BS: Texas does it again- conservative books

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Bill D
Date: 19 Mar 10 - 01:59 PM

BB..:
1. I did...thanks...

2. "Your statement is logically equivilent to the following- so I will accept NO critism of my statement."

piffle! It has no such 'logical' connection. Your rewording damages the very concept.
My statement says simply that Obama's positions, as stated, are similar to my own and that I see, so far no reason to doubt that he means what he says.
   And I have ALWAYS been open to clear, reasoned critiques....even as I reserve, as we all do, the right of dissent when critiques seem neither clear or reasoned.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Riginslinger
Date: 19 Mar 10 - 02:09 PM

"Very few were home educated."

         Which would explain why they rarely sounded like Ann Coulter when they talked.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Amos
Date: 19 Mar 10 - 09:07 PM

"If America's lucky, what happens in Texas will stay in Texas -- at least when it comes to education standards. It would even betterÊif the right wing's destructive manipulation of the state's schools wasn't happening at all. Last week, the Republican-dominated Texas Board of Education approved a social studies curriculum that extols the importance of the National Rifle Association, Phyllis Schlafly, Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, and Joseph McCarthy.

Right-wing board members removed Thomas Jefferson from "a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century"; many of them bear ill will toward the third U.S. president because he coined the term "separation between church and state." They also decided to require U.S. history classes to teach the difference between legal and illegal immigration. Last week's vote was the culmination of a decades-long plot by social conservatives to gain control over the influential Board of Education and, ultimately, the power to impose a far-right ideology on the nearly 5 million schoolchildren in Texas. Unfortunately, what's happening in the Lone Star State may spread nationally: Texas is one of the largest textbook buyers in the nation, and publishers, eager to get the business, often tailor their books to the state's standards.

IN WITH NEWT GINGRICH, OUT WITH SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: The Texas Board of Education is trying to create an alternate universe where McCarthy's dangerously slanderous allegations were true, Ronald Reagan was the greatest president in U.S. history, the separation of church and state doesn't exist, global warming is a myth, and people of color barely exist. The board voted 10-5 along party lines to give preliminary approval to these changes last week, and they will likely give final approval in May. Although the state has a large Latino population, efforts by Latino board members to "include more Latino figures as role models" in the curriculum were consistently defeated. At one point, a board member stormed out, saying, "They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist. They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians. They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world." Republican Don McLeroy, the board's leading conservative crusader, lost a battle to "remove hip-hop and insert country music in its place from a proposed set of examples of cultural movements." Telling, however, was Republican Pat Hardy's justification for including hip hop: White people listen to the music too. "These people are multimillionaires, and believe me, there are not enough black people to buy that," she said. "There are white people buying this." Important liberal figures are also being wiped out of U.S. history. The Republican majority voted against requiring Texas textbooks and teachers to cover the late Democratic senator Edward Kennedy, the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and leading Hispanic civil rights groups. (Hillary Clinton and Thurgood Marshall, the country's first African-American Supreme Court justice, will be taught.) Instead, students will learn about "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s." "We are adding balance," said McLeroy. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."Ê

RIGHT-WING PLOT TO TAKE OVER TEXAS' EDUCATION SYSTEM: McLeroy may be one of the most influential education officials in Texas, but he's certainly no expert. "The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel," he told the Washington Monthly. "Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan -- he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes." Beginning in the 1960s, social-conservative "citizen activists" started taking advantage of the state's "little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content." Publishers began "self-censoring" their books to avoid protests by these activists. The situation became so absurd that in 1995, the Texas legislature finally intervened "after a particularly heated skirmish over health textbooks -- among other things, the board demanded that publishers pull illustrations of techniques for breast self-examination and swap a photo of a briefcase-toting woman for one of a mother baking a cake." The mid-90s is also when the Texas GOP began aggressively going after local school board races and in 2006, Republicans claimed 10 of the 15 Board of Education seats. One of the ideologues on the board is Cynthia Dunbar, who has called public education a "tool of perversion." In 2007, Gov. Rick Perry (R) named McLeroy, a suburban dentist, as chairman. The standards the board is now voting on were recommended by right-wing friends of the conservative bloc, including "a Massachusetts-based preacher who has argued that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were God's punishment for tolerating gays." Although the Texas Education Agency originally assembled a team of teachers and professors to review the standards,ÊMcLeroy pushed them out. The Board of Education's right-wing agenda has been aggressively pushed by Fox News in recent weeks, with the network claiming that liberals in the state are trying to remove mentions of Christmas and Independence Day from textbooks. The claims were so outrageous that the Texas Education Agency put out a press release debunking them. McLeroy may have gone too far: He recently lost his primary re-election battle to a more moderate Republican.

SPREADING OUTSIDE OF TEXAS: As the New York Times explains, Texas' standards "serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books." Because the Texas market is so large, books for the state's students "often rocket to the top of the market, decreasing costs for other school districts and leading them to buy the same materials." "The books that are altered to fit the standards become the bestselling books, and therefore within the next two years they'll end up in other classrooms," said Fritz Fischer, chairman of the National Council for History Education. While Texas's ultra-conservative positions were generally balanced "by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation's largest textbook market," California has delayed buying new textbooks until 2014, giving Texas "unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come." Textbook publishers have become nervous by the bad publicity, saying that they now have the ability "to deliver completely customized content" to different states. The situation in Texas, however, has also made textbook authors uneasy and wondering whether they'll be comfortable endorsing their own books. "I'm made uncomfortable by mandates of this kind for sure," said Paul S. Boyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus and author of several popular U.S. history textbooks, including some that are on the approved list in Texas.
Ê(The Progressive)

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Riginslinger
Date: 19 Mar 10 - 09:19 PM

They'll never accept the Texas text books in Idaho.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Bill D
Date: 19 Mar 10 - 10:16 PM

re: Amos' post detailing the danger of the Texas move to affect the educational patterns of both Texas & the country...

"One of the ideologues on the board is Cynthia Dunbar, who has called public education a "tool of perversion."...I watched Cynthia Dunbar last night as she dodged direct questions about her views. She is a teeny bit more aware than McElroy about how extreme statements will play on national TV, but spreads them liberally ,,ummmm... widely ...in Texas.
   
Make no mistake...if some moderate Republicans do not speak up and help expose this blatant attempt to impose dogmatic conservative views on the entire operating machinery of the country, they will lose what credibility they still have.

This not a game! This is serious stuff....and I don't have to invent examples... the extremist conservatives TELL us exactly what they have in store if they ever get the right foothold.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: ichMael
Date: 19 Mar 10 - 10:34 PM

"We are adding balance," said McLeroy. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left." -- How true this is. Academia is skewed too far to the left.

Sotomayor (mentioned in the article) is a good example of the left skewing. "The Republican majority voted against requiring Texas textbooks and teachers to cover the late Democratic senator Edward Kennedy, the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor..." Do you folks know anything about Sotomayor? She was a member of La Raza (may still be). La Raza means "the race." She was a member of a political group based on race. What does La Raza advocate?

"We have an aging white America ... They are dying ...We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him." ~ Jose Angel Gutierrez, La Raza Founder

Things HAVE gotten a bit out of hand when liberals think that kind of garbage should be taught in public schools. The states have no choice but to step in and put a stop to it.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Greg F.
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 09:17 AM

...if some moderate Republicans do not speak up... they will lose what credibility they still have.

At this point in time, and with their resounding silence, they HAVE none left to lose & have not had for some time.

Of course, Texas has traditionally harbored a near numerical majority of right-wing nutcases as Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower and for that matter Kinky Friedman - have amply documented.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Riginslinger
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 09:19 AM

I can't imagine why Sotomayor or Edward Kennedy would be in a text book anyway.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Bill D
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 11:09 AM

You can't? They are part of **history**! It IS possible to report and explain history without judging or taking sides. Ted Kennedy was a major figure in politics and a respected Senator for almost 50 years.
(and Sotomayor is being subjected to the same broad type of 'smear by association' campaign that ACORN is...there is NO evidence that she harbors any racial bias.)

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: ichMael
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 01:14 PM

Was it Trent Lott who was hounded out of office because he had something nice to say about Strom Thurmond?

Meanwhile, Sotomayor was on the GOVERNING BOARD OF LA RAZA FOR SIX YEARS. Some info on La Raza:

La Raza teaches that Colorado, California, Arizona, Texas, Utah, New Mexico, Oregon and parts of Washington State make up an area known as "Aztlan" — a fictional ancestral homeland of the Aztecs before Europeans arrived in North America. These areas belong to the Latinos and Latinas and must be surrendered to "La Raza" once enough immigrants, legal or illegal, come to constitute a majority, as in Los Angeles. Once this is achieved, the current borders of the United States will simply be obliterated.

But the "reconquista" won't end with territorial occupation and secession. The final plan for the La Raza movement includes the ethnic cleansing of Americans of European, African, and Asian descent out of "Aztlan."

Miguel Perez, a La Raza spokesman at Cal State-Northridge, has been quoted as saying: "The ultimate ideology is the liberation of Aztlan. Communism would be closest [to it]. Once Aztlan is established, ethnic cleansing would commence: Non-Chicanos would have to be expelled — opposition groups would be quashed because you have to keep power."

http://alwaysonwatch2.blogspot.com/2009/07/sotomayor-and-la-raza.html

Haven't checked out the site. Just the first one to turn up when I typed in Sotomayor Governing Board. The information is accurate.

So, you have a woman who was not just a member of a group that advocates racial cleansing, but she was on the GOVERNING BOARD FOR SIX YEARS. And there are people in this country who think that such a person should be lauded in textbooks? She and her principles should be held up as exemplary?

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: pdq
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 01:26 PM

Straight from a famous part of the horses's anatomy, Texas-born...

                                                                           Mario Obledo

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Amos
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 01:33 PM

ICh,

I believe you are spreading fumes.

Aside from some reactionary blog, is there any documentation of this service of SOtomayor on the governing board of La Raza?

If so what is the "La Raza" of which she was on the board--the same La Raza that serves up the wild-eyed Azatlan pap? Or some other group>?

And what issues or actions did she handle while so serving?

Let's get some facts clearly in mind before we go off hollering and arm-waving.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: mousethief
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 01:54 PM

"But the "reconquista" won't end with territorial occupation and secession. The final plan for the La Raza movement includes the ethnic cleansing of Americans of European, African, and Asian descent out of "Aztlan.""

I think there's a thread all about people like you, only in England.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: pdq
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 02:19 PM

Some really good reading about Atzlan by a guy named Chang...

                                                                The Allure of Aztlan

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 02:41 PM

If (note the "if") the stated area was once part of a self-governing Aztec state, and if (note the "if") the descendants of the people of that state are those called "chicanos", how does the position of La Raza significantly differ from that of the Irish Republicans (save by geography).

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Bill D
Date: 20 Mar 10 - 02:57 PM

"Was it Trent Lott who was hounded out of office because he had something nice to say about Strom Thurmond?"

Nice? Sure...then he added a bit...
"...When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either."

Nice reasonable fellow, Mr. Lott...who represented the bigoted views of many of his constituents quite well.

"In 1998, Lott caused some controversy in Congress when as a guest on the Armstrong Williams television show, he equated homosexuality to alcoholism, kleptomania and sex addiction. When Williams, a conservative talk show host, asked Lott whether homosexuality was a sin, Lott simply replied, "Yes, it is."

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: Riginslinger
Date: 21 Mar 10 - 07:31 AM

The concept of Aztlan--if one is to assume it ever existed--differs quite a bit from the position of the Irish Republicans in a number of ways. First of all, one has to assume the (if's) are givens, and then realize that the area in question wasn't taken by force of arms and then repatriotized by people planted there from another area as a matter of policy.

             The original inhabitants were never part of one single group of people, there were many tribes and they died off from disease prior to the arrival of Europeans--the European diseases preceded them. The Europeans came from different places, not all representing a single government, and they fought wars between themselves. In addition there were people from other places--Asia and Africa.

             The resistance was never unified once the take over started, because it was never unified before he take over started.

Subject: RE: BS: Texas does it again- conservative books
From: ichMael
Date: 21 Mar 10 - 09:03 PM

Can't find the info on Sotomayor's leadership role in La Raza now. Oh well. She was a member and that's enough. La Raza, "The Race"...yeah, membership in that's a real plus on your resume.

I found that her leadership role in the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) is well-documented. Those darlings think it's "insensitive" to criticize the FALN. Man. The Judicial Watch piece about that is gone, but mention of it can be found HERE.

And it makes sense to have Sotomayor on the court now that Obama's launched his assault against the American school system. Obama's a union buster. His target is the American Federation of Teachers, and fergitabout any kids that get in the way. Obama's going to be shoving charter schools in our faces now, and Sotomayor's in place to rule favorably on them. Below is an excerpt regarding a charter school:

"The Race" sponsors and supports militant ethnic nationalist charter schools subsidized by your public tax dollars (at least $8 million in federal education grants). The schools include Aztlan Academy in Tucson, Ariz., the Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, Ariz., Academia Cesar Chavez Charter School in St. Paul, Minn., and La Academia Semillas del Pueblo in Los Angeles, whose principal inveighed: "We don't want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain . . . ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction."

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/11444

Lol. I love that "neo-liberal." All you libs who support this crap...they hate you. The people who want to destroy America hate you more than they hate me. They hate your death wish.

Anyway, Obama's been assigned various tasks. One is to gut Medicaire, and he's trying to do that now, and the next task will be to gut education. Gotta break a few eggs to wreck a country, now if only those pesky patriots with their schoolbooks would get out of the way.