Emmett O’Connell: You bring up a very interesting trend in our foreign policy, which could be an interesting way to approach a show on Pakistan. I’ll see what the rest of the staff — particularly those who produce the bulk of our Middle East shows — think about this.

“The question could prompt a constitutional debate over war powers that only the federal courts could resolve.”

Isn’t this a debate that’s about 60 years overdue? I think plenty of citizens have tried challenging presidents (in and out of the courts) but where has Congress been–why hasn’t it asserted itself?

More questions: How did we ever lose something that seems so fundamental to a republic–that is, the idea that it is the branch of government most answerable to the people that should have the solemn responsibility of declaring war? And how did we lose all sense of the gravitas of war such that we’ve allowed our presidents to engage in unchecked “police actions” all over the world for decades? Finally, is this a power that can be wrested back from the executive branch?

One of the major themes of “Open Source” is that of the evolution of the United States from republic to empire. I would suggest that nothing has facilitated this transformation more than allowing Presidents unfettered access to military power.

I know you guys may not believe us when we tell you this, but Chris really doesn’t watch tv. On top of that, is there really, actually enough stuff to to talk about to make an hour of radio *about* Dancing With the Stars interesting? I suspect not. Now if you re-pitch this as a passion for ballroom dancing show, Allison, you may get my attention. The subculture of ballroom dancing, as portrayed in Baz Luhrmann film Strictly Ballroom, seems really strange and fascinating to me.

Thanks for alerting us to this story, Bobo. Pretty intense. It’s interesting, and I’m definitely going to bring it up in the story meeting tomorrow, but honestly, I’m not really sure how to convince Chris and Mary to make this into a show. Is it about the power of mass protest on the web? The downfall of digital copyright? I think this guy has an interesting take re: the negative feedback loop that law suits start.

4/29/07 New York Times Editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/opinion/NYmoney.2.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Thanx for your reply!

Specifically, I’d like to talk about the current crisis involving Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the former chief justice who was recently fired. Apparently, protests outside the supreme court include liberal reformers, right wing religious folks and lawyers.

Maybe as a way to move away from the last Pakistan show, talk about the people who we choose to expediently align ourselves with overseas. People like Musharraf and Mubarak may do what we want, but they aren’t exactly saints in the eyes of their people. Are we seeing the danger of this strategy in Pakistan with popular protests against a hard line ruler who happens to be our friend?

Vijtable: The trick to pitching this one is figuring out how to make a Biko hour fresh today. What about the story resonates in South Africa in 2007?

rahbuhbuh: I don’t know that we’d do a legalization show (been done a lot), but a couple of people in the office have been flirting with the idea of a Passion: Beer show.

Sutter: A very smart critique. You’ll be pleased to know that Greta’s cracking the whip on getting posts up as early as possible. As far as the open source stuff goes, you may well be right that it’s not a perfect metaphor. We do hope that our editorial judgment is part of what makes OS interesting and original. Chris and Mary have been in the radio talk show business for a long time, and their standards for guests and angles are pretty high. So while editorial control will never be perfectly democratic, your pitches and leads are truly informing the way we produce. We’re now airing many more listener-suggested hours than when we first started — both because all of you are getting very good at pitching and because we’re learning how to use your ideas. We hope that the new website (to be developed this summer) will allow listeners to vote for their favorite pitches.

rahbuhbuh: We’ve been hoping since the very birth of OS to work listener-supplied audio into the show. Unfortunately we haven’t had the resources develop the software we need. It’s definitely high up there on our wish list!

rahbuhbuh: We’ve done several shows on the future of newspapers. I think this one was our most recent. It doesn’t focus exactly on what you’re pitching, but I don’t think we’ll revisit the general topic immediately. As far as NPR goes, it did receive a $200M bequeath just a few years ago, so it’s not 100% dependent on listener or corporate support…

TromboneErik: Public campaign financing is something we might think about closer to 2008, but it would take someone with a fresh sermon.

rahbuhbuh: Has teaching the US government curriculum changed in recent years? Maybe, but until we’re sure there’s an interesting trend there, it’s a hard story to jump on.

john_d, that’s very well argued and well pitched. I’ll definitely bring it up in our meeting, but, full disclosure, Mary’s got a 13 year old son, so any discussion of 14 year old sexual consent is going to make her squirm.

Rob Halligan: Congrats on your first pitch! It’s an interesting question, whether throwing money at poetry changes anything. I feel like I just heard or read a piece about Poetry Mag and their cash cow — can anyone think of where?

RobertPeel and EmmettO’Connell before him: I like the idea of coming at this election cycle from alternate angles (not the straight personality profiles and money matrices), and I did enjoy going state by state, issue by issue during the midterms. Do you think it’s too early to start? I’m not sure we know what the issues will be in 2008 yet, which is partly why those personality pieces are so boring.

enhabit: Why not start it your “rewriting the hippocratic oath” project on our wiki and see if anyone joins up? It’s been pretty dead lately, but we’re always looking for ways to revive it.

DougM: Great pitch. Econ is not my forte, but I’ll read the articles and bring it up in the meeting.

Brian Dunbar: Maybe Chelsea’s upcoming show on aging and geriatric medicine will tackle a part of this? (i.e. why we might not want to live into our tenth and eleventh decades). I also wrote a feature on senescence a looong time ago.

sidewalker, we love the tango idea. It’s on the board, which means there’s a very good chance that a producer will pick it up soon.

hurley, check out Sam’s feature on jellyfish ascendency.

The point being that even though the particular focus of this might seem trivial to some, it demonstrated a really amazing new form of protest. Almost 50,000 people came together, spontaneously, in the space of a few hours, to demand their rights from an organization which was in no way obliged to listen to them. And it worked!

The Boston Tea Party probably evoked a similar response from people at the time: “Ha, they’re getting all worked up over tea?! There’s bigger things to worry about.” But the point is not whether it’s tea or a 16 digit hex code, the point is that it represents an important cultural and political moment.

But now, apparently, wikipedia is trying to suppress ‘the numbers’. Is this turning into a showdown between traditional media and the open source community? We’ll see.

This is cool stuff, folks. A google search just a second ago revealed that ‘the number’ has 298,000 hits. It’s going to keep spreading. I’m sure blueray is going to be hacked soon. The entire industry is probably getting quite scared right now. They can’t keep us under their ‘intellectual property’ boot for much longer. Copyright a number! Ha!

This is amazing, truly a breakthrough on so many levels. The HD-DVD encryption code was recently broken. It’s a number, nothing else. And HD-DVD is saying that number is their intellectual property. They’re trying to copyright a number! Anyway, the number got Dugg so many times by fans of digg.com, that it made it on the front page. Digg, which is sponsored by HD-DVD, removed the number repeatedly from its site. News spread quickly of the censorship, and the community revolted. Thus was born: the internet Riot.

As of right now, every story on Digg.com’s front page is about the number. Here’s the slashdot article about it as well: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/05/02/0235228.shtml

If ever there was a ROS show topic, this is it. I’m really blown away just watching this unfold right now.

I find myself tuning in to it lately. And thoroughly enjoying it, though I’ve had zero interest in any other ‘reality’ shows and don’t usually like TV, in general. I seem to latch onto to one show at a time for diversion and some sense of belonging to the mainstream culture. I already had a show I was watching, so it’s a dramatic shift from my normal behaviors to start watching another.

Why do I like Dancing With the Stars? I caught the last 15 minutes of an episode by chance and found that I was sitting there with a big grin on my face. It was purely joyful to watch.

In these times of a pre-emptive war gone bad and all the other cataclysmic news we face each day, I find that I need the thoroughly light-hearted entertainment. It’s a competition without vitriol. The contestants have warm comraderie. It’s live. Everyone involved seems to be having a good time. The celebrities who take it on actually work quite hard and develop skills. Some even become surprising fantastic dancers. It’s a fantasy world where the most important concern is how well you glide across the floor. It pokes fun at itself. It’s the glamour of ballroom and sense of being thrown back to a more naive time. Most of all, it makes me want to dance. To see if I can manage an ounce of the grace and vibrance. In a strange way, it gives me hope. A light in the darkness.

I wonder just how popular this show is and if anybody has looked at why. Have ballroom dance schools seen a spike in enrollment?

Anybody wanna dance?

Has teaching the US government curriculum changed in recent years? K-12 students must hear stories of voting machines miscalculting, recounts, stolen elections? Proposed impeachment for infidelity or lying. Signing statements. Lobbying reform. Do the lessons shift with the times or is the same checks and balances year after year? Are the Mock United Nations ignored too? Are students in war time more politically aware?

Sarah Asher: I’ll pitch this too. You seem to have a lot of info and resources at your fingertips; any ideas about who you’d want to hear on air?

Anyhow, here’s the pitch. I call it

Abuse ‘Em Now, Jail ‘Em Later!

Thanks to news out of Texas, we are reminded that children in institutions are sitting ducks for child abusers. We agonize over these kids, as long as they ARE kids. Then we toss them to the wolves.

Victims of child abuse adapt many coping strategies. Often these include drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately, early abuse can actually alter brain maturation, leaving the adult with the impulsivity and poor judgement of a child. Early onset alcoholism is particularly hard to treat.

What happens when these kids become adults? Mercy goes out the window. They get the same half-ass non-treatment all adults receive at the hands of the criminal justice system. As a result, these early victims may well spend the rest of their lives in and out of prison on substance abuse related charges.

I know of one man, abused for over a year by his ‘big brother’ who is now serving 11 years for his 4th DUI (he’s hurt no one). He’s been through ‘long-term’ alcohol treatment 7 times, but can’t get inpatient treatment for depression or PTSD.

What are the obligations of a society towards its victims? How can we treat these men and women without just turning them loose (my friend the drunk driver certainly doesn’t need to be patted on the head and set free – eventually he will kill someone) Would more victims come forth if there were a real chance of help? and how many bogus vitims would join them? What about those brains? There’s a lot to talk about!

http://www.nida.nih.gov/NIDA_notes/NNvol17N1/Childhood.html
http://www.darkness2light.org/KnowAbout/statistics_2.asp
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh25-1/52-57.pdf
http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/AboutNIAAA/CongressionalInformation/Testimony/about_292004.htm
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh22-2/95-106.pdf
http://www.alcoholfreechildren.org/en/research/briefs.cfm?doc_id=296
http://www.alcoholfreechildren.org/en/research/briefs.cfm?doc_id=294
http://www.alcoholfreechildren.org/en/research/briefs.cfm?doc_id=303
http://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/
http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/nhsda.htm
http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/nhsda/TeenAlc/teenalc.pdf
http://www.abanet.org/crimjust/juvjus/Adolescence.pdf
http://www.juvjustice.org/media/resources/resource_134.pdf
http://www.juvjustice.org/announcement_104.html
http://niaaa.census.gov/
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CXH/is_4_26/ai_106731276
http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/SupportingResearch/Journal/spear.aspx
http://www.duke.edu/~amwhite/Adolescence/adolescent8.html
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun01/teendrink.html
http://www.enotalone.om/article/11152.html

thanx for the dialogue.

Thanks for your comment, enhabit! Let’s hope they eventually pick up an African theme for a show, besides the usual “Africa’s troubles can be solved by U.S. intervention.”