Some conservative members of the Texas Board of Education assert that the history books used in this state have a pro-Islamic bias, and they are upset about it.
Never shy about wading into the culture wars, they are planning to vote Friday for a resolution that would send a blunt message to textbook publishers: Do not present a pro-Islamic, anti-Christian version of history if you want to sell books in one of the nation’s largest markets.
At some point, Texas schoolbooks are going to be nothing but the Old Testament, a history of the Alamo, and a section on Reagan.
General Stuck
decoded – There’s a Mooslim ni##er in the white house.
decoded = There’s a mooslim ni$$er in the White House
decoded – You know the drill
The Raven
And that famed family of lords, the Bushes.
Croak!
Tata
So the reason we’re so upset about this – beyond the comic time bomb of children raised on the propagnada attempting to join the rest of America at a college level reality – is that Texas’s textbooks are so many they influence the rest of ours? Why don’t competing academic publishers simply put out better textbooks?
LGRooney
IOW, they talk about more than just terrorism
IOW, they mention the more than 1,000 years of wars, slavery, & inter-factional violence in Christendom and mention the separation of church and state as it actually happened.
The Raven
Because putting out a textbook is expensive, and publishers are enormously influenced by the major markets of Texas and California, and perhaps a few other states like New York. If a textbook publisher can’t pick up at least two (better all) of them, it’s not worth it to put out the book.
But, modern technology to the rescue! Soon we will have state-customized textbooks, so that alternate versions will be available, to promote the spread of ignorance.
Croak!
dmsilev
“Reagan descended from Mt. Sinai, and after giving the Ten Commandments to the Israelis, used the Second Amendment (which was engraved on the third stone tablet) to prevent a bunch of illegal Mexican immigrants and drug lords from invading Texas.”
Mentioning tax cuts will require a second sentence, but I think we’re getting close.
dms
gnomedad
You mean they talk about math and architecture and not just beheadings?
Mr. Cole, I stand in awe.
General Stuck
@Tata: Texas is a main supplier of textbooks for the country.
Cat Lady
Fixt that for him.
Keith G
The Alamo was a side show where a bunch of wankers disobeyed orders, got trapped, put up a decent fight, and many (including Crockett) were killed after surrender.
San Jacinto was where the action was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_San_Jacinto
The joke is on the Texas textbook extremists. As a former Texas teacher, we teachers know that in social studies, text books are secondary. Hell, kids rarely can find them. If you want to bury a piece of info, put it in a history text – boom, it’s gone.
Ann B. Nonymous
Never fear. If the far right’s past behavior is any guide–screeching that the other side is planning on putting in policies they want to enact for themselves–they’ll be mandating that companies put in hiring quotas for poorly educated white high school students and the home-schooled (the latter is not quite a subset of the former, but close, close).
El Tiburon
I cant wait for the chapters on newt Gingrich and phyliis schafly.
True American heroes.
El Cid
Don’t forget
Intelligent DesignCreationism!TR
I get that Texas is the single biggest buyer, and textbook makers bend to their wishes to sell the most books.
But why can’t blue states band together and insist that, you know, “facts” be taught in their textbooks, and tell the publishers that they refuse to take orders from the Texas Taliban?
Or why some scrappy publishing company hasn’t figured out that they could make a killing putting out good textbooks that would appeal to state boards of education that value education more than brainwashing kids with the 700 Club Junior Edition?
I get that the market rules in this case. But consumers should band together to demand a better product, and/or savvy producers should recognize there’s an important niche in the market to be filled.
debbie
General Stuck, Texas has the largest school system with the most potential sales. Nothing to do with supplying books.
I don’t think Texas’s influence will last much longer, what with the advent of on-demand publishing. Particularly as their curriculum demands move farther away from accepted norms.
debbie
General Stuck, Texas has the largest school system with the most potential sales. Nothing to do with supplying books.
I don’t think Texas’s influence will last much longer, what with the advent of on-demand publishing. Particularly as their curriculum demands move farther away from accepted norms.
schrodinger's cat
I don’t what it is about wingers and rewriting history, the Indian version of wingnuttia (BJP-RSS), tried to change history textbooks too, when they were in power, for the very same reason, pro-Islamic bias. I don’t know how far they were successful. Idiots.
wilfred
This is brilliant. I mean, if there is a ‘textbook oligopoly’ that means that the minds of young people are already under the control of a small group of publishers, no?
I have a headache.
Kryptik
@TR:
The problem here is one state board’s standards vs. trrying to get several individual states to agree on one standard or at least similar standards. The latter is going to be like pulling teeth.
rickstersherpa
Ah, the business plan of text book publishing needs to be explained. Remember, the goal is sell most possible kind of the same books, not sell the best, most enlightening book. The economy of scale is very true in publishing since it does not cost appreciably more to print 100,000 books then it does to print 10,000). If a book passes muster in Texas, it pretty much will past muster through the rest of Red State nation.
Really, this anti-muslim tide that is rising, particularly out of small town and rural America should not be a surprise. This is the area that is the prime recruiting ground now for our military, particularly the Army and Marines. With the decline of family farming and the manufacturing jobs that replaced it for a brief moment inthe 1970s and 80s, about the only good jobs for a male (and female for that matter) high school graduate who does not have the money or inclination for college in these areas is the military. So these folks have seen their children, or the children of people they know, go off the last ten years and fight people who are, after all Muslims. One of the thing about long, interminable wars is that they tend bring out hard feelings about the other side, who are after all, for good reasons and bad, trying to kill you. Hence many Muslims around the world have lost their warm and fuzzy feeling about Americans and Americans have lost their warm and fuzzy feelings about “freedom-fighting Muslims” (ah, the good ol’ days of Reagan and Charlie Wilson’s war).
Someone may start a war for cold, rational, reasons (obtaining oil supply, increasing flow of tax money to private arms manufacturers and service providers, and intending to send a message of fear to one’s enemies). But war soon steps out of the bounds of reason. We humans are not built by evolution to do nuance well, particularly when tribal loyalties are in play. It quickly becomes “us v. them” (notice how so many of us, me included, can quicly call our American political opponents dehumanizing names such as “Teatards,” a quick way of saying “hey, I am in your tribe and against those “orcs.”) . So that a few thousand Muslims are actively plotting mass murder of Americans, with not insignificant popular support in some Muslim communities quickly becomes all Muslims when you are in a shooting war. For as Sherman called it, war is Hell, profoundly and most terribly Hell. And we who participate it quicklyl become damned.
Jager
As a friend in Dallas said, “if the schools here get any worse, I’ll have to send my kids to school in Nuevo Laredo”,!
I don’t know if he coined the phrase, but he also said, “Texas has turned into Mississippi with good roads” and he is a native Texan!
arguingwithsignposts
You left out the chapter about Ayn Rand. Hater.
rickstersherpa
Reading this article, I am reminded how much of the right’s culture wars is really nothing more than the “Dauphin” and the “Duke of Bilgewater” types doing another scam to separate green backs from the pocket of ‘God-fearing, patriotic, Christians” and personal promotion. I found this particular paragraph enlightening after reading that the proposal comes from a professional conservative called Rives out of heart of the East Texas bible belt, Odessa, who had recently lost an election.
“It is unclear whether the measure would have any practical effect, since the board has already adopted its standards for world history texts and is not expected to revisit the issue for several years. The bloc of Christian conservatives on the board lost two seats in last March’s Republican primary and may have less sway next year.”
It seems this proposal was very much about getting Mr. Rives some attention, and has worked very well from his point of view. The business model of right wing political agitation has made billions the last thirty years as Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Richard Vigueire, and so many others can attest. Doing well while doing good I guess they would say.
arguingwithsignposts
@Jager:
I am a native Texan, now living in a majority blue state (thank you Chicago!), and I have had to rethink a lot of my pride in my home state over the past few years.
And the roads aren’t even that good.
Gin & Tonic
All the crackers got killed, didn’t they?
Linda Featheringill
@Keith G:
Bravo! You made my day. :-)
lonelypedestrian
It is not just Texas. I saw a flyer this morning at my Long Island Railroad Station declaring Carolyn McCarthy a puppet of Nancy Pelosi who voted to destroy the greatest healthcare system in the world and supports the “victory Mosque at Ground Zero”.
Haterade sells everywhere.
New Yorker
In other words, too many references to math and astronomy that the Islamic world kept going in the middle ages while Christian Europe was burning witches. Time to throw Omar Khayyam on the wingnut boogeyman list along with Thomas Jefferson!
Exactly, it’s a hysterical paranoid witch-hunt in which the number of actual communist agents/Islamic radicals is laughably small and has no chance of taking control of this country.
Has anyone pointed out to Mr. Rives who owns a large portion of NewsCorp’s shares? Would his head explode from the cognitive dissonance?
WaterGirl
@arguingwithsignposts: With the recent polls, are you worried about the senate seat and governor’ mansion in IL? I know I am.
Seanly
@arguingwithsignposts:
Chapter? Just one chapter? The entire 9th grade will be devoted to Ayn Rand! Economics from Atlas Shrugged; art appreciation from The Fountainhead; objectivism sex ed with Andrea Mitchell & Alan Greenspan.
rickstersherpa
An interesting book if you want read it about high school and middle school text books called “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James Lowen. See http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/
Lowen is also great on the continuation of the “Confederacy Party” in the U.S. after the Civil War to the present.
Texas maybe making its books worse, but they have always been bad and full of crap. The best, most nuanced and ironic view of complete multi-volume American History , not a text book Page Smith’s ie viewe
PurpleGirl
@New Yorker: Probably not. They have a way of ignoring that which they do not want to know or acknowledge as true. Facts, we don’t need to stinking facts.
PurpleGirl
Meant to write:
Facts, we don’t need no stinking facts.
I tried to edit the comment, but I couldn’t. Bleh.
Carol
Technology may well be our rescue here.
We are probably not very far away from downloadable textbooks. Cheaper, faster, and easy to update. Who needs paper anymore? Not only that, but a Professor could easily make his/her product available to a wider audience because there would be no need for endless rounds of approvals for shipped paper product. Each teacher then could recommend books and automatically have them delivered to their students instead of waiting for approvals.
Could Amazon soon have a very profitable sideline where concerned parents could download real information for the kiddies, sidestepping the Texas Taliban? I’m surprised this isn’t already happening, given the cost of paper textbooks isn’t exactly dropping and the speed of knowledge means constant updating anyway. I guess IPads and Kindles are still too expensive for the kids this year. But probably by next year or the year after that, you should be able to buy one for less than $100, and used ones for half that. Cheap enough for parents to not worry about lost or broken ones-the same way a simple mp3 player went for hundreds to barely more than $25 depending on brand and capacity. Indeed. the typical mp3 player if formatted correctly, has the capacity for a whole library of books.
Maybe that’s why the Texas School Board battles are so heated. They are trying to corner the market before Kindle takes control away from them and gives it to more sane people.
Jay C
Outside of the vague “assertions”, can any of these winger assclowns cite any particular or specific examples of what might constitute “pro-Islamic, anti-Christian” material in any of their history texts?
I mean, I think I can guess what they’re getting at: any history text that doesn’t make “CHRISTIANITY GOOD, ISLAM EEEEVIIIILLL!!!!! its fundamental thesis (and probably in no more sophisticated form) is unacceptable in their estimation; but if they’re making claims about [the wrong sort of] bias in school texts, they really ought to present some evidence. But oif course, probably won’t.,
john b
@rickstersherpa:
i seem to recall that much in Lies My Teacher Told Me was pretty biased and questionable as well. i remember reading that book in my high school us history class and thinking “hmm, pot meet kettle”
bemused
A teacher told me that their districts’ school books are about 20 years old. I question how much history is even being taught especially in the most financially strapped schools. I remember in the 60’s learning about monopolies, anti-trust history. I have a suspicion that these topics haven’t been covered much in school in years, maybe decades.
We live in an area with more native americans than in many other parts of the country. I was shocked to hear this story from a parent. Her outraged high school daughter was told by other teens who most likely heard it from their parents that a native american receives $100 thou from the government when he/she reaches a certain age. The daughter also heard from her friends that a couple of centuries ago, native americans deliberately infected white people with smallpox trading blankets to them. The girl’s parent was horrified and told her neither story was true along with giving her a history course on what white people did to native americans.
Carol
I googled downloadable textbooks and got this:
Where to Download Textbooks
So far it seems to be mostly college and open source, but 7% of textbooks are downloadable. But if a school board has enough students with Kindles or computers and who do not want the Texas Taliban to dictate content, they could commission their own and bypass the diktat.
arguingwithsignposts
@WaterGirl:
Somewhat, but not overly. Still time before election for GOPers to screw up more.
Upper West
Texas schoolbooks are going to be nothing but the Old Testament, a history of the Alamo, and a section on Reagan. . . .
. . . and football.
NobodySpecial
IIRC, Texas schoolbooks don’t sell that well outside of Texas, and states can request books that aren’t Texas-approved.
angler
Two remedies, sane candidates for the TSB:
mclaren
Preferably all at once. Ronald Reagan beat General Santa Ana when he fought at the Alamo, then became a movie star where he played Moses in the film The Ten Commandments. Reagan also liberated the concentration camp at Bitberg in WW II and won the Cold War.
As a practical matter, more and more states are moving to free open-source textbooks, so this is a nontroversy. In the near future textbook publishers are going away. Free open source textbooks represent the future.
qwerty42
Should we be worried about this insidious al-jabr?
And don’t think “Arabic numerals” were accepted so easily. We can always go back to good old Roman Numerals.
angler
Too dense to make the link work.
The Texas Schoolboard Dem alternatives to the nuts are
Rebecca Bell-Metereau
http://www.actblue.com/page/rebeccabellmetereau
and Judy Jennings
http://www.actblue.com/page/judyjennings
ruemara
2 thoughts.
Kindle + digital publishing = Moron Removal Machine
WTF Texas? Will you just drop off the planet already? Leave Austin and whatever progressive types are there, then take nose dive.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@ruemara:
I wouldn’t mind seeing Texas given back to Mexico. The problem is that Mexico would probably refuse it and declare war on us for the insult.
Maybe we should throw in Arizona?
Jager
@mclaren:
If you visit the Reagan Museum in Simi Valley, you find a huge military display, in it are uniforms St Ronnie wore in his movies. They pretty much cover all our wars up to Viet Nam, he did look dashing in a cavalry uniform, kind of sweaty in Hell Cats of the Navy. (think thats when he met Nancy and with her Hollywood reputation no wonder he was sweating) I sure his “followers” believe he actually served in all those wars.
jrg
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
I give them 6 months before a holy war breaks out between the Protestants and the Catholics. Not that that would be a bad thing… If they insist on re-learning the hard lessons of history, at least they wouldn’t drag the rest of us into it.
Tata
My point exactly. Screw Texas. If they want to make their children unemployable they don’t get to take the rest of us with them.
thalarctos
Oh, Texas will soon be rid of that. Along with pretty much everything more advanced than basic arithmetic.
And there shall be much rejoicing. Morons.
(As some smart Texans once put it in song, “Life is Hard, but Life is Hardest When You’re Dumb”)
Sir Nose'D
I hope for the love of FSM the Texas Board of Education does not figure out the etymology of algebra (hint: al-jabr, الجبر).
update: Damn you, querty!
Comrade Dread
Some people just aren’t going to be happy unless every reference to Muslims is limited strictly to jihadists.
And while I may have some sympathy to the notion that Islamic group incursions into Europe in the pre and post Crusade era aren’t often covered in depth, I’m still in touch with this thing called reality and believe that this is due more to the age level the books are aiming at, the limited amout of time schools have to cover several thousand years of human history, and the attention span of kids on covering complex human motivations, political issues, socio-economic conditions, and religious factors that drove the continuing conflicts, rather than some shadowy modern Mooslim conspiracy to make Christians look bad by buying stakes in publishing houses.
Cripes. What do they put in the water in Texas?
suzanne
God, Texas is such a cesspool. I don’t even like flying through there, ’cause I don’t even want to give them the revenue produced when I buy a soda at the airport between flights.
Not that anyone actually reads the books, anyway.
Marmot
@Odie Hugh Manatee: What the heck is it about comments regarding both wingnuts and Texas?
You always get some brainiac conflating the two:
Up above is a comment about seeing a wingnut poster at a Long Island Railroad station (I guess it’s at a station, not the train itself). Did anyone step up to say, “Why doesn’t Long Island drop off the map already?”, as noted genius ruemara asks about Texas?
Of course not. It’s ridiculous. In Texas we have a small bunch of wingnuts fucking over our kids and yours. The better course of action would be to help us fight those wingnuts:
Rebecca Bell-Metereau
http://www.actblue.com/page/rebeccabellmetereau
and Judy Jennings
http://www.actblue.com/page/judyjennings
Marmot
@suzanne:
Brilliant! You are so smart, the way you blame all 24 million Texans for something you saw on the teevee one time! And your boycott campaign! Efficient, effective, effervescent!
So something useful for a change, suzanne:
Rebecca Bell-Metereau
http://www.actblue.com/page/rebeccabellmetereau
and Judy Jennings
http://www.actblue.com/page/judyjennings
kindness
What a hoot. The fundamentalists who control Texas (and most the Republican party) actively want a Dominion state. They just want it to be a Christian Dominion state. The rules they would lay down are so close to what the Taliban wants, it makes Markos new book look accurate (no matter how much the left & right wing pontificators complain about it not being so).
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Marmot:
Hey, I’m also in total agreement with Bugs Bunny about cutting off Florida and kicking it out to sea.
It’s just how I roll. ;)
kindness
@Marmot: Hey…don’t blame her. Look at what Texas is trying to do to the Nations textbooks. Yea, Texas is driving the market so that now kids around the whole nation have to read fundamentalist bullshit that Texas now demands.
Mind you, I know and love many Texans….but they aren’t representative of who is running the show there.
If only Molly Ivins didn’t die so young.
Marmot
@kindness: Truly. And they don’t quit, either. This Texas textbook problem is just another version of Kansas teaching intelligent design — and wasn’t there another in Delaware?
The wingers really do believe this stuff, too. With the certainty only blind faith will provide. They also believe that the rest of us are in thrall to some crazy conspiracy. Now with pro-Islamicism!
Marmot
@kindness: @kindness: See, this is what I’m talking about:
burnspbesq
If Texas seceded from the union, who would miss it and why?
burnspbesq
@Marmot:
” It’s not Texas doing it—it’s a small bunch of fanatics who’ve gained power over an influential board. The sooner some of you internalize this, the sooner we fix the problem.”
Nice try, but that dog doesn’t hunt. Y’all went to the polls and ELECTED those people. You’re complicit in their actions.
PTirebiter
My wife, who teaches here, reminds me it will have no practical effect. The value of history classes in Texas is in the salaries they provide to hire additional assistant football coaches. Revising teaching plans is a time killer and the coaches have a lot more important things to do.
Sam Houston, Goliad, Alamo, Identify the Mike, Load left on two, Win!
PTirebiter
@burnspbesq: Please sign in and let the viewers at home know which state you’re writing from.
MattR
@Marmot:
If it makes you feel any better, I have been asking that question for years (and I have never got a good answer from someone who does not live there)
Lee
@Ann B. Nonymous: With two kids in school in Texas I can confirm this. The books for social studies are rarely used.
Modern technology will also undo many of these problems. There is already one school district that has gone to all Kindle books. It is only a matter of time before they all do.
burnspbesq
@PTirebiter:
I write from approximately 35,000 feet in the air, on my way home to another bastion of progressive politics and secular humanism – orange county.
If a kettle is black, the fact that it is the pot calling it out does not change or excuse the blackness.
burnspbesq
@Lee:
“Modern technology will also undo many of these problems. There is already one school district that has gone to all Kindle books. It is only a matter of time before they all do.”
Another dog that won’t hunt. Two questions for you:
(1) where is the $ to buy and maintain all these Kindles going to be found?
(2) as a matter of law, why is a textbook on a Kindle not subject to the control of the state board of education to exactly the same extent as a traditional textbook?
trollhattan
Cept fur they’ll have to cut out all that lybrul crap about Jesus sayin’ luvz yer neighbor like yer ownseff. Texas wants the kick-ass Jesus.
scav
@burnspbesq:
ain’t gonna save TX or any other will-to-ignorance state, what it does is mitigate their undue influence as the “largest market” helping drive what every other school district uses cause it’s cheaper.
Have all computers been wiped from the planet suddenly? There will no doubt be sturm und dram about driving the poor publishers out of business and mas whining about copyright and passwords or encryption or blah blah blah, but hardware, seriously?
PTirebiter
@burnspbesq:
True enough, but expecting that pot to temper its accusatory tone with a humility commensurate with its own level of blackness seems reasonable to me.
Especially when the pot was complicit in the deification Saint Ronnie, the first cause of all Republican disasters and provider of the winning formula.
Having said that, where in Orange County? As a boy, at Tin Can Beach with a lunch from Noel’s was about as good as life gets.
I think the Hunting Beach Chamber successfully discouraged any reference to Tin Can.
evinfuilt
While a bunch of you complain about Texas, here in Texas we’ve nearly turned Blue. The last primaries turned the corner and the Dental Creationist Wingnut was shown the door. Help us get Bill White to be Governor (help us shame Perry into an actual debate, which he’s afraid of.)
Texas will be a Democratic stronghold in 20 years no matter what, Balloon-Juice can help us get there sooner. I’m still trying (even hopelessly) to get Rand Pauls father out of my district. It’s shameful that a lot of us nerds living around Johnson Space Center have him “looking out for our interests.”
goatchowder
No, not TEXAS schoolbooks, ALL OF AMERICA’S SCHOOLBOOKS!
The Texas Board of Religion is holding all schoolbooks all over the country hostage! They represent a huge purchasing bloc, and the textbook manufacturers have to bow to that. They can’t make a Texas-only version of the books.
The textbooks we have in the schools in California have been getting consistently worse every year. They’re damn near useless– oversimplified, USA-TODAY-colorized, lacking in substance, miserable. They’ve become like McTextbooks. Why? Partially because of constant budget cuts here and everywhere, but also because fuckwit Talibans in Texas are making it impossible to make a decent textbook at any price.
goatchowder
@kindness:
Ain’t Jim Hightower still around?
burnspbesq
@PTirebiter:
I was eleven years old and living in Midland Park, New Jersey when Reagan was elected governor. I think I have a good defense to that charge. :-)
Orange, near the 22/55 intersection.
suzanne
@Marmot:
Hey, your government does stuff I disagree with, so I do my damnedest to avoid enabling it. Doesn’t mean every last Texan is responsible, but, hey, someone is electing complete fuckwits, and it isn’t me. So my boycott will continue unabated.
Keith G
@suzanne:
Over generalize much?
I guess maybe you were just using hyperbole to make a point since no progressive I know would be so infantile and narrow minded.
Lee
@burnspbesq: The district that switched is actually saving money. The cost of the custom loaded Kindle is cheaper than all of the books for the students.
Part of the cost of the books (I have no idea how much) is the actual physical book. With the Kindle you have one physical object.
If book publishers no longer have to physically create books, it makes it easier for them to custom edit since they lose the economy of scale of massive production runs of the books.
Xenos
@evinfuilt: Texas is even a net producer of federal taxes. When they realize they have made some progress they may be more willing to think about how to maintain it.
In any case, the best way to turn Texas blue is to let Oklahoma and Arkansas become pure GOP cesspools. Oklahoma is already there, and Arkansas is not too far behind. That will be a real cultural tipping point.
Keith G
My government among other things helps to fund a very affordable, accessible, and good community college system.
My government also helps to fund and administer a program where indigent HIV patients can get life saving meds at $5.00 per Rx.
You paint with a broad brush that appears to be in inverse proportion to your knowledge base.
gex
@El Cid: And plate tectonics and heliocentrism.
ETA: Er. rather their opposites. no plate tectonics and geocentrism.
gex
@Kryptik: Local control, bitchez!
gex
@Lee: And it is likely that they don’t even care what their children really are learning, so long as the official books have the right information are designed by them and *bought from their publisher of choice*. The fiscal conservative leaders in Texas are happy to get their hands on textbook money. That shit is expensive. What better way to get money out of the government and back into the (right) people’s hands.
kindness
OK, so in the spirit of community and honor to those who are willing to support out of state progressive Texans who certainly do need our help,,,
Does anyone have a link to the ACT BLUE site for Bill White? If so, please link to it & I will contribute. I’m not going to break anyone’s bank but out here Carly Fiorina is sucking mud against Barbara Boxer so I don’t have to worry about that one & I still think Queen Meg will lose to Jerry Brown. I’ll give to Jerry too. Even though my pittance won’t come close to the $119M QMeg has shoveled herself.
Socraticsilence
@New Yorker:
I’m still waiting for someone to point that out on Fox News- I just want to see the reaction when its pointed out that the exact same guy whose funding the “Ground Zero Mosque” is also the leading non-familial shareholder in Newscorp.
PTirebiter
@burnspbesq:
And there you have it, your experience should give you all the more reason to temper your judgments.
For the record, by the time I moved here, the corporate coup was over and their biblical brown-shirts were already in place. We do what we can.
I used to be fairly familiar with Orange. In High School I did piece work for Blue Haven Pools. When Fountain Valley, Lake Forest and Mission Viejo we’re booming I made a small fortune doing a job that Americans weren’t willing to do.
suzanne
@Keith G: Your state government also executes more prisoners than that of any other U.S. state. Including a dude who was most likely innocent. Cheap community colleges and AIDS meds, while fabulous, don’t absolve the government of that. My personal boycott continues.