I know, there is no middle of the road where reality is concerned, but the middle of the road is where politics happens.

Civility from this side would go a long way in making this debate easier.

To dismiss these people is the same elitist mistake supporters of Scopes, Darwin, and Clarence Darrow made. Scopes lost. These people share this state, its future, our children, our world with us. It would do educated folks a lot of good to try to understand why people are afraid, what it means to them to be called “fruitcakes” for their religious beliefs. You aren’t acting like educated people if you keep calling sincerely religious, conservative people “crazy.” If we are educated, why are we name-calling? We aren’t persuading anyone with this childishness. Make your arguments for telling the truth and make your arguments about how important faith is to the American people. What is wrong with a curriculum that informs everyone on the importance of religious liberty? Balance Joseph McCarthy with Edward R. Murrow. Murrow let McCarthy bury himself. All he did was give him the forum to do it. Franklin Roosevelt scoffed at his critics but he didn’t dismiss them as “looneys.” He had to win middle of the road support with dignity and humor, not name calling.

Stop telling everyone how smart you are and allow the truth of the American story tell itself.

I am more liberal than most of you, I would wager to say, and I am offended by your tactics. You aren’t any better than those you criticize. As a matter of fact, if you were smarter, you would know how ineffective you are when you stoop this low.

Guess what? There were communists who gave Stalin the secrets to the atomic bomb. Was our country destroyed by the misguided idealism of some confused and possibly dangerous individuals? Was J. Edgar Hoover wrong to push for the execution of Ethel Rosenberg? Yes. But her brother was indeed a spy. If you are afraid to say McCarthy had a huge following then something is terribly wrong at the heart of your understanding of America that is as wrong as calling McCarthy a hero. People named names before committees. Did that make them less American? No, it meant that they did what they thought was the right thing to do. Did people suffer because of being named? Yes they did. Are you saying that naming names in the McCarthy era is the same thing as reporting suspicious activities of possible terrorists today? It isn’t and you know it. I am not sure that name calling doesn’t take us one step further down that path of tearing the nation apart all over again. How in the world are you going to teach students that McCarthyism is wrong if you censor the supporters of McCarthy?

Saying that you can’t talk to conservatives about education is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer should have lost his security clearance because he was married to a woman who had supported communism.

You will have to sit down and talk to these “fruitcakes” because you need their tax dollars to run the schools and pave the streets. So, bring your college degrees and your human understanding to the table. You aren’t going to teach them anything when you call them names and you aren’t going to compromise with them until you learn some manners.

Jaye Ramsey Sutter, J.D.
Professor
Government, Political Science, and Criminal Justice
Houston Community College–Southwest

Louisiana just passed a law allowing teachers to add “supplemental” Intellichimp Design nonsense to science curriculum.

A biology seminar that attracts 1800 scientists has already moved their planned New Orleans convention to another state because of these redneck reactionaries.

Come on up to Colorado. We don’t allow that nonsense up here. And we’d be happy to have your students and your tax dollars. And since I work with schools, it would help me out if your kids moved here and made our schools stronger.

Texas is going to suffer for this Neanderthal behavior. Science people will shun your stupid state and move elsewhere.

Maybe that’s why they cancelled the supercollider. Your state is full of ignorant hicks and isn’t worthy of a supercollider.

We do see stunned and frightened Americans down under, only now do I begin to percieve their fear and why they must run so far. Congratulations TFN on your laudable effort to offer an alternitive point of view.

I could go along with no IRS but I really wonder if these extremists have thought out what this country would look like without its alphabet soup. We’d have a very weak government for one thing. In fact, we’d look a lot like Somalia and Afghanistan: weak-to-nonexistent central governments, every person for him/herself. If you’re stinkin’ rich like your acquaintance and these ultra-libertarians that I know, it might be a nice life. Living in a walled fortress of a home, having your own little private army of police/bodyguards. No pesky government regs to have to abide by. Very few taxes since there’s hardly any government infrastructure to support. No public schools to fund…. you’d just hire private teachers to teach your kids at home.

You could do whatever you want since the most you’d need to do is just bribe whomever you need to bribe to get your way.

If you’re in business, you can treat your employees like slaves. No labor laws! If your employees died due to your neglect, so what? Who’s going to bother you?

Yep, a very nice life for the super rich and well-connected.

He forgets the fact that the American family was often a large extended family living in the same house or a couple of adjacent houses in the old days, and most of them lived on farms where their means of total support were at the house. It would be nearly impossible for the isolated nuclear family of today to meets its own needs and the needs of elderly parents. It would tear many families apart and bankrupt them.

All my acquaintance can see are the tax dollars he would no longer have to pay to support someone else’s elderly parents. Because he is young, he does not have an “old people” problem at his house. Therefore, he has the luxury of being able to think this way—having been nursed and schooled by the greatest intellectual minds of our age: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc.

I just wish the elderly people in this country would wake up to the fact that these conservatives with these fruitcake ideas are their enemies and not their friends.

If I were a betting man, I would bet my last nickel that you are right about the tort reform.

Of course, if we invoke the radical right perspective, anyone who really wants H1N1 flu vaccine should show personal responsibility by using their own money to establish (from scratch like mom’s biscuits) a H1N1 vaccine manufacturing laboratory in their kitchen. Make just enough vaccine to inject into yourself and the members of your household. It would be ideologically wrong to share your vaccine with neighbors because the neighbors are personally responsible for establishing vaccine labs in their own kitchens to meet their own needs. When the vaccine is ready, each nuclear family would be responsible for injecting or nose-misting its own members and monitoring for side effects.

There are a lot of government workers in my area. Over the years, come election time, I have watched them go steadfastly and dutifully down to the ballot box to vote for the individuals who would take away their jobs as soon as they got in office. All I could do was scratch my head.

I agree with Steve. The only way to get a better SBOE is at the ballot box.

Charles, what do you want to bet the people who are anti-vaccine are probably the same ones who are FOR tort reform.

As for American Indians, they tend to be VERY patriotic (in the conventional sense of the word). Many of them serve in the armed forces, and one of the first casualties of the Iraq War was an Indian woman.

Another contribution of American Indians: our form of government. Much of it is patterned after the government of Iroquois Nations.

As for DG’s post, maybe he/she is from California and the point of his/her posting was how substandard California public education is -given the quality of his/her writing. DG has some difficulty with punctuation and synonyms (then vs than).

In what way is Texas “one of the best states in union”? Because TX executes more people than any other state? Because Texas is conservative, that is why it is doing relatively better than other state? And are ALL red states doing better economically than ANY blue state? I’d like to see the supporting stats – which DG didn’t share.

He/she ends by saying: “THAT WOULD CONSERVATIVES.”
Er, huh??

Actually, TX local tax is one the most regressive in the nation; the poor and middle class bear more of the tax burden per capita than the wealthiest.

We are all vaccinated out our house ’cause we ain’t stupid. No one has died from the vaccine here or gotten any related side effects.

The radical religious right seven have their minds made up and know exactly what they will do. Using motions and majority votes, they plan to cut and revise every social studies standard they think contradicts their crazy beliefs. Too liberal? Too multiculturalist? Too much Hispanic history in Texas? Too much mention of non-Christian religions? Too disparaging of America’s Christian heritage? Not American exceptional enough? It will be cut out! Censored! Edited!

These people now have the power to write the social studies standards to precisely match their bizarre Christian fundamentalist and Republican fascist views and agendas. They don’t want to listen to teachers or experts anymore. In January and March they will go through the standards one by one and amend each one in full public view to correspond to their brand of ignorance, American exceptionalism, multicultural despisement, historical revisionism, and bigotry–because the Legislature has shown that it will do nothing to stop them.

It’s time to change the SBO–and the Legislature–at the voting booth! Wake up, Texas citizens!