When we were campaigning in 1976, I don’t think anyone thought you’d be there in 2009, still. Sen. Reed Smoot served Utah for one day shy of 30 years. No one else from Utah has come close to your 32 years of service, and it will be a long time before any other challenges your longevity.
Not bad for the first office you ever got elected to.
Kathryn and I wish you all the best on your birthday.
And we’ll be pleased to set you straight any time you want.
“A Sense of Wonder” won praise at film festivals over the past few months, and now has premiered in a 100-city tour designed to get some attention for a near-documentary film, during National Women’s History Month.
Actress Kaiulani Lee painted her one-woman show on Rachel Carson on the big screen. The movie tells the story of Rachel Carson and the tremendous growth of environmental consciousness and activism following her 1962 book Silent Spring. Karen Montgomery produced, Christopher Monger directed, cinematography was done by Haskell Wexler (two-time Oscar winner, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Bound for Glory).
(A screening is planned in Dallas on March 31 for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — but it’s a private screening. Only four other screenings in Texas have been scheduled.)
To find a screening near you, go to the “Sense of Wonder” interactive website, and click on “Screenings.” From there, either click on the list of sites, listed by date, at “100-city tour,” or click on the interactive map to find a site near you. You may also sign up to sponsor a screening.
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonderso indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
“In 2008, there were 20 scouts across the county who had gotten all 121 merit badges. I’m adding my name to that list,” Wes says.
But Weaver’s accomplishments don’t end with badges. The teen also earned his Eagle Scout award by building a 112-foot bridge over a creek bed in Lake Murray State Park. It was no easy task with the rugged terrain
“Just digging the holes I was thinking I’m never going to be done. All my weekends are going to be spent out here digging holes,” Wes says.
“It was scheduled to take between two to three months. It ended up taking a year and 6 months,” says Wes’s father, Rusty Weaver.
Rusty helped his son plan out the bridge and construct it, along with the rest of Troop 112. Now all kinds of area bicyclists, hikers and outdoor enthusiasts can enjoy the state park a little more. [video available here]
Keeping with an interesting if perplexing tradition, bugling was the last merit badge he earned. Weaver had aimed for 121 since he first became a Boy Scout, and his Scoutmaster, David Mannas challenged the troop to earn their Eagle rank and then go beyond the 44 merit badges Manass had earned.
Many of Weaver’s merit badges were earned in the traditional fashion, at the many summer and winter camps he attended over the years. Weaver’s father, Rusty Weaver, became the Scoutmaster of Troop 112 and is a Climbing Director for Arbuckle Area Council. “My dad would be at camp two to four weeks a summer so I stayed at camp and took all the merit badge classes I could. Before I knew it, I had 80 merit badges.”
He attends Plainview High School concurrently with Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics, Regional Center and looks forward to finalizing his college plans.
Weaver was recognized for his rare achievement at the Arbuckle Area Council Annual Recognition Banquet, Feb. 28 at Camp Simpson in Bromide. His parents are Trish and Rusty Weaver, Ardmore.
My father lived through the Great Depression. That was what we noted whenever he cheered when somebody got a job with the Post Office. “It’s a steady job,” he’d say. “The Post Office doesn’t lay people off. They have good health care, and a pension.”
Elena Kagan took the oath of office to be the nation’s top lawyer, the Solicitor General, last Friday. The Associated Press is running a story (here from the Sacramento Bee) on whether this is a tryout for the Supreme Court itself, “Obama could make top high court lawyer a justice.” (Isn’t that a tortured headline?)
Three justices may want to retire soon: Justice John Paul Stevens is 88 years old. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 76, and back on the court in record time after surgery for pancreatic cancer. Justice David Souter is third oldest, at 69.
So, this AP story could be a good article for use in government classes. Consider these questions:
Is Solicitor General a stepping stone to the Supreme Court’s bench?
What is the role of the Solicitor General?
How important is Supreme Court experience, or experience in other courtrooms, to success in arguing before the Supreme Court?
What are some of the top cases before the Supreme Court this term, and what are the potential and likely results of these appeals?
What is the role of the U.S. Senate in selection of federal judges, and especially in the selection of Supreme Court justices?
Kagan clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. What do law clerks do for justices? What does her clerking suggest for Kagan’s advocacy of Voting Rights Act issues, since she worked with Justice Thurgood Marshall?
The Sacramento Bee, one of America’s great newspapers which we hope can stay in business through these tough times, today put up a map of California unemployment, county by county. The map shows unemployment changes over the past year with an interactive slide that makes it great for classroom use in economics, but makes it impossible for me to embed here (it’s in Adobe Flash).
California’s unemployment is at about 11% statewide. Colusa County’s unemployment is 26.6%. Two counties away, in Marin County, it’s only 6.8%
California economics classes can use their knowledge of agriculture and industry in the state to make educated guesses about what is going on in each county. Surely there are uses the rest of us can find. Colusa and Imperial Counties are two of the hardest hit — with the internet, can your students tell what that is going to mean for prices on fresh produce and processed foods?
This is where computers and the internet step out ahead in the education tilts, with tools like this interactive map. Thank you, SacBee. Can you give teachers a download?
Four Stone Hearth #63 comes for a soak in Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub on March 25. Zounds! That’s next week!
You can start sending in nominations now. Drop a note to me here — edarrell AT sbcglobal DOT net — or send them to Martin Rundkvist, who keeps the fire burning on the original four big stones (and blogs at Aardvarchaeology).
The Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focussing primarily on four lines of research:
archaeology
socio-cultural anthropology
bio-physical anthropology
linguistic anthropology
Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth
Marriage of Bathtub and Hearth, at Cape San Blas, Florida - yours for just $1.7 million! Four Stone Hearth, much cheaper.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
David and Shannon Croft, as parents and next friends of their three minor children (collectively, the “Crofts”), bring suit against the governor of the state of Texas, Rick Perry (“Perry”), arguing that Texas Education Code § 25.082(d) is an unconstitutional establishment of religion. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of Perry, holding that § 25.082(d) had a secular legislative purpose and was not an establishment of religion. For the following reasons, we affirm.
* * * * * *
Conclusion
The Crofts have standing to challenge the 2003 Amendments. But the Amendments are constitutional and satisfy all three prongs of the Lemon analysis. There is no excessive entanglement, and the primary effect of the Amendments is not to advance religion. The most difficult prong—for this and for moment of silence statutes generally—is legislative purpose. But our review of legislative history is deferential, and such deference leads to an adequate secular purpose in this case. While we cannot allow a “sham” legislative purpose, we should generally defer to the stated legislative intent. Here, that intent was to promote patriotism and allow for a moment of quiet contemplation. These are valid secular purposes, and are not outweighed by limited legislative history showing that some legislators may have been motivated by religion. Because the 2003 Amendments survive the Lemon test, they are not an unconstitutional establishment of religion, and the judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED
Some guy who goes by Joeyess seems to be the one who put this together — wrote the song? Performed?
Call it sequencing. Students often ask — at least once a week — whether I was a hippie. They figure that’s a possibility since I don’t like much of the rock of the ’80s, and they don’t know much history of the ’50s and ’60s. They don’t believe me when I tell them I thought college was a better idea. They look confused when I tell them I was a plainclothes hippie.
Noodling around the radio dial the other day, I wondered how an antiwar movement could work with ClearChannel running so much of the radio formats, and none of the formats being exactly friendly to the slightest political commentary.
So, take a look. Tell us what you think in comments.
Political folk music in the Internet Age, Pete Seeger channeled through Lawrence Lessig (profanity in lyric makes it NSFW, NSFC, alas):
Millard Fillmore’s life was shaped by the women he loved. His first wife, Abigail Powers, probably was the chief spur for his drive which took him to the presidency. In the White House, she stood for education and improvement of American culture — she founded the White House Library in 1851. A remarkable woman you should know more about.
From the National Guard Image Gallery: Fort Wagner, South Carolina, July 18, 1863; "The Old Flag Never Touched the Ground": The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment was recruited in the spring of 1863 by Governor John Andrew, who had secured the reluctant permission of the War Department to create a regiment of African-American soldiers. Like all Massachusetts Civil War soldiers, the 54th's men were enlisted in the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. These Guardsmen would serve as a test case for many skeptical whites who believed that blacks could not be good soldiers. The battle that proved they could was fought on Morris Island, at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. Following three days of skirmishes and forced marches with little rest, and 24 hours with no food, the regimental commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, requested the perilous honor of leading the attack of Fort Wagner, a sand and palmetto log bastion. As night fell, 600 men of the 54th advanced with bayonets fixed. Despite withering cannon and rifle fire, the men sustained their charge until they reached the top of the rampart. There, Colonel Shaw was mortally wounded. There, also, Sergeant William Carney, who had earlier taken up the National Colors when the color sergeant had been shot, planted the flag and fought off numerous attempts by the Confederates to capture it. Without support, and faced with superior numbers and firepower, the 54th was forced to pull back. Despite two severe wounds, Sergeant Carney carried the colors to the rear. When praised for his bravery, he modestly replied, "I only did my duty; the old flag never touched the ground." Carney was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions, the first African-American to receive the award. The 54th Massachusetts suffered 270 casualties in the failed assault, but the greater message was not lost: some 180,000 African-American soldiers followed in the footsteps of these gallant Guardsmen, and proved that African-American soldiers could, indeed, fight heroically if given the opportunity.
This is one of a series of artworks describing the history of the National Guard. A sizable gallery of art covers the first muster of a militia in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1637, through rescue and recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Along the way are highlights such as Lexington and Concord, Teddy Roosevelt’s New Mexico Rough Riders in Cuba, including Fort Wagner and the return of General Lafayette. With some caution on accuracy, these are good for classroom use (the Rough Riders picture shows a man on horseback, but I understand the Rough Riders’ horses had not yet arrived when they stormed up San Juan Hill; it took more than 30 years for Carney to get his medal, etc.).
NYC Educator spells out the difficulties. It’s not the teachers’ fault when the major systems needed to run a school don’t work — like the lights, heat, phones, furniture, plumbing, etc.
But these guys who tell us the teachers need to be fired — do you think they ever feel the pain?
When was the last time one of these school superintendents had to run a copy machine, let alone repair it before it would run, or bring their own paper to have something to make copies on?
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 