Last Friday the ultra-conservative faction of the Texas State Board of Education enacted new curriculum requirements for textbooks on social studies which include an alarming emphasis on ideology over facts.   The same fools who want to claim Genesis is science and Darwin is speculation now want to ignore Thomas Jefferson and anything else supporting separation of church and state.  Another amendment to the curriculum attempts to justify McCarthyism.

This is not education, it is brainwashing.  It is bad enough we have this kind of posturing by the politicians, but to write the posturing into our educational system, which is already devoted to teaching to standardized tests instead of preparing students to adapt to changing world, further sends our children down the path of irrelevance.

And more than just Texans are harmed by this triumph of indoctrination over education, as Texas is one of the biggest markets for textbooks.

America didn’t become great just by preaching it.   We became great by being the place where a free flow of ideas produced more and better new ideas, and where people were encouraged from an early age to be innovators.  If we let the Texas Taliban ideology dictate the content of our students’ curriculum, we are in serious danger of losing our edge at a time where competitiveness on  a world-wide basis has never been higher.

It is once again the Church of the Holy No(t if we can’t take credit for it) versus the Church of the Holy Handout bringing Congress to a standstill.  This time it’s a group of Republican Senators wanting to block stimulus funding of alternative energy because some of the manufacturing will take place overseas.  Rather than address WHY that happens and how to solve the problem, they just want to block it.  And if it keeps us in thrall to Holy Oil, so much the better.

The reason we have not seen the investment we need in manufacturing of alternative energy products in the US is because the investment is not going to happen until and unless there is  stable environment for it so investors can have a reasonable chance of making a return on their money.  Temporary stimulus bucks don’t do that.  A long term plan that prices carbon emissions will.

It is time for Congress to recognize the science side of capitalism as well as the religious one.   Pricing carbon will steer the market forces towards creating a United States that is self-sufficient in energy and can lead the world out of the Carbon Age.  Or we can keep on as we are doing, and eventually manufacturing will come back – as sweatshops where our grandkids and great-grandkids make cheap trinkets for the Chinese and Indian middle class.

John Linder (R-GA) announced  on February 27 that he will not seek re-election to Congress.  Following on the heels of similar announcements from Joseph Kennedy and Evan Bayh, this is an excellent trend.

I have disagreed with Linder on just about everything, and found him such a frustrating person to correspond with that at one point I finally put in a letter to him something I had been thinking about many politicians for years:  ”Are you really that stupid, or do you just think I am?”  He supported laws which trash our Constitutional liberties in the name of delusions of security.  When asked specific questions, he did not respond.

To those who are thinking of running for these seats in November,  I ask the following:

Are you an American first, or a [insert the name of your favorite church or political party]?

If you are not willing to tell the Republican or Democratic bishops that you are voting your beliefs and not theirs, then please do not run.  Better yet, run as an independent.