GSPM Blog

The day after Sonia Sotomayor was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court last week, PBS aired a special on the making of the Tony-awarding winning musical, In the Heights, written by the son of Puerto Rican immigrants to New York, Lin-Manuel Miranda.  On the special, Vanessa (played by Karen Oliva) sings "It Won't be Long Now," whose lyrics might as well be the theme song for the Obama Administration's nomination of Judge Sotomayor.  (This version does not come from the PBS special.)

             

The elevated train by my window doesn't faze me anymore
The rattling screams don't disrupt my dreams
It's a lullaby, in its way
The elevated train drives everyone insane but I don't mind, oh no
When I bring back boys they can't tolerate the noise
And that's okay cuz I never let them stay
And one day, I'm hoppin that elevated train and I'm ridin away
It won't be long now
The boys around the way
Holler at me when I'm walkin down the street
Their machismo pride doesn't break my stride-
It's a compliment, so they say
The boys around the way
Holler at me every day but I don't mind, oh no
If I'm in the mood, it will not be with some dude
Who is whistling cuz he has nothing to say
Or who's honking at me from his Chevrolet
And one day, I'm hoppin in a limousine and I'm ridin away
It won't be long now

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In Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) reformist freshman Senator Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) is about to leave Washington in defeat when he stops by the Lincoln Monument -- being rededicated today -- and is inspired by Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Smith's own assistant  (Jean Arthur) to launch a fillibuster on behalf of his plan to build a national boy's camp.

              

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Steve Billet, Director of Legislative Affairs at The Graduate School of Political Management talks about new campaign finance laws and why they have not seemed to work.

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Politics is like painting.   The issues need to be framed.  Various characters need to be placed in their proper relationship.   The light needs to illuminate what is important.   An emotion needs to be defined.

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Picking Supreme Court Justices: Presidential Wins, Losses

With President Obama’s appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, it’s a good time to review recent history of Court nominations – and how they ultimately fared.  Over the past 50 years, 27 people have been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and of those 19 (70 percent) were confirmed, 3 were rejected, 4 were withdrawn and no action was taken on one of them.

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GSPM Career Services Director Mag Gottlieb talks about how to find a job in politics, her experiences in the field, and her newly released E-Book on careers in politics. 

The E-Book can be found here. 

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At 10:15 this morning, President Obama announced his first nomination to The United States Supreme Court. 

Everyone has been talking about what will happen and what her qualifications are. 

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When Benjamin Franklin met the dying French philosopher Voltaire in 1778, they first shook hands.  The French crowd wanted a more flamboyant, symbolic gesture.  As John Adams recorded the scene: "This was no satisfaction; there must be something more.  Neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected; they however took each other by the hand.  But this was not enough.  The clamor continued until the explanation came out: il faul s'embrasser à française.  The two aged actors upon this great theater of philosophy and frivolity then embraced each other by hugging one another in their arms and kissing each other's cheeks, and then the tumult subsided.  And the cry immediately spread through the kingdom, and I suppose all over Europe: Qu'il es charmant de voir embrasser Solon e Sophocles."

                            

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As a current student at the Graduate School of Political Management, I am taking a class called Politics and the New Media taught by David Almacy.  As part of our assignment for the following class, I am supposed to respond to the statement "old media is dead" in a concise manner.  Immediately, I thought "well, yeah of course, old media is dead" as I recalled my own reliance on new media bloggers for my daily dose of news stories.  However, before I started typing the answer to my assignment, I did what any good student would do - I typed "old media is dead" into Google.  News stories from ghosts of old media critics' past filled my screen.  I clicked on "The Old Media is Dead, Long Live the New Media" an article from the Huffington Post posted in August of 2005.  Almost four years have passed since this article was written about  a new media takeover that would leave old media as a way of the past.  However, although old media sources have received less popularity than they used to - they still remain relevant and present in our lives.  Even with the overhaul of popular blogs and other new social media tools that may hint at eliminating old media in the future, I have to wonder - if the old media is destined to die out as a result of the new media, why hasn't it happened yet?

 

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You can learn a lot at the movies.  If you are watching historical or political drama, you can hear some pretty good speeches.  Hollywood scriptwriters have given some good lines to English King Henry II and his wife Eleanor. Both were ambitious and their ambitions sometimes came into conflict in ways that put most Washington political intrigues to shame.

Henry had a lot of conflicts.   One of the most famous was with his old drinking buddy, Thomas à Becket, whom Henry had appointed archbishop of Canterbury, assuming that Becket would be a pliable and not-very-pious ally.  Instead, Becket stood up to Henry to defense of the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts over clergymen accused of crimes as well as other ways in which Henry attempted to extend secular control over the church.  Over Becket's opposition, Henry adopted the Constitutions of Clarendon which brought priests into lay courts.  Former royal pal Becket protested and fled to France and the protection of the Pope after he excommunicated Henry from the Church.

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