Mitt Romney Gangnam Style Dance

In other words, this is why it is important to choose a good theme to enter into for stump speeches.
This is from the tonight show. Enjoy!

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AP Exam Review Materials

In preparation for our review sessions this week I have put together a poll that I will use to help me (and you) determine which units to focus on during review days. Please take the time to vote in the poll, and remember you are allowed to select more than 1 unit when voting.

Also, here is a link that could be useful for your AP exam preparation. It will take you to the College Board's APStudents site specifically designed to prepare you for the AP US Gov exam. Especially, useful is a list of all the frq's given from 2003-2013 (downloadable in PDF format). However, in order to view the FRQs from past exams you will need to log into your College Board account. 

APStudent US Government & Politics Exam Practice Page

Finally, remember there are Barron's books available in my room as well as a myriad of  study materials that can be found online.

Lastly...

Bureaucracy Blog Debate

Ideally the government should be fully efficient to provide the best service for the people as the bureaucracy is meant to serve the people and it is our government. The bureaucracy provides people with services that they need so if the government is the one to implement those then they need to provide the people with the best service they can.  However, as we know the government is not efficient with pretty much any of its agencies and it does not do a great job all the time.  Realistically, the government should try to be as efficient as it can and keep that in the back of their mind but really they need to make sure that are adequately serving the people.  For the government in order to properly serve us they might not be able to be as efficient as we would like.  However, the main priority is them fulfilling their duties to us.  Saying this it shouldn’t mean that they take forever but they shouldn’t have to rush.  Them rushing would only lead to them not properly serving us and meeting our needs.  Like ally mentioned in her blog post about the 900,000 veterans who are waiting to receive health benefits I see where she thinks the government and our bureaucracy should be efficient to take care of that.  I think that in certain situations the government should rush and prioritize those cases especially for people who served our country. 

              It is true, the way the government is set up causes the bureaucratic pathologies to be inevitable.  For example, the red tape pathology can never be avoided.  The government has to write everything down and file paperwork and have regulations on so many things in order for the government to run properly.  That is necessary for the safety of the people.  So with all of this the efficiency is then affected.   If the government was run like a business it would just become more corrupt.  The government was meant to service the people and businesses only look to help themselves.  This would even further hurt the people.  The power that the government already holds over the people would be taken to a whole new level. However, it can be seen that only certain programs might be able to be run like a business.  The dmv for example might run better as a business because it cannot be corrupted and an outside source might run that system better and quicker. 

             

Bureaucracy Blog Debate

Efficiency in government and the bureaucracy is the most important goal in mind because the main point of having government and the bureaucracy is to ensure the public stays in control and is able to function, without major problems. If the systems are inefficient and do not perform the required function, then government would be pointless. Efficiency is not the only goal of the government, however. The government must also ensure its people are safe and to protect all of its citizens rights, but in order to do this the system must be efficient. The Daily Show clips explained how over 900,000 veterans are currently waiting in order to receive health benefits coming home from war and how almost the entire system was still being conducted using paper. This inefficiency causes the veterans who have served to protect our country to suffer without the benefits which they were promised. Since these people have risked their lives and fought for our country's freedom, they should not have to wait for their benefits they deserve because the system is inefficient. Efficiency of all government and bureaucratic agencies must be the first priority in order to function. However, even though the systems do take a long time in order to function and are not extremely efficient, a majority of the time they do work in the long run. The process for example of veterans receiving their benefits takes on average about a year, but they do end up getting their reward in the end.
 Weber wanted for a bureaucracy to work like a business where everyone is in charge of their own job and they all work their own task to get the job done. This would be the ideal way for any company or agency to work, but with mixed ideas from different parties and outside opinions, this is not how the bureaucracy in the United States works. Since the nature of government is competition between the parties, the republicans and democratics are constantly working to gain the most power and have the most influence in the way government runs. This constant conflict causes for the bureaucratic agencies to not function to their best ability. The obsession to try to gain control causes competition between the parties and the system does not run as an organized structure as Weber had envisioned. Therefore, the nature of the government does cause the bureaucracies to operate differently than Weber has expected.

There are positives and negatives to running the government like a business. If the government were like a business, everyone would have a specific role that they have to accomplish and it would cause the system to be much more efficient because it would model Weber's idea. Also, the productivity would increase if one person was working on a task rather than many people arguing on how to make it better. One negative result of the government being run like a business is many people who now are in the bureaucracy would lose their jobs, creating a higher unemployment rate throughout the country. Millions of jobs would be unnecessary if only one person had a specific role, so there would be fewer people needed to make decisions. If less people were hired however, then this would be less people the government has to pay for unnecessary jobs in the government. So, either way there are positives and negatives to making the bureaucracy run more like a business.