Frogs, Science, and Texas Anti-History

Do you know a child interested in science? Then go to the library or a bookstore and get that child this book.

It's PZ Myers-endorsed:

I just got my hands on a very interesting book for the younger set: it's aimed at kids in grades 5-8, and it's a description of the life and work of a real live scientist, someone who does both field and lab work, and studies development and the effects of environmental toxins on reproduction. The man is Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley, and the book is The Frog Scientist(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Pamela Turner. It's excellent stuff — it humanizes the scientist and also does a very good job of letting kids see what scientists actually do in their research, and why they're doing it. If you've got a young one who's thinking about being a scientist when she or he grows up, you might want to grab this book as a little inspiring incentive.

Plus it has lots of fabulous photos of frogs. You can't go wrong.

And it's a tiny ray of light in the approaching permanent night of the Texas Textbook Wars.

Tristero reminds us that this mess is about much more than textbooks:

The intent is two-fold:

1. To render a public school education all but worthless by teaching blatant lies and distortions, thereby advancing the long-desired rightwing meme is, in fact, worthless and should be eliminated.

2. As long as there must be a public education system, indoctrinate children to in the lie that rightwing/christianist authoritorianism is a core American value and not, in fact, the very antithesis of the Americanism the Founders intended.

Textbook procurement protocols must be changed to eliminate the influence of these ignorant, malicious lunatics from the national discourse. Otherwise, we deserve everything that's coming to us.

And via digby, Walter Shapiro give us the conservative draft of history:

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) took the oath of office on March 4, 1933, the national unemployment rate stood at 25 percent, in part because of the interventionist liberal economic policies of the Hoover administration. But even in the depths of the Depression, millions of Americans saw the cigarette-smoking, martini-drinking FDR as a beacon of hope, since he had pledged during his victorious 1932 campaign to balance the federal budget. As Roosevelt delivered his Inaugural Address on a cold, gray Saturday afternoon, the new president's signature phrase ("We have nothing to fear but fear itself") implied that he would restore economic confidence by following prudent policies to strengthen the free-market system that always has been, as we have learned, the source of American greatness.

Little known to most voters, though, Roosevelt and his closest economic advisers (Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell) had been influenced by the socialist-leaning doctrines of a controversial European economist named John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). During his first months in office – known as the Hundred Days after the brief second French dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) – Roosevelt enacted a dizzying series of policies designed to centralize economic power in the hands of Ivy League-educated bureaucrats in Washington.

Not even my FDR-hating republican grandparents remembered it like that.