Hey, Aynrandy: There's a Lady With a Lamp Here Wants a Word With You

What part of "immigrants built his country" does the Tribble-Toupeed One not understand?

In an interview that aired Sunday, Paul said that those immigrants "are not bad people" but added the United States "can't invite the whole world" inside its borders.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/04/13/3194157/rand-paul-us-cant-invite-the-whole.html?sp=/99/164/#storylink=cpy

Not to mention that our only hope of future economic security is immigrants - illegal ,dark-skinned, non-xian, gay and everything else.

Also, unless you are 100 percent Native American, shut the fuck up about "illegal immigrants."

And just by the way, moron, a good definition of "bad people" is "people who want to run the United States despite having not the faintest idea of what this country stands for."

How to Stop Texas from Destroying American Education

The textbook wars aren't over; there is still hope for stopping the wingnut freakazoid anti-history Texas is determined to foist on the country.

You can support two members of the reality-based world running for the Texas school board, as explained in the following letters to The Nation magazine:

Austin, Tex.

Complaining about the backwardness of the state that gave America Barbara Jordan, Molly Ivins and LBJ is tempting, but it's more useful to participate in the electoral process. In 2008 most of the board's worst incumbents had no opponents. The extremists control the board because they always run, always get out the vote and always fund their candidates.

Fixing the Texas Board of Education just requires some effort and money. If Rebecca Bell-Metereau (voterebecca.com) and Judy Jennings (votejudyjennings.com) win election, the anti-education faction will be in a minority on the board. The districts are huge and gerrymandered, but they are winnable.

VICTOR YODAIKEN

San Marcos, Tex.

I am running for the Texas State Board of Education, in District 5. All of us must view our public education system as a treasure we must guard and nurture carefully, whether or not we have children in public school. My husband and I sent our two daughters to public school, and we volunteered our time to help improve the quality of education for our daughters and for other people's children as well.

I teach at a public university, and I have witnessed the recent deterioration of my students' preparedness for higher education. They have suffered under a relentless regime of preparing for tests, meanwhile failing to develop critical or creative thinking skills. The Texas Board of Education can turn this trend around if we elect reasonable people in Districts 3, 5 and 10. Texas textbooks' influence is huge. The curriculum and books in Texas must provide the best education we can offer in the twenty-first century.

REBECCA BELL-METEREAU

When your children and grandchildren are studying American history that profiles Harriet Tubman instead of Phyllis Schafly and identifies Joseph McCarthy as the un-American bigot he was, you can congratulate yourself that you made it possible because you supported candidates like Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau.

Making History Fungible

Blue Texan brings us a funny:

Dick Armey, the former Congressman from Texas and current teabagger, actually grew up in North Dakota — but he certainly sounds like he was educated by the Texas School Board.

“Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow,” Armey reported in his luncheon address.

No. Jamestown was founded strictly as a business venture by a group of entrepreneurial English noblemen looking to find gold. And the Jamestown colonists’ “look out for #1″ philosophy got a lot of them killed.

Armey seems to be referring to the Plymouth Colony, whose idealistic founders did not want to repeat the mistakes of Jamestown, and thus signed the Mayflower Compact, which called for “submission” to the “general good.”

The problem for Armey is that the for-profit Jamestown was an epic fail and the “socialist” Plymouth was a big success.

Armey is also confused about Alexander Hamilton.

“The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers,” Armey explained. [...]

A member of the audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government”?

Historian Armey was flummoxed by this new information. “Widely regarded by whom?” he challenged, suspiciously. “Today’s modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton.”

Ahem. Notes Dana Milbank, "Hamilton favored a national bank, presidents and senators who served for life and state governors appointed by the president."

Yes. As any high school student should know.

It is an on-going fascination of mine that the very same wingnuts who are constantly bragging about how much they love this country are so frequently pig-ignorant of its actual history.

I don't think it's genuine ignorance as much as the typical wingnut/freakazoid refusal to acknowledge any fact that does not fit perfectly into their un-American world view.

I doubt if it takes even 20 years for repugs to start insisting that the 2000 election was a historic landslide for bush, and 2008 an actual Palin victory that was stolen from her by a bunch of trial lawyers and handed to an illegal immigrant who didn't even speak English.

The Quitter Vs. Liberal George

Why study history? Because someday it might stop you from making a complete ass of yourself on national tv.

Blue Texan explains:

So Glenn Beck asked the Quitter who her favorite Founding Father is, and she answered “all of them” — which was, totally coincidentally, exactly same answer she gave Katie Couric when asked what newspapers she read.

Anyway, Beck wouldn’t have it, and when pressed, she came up with — tada! — George Washington.

Strange choice. I don’t know why Palin would admire someone who was soft on terror opposed to torture.

Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner] … I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause … for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.

There's more. Read the whole thing.

Don't Miss "The People Speak"

Regardless of whether you've read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States - and if you haven't, read it now - don't miss the documentary based on it this weekend.

The first time Howard Zinn's now-classic book "A People's History of the United States" appeared on TV was in "The Sopranos" on HBO, when Tony's teenage son A.J. came home from school with a copy of the book and told his parents that, according to Zinn, Columbus was a slaveowner and murderer. Tony got mad, and replied, "In this house Columbus is a hero. End of story!"

That was 1999. This Sunday, Dec. 13, Zinn's "The People Speak" – the documentary inspired by his books "A People's History" and "Voices of a People's History," will be broadcast on the History channel at 8 PM/7 Central.

The documentary "gives voice to those who spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history," says Anthony Arnove, who produced and co-directed the show and co-edited the "Voices" book. The featured voices "forged a nation from the bottom up with their insistence on equality and justice" and "remind us never to take liberty for granted."

The History channel is best-known for WWII documentaries, which has earned it the nickname "the Hitler channel." "The People Speak" made it onto this unlikely site apparently because of the irresistible actors who appear in the documentary, including Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Morgan Freeman, and Sandra Oh, along with music performances by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Eddie Vedder, among others.

My personal favorites on "The People Speak": Malcolm X's "Message to the Grass Roots" from 1963: "America's problem is us. We're her problem." And Frederick Douglass's 1857 words, read by Don Cheadle: "Power concedes nothing without a demand."

"We wanted to choose words that had some meaning today," Zinn told me; "Not from Supreme Court decisions or presidential speeches, but from some people you've never heard of."

There's also a soundtrack on CD, and a big "People Speak" website with video and a classroom study guide. A two-disk DVD will be out in January. The "People's History" book, meanwhile, has now sold two million copies.

And the Christopher Columbus part that got Tony Soprano mad? It's in the documentary: the Spanish priest Bartolomeo Las Casas' "Brief Account" of "The Devastation of the Indies" – read by Viggo Mortensen.

Watch it.