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Description
"The recession-era days of state reliance on the federal government are waning. States and localities are increasingly assertive in seeking independence from Washington's policy priorities, especially when those priorities clash with their partisan leanings. Kevin Smith and Alan Greenblatt's trusted and proven text employs a comparative approach to show how the geography, history, political culture, institutional structures, economic underpinnings,...
3) Lawmaking
Description
This program shows the process of lawmaking. Through dozens of interviews at state capitols across the United States, we meet officials in state legislatures and learn about their respective roles in the making of laws. We meet the speakers of the Senate and House, the minority leaders, the chief clerks; see caucuses, committees, and lobbyists in action; and develop an understanding of how they interact. Students learn how legislators compromise to...
4) Lawmakers
Description
This program focuses on those who choose to become legislators, and why. Many senators and representatives, from all walks of life, speak about what motivates them to seek public office. Interviews with factory workers, farmers, housewives, and policemen, who also serve in their state legislatures, dispel preconceptions about overly ambitious politicians. We learn that campaigning has become a nearly continuous process for representatives. The program...
Description
This innovative and useful reference fills the need for practical information and conceptual analysis of the roles and functions of state government by providing accessible state-by-state and regional overviews of government and politics. Features include substantive essays; in-depth profiles of each of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and all U.S. territories; an encyclopedic A to Z section with entries covering the overarching concepts,...
Author
Description
"While the Congress literature of the 1970s and 1980s led to the dominant impression that all politics is local, in recent years legislative behavior has pointed in more national directions. Dilemmas of Representation comprehensively examines the multifaceted activities of several legislators from New York, one of the country's most diverse states. Legislators still include strong local components in their home styles, but a variety of national factors...
Description
This documentary zeroes in on the price candidates pay to win election to public office. Media drives campaigns; money drives media. As a result, modern political campaigns have become enormously expensive, with winners often decided by the size of their campaign expenditures. This video investigates where candidates get their money and what they trade in their quest for political power. This thought-provoking program takes a look at wealth and its...
Description
From murders to manhunts to a win-at-all-costs political campaign, this riveting expose presents the disturbing story behind the passage of California's stringent "Three Strikes" law. Through candid interviews and news footage, Mike Reynolds and Marc Klaas-brothers-in-arms turned bitter opponents-and other key players including judges, legal analysts, and state officials illuminate both sides of this heated issue, revealing in stark terms how criminal...
Description
Did our founding fathers envision today's political campaigns? Do political races serve our democratic ideals? How do candidates get voters to choose them? Viewers learn how running a campaign has turned from the noble pursuit our founders planned into a manipulative science. Although campaigns from the beginning suffered from negative rhetoric, in the age of television they have become even more harsh and a lot less truthful. Viewers learn about...
13) The Law
Description
The law is a set of rules found in all organized societies. In the modern world, many key aspects of human existence are governed by laws: registration of births, school attendance, traffic, taxation, business, procreation, and the pronouncement of death. This program discusses the application of law to regulate human conduct, including the subject of global human rights. But can any international law successfully influence sovereign nations that...
Author
Description
Narrowing the nation's power is the tale of how a cohesive majority of the Supreme Court has, in the last six years, cut back the power of Congress and enhanced the autonomy of the fifty states. The immunity from suit of the sovereign, Blackstone taught, is necessary to preserve the people's idea that the sovereign is "a superior being." Promoting the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity to constitutional status, the current Supreme Court has...
Description
This fast-paced and informative program shows students how the Constitution established the Executive Branch, and provided for the separation of powers and the relationship of the Executive Branch to the Legislative and Judicial Branches of the federal and state government. Specific roles of the Chief Executive are defined such as Commander-in-Chief, Foreign Policy Director, Legislative Leader, Party Leader, Popular Leader, and Chief of State, interspersed...
Description
This program explores the history and anatomy of the ongoing political debate over the idea of shifting power and authority from the federal government to the states and individuals. The program goes back to the founding of the country and examines the split between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over how much power the federal government should have, through the Civil War, to the rapid expansion of federal powers during the Great Depression...
Description
This program deciphers the legislative process by explaining how an idea metamorphoses into a law. In interviews, prominent legislators and lobbyists explain how a bill is conceived, moved through the House and Senate or killed in committee, amended, prepared for a vote, and sent for the President or Governor's signature.
Description
One government service after another has been turned over to private business for a profit. In this program, Bill Moyers Journal and Expose: America's Investigative Reports examine a whistleblower's tale of military housing contracts gone awry as Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Eric Nalder reveals what happens when one private contractor drops the ball. In addition, Bill Moyers talks with New York Governor David Paterson about how states are coping...
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