’s.”

John McKay, the former United States attorney from Seattle, said he was disturbed by the entire exchange.

“I greatly resented what I felt Mr. Elston was trying to do: buy my silence by promising that the attorney general would not demean me in his Senate testimony,” Mr. McKay told the investigators in his statement. “I believe that Mr. Elston’s tone was sinister and that he was prepared to threaten me further if he concluded I did not intend to continue to remain silent about my dismissal.”

H. E. Cummins, the former prosecutor in Arkansas, had raised a similar accusation in February in an e-mail message he wrote to other prosecutors who had been dismissed.

Iraq Special Investigator Stuart W. Bowen Jr. may have once been a loyal Bushie - he was Bush's counsel when he was Governor of Texas and served in the same role for the Bush-Cheney transition team after the 2000 election.  But now he seems to have invoked the wrath of the White House.  From the WAPO:

The inspector general who uncovered cases of waste, fraud and abuse in the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is under investigation by a presidential panel, according to the White House.

Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is under investigation after complaints were made by former employees about his work habits and work he required employees to perform. The investigation is headed by the integrity committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which is made up of inspectors general appointed by the president...

In his latest report, released Monday, Bowen credited his office with having conducted 307 investigations. He also said that Iraq was still plagued by power failures, inadequate oil production, shortages of clean water and health-care problems. In the most recent quarter, his inspectors reviewed eight projects and found that seven of them were not well maintained and may not function as well or as long as planned.

There's a new bill in the House, The Free Flow of Information Act, that would create a federal shield law, allowing reporters to maintian the secrecy of their sources, unless ordered otherwise by a judge.

Earlier this week, NDN's Globalization Initiative released a major new paper entitled A Laptop in Every Backpack.  Part of our Series of Modest Proposals to Build 21st Century Skills, the paper argures that:

Achieving the American Dream in this century increasingly requires fluency in the ways of this network and its tools – how to acquire information and do research, how to construct reports and present ideas using these new tools, how to type and even edit video.  We believe we need a profound and urgent national commitment to give this powerful new 21st knowledge, essential for success in this century, to all American school children. 

We believe that America needs to put a laptop in every backpack of every child.  We need to commit to a date and grade certain: we suggest 2010 for every sixth grader.   These laptops need to be wirelessly connected to the Internet, and children need to be able to take them home.  Local school districts should choose how best to do this, but there needs to be federal funding and simple, federal standards.  Funds and strategies for how training our teachers to lead this transformation need to be part this commitment. 

And in 10 states, educators are dealing with another challenge, childhood obesity, in an innovative way that takes advantage of emerging technology:

Children don’t often yell in excitement when they are let into class, but as the doors opened to the upper level of the gym at South Middle School here one recent Monday, the assembled students let out a chorus of shrieks.

In they rushed, past the Ping-Pong table, past the balance beams and the wrestling mats stacked unused. They sprinted past the ghosts of Gym Class Past toward two TV sets looming over square plastic mats on the floor. In less than a minute a dozen seventh graders were dancing in furiously kinetic union to the thumps of a techno song called “Speed Over Beethoven.”

Bill Hines, a physical education teacher at the school for 27 years, shook his head a little, smiled and said, “I’ll tell you one thing: they don’t run in here like that for basketball.”

It is a scene being repeated across the country as schools deploy the blood-pumping video game Dance Dance Revolution as the latest weapon in the nation’s battle against the epidemic of childhood obesity. While traditional video games are often criticized for contributing to the expanding waistlines of the nation’s children, at least several hundred schools in at least 10 states are now using Dance Dance Revolution, or D.D.R., as a regular part of their physical education curriculum.

Based on current plans, more than 1,500 schools are expected to be using the game by the end of the decade. Born nine years ago in the arcades of Japan, D.D.R. has become a small craze among a generation of young Americans who appear less enamored of traditional team sports than their parents were and more amenable to the personal pursuits enabled by modern technology.

And that's not a good thing for the Republican Presidential hopefuls, as Adam Nagourney of the NYT points out:

As they gather Thursday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library for their first debate, the Republican presidential candidates are thrilled at the chance to associate themselves with Reagan. But they may not be able to escape the challenge created for them by the current president.

As much as Iraq or health care or any other issue, the question of how to deal with President Bush is vexing the Republican field. Do they embrace him as a means of appealing to the conservative voters who tend to decide Republican primaries? Or do they break from him in an effort to show that they will lead the nation in a new direction? Do they applaud his policies or question his competence — or both?