I was sitting in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center court house in downtown Los Angeles. I got called for jury duty. A responsibility that most upstanding Americans expended their most creative efforts to get out of serving. 300 of my fellow Americans failed to find that perfect excuse.

I stopped at the table of the American Civil Liberties Union table at the American Library Association annual convention in Anaheim, CA. I was given a copy a small blue book of the Constitution of the United States of America. I stop by the Cato Institute table where I am given a small red book on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. I didn’t get squat from the Hoover Institute because I got the impression I shouldn’t approach the table let alone be allowed see what freebies they wanted to pass on to library type folks.

Everything we think is new it is only a whisper of the ancestors reminding us to carry the positive forward. There are a lot of similarities between the Chautauqua Movement of the early 20th century and what we are trying to accomplish on a daily basis here are BlogHer and at the BlogHer Conferences.

Last week, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told an interviewer that under her Presidency, the United States would "obliterate" Iran if that country were to "foolishly consider" a nuclear attack on Israel. Cynematic from Momocrats takes us to the videotape:

Today's blog post started in anger. I had been seething in recent days over Pat Buchanan's factually-distorted, ahistorical diatribe in response to Barack Obama's speech on race. It wasn't merely Buchanan's snide contention that: [N]o people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.

Before I came to BlogHer, the term mommyblogger meant nothing to me, even though I'm a mother and I blog. I was shocked that there was so much vitriol directed at women for whom motherhood was a focus for writing. It's perfectly logical that mommybloggers would be a political force, just as they are a marketing force.

This week, I'm finding some of the best writing in the academic blogosphere that I've seen in a long time. See, there's an excellent meme making its way around the academia and education blogosphere: "Why I teach history." The responses on some blogs have been so terrific and, I think, important that I thought I'd offer a round-up here.

Here in the U.S., the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001 gave further impetus to the era of high-stakes testing already welcomed by many state boards of education. NCLB called for teachers to be "highly qualified" and for students to be tested primarily on math and English-reading skills. Science tests--to be administered to students approximately every three years--are coming soon. Not surprisingly, many schools and districts, faced by NCLB mandates to improve students' scores on math and reading exams, have begun "teaching to the test" and giving (very) short shrift to subjects not covered by the tests. Not on the tests: history and culture.