Texas school board - again in the news

Last week ("Texas school board - redux," 3/4) I wrote reassuringly that the leading conservative on the Texas School Board that was rewriting history for the nation's textbooks had been defeated in his re-election bid and that another conservative member had been forced into a run-off.

Good news. But too late. Today, the old board is still in office, and the AP news service reports this:

A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.

Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic."

In explaining her vote against the changes, Democrat Mavis Knight said that the majority had inserted what they wanted into the standards "regardless as to whether or not it's appropriate."

Decisions by the board – made up of lawyers, a dentist and a weekly newspaper publisher among others – can affect textbook content nationwide because Texas is one of publishers' biggest clients.

Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board's most prominent Democrats . . .

By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding "American exceptionalism" and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.

Some board members themselves acknowledged this morning that the process for revising curriculum standards in Texas is seriously broken, with politics and personal agendas dominating just about every decision.

There seems little hope that the Texas domination over textbook publishing will decline any time soon. As explained in an earlier post: it's too expensive for publishers to have multiple versions of a subject for different states. So the state that buys the most textbooks dominates the content. However, perhaps economic hard times will ride to the rescue.

Textbooks now cost so much that more and more schools are turning to internet materials instead. The beauty of that is that no one dominates the field. Choices will be plenty, and new curricula of all sorts of persuasions can be easily produced.

So let the religious conservatives have their version of history for their schools. I'd love to see the "secular humanist" version of American history.

Ralph

Shame on Little Liz

The list of conservatives who are denouncing the smear campaign by Liz Cheney's Keep American Safe tv ad continues to mount:

1. Nine former Bush administration officials.
2. Senator Lindsey Graham
3. Clinton impeachment prosecutor and Dean of Pepperdine Law School, Ken Starr
4. Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey

This is remarkable. Conservative powerhouses criticizing the XVP's daughter and mouthpiece.

It is certainly deserved, because Liz (aided and abetted by Bill Kristol, I've read) has struck at the very heart of the judicial ethic that everyone deserves legal representation, no matter the alledged crime. So when Liz tries to brand the lawyers who defended Guantanimo detainees as "terrorist sympathizers" (some of the detainees turned out to be innocent, remember) and says the lawyers are not fit to later serve as attorneys in the Department of Justice, she is attacking our American sense of fairness and justice.

Here's how Lindsey Graham put it to The Cable: "...America requires the unpopular to have an advocate and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer."

Liz is out of her league and has been for a long time. That's why I call her "Little Liz." She has her father's screwy values and her mother's disagreeable personal style -- a really, really bad combination.

Ralph

Pass health care reform

Reason #539 for passing the health care reform legislation:

Rush Limbaugh has vowed to leave the country if it passes.

I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.

Hallelujah !!!! Let's reform health care and get rid of Rush as a side effect.

Ralph

You've gone too far, Liz

Shades of Joseph McCarthy !!!

Liz Cheney heads a conservative group, Keep America Safe, that is running a tv ad that calls into question the loyalty of lawyers who once defended Guantanimo detainees and who are now employed by the Department of Justice.

Of course, it's pure politics disguised as patriotism. Liz snidely implies that a lawyer who has defended detainees (never mind that some of them may have actually been innocent) is working against our country -- and (hint, hint) if the Obama administration then hires them, the Obama administration must also be disloyal.

Oh, she doesn't come right out and say that. But what else could this ad be getting at?

Well, Liz has gone too far, even for former Bush administration officials. As reported by HuffingtonPost:

In a statement signed by nine former Bush officials and 10 other lawyers, critics condemned the ads as a "shameful series of attacks...both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications."

The letter defends the current selection of Department of Justice attorneys saying that "the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams's representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre ...To suggest the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people who have taken honorable positions on contested questions and demands a uniformity of background and view in government service from which no administration would benefit."

And that, my friends, is cutting pretty close to the bone. Better cool your guns, Little Liz.

Ralph

Republican = Hypocrisy

A never-ending source of ironic outrage is supplied by Republicans who seem to have a bottomless pit of hypocrisy.

How many, and counting, in Congress who voted against the stimulus bill have gone to their home districts and crowed about getting money for some project or other with stimulus money?

And now we have Sarah Palin acknowledging -- while in Canada -- that she used to slip over the border into Canada to get medical treatment from their single payer system, which she now deplores.

According to Sam Stein on Huffington Post:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care -- admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada's single-payer system.

"We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn't that ironic?"

The irony, one guesses, is that Palin now views Canada's health care system as revolting: with its government-run administration and 'death-panel'-like rationing. Clearly, however, she and her family once found it more alluring than, at the very least, the coverage available in rural Alaska. Up to the age of six, Palin lived in a remote town near the closest Canadian city, Whitehorse.

So there you have it. The realities of life and the benefits of government programs are as naught, if one can make political hay out of saying the opposite.

That seems to define Republicanism these days.

Ralph

"Welfare queens"

Ronald Reagen liked to cite the "welfare queen" who arrived in her limousine to pick up her welfare check (or something like that); and it was pretty effective in turning people against the social network that Democrats believe government should provide.

Now, as if in echo, Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay claims that extending unemployment benefits is bad policy, because it encourages unemployment. He claims that "studies show" that people wait until a few weeks before the benefit is going to run out before they look for a job.

I'm sure you can find a few individuals who take advantage of the system that way, just as there may well have been some individual who arrived in high style to get her welfare check.

Tell that to the 98% of those who have lost their jobs in this Republican recession -- those who are desperate for work and who look every day, hoping to keep their homes and feed their children.

This kind of out-of-touch Republicanism only works because they also sell misinformation ("Obama is leading us into socilism"), and people buy their lies and wind up voting against their own interests.

The Democrats have got to find some way to break that combination.

Ralph

Bake sales

Remember the slogan a couple of decades back:

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if schools got all the money they needed and the Pentagon had to hold a bake sale to pay for a new bomber."

Today Huffington Post's Ryan Grim writes about an article in the Washington Post on the decision facing Obama about continued funding of our nuclear arms program, which was designed to deter a powerful USSR and is no longer needed to balance a much weakened Russia.

Grim's point is that nowhere in the article are words like "cost" or "debt" or "deficit" or "fiscal crisis." We don't talk about whether we can afford weapons.

But in the first sentence of any article about health care reform you're likely to encounter "trillion dollar overhaul," and Republican senators will justify their "no" votes by saying it will wreck our economy.

One reason it is difficult to afford health care for all our citizens is that we are paying so much to keep the military-industrial complex healthy. Not that we should not protect ourselves, but that's not what we're doing when we continue weapons systems that are no longer needed. When conservatives want to "starve the beast" of government so we can't afford social programs, they never consider even putting the weapons industry on a diet.

Priorities. Indeed !!

Ralph