That’s Right Nate

There is an old saying that winners write history.  Well nobody is a bigger winner than the state of Texas whose Board of Education approved a social studies curriculum that will finally tell the conservative side of history.  A lot of internal debate has been splitting the Texas Board with those who question Darwin’s theories of evolution on one side and those that scream and throw things when Darwin’s name is mentioned on the other.

The new version of history in Texas shows a country guided by God’s divine light until the Obama administration and features such important historical figures as The National Rifle Association, Focus on the Family, and Tom Landry.   This is an American guided by God and inspired by Ronald Reagan to be the greatest country in the Earth.   We are the country that won the American revolution, provided hope to countless immigrant refugees, save the world from Axis tyranny, found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and continues to thrive despite the Obama recession today.

Now, I know some of you supposed “historians” will say that some of those things aren’t true.   Well, really who is to say.   Historical records are spotty at best.   How do we know what is happening in the world today? We watch Fox News.   Simply by being on Fox News, we know that something is news.  In much the same way, being in a text book will make things history.   We get irritated when madrases in the Middle East teach that the United States is a great Satan, but that’s because they aren’t winners.  They have no right to decide what is history.

Maybe a few small facts get changed.  Instead of Thomas Paine writing, “The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun,”  he now writes, “The Christian religion is worshiping the son of God.  I think it’s great.”   Sure, the meaning changes slightly, but which is the moral that you want your children to take away?   Will hip hop culture be as angry if black children can read that they were happier under slavery?  I think not.

The price of our unique greatness is that we must not only be great going forward, but we must accept the challenge of being great going backwards as well.   To do this we have to change a word here or a fact there, but it is a price I’m willing to pay and I’m glad to see Texas shares my vision.  I just hope they don’t secede before American textbook companies start printing to this curriculum.  As one of the largest states, Texas has a huge impact on what appears in books all over the country.

Kay Bailey Hutchinson with liberal children's entertainer Clifford the Big Red Dog

Last night, in a stunning blow to President Obama, Governor Rick Perry won the nomination for another run at the Texas governor’s mansion.   Striking a resounding victory against business as usual incumbent driven politics, lone star voters sent a powerful message by voting for Rick Perry’s reelection. Perry called his win “a very important moment in our party’s history,” coming after wins in governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, and the special Senate election to replace Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts.

Perry’s opponent Kay Bailey Hutchinson was clearly Obama’s choice for the seat as can be seen on her campaign page where she comes out strongly for hot button liberal issues like the second amendment, family values, and increased border security.  Texas voters saw through her liberal track record.  “I think the message is pretty clear: conservatism has never been stronger than it is today, and we are taking our country back,” Mr. Perry said.

It wasn’t a great day all around for Texas however as incumbent Don McLeroy—a creationist and critic of church-state separation—narrowly lost his re-election bid for the powerful State Board of Education to challenger Thomas Ratliff in the March 2 Republican primary.  With McLeroy’s defeat a lot of dreams for history books that don’t leave out God’s divine role in the founding of American from history books or replace God’s love with a whole bunch of sciencey stuff in biology books.

Still, Perry’s victory remains the big news for the night and a huge blow to the Obama administration and to incumbents

In 2005, with the liberal and homosexual agendas making huge inroads in Texas, the state found itself in increasing danger of a referendum making gay marriage legal and ending life as they know it in the lone star state forever.   Now Texans, don’t cotton to those kind of changes and they sure don’t take them lying down.   A referendum was overwhelmingly passed that not only banned gay marriage, but also declared, “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

The state of Texas had spoken.  In order to prevent homosexuals from getting married, the state would no longer recognize marriage of any kind.  This was the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for many longtime married couples in the state.  It must have been quite a shock for a lot of children in the state to learn that not only were their parents not married, but neither were their grandparents.  When asked for comment,  Jerry Strickland, a representative for the Texas Attorney General said, “The Texas Constitution and the marriage statute are entirely constitutional. We will continue to defend both in court.”

Kelly Shackelford, president of the Liberty Legal Institute in Plano explained the language was designed to be broad enough to prevent the creation of domestic partnerships, civil unions or other arrangements that would give same-sex couples many of the benefits of marriage.  In fact, it prevents two lesbians and two gay men from engaging in heterosexual marriages and then simply swapping partners to get around legal restrictions.

As a non-Texan I can only admire this kind of bravery.  It reminds me of the scorched Earth techniques used to frustrate Napoleon and later Hitler.   By sacrificing their own marriages Texas has struck a blow to defend the sanctity of those very marriages that they can no longer have.   I believe there is a lesson here for the rest of us.

Eric Clapton’s song Layla is a very key piece of rock and roll history.   Clapton had written that song to George Harrison’s wife Patty.   In fact, Eric Clapton was eventually successful in getting her to leave the Beatle guitarist for him.  It was a tribute to the two guitarists’ friendship, the  free love of the 1960s, or heavy drug use that the 2 men remained very good friends.   I would have hated to be in Eric Clapton’s position.   When you convince somebody to leave their happily married life you now have a ton of responsibility you wouldn’t normally have in a relationship.   When you tell somebody that you have a once in a life time love and that even the bonds of matrimony shouldn’t hold you apart, it makes it tough to leave her alone the following Saturday to go drinking with your buddies.

There was a big rally in Austin of nearly 200 Texas secessionists yesterday.   These secessionists are sometimes called tenthers because they  believe that everything from Social Security to Medicare to the federal highway system violates the Tenth Amendment. According to the petition, Texas officials must either “immediately move for the restoration of the complete and unadulterated Sovereignty of Texas, explicitly adhering to the 10th Amendment wording of the U.S. Constitution,” or “move immediately for complete Secession from the United States of America.”

I hate to see Texas go, but like all conservatives I am very concerned with following the original intent of our founding fathers regardless of how contradictory it can be at times.   This brings us back to that Eric Claption, George, and Patty Harrison love triangle.

When Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, he had actually sent Robert Livingston and James Monroe to buy New Orleans and West Florida from Napoleon for up to $10 million.   At first, the French weren’t interested, but after losing Haiti and needing money to pay for costly European wars, the French agreed to sell the entirety of the Louisiana Purchase to the Americans for $15 million.  The problem is, this is not what Thomas Jefferson had wanted.   In fact, he was pretty sure he couldn’t do it constitutionally because the Constitution said nothing about a President having the power to buy new land.   In the end, he tried to make the deal as a treaty to get around the Constitution.

When Texas first joined the Union, we made the kind of promises to Texas that Eric Clapton had made to Patty Harrison.   We told Texas that they should be with us and we wouldn’t free their slaves or make them convert to Catholicism like the Mexicans would.   Now at first the United States refused to allow Texas into the Union, but Texas was crafty.  Sam Houston threatened to ally itself with England and the US didn’t think they had a choice.  In many ways, this is analogous to a woman pretending to be pregnant to get you to marry her.   Frankly, our whole relationship with Texas has been based on that kind of deception.   It is clearly time to let Texas go and in fact the really infuriating thing is you know Texas is the type of state that will eventually start calling us and bothering us to take it back when as a country we are ready to move on with our own lives.

Like Eric Claption, we made promises to Texas, but at the time we didn’t reallize we were being played.   Texas has always been a playa and Texas will continue to be one.  The moral of the story is that when you see how a state or territory treats the country its with, it is a very good indication of how it will treat you.   We can still buy our oil from Texas and as they’re trying to replace science with the Bible I am pretty sure there are a lot of things they’ll need to buy from us.   In fact, for every 88 cents that Texas sends to the United States government, it gets $1 worth of services back.  In the end we will be money ahead by letting them go.  Maybe they’ll go back to Mexico.  This was never going to be a long term relationship and unfortunately, it’s gone on way too long.

I started to make a video montage that I hoped would convince Texas to stay in the union.  I had that catchy Against All Odds song by Phil Collins cued up and was all set to make the ultimate sappy video of the great times we’ve had together, but then it hit me like a ton of bricks.  When one partner keeps threatening to leave, it isn’t a healthy relationship. It is called emotional blackmail.  Even though it pains me to say it, perhaps it is time for the United States to secede from Texas.  This video captured my feelings at the moment.  It really isn’t the warm and sappy video I had intended, but maybe it is the video I needed to make.  What really hurts is the one person who would probably understand how I’m feeling is Dr. Phil and he’s a Texan.

Maybe, its just me, but the more I hear people complain about the economy the madder I get. It isn’t so much that I disagree that the economy is in a bit of a slow spell so much as I get tired of hearing it all blamed on the President. The reason that the economy is having issues isn’t George Bush or the Republicans, but the Democrat party and the local Democrat elected officials. If you want to find states where things are booming, look for Republican controlled states.

Case in point, Texas is doing terrific right now. The fact that Texans don’t complain much probably obscures this fact from the rest of the country, but in this Republican state Maserati sales are up 86 percent so far this year, according to the TexAuto Facts Report.

Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent are expanding their luxury stores at the Galleria shopping mall. New construction permits in the city have jumped by almost 30 percent. The region added more than 100,000 jobs last year. And the mayor just proposed a dream budget for next year featuring more cops and lower property taxes.

Now, this may be a result of belt tightening as well because the Maserati GranTurismo does get 30 mph on the highway, but the point is Houston in particular and Texas in general is doing great. If the other American cities would return to the work ethic that made this country great instead of looking to Uncle Sam for more handouts, they could achieve the same type of success.

“We know that everybody is talking about a recession in the U.S., but we’re not experiencing that here,” said Tracye McDaniel, executive vice president of the Greater Houston Partnership, a business development group. “We exist in this bubble, if you will.”

This past week the Texas board of education stopped an effort by teacher’s groups to hijackthe statewide English curriculum and instead turned the job over to Washington DC based Consultant StandardsWork.  There is a reason that we have modeled so much of our country’s educational sytem after Texas and it is impressive moves like this to keep educational policy in the hands of professionals and away from special interests like teachers groups that we as a nation must applaud.

The meeting began when a proposal the teachers had been working on for the past 3 years was roundly rejected by the State Board of Education’s social conservative block 9-6.  Many on the board were resentful that the teachers had been working behind the scenes over the past 3 years with educational consultants to devise their plan.  Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, said some teachers and their supporters “subverted” the process of writing the curriculum standards by working behind the scenes to influence the final version of the plan. “We don’t want to say we’re not listening to teachers, but I am very frustrated,” she said. “This process has become a joke and mockery.”

Fortunately, with litle time the State Board of Education was able to call up Republican Education Consultants StandardsWork to draft a new curriculum.  According to StandardsWork the thing that seperates the company from others is its “Customized, grassroots approach to reform initiatives.”

According to StandardsWork’s company website (http://www.goalline.org/) the seeds of StandardsWork were planted in 1991 when [Leslye] Arsht helped U.S. Department of Education Secretary Lamar Alexander promote America 2000. That initiative was then-President George H. W. Bush’s campaign to engage communities in education reform. One of the six national education goals reflected in that strategy was that American students leave grades four, eight, and twelve “having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history and geography.”

Fortunately, the Board of Education in Texas did the right thing by going with a group that has been at the forefront of the educational success of the last 14 years rather than the teachers who continue to be a lodestone around the neck of our sinking schools.  You’d think everybody would see the wisdom of this decision, but you’d be wrong.  Some board members and teachers complained. 

“The state board is split between members who respect the opinions of teachers and education experts and … other members who clearly don’t,” said Kathy Miller, president of the education watchdog group Texas Freedom Network. “So this board is increasingly unable to complete tasks with efficiency and a respect for informed debate and expert opinion.

“How am I supposed to vote on a document when I’ve had it in my hands for slightly over an hour?” asked angered board member Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democrat from Corpus Christi. “How are we supposed to reply to our constituents? I don’t understand that. I can’t support a document that I haven’t had a chance to read.”

“I find it’s really wild that we can work for three years on a project and then the board is so qualified they can pull it out of their hat overnight,” said board member Pat Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who, like other board members, received the substituted document when it was slipped under her hotel door less than an hour before their meeting was set to convene Friday morning.

This is a reading curriculum lady.  If you’re making the decisions and you can’t read a simple 100 page document in an hour than maybe you shouldn’t be involved in the process in the first place.  This is an important blow for the type of top down educational reform that President Bush has been trying to bring to this country for the past 8 years.  I applaud the Texas Board for picking consultants who know what they’re talking about over the special interest teacher groups.

One of the great joys of starting this blog has been my communications and friendship with TJ Baker-Holm whose candidate for Republican nominee in the 18th District of Texas House of Representatives I highlighted before.  I can’t say enough about Ms. Baker-Holm and the fact that her own biography reads like everything the Republican party says it wants to see from people–selfmade, responsible, community involved.  TJ is a single mother who I believe brings a very different perspective to politics from most of congress.  If we are truely serious about bringing different voices to the table in this country Ms. Baker-Holm should have a seat of honor at that table.  I am hopeful and confident that Texas politics has not seen the last of her.  There is going to be an upcoming feature on her in Skirt magazine and I strongly encourage people to check out the Skirt website at http://houston.skirt.com/ and their talented editor Dusty Gilbert.

In the 18th District, the current incumbent is Sheila Jackson Lee who came to congress with a lot of Enron funding.  She is best known for her insistence on complimentary upgrades to first class while flying.  Her Republican candidate this time is John Faulk who TJ Baker Holm flat out accuses of receiving monetary help in the election from Ms. Jackson Lee.  Faulk and Baker have much bad blood between them inclduing Faulk sending a recent certified letter to Ms Baker Holm’s mother. 

I know that the 18th is Barbara Jordan’s district and I do reallize there are strong reasons why an African-American representative makes sense for the district, but if people are serious about change in the district, I believe that the 18th District’s Mike Taylor has the best chance for making the change a reality.  Taylor (http://www.miketaylor08.us/) is an advocate of smaller more managable government and though I am in no means a libertarian, Taylor may be just what the 18th needs.  His chances of winning are small, but the impact of every vote for him over a simple straight ticket or leaving the contest blank is huge.  That’s why I’m making Mike Taylor my first endorsement on this blog.

I just heard back from TJ Baker Holm’s campaign that she lost in the primary for House of Representatives in the 18th District.  I will not copy and paste the email that I received, but to make a long story short there were some strange dealings in the Republican primary including allegations that Holm’s opponent received financial backing from Sheila Lee Jackson the Democratic incumbent candidate.  I don’t know if this is true or not, but it would certainly be a new low in dirty politics.  The final results were:

John Faulk        5,617    79%
TJ BAKER-HOLM        1,533    21%

If even half of what I was told by Ms. Baker-Holm’s campaign is accurate.  It is indeed a sad day for Texas politics.