The state's board of education, by contrast, feels entitled to enforce its homemade party line with a rigidity that no comp-lit pinko would dare to dream of
Note: This letter is from JC Dufresne of Cibolo. He's not a big fan of District 5 SBOE member and conservative Ken Mercer of San Antonio. Mercer and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, TSU professor of San Marcos, are squaring off for the District 5 seat in November.
More here from Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703734504575125971351286404.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
Send your comments and news tips to roundup.editor@gmail.com, to Mr. Dufresne at jcdufresne@satx.rr.com, or click on the "comments" button at the bottom of the story
To the editor:
District 5 member of the State Board of Education, Ken Mercer, wants students in Texas schools to learn about the unintended consequences of the “Great Society” legislation passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration. Since neither he nor the rest of his cabal listed any, I wonder what those unintended consequences were.
Ken Mercer
I also wonder why Mr. Mercer’s cabal aren’t concerned that Texas students aren’t required to learn of the unintended consequences of repealing many of the provisions of the Glass-Stegall Act which prevented the collapse of our banking system for nearly fifty years until politicians from both parties dismantled it. Since then we’ve had a string of financial debacles, first the Savings & Loan crisis then the hedge fund collapse and now the Great Recession of 2008.What of the unintended consequences of deregulating other industries? After the collapse of Enron which destroyed the finances of many Texans you’d think the conservative mantra of deregulation would be worthy of discussion. Even Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, now admits that the market isn’t as good at self correction as he thought it was.
Ken Mercer and his cabal claim that they need to make such adjustments to correct for the liberal bias of the volunteer teachers who give their time to write our curriculum standards and the “expert” reviewers. Oddly, most of those reviewers were in fact appointed by none other than the ultra-conservatives; except of course Ken Mercer, who couldn’t be bothered to make any appointments.
JC Dufresne
Cibolo, Tx 78108
13 comments:
Gee, wouldn't it be just stupid to let the fox watch the henhouse? Why don't we do away with Congress and just let the bureaucrats run the government and tell us what they want us to know and do? That's the same as what this nimrod is suggesting for the State Board of Education.
What are the unintended consequences of Great Society? Well, let's see the demise of the African American family through the denigration of the family unit. The way that the system was set up was that the more kids you had the more food stamps you got, and that if you had a job of any kind you didn't get support, and that if you were a single woman with a home full of kids then you got a lot of support that essentially was just enough to keep you from starving and kept a roof over your head, but kept you fully at the mercy of your benefactors (or as they called in the antebellum era - "massa's". So what has the unintended consequences been? The destruction of what took a hundred years for the African American community to achieve - status and wealth as they built a middle class, which now has disintegrated into either a upper class or lower class. The best of intentions were done to meet a need, but ended up creating ghettos, and two or three generations of the African American male being found not worthy of support and instead has found his worth in living a life of crime involved with gangs and drugs which then leads to the massive relocation of them to the prison system. That my dear is a massive unintended consequence.
I don't know what the point of this Al-Anonymous 1 is but it sure reeks of white revisionist historical nonsense to me.
This writer thinks he understands the black experience in America when all this is is more racist stereotypes coming from a phony "whitist" superiority perspective.
Intellectual masturbation is another way to describe it. This guy could write script for Russ Limbaugh or Glen Beck. Those fans would love this crap.
And to make matters even funnier, Anonymous 1 works as a "Greeter" at Wal-Mart.
"Stupid is as stupid does."
The incredible ignorance being shown in Texas and throughout the nation is a culmination of generations of extremist perspectives and failure of the 2-Party system in the U.S.k
A study of Texas politics highlights the disturbed thinking throughout the nation and the questionable direction we all are heading towards, like a giant tsunami, whether we all want to or not.
Texas is the land of extremes, e.g., weather, land quality, education and least of all politics.
Gov. Rick Perry has led the way for the past 8 years and the results are obvious if anyone cares to view it honestly.
What is occurring at the SBOE is merely one symptom of a state in crisis.
Where have all the real leaders gone?
We are in quicksand and it was created by devious and greedy officials and by the voters who enabled these buffoons.
The real sadness I feel is the legacy we will leave future generations. It is too late to significantly turn this mess around during the remainder of my lifetime.
I hope future voters get smarter and start positive change:
- Vote out incumbents
- Push for term limits
- Limit or eliminate campaign contributions and perks
- Remove extremists from high positions.
Maybe, if we do this quickly, we may yet save Texas and the nation from crumbling into further decay and eventual dust,
Talk about "unintended consequences." How about this:
Anonymous 1 meets a beautiful black woman on welfare. He loves her so much he moves into the inner city black ghetto, learns to love soul food and jazz, provides for her fatherless children a healthy male role model, and supports her while she gets skills to get a job and better her life. He and his new soul family lives happily ever after in multicultural American bliss in the inner city.
Sounds like pretty good "unintended consequences" to me.
Okay brainless 2-4, tell me the story of unintended consequences for the LBJ Greater America. Why is it that the demise of the African-American community can be traced back to the beginnings of the Great Society? Coincidence? No. I am totally open to the suggestions, stories, etc. that you have as to why you think that they have as a demographic have lost their middle class.
Can you offer a story that does not smack of elitist liberal b.s.? From the normal stock of writing for this blog, the answer is most likely not.
How about the answer to the first question? Why do we need a Congress since all they are doing is doing the will of the big boss in the White House (ain't that an oxymoron nowadays?).
Racist? Yeah, I see it every time I listen the liberal elite tell the African-American community what they want them to hear, and then continue to ignore them in-between campaign stops.
You guys are the crackers that my friends in Georgia laugh about when they talk about white-folk. Fools.
Dear Racism Exposed:
Your "racism" is evident for all to see. Did I once use the word that is pc off-limits? Did I use derogatory terms to describe you as a "n" or any other derogatory term? No. Yet, you begin your diatribe with the "honky" term. Thanks. That felt good, do it again. Then you get another shot in with "whitey". Yep, ain't nothing as good as getting lashed with vitriol from an angry pseudo-wannabe black man. (though I surmise that you are actually some dyed-in-the-wool white guy in his forties or fifties that is a lingering leftover from the acid-dropping 60's who has a fro and wishes he were really black to account for his white angst...)
Let's deal with the facts. what is the "Afro-American" experience? Is it about all of the cultural stereo-types that everyone watches movies about and thinks thats it? Is it the current fad of hip-hop culture that talks about "ho's" and "bitches" to describe the women of your race? Sure....
Maybe, if everyone (white, black, Hispanic, etc.) would back up and look at the family unit, and what our government has done for it, that is the cultural experience of all races, and the government has not done any favors for any of us, but most of all to the African-American community by essentially keeping it on the tit of government largesse by creating an entitlement class that is two or three generations deep now that has destroyed the middle class of the African-American community. Is that the cultural experience that is something to be proud of? The saturation of the black neighborhoods with drugs that have increased the black on black crime? Is that the culture experience that you so desire? Geez... you are seriously conflicted within your soul. If nobody cared you dimwit then why in the hell would I take this much time out of my life to write and complain about the negative effect that the federal government's social programs have had on this specific demographic? Someone asked what were the unintended consequences, and so I offered up an answer. There are millions of more, but this one is the one that I think has been the one that has had the most detrimental effect. Get off your doped induced high, and open your eyes to see what the Government has really done to the public. This blog is regularly filled with the hatred of supposed developers being the ilk of America, but I would offer another thought - the government that has allowed that to happen, which is derived from both the Democrat controlled federal government and the Republican controlled federal government. It is the government's desire to control every facet of our lives that drives them to seek more power, and once they have it then our lives are no longer free. It is controlled by one regulation after another. Power knows no party, it is the secular god known as GOVERNMENT.
The unintended consequences Anonymous offers a long-winded but decent job trying to justify and defend his limited and clearly anti-government perspective - which is unquestionably white conservative.
The truth is government programs from the 60s were used to kick start economic development and were not a bad thing. But what this Anonymous writer is doing is making his analysis of the past fit to his already biased current white, anti-government perspective and justifying the causes in retrospect.
I could talk to a number of other academics, sociologist and modern US historians and they would point out the inherent fallacies of his white, anti-government analysis.
The simple truth behind this person's unintended consequences argument is that he is trying to justify the right wing historical revisionism of the SBOE (or possibly to pump up his own personal superiority complex).
Some of his arguments may have a little merit (as most arguments do), but he is either playing faux intellectual or choosing to put himself out there as a literary shill for the right wing.
Sorry, guy, but sometimes the worse racist is the person who doesn't think he is a racist.
Ralph:
I couldn't agree more, the liberals make the worst kind of racists since they don't think that they are.
I also agree with the perspective that if I had a superiority complex that I might be trying to pump it up; but since I don't that doesn't work either. It really sounds as if you are a liberal literary shill; but I won't judge you as you seem to want to judge me. I was simply offering my opinion, and since I can obviously tell that this is such a liberally-biased intolerant bastion than I would just as soon keep my opinions to myself.
Liberals are so much fun to play with. They only react and rarely if ever have any original ideas. They are so predictable when you suggest anything that is conservative in nature. The more it makes sense the quicker they are to attack the author. They were indoctrinated by their educators, primarily in college and have lost the ability to listen and analyze new ideas. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Hey right wingnuts. What is certainly not original is to blame every social and economic ill on government. It takes more courage and intellectual activity to blame the real source of America's problems - our citizen's ignorance about their own ignorance.
What would be original from you black and white thinkers it if the right wing could fathom governments doing anything correct except for attacking countries that don't like our arrogance or giving corporate fascism a good name.
You wingnuts are so out of touch you would go drive a Pinto and blame Ralph Nader for its exploding gas tank.
Hey "Deliverance" autobiographers. Blaming the government programs of the 60's for the Black experience in America is not original at all.
The intellectual wings (an oxymoron - except for the moron part) of the Neo-nazi hate groups have been espousing your views for years.
I suggest you contact Glenn Beck. He needs all the writing help he can get.
Again, for you who are truly "ignorant" and elitist to boot; let's remember that it is a great many African-Americans who espouse these same views of the Government's "helping hand" that has ruined the black middle class. (Neo-Nazi's just happen to think it fits their ideology, and so they conveniently use it).
Just as Democrats are aligned with baby-killers, doesn't make them all so. Or that some Democrats are aligned with the Communists in Cuba, doesn't necessarily make it so. So when a white guy (me) makes statements that are also espoused by the Nutsies, doesn't not make me a Nazi (isn't that you judging me? I thought you guys were tolerant...).
Anyway, I never said Government doesn't do some things well. I will even give credit to the fact that in with the Great Society idea, they thought they were trying to do the right thing. That's a given. Now let's review the history of the program and see what good or ill it did. Some good and a lot of bad. Let's review the fiscal impact of the program, way out of the range of projections, which would indicate that it ought to be pared back to within the approved levels. It has obviously had societal impacts not meant to happen, and it has caused massive amounts of debt that it should not have incurred.
Government also does the military thing right. It gives the country stability. When it functions properly it represents the desires of the citizens they represent, not the agenda of one political party or the other against the wishes of the citizens it represents.
Did you notice how the citizens were against the current Health care bill by as much as 77%? They didn't disagree that it needed fixing, they just disagred with the one proposed by the Left wing of the Democratic Party which then had to bribe (illegal) COngressmen and Senators to get it passed. (Even Bart Stupak stooped down into the hog trough to get some free airport money...talk about your sellouts.)
There are some original ideas and thoughts for the liberals to chew on. Now, will one of you please take the time to critique this without getting into personal insults? Or is that just a little too much to ask?
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