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Check out our first politics file of the season

here.

Includes midterms and agenda evidence including hard to find Democrats uniqueness as well as economic stimulus, stem cell research, and more!

After much work and set-up, InfiniteCamp has been released to the world! Check it out here and have a great summer preparation for the upcoming topic.

InfiniteCamp is a free community to extend your camp experience online. You can pay-as-you-go for camp kits and starter files to jump-start and complement your research and summer preparation. It’s the best complement to going to camp or way to keep up with summer work if you can’t attend a camp!

You can make your own TOC pump-up Google Vid here, post a link in comments when you need a break from cutting cards.

Global relief efforts in Haiti have to move from band-aid and emergency solutions towards more sustainable long term plans that will put a foundation in place to rebuild the poverty and disaster torn country. Agricultural infrastructure and investment could provide this foundation, according to recent reports:

In Haiti, we have the chance to deliver something that the global community has long declared a priority: to transition from short-term interventions to addressing the underlying causes of hunger and poverty. The U.S. global hunger and food security initiative – Feed the Future – embraces this challenge, calling upon development partners to invest in country-led plans that provide a comprehensive approach to substantially and sustainably reduce hunger and poverty.

Wow. The biggest weekend of the season, with thousands of debaters on both coasts!

We’re hard at work on what will be our best politics file yet, and aim to have it posted with the most recent evidence by MIDNIGHT tonight! (*UPDATE: Check in the morning)

Also, we will be Live-Blogging the Cal Tournament this weekend – so check back for thoughts, insights, funny stories, and pictures. (And of course, results).

Good luck as you continue your preparations.

A new report shows that while much of poverty alleviation initiatives are focused on poor in urban areas, the number of people living in poverty in the suburbs has skyrocketed at an alarming rate:

Between 2000 and 2008, the number of poor people living in America rose by 15.4 percent — nearly twice the growth rate in the overall population in the same period. But the growth wasn’t even across geographical areas.
The poverty rate in American suburbs increased 25 percent during that period — and is growing significantly faster than the national average and urban rate. Due in large part to suburban population growth and the housing slump, the suburbs now contain the nation’s biggest and fastest-growing poor population.
And some suburban areas’ poor populations — particularly those in the Midwest — are growing faster than others. The Brookings Institution ranked metropolitan areas by the increase over the last decade in their share of suburban poor.

Read the Huffington Post’s analysis or the original Brookings Institution report here.

Part of Obama’s new budget includes billions more for educational programs, and a change in emphasis from testing to focus on career preparation. While No Child Left Behind has often been a political football, here’s hoping that this funding change will sail smoothly through:

President Barack Obama is seeking a major overhaul of the U.S. education system, with a shift from an emphasis on testing to an emphasis on career preparation — a plan that he is backing up with billions in budget incentives.

The administration has already pumped $100 billion into education and is now moving to rewrite legislation that has governed the nation’s schools for nearly a decade.

Obama’s proposed $3.8 trillion budget includes $49.7 billion for education, and much of the 7.5 percent increase is focused on programs under No Child Left Behind, which could come up for reauthorization this year.

But for the attempted Christmas day airplane bombing, it has been a fairly quiet year in terms of attempted terrorist attacks on US soil. US intelligence officials brief congress:

WASHINGTON — America’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Tuesday that Al Qaeda and its affiliates had made it a high priority to attempt a large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months.

The assessment by Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, was much starker than his view last year, when he emphasized the considerable progress in the campaign to debilitate Al Qaeda and said that the global economic meltdown, rather than the prospect of a major terrorist attack, was the “primary near-term security concern of the United States.”

Obama’s new budget announced today does increase overall NASA funding and even extends the life of the International Space Station. However, the President took an unprecedented gamble by looking to end funding for the space organization’s manned moon-flight mission.

But the plan ends the Constellation program “which was planning to use an approach similar to the Apollo program to return astronauts back to the Moon 50 years after that program’s triumphs.”

The budget notes that an independent panel found the moon program was years behind schedule.

Is this good or bad for NASA tradeoff scenarios? You can be sure, we will cut some updates for this weekend…

Obama pulls no punches

Obama will answer viewer submitted questions on the State of the Union. You can submit them here.