E-Mail Watch: Hate Crimes and Bestiality

Texas has an abundance of religious-righters who send countless e-mails circulating throughout the internets. We don’t want to give specific ranters publicity by identifying them, but we will occasionally post examples of their nonsense to show the kind of extremism that passes for discourse on the far right. Today we note an e-mail attacking proposed […]

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FOX Gets It Wrong on Texas Curriculum Battle

Efforts to politicize our kids’ social studies classrooms got a hand from FOX News on Wednesday. FOX aired a piece on the growing controversy over revising social studies curriculum standards in Texas. Publishers, of course, will use the revised standards to write new history, government, geography and other social studies textbooks. The two commentators on FOX […]

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A Teacher Responds to Criticism from the Right

In May we reported that a member of a social studies curriculum writing team was complaining about an “overrepresentation of minorities” in the curriculum standards. That member, Bill Ames, is a political activist appointed by Don McLeroy, who at the time was chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. Now a teacher, Kimberly Griffith, who […]

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Off the Cliff

The bizarre (and long discredited) claims that President Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen keep coming from the far right. So is Texas-based Vision America, a religious-right organization headed by Rick Scarborough in Lufkin, now jumping off the crazy cliff? Seems that way. In an e-mail — signed by Scarborough — to supporters today, the organization […]

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Another Look at David Barton

Chris Rodda, writing for Daily Kos, explains why giving David Barton any influence over a public school curriculum is a very bad idea. As you know, the Texas State Board of Education has appointed Barton to a panel of so-called “experts” guiding the revision of the state’s social studies curriculum standards. Barton founded and heads WallBuilders, a […]

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