Category Archives: Social Studies

The Globe and Mail‘s Christie Blatchford has written one of the best pieces I’ve read on the “unequal toll” of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

While race remains the “back story” in the MSM, Blatchford puts to words what the images out of NOLA have been screaming all week…white folks got out of town, poor black folks didn’t (and the initial reponse of the government has been to treat the those remaining firstly like criminals and secondly like refugees).

Katrina’s unequal toll
‘Miss, with great respect for your race, I don’t see no white people here,’ Christie Blatchford is told in New Orleans

By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
Saturday, September 3, 2005 Updated at 1:59 AM EDT
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail (September 3, 2005)

Ernest (Dutch) Morial, after whom the New Orleans Convention Center was named, was the first African-American to graduate from the Louisiana State law school and later became the state’s first black assistant district attorney.

He necessarily must have been a proud, brave man.

On the small bronze plaque erected in his honour at one end of the sprawling building, which, for days now, has housed upward of 10,000 hurricane refugees, Mr. Morial is called “The Man of Firsts.”

Well, this week has marked another first, one that might have enraged and tormented him.

It is Mr. Morial’s people — African-Americans — who in the main as of late yesterday were still living in this battered city’s most appalling conditions and who, despite reports to the contrary, are weathering them with a terrible grace.

The people crowded into the convention centre are overwhelmingly black, yet the Big Easy is — was? — a relatively diverse city, with about 62 per cent of the population black and 28 per cent white. Yet rare are the white faces to be seen among these folks who have suffered so dreadfully, and rare are the white faces who even dare enter the fetid, revolting building.

As Autherine Algere said yesterday, as she took Globe and Mail photographer Fred Lum on a tour of the centre, past the foul, overflowing latrines, in one of which sits the body of a disabled woman who died in a handicapped stall; past the quiet area where the world’s maddest unofficial paramedic, Derrick Trahan, has set up a makeshift first-aid station; past J Section, which, unbelievably, because people will often self-segregate if it is not forced upon them, houses the Little Saigon part of the convention centre and is exclusively Vietnamese.

“Miss, with great respect for your race, I don’t see no white people here. Where they at? I live here, I know there’s plenty of white folk in New Orleans.”
Ms. Algere, who clutched her Bible in her right hand, looked upward to beg the Lord’s forgiveness for what she was about to say. “It was to hell with us Negroes.”

It was the closest to overt recognition, let alone complaint, of what television reporters call the “back story” of this horrific natural disaster: As the American South was once divided into slave and master, so was the aftermath of hurricane Katrina clearly divided along racial lines. The white folks in the main got out of town; the black ones didn’t — not, as they are quick to tell you, because they didn’t want to go, but because they couldn’t.

Donelle Deffina and Davonna Good, a couple from Eldorado Hills, Calif., near Sacramento, were two of the rare white faces still in the convention centre yesterday. Tourists who were booted out of their hotel after the storm hit, they were brought here Tuesday about noon, when the cavernous place was virtually empty, occupied only by the families of local police officers (who, the women say, were shortly afterward taken out).

“Last night,” Ms. Deffina spat furiously, gesturing at all those collapsed on the hard concrete floor all around her, “these people were told by a Louisiana state trooper that in four hours, 300 buses would be here.

“Well, they put their elderly and their sick up front, all neat, and the babies. They cleaned up their own areas and then they stood in line until well after midnight. Not a single bus came.

“We’ve been here four days and we have not seen one person of authority. No FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Authority]. No Red Cross. No National Guard. No one.

“Don’t you believe what you’ve been hearing,” she said fiercely. “These people are great. They were brought here, as we were, by the authorities, lots of them rescued from rooftops, and they haven’t received any medication attention, any water, or one word of encouragement.”

Earlier this week, the convention centre was the site of some of the worst rioting New Orleans has seen since the levees burst and almost 80 per cent of the city was flooded. And there was truth in those widely reported stories, as people will tell you in the most awful straightforward way.

Two young girls were apparently raped in one or another of the bathrooms; there are reports a 13-year-old boy was also raped, his throat slit; and two days ago, when the felicitously named Regina Hamilton was parking her car on the second floor of a downtown garage, to keep it safe, she was carjacked by an armed man who then began to paw her. “Please,” she whimpered, “not after everything else.” He grabbed her hard on one arm, rape his clear intent, and Mrs. Hamilton slipped from his grasp and jumped to the ground below, snapping both ankles in the process.

She was crawling, painfully, back to the convention centre when two young men in a golf cart saw her and came to her rescue.

As of yesterday, reunited with her 19-year-old daughter Kelley, Mrs. Hamilton had not yet received even an Aspirin for the pain; her pleas for medical help to the police officers outside fell on ears that were, if not deaf, numb.

Not until Mr. Traham, who relying on a high-school first-aid course, appointed himself the convention centre medic five days ago, came to pick her up on the little flatbed wagon he drives throughout the centre, did she even receive any quasi-expert medical attention.

Everyone from President George W. Bush on down is now talking cheerfully about all the aid pouring into the New Orleans area.

But virtually none had arrived by day’s end yesterday — only heavily armed reinforcements for the local New Orleans police, much-praised by the refugees here for their kindness, if not their ability to do anything.

The new show of force has served to quell the lawlessness and looting, but it is also intimidating. When there was an explosion (a fire, it turns out, down by the pier) on Wednesday night, Ronate Walker, who is 24, decided he’d had enough and decided he had to get his extended family — wife, sister, her husband, two grandmas and one grandpa and his own three little daughters — out of Dodge.

He found a parked car with the keys in it, drove around the block (so he’d be on the side closest to his relatives) and tried to corral his gang. But they wouldn’t leave; they were too afraid.

So Mr. Walker parked the car where he’d found it, keys where he’d found them, and found himself surrounded by armed police, telling him he was lucky the jails were closed. “The ground was shaking,” he said tearfully. “I was just trying to look after my family.”

Everywhere Fred and I went yesterday, people came running up to us. They knew, by Fred’s cameras, we were press. They knew we couldn’t help. But they were so grateful that their story might be told (and, I believe, to see a couple of white people who were not afraid of them because of their skin colour) that they embraced us like friends.

Most of them were brought here, or told to come here, from the safe high ground of local highways where many of them spent days waiting for buses and help, after they were rescued from roofs and attics.

Nothing happens. Nothing changes. And yet as each new rumour arises of an army of buses on its way, they line up, orderly-like, their old people and babies up front and wait.

“They’re treating us like animals,” Rozz Smith, a 44-year-old motivational speaker, said yesterday. She also gave us a tour, hobbling because of the toe she broke when she was trampled in a stampede over something — gunshots in the night, rumours of food or buses, I forget which now. “Every night they say the buses are coming. They never come.”

The medic, Mr. Traham, said nine people have died in the centre named after Dutch Morial. They’re kept in what everyone calls “the fridge.” They were taken there, not by any authorities, not by police, but by the people who watched them die and wither away, and who now can hardly bear to remember that for a few days here, these strangers were family.

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The Gallup Organization has just released a comparison of public opinion trends regarding the current war in Iraq and the Vietnam War. There are some interesting findings, here’s the summary:

Although public support for both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars was strong as each conflict began, at least as measured by Gallup’s “mistake” question, opposition to the latter has escalated much more quickly. Within a year and three months of the Iraq war’s inception, a majority of Americans said it was a mistake. It wasn’t until over three years after the inception of the Vietnam War that a majority called it a mistake.

At the same, Americans much more quickly perceived that the Vietnam War was a major problem facing the United States, with over two-thirds naming it as the nation’s most important problem within the war’s second year. By contrast, even today, some two years and five months after the Iraq war began, only a little more than a fourth of Americans say it is the nation’s top problem.

In short, Americans have been quicker to oppose the Iraq war, but less likely to consider it the top problem facing the nation.

With all of this, it is worth remembering that a good deal of the significant societal impact of the Vietnam War did not take place until long after the war’s two-and-a-half-year mark (essentially where the Iraq war is today). Vietnam continued to be a major factor in American life as late as the presidential election of 1972 — some seven years after it began. And — as noted above — the cost of the Vietnam War in terms of human lives was ultimately many degrees higher than the cost of the Iraq war so far. But the fact that a majority of Americans already say Iraq was a mistake, and that it has become perhaps the most significant issue facing the Bush administration today suggests that comparisons between the two situations are not totally unreasonable.

The Media Research Center—the folks you trust to track down all that liberal media bias—rang the CyberAlert alarm bells today about a NBC News report on Tuesday night.

As part of a story comparing the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, NBC reporter Jim Miklazewski oberved that “while there are marked differences between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, the rhetoric, at least, is beginning to sound much the same.”

Miklaszewski noted that “Rumsfeld ignored the latest polls which indicate a majority of Americans now think it was a mistake to go to war in Iraq.” [on screen: CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll “Iraq war a mistake?” Yes: 54%]

The Rumsfeld confirmed that he could care less about what Americans think: “I think it will have the support of the American people, and it will be sustained and we will be successful.”

So what does the Bush Administration do? Well, send more troops to Iraq. Can anybody say LBJ?

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The Globe and Mail has an interesting story on Rev. Pat Robertson’s call for the assissination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, which includes statements from US government officials “distancing” themselves from Robertson’s “doctrine of assassination.”

The self same government responsible for the 1963 slaying of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and several attempts to kill Fidel Castro. In 2001, George W. Bush gave the CIA an explicit go-ahead to carry out covert missions to assassinate Osama bin Laden and his supporters around the world, effectively lifting a 25-year ban on such activities. (See the list below of US-back assassination plots since World War II.)

According to some reports, the US government which was closely involved the failed coup in Venezuela last year had plans “neutralize” Chavez if he was reelected (which he was, of course).

Oh, but now the US has Executive Order 12333, which says “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” So I guess Hugo doesn’t have to worry about the toxin-spiked cigars, exploding conch shells, even a wet suit slathered with fungus spores, all of which the US government tried to use against Chavez’s buddy Fidel.

The most hilarious response was from war criminal and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Our department doesn’t do that kind of thing, it’s against the law.” I guess Rummy draws the line at the torture of prisoners, killing of civilians, and leading illegal wars.

The most stupid response to the affair had be from Senator Richard Lugar, who accused Chavez of creating the network to spread his left-wing message across the continent. Duh!

In response to Robertson’s rant, Hugo, said, “I don’t even know who this person is.”

Chavez then offered to help needy Americans with cheap supplies of gasoline. “We want to sell gasoline and heating fuel directly to poor communities in the United States,” he told reporters at the end of his Cuba visit.

The Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA owns Citgo, which has 14,000 gas stations in the United States.

Just for the record, here’s a list of prominent foreign individuals whose assassination (or planning for same) the United States has been involved in since the end of the Second World War. The list does not include several assassinations in various parts of the world carried out by anti-Castro Cubans employed by the CIA and headquartered in the United States. (Source: <a href=”http://www.powells.com/biblio/72-1567512534-0″Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum.)

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To find the latest on America’s favorite war protesting mom check out Truthout.org’s “One Mother’s Last Stand.”

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The billionaire Rev. Pat Robertson—Yale Law School grad, former Republican presidential contender, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and the Christian Broadcasting Network, and host of the “Christian” talk show “The 700 Club”—has declared that under a “doctrine of assassination” US agents should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez…

“I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war,” Robertson said. “And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United … This is in our sphere of influence, so we can’t let this happen.” On Monday, Robertson said on the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club”: “We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability.”

“We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” he continued. “It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.” His comments came on the same day that Hugo Chavez traveled to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro.

If you didn’t realize it before, religious extremism is out of control in the USA and while most Americans don’t believe it, Christian extremism is potentially much more harmful to the world than Isalmic extremism.

In October 2003, Robertson suggested that the US State Department should be blown up with a nuclear device. (BTW, he was not arrested as a potential terrorist for saying: “If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that’s the answer.”)

At the Republican National Convention in 1992, Robertson said that that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

He agreed with “Moral Majority” founder and Southern Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU and the People for the American Way.”

In light of his past comments, the suggestion that the US should assasinate the democratically elected leader of one of the world’s major oil suppliers is not that suprising. The failed coup in Venezuela was backed by the US, so Robertson is merely voicing the current thinking of the Bush Administration?

Here’s a sampling of other public opinions Rev. Robertson has expressed:

“There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.” (November 1993 during an address to the American Center for Law and Justice)

“That [separation of church and state] was never in the Constitution, however much the liberals laugh at me for saying it, they know good and well it was never in the Constitution! Such language only appeared in the constitution of the communist Soviet Union.” (The 700 Club, Jan 22, 1995)

“If anybody understood what Hindus really believe, there would be no doubt that they have no business administering government policies in a country that favors freedom and equality. … Can you imagine having the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as defense minister, or Mahatma Gandhi as minister of health, education, and welfare? The Hindu and Buddhist idea of karma and the Muslim idea of kismet, or fate condemn the poor and the disabled to their suffering. … It’s the will of Allah. These beliefs are nothing but abject fatalism, and they would devastate the social gains this nation has made if they were ever put into practice.” (The New World Order, page 219) [Sounds a lot like the US to me.]

“Presbyterians are the spirit of the Antichrist.” (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, p. 85)

“The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement… We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America.” (The 700 Club, September 27, 1993)

“Satan is a tool of God’s love in the sense that he forces us to see God’s loving patience.” (Answers to 200 of Life’s most Probing Questions)

“If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it’ll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn’t necessarily something we ought to open our arms to.” (The 700 Club, June 8, 1998)

“Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together.” (The 700 Club, January 21, 1993)

By his own words Robertson is clearly a warmonger, promoter of religious intolerance, and hate among other things. In Caracas, pro-Chavez legislator Desire Santos Amaral accused Robertson of shedding his Christian values.

“This man cannot be a true Christian. He’s a fascist,” Santos said. “This is part of the policies of aggression from the right wing in the North against our revolution.” Well, think I’d have to agree with that.
__________________________
Aug 23, 12:21 PM EDT
Televangelist Pat Robertson Calls for Assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

By SUE LINDSEY
Associated Press Writer

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has suggested that American agents assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stop his country from becoming “a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.”

An official of a theological watchdog group on Tuesday criticized Robertson’s statement as “chilling.”

“We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” Robertson said Monday on the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club.”

“We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” he continued. “It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

Chavez has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of President Bush, accusing the United States of conspiring to topple his government and possibly backing plots to assassinate him. U.S. officials have called the accusations ridiculous.

“You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,” Robertson said. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war … and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”

On Tuesday, critics objected to Robertson’s statements.

“It’s absolutely chilling to hear a religious leader call for the murder of any political leader, no matter how much he disagrees with such a leader’s policies or practices,” said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

David Brock, president of Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog group, said the remarks should discredit Robertson as a spokesman for the religious right.

Robertson, 75, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate, accused the United States of failing to act when Chavez was briefly overthrown in 2002.

A Robertson spokeswoman, Angell Watts, said he would not do interviews Tuesday and had no statement elaborating on his remarks.

A call seeking comment from the U.S. State Department was not immediately returned Tuesday.

Chavez was believed to be in Cuba, but his whereabouts were unknown and no media access was announced.

In Caracas, pro-Chavez legislator Desire Santos Amaral accused Robertson of shedding his Christian values.

“This man cannot be a true Christian. He’s a fascist,” Santos said. “This is part of the policies of aggression from the right wing in the North against our revolution.”

Santos said she thinks U.S.-Venezuelan relations could still improve but comments by “charlatans and fascists” like Robertson only get in the way.

Venezuela is the fifth largest oil exporter and a major supplier of oil to the United States. The CIA estimates that U.S. markets absorb almost 59 percent of Venezuela’s total exports.

Venezuela’s government has demanded in the past that the United States crack down on Cuban and Venezuelan “terrorists” in Florida who they say are conspiring against Chavez.

Robertson has made controversial statements in the past. In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

—

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Today’s New York Times has a couple of interesting articles on the so-called “evolution debate” (there is no debate among mainstream scientists).

First, in his “On Language” column in the NYT Magazine William Safire scrutinizes “creationism,” “evolutionism,” “neo-creos,” and the PR firm for ID, The Discovery Institute, which just happens to be the subject of the page one story “Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive” of the newspaper.

As part of on ongoing series called “The Evolution Debate”, the article by Jodi Wilgoren examines the Discovery Institute, which is the propaganda machine behind the idea of “intellegent design.” The Seattle-based Discovery Institute (founded in 1990 as a branch of the right-wing Hudson Institute) is funded, not surprisingly, by the same right wing Christians who backed Bush in recent elections, which explains why W. is mouthing their stance on the evolution v. ID “debate.” But the Discovery Institute also gets mainstream backing, including $1 million a year from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

The Times reports that “since the presidential election last fall, the [intelligent design] movement has made inroads and evolution has emerged as one of the country’s fiercest cultural battlefronts, with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require criticism of evolution.”

The Discovery Institute also pushed the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a “teach the controversy” approach and helped design a curriculum to support it, according The Times. Institute talking points almost made it into the No Child Left Behind Act, too. “A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute’s talking points. “Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy,” was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.”

According to The Times “these successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” in favor of a “broadly theistic understanding of nature.”

A couple of sidebars…

One of the “Ads by Google” posted on The New Times on the Web version of the Discovery Institute article was:

“Believe in Jesus?
We’ll pay you $75 right now to complete a simple survey!
PaidSurveysOnline.com”

And, as Signe Wilkinson illustrates in this cartoon for the Philadelphia Daily News, it’s too bad W. hasn’t come up with an intelligent design for Iraq.

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Austin Community College is facing a barrage of criticism after a report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the college told a veteran that his tours of duty in Iraq disqualified him from receiving in-state tuition rates.

College tells veteran he is not a Texan

By Jay Root
Star-Telegram Austin Bureau
AUSTIN – Carl Basham was born in Beeville, registered to vote in Travis County in 1998, holds a Texas driver’s license and does his banking in Austin.

So he was shocked when Austin Community College told him a few weeks ago that he didn’t qualify as a Texas resident “for tuition purposes.” Basham, a former Marine corporal, said he was even more shocked when officials told him why: After two tours of duty in Iraq, he’s been out of the state too long to qualify.

“They told me that I have to physically live in the state of Texas for at least a year,” Basham said in an interview Tuesday. “It kind of hurts.” Austin Community College officials were unable to specify why Basham isn’t considered a Texas resident, only that he didn’t meet state requirements as determined by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. A spokeswoman said privacy laws prevent a discussion of Basham’s case.An official at another college said the fact that he entered the military in another state nearly a decade ago, despite his deep Texas ties, might be the reason.

Either way, two state officials said bureaucratic technicalities should not prevent the decorated veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom from being considered a Texas resident — and paying about $500 a semester in tuition instead of around $2,600.

“Mr. Basham has gone to war for us, and I intend to go to war for him!” said state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, in a letter to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. “We owe it to our returning service men and women to make it as easy and uncomplicated as possible for them to resume their normal lives.”

Likewise, state Rep. Suzanna Hupp, R-Lampasas, who represents many veterans serving at Fort Hood, said she wants to investigate the matter.

“I think we need to look into it further. It doesn’t make sense that people who have bullets flying over their head aren’t treated properly when they get back,” she said.

The higher education board is investigating the case, an official there said.

Basham, 27, said he has to come up with about $3,000 now to pay for tuition and books as he works toward a degree in emergency medical care. Although he expects to get his college paid for eventually by the federal government, he said those GI benefits won’t kick in for several more months, so he’s stuck with high out-of-pocket expenses for now.

Basham’s wife, Jolie, said an admissions officer at the college kept asking for documents proving his Texas residency. He brought in his driver’s license, car registration papers, voter registration card, bank records and tax returns — all sporting a Texas address.

“She said, ‘It’s really your military service that’s holding you back.’ I couldn’t believe that those words came out of her mouth,” Jolie Basham, a California native, recalled.

She said it stung her husband badly to be told he was not a Texan.

“He’s always Texas this and Texas that,” she said. “It’s always been his home.”

Jolie Basham remembered her husband’s reaction when he got his car stolen last year while they were stationed in California at Camp Pendleton.

She said the Texas plates had been removed and mangled, but Cpl. Basham refused to replace them.

“He sat there and hammered ’em out and screwed them back on his car,” she said. “He refused to get California plates.”

Basham, the son of an air traffic controller who often was tranferred around Texas as he moved up the career ladder, lived most of his youth in Waco. During his junior year, he followed his parents to Monroe, La., where he graduated from high school.

It is there that he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Over two enlistments and eight years of service, Basham was awarded a Combat Action Ribbon, a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and other decorations. He served as a driver and an auto mechanic in two tours of duty in Iraq, each lasting seven months, he said.

Basham was honorably discharged from the Marines on Jan. 31. He said he got to Texas as fast as he could, but he had to stay in California until his wife, who had pregnancy complications, gave birth in May.

The Texas Legislature has generally gone out of its way to ensure military veterans pay the lowest possible tuition. But it’s not a perfect system, and some veterans end up falling through the bureaucratic cracks.

Donna Darovich, spokeswoman for the Tarrant County College District, said the big problem is that Basham entered the service in Louisiana, even though he only lived 1 1/2 years there.

“It basically doesn’t matter if you’ve lived here all your life,” she said. “Where you enlist is what kind of sets the stage for residency.”

Ray Grasshoff, a spokesman for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, could not say how many returning service members face the problem Basham has encountered. But he said officials were looking into his case now.

“Our staff is trying to talk to the ACC staff and trying to figure out what can be done if anything to resolve the issue,” Grasshoff said. “We, of course, support veterans and all they do for the country and want to make sure they get all the benefits they’re entitled to.”

Jay Root, (512) 476-4294 jroot@star-telegram.com

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Pastafarians of the world unite!!

Bobby Henderson needs your help in his crusade to get Flying Spaghetti
Monsterism in the curriculum of Kansas’ public schools.

The Kansas State Board of Education is considering inclusion of the George W. Bush endorsed theory of life known as “Intelligent Design” along side the teaching of evolution in science classes. Henderson has written an open letter to the Kansas Board proposing to broaden the number of “alternative theories” Kansas students will learn to include Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

“Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith.”

In short he wants one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

If the non-scientific, faith-based concept known as ID – which says Darwin’s Theory of Evolution cannot explain the complexity of creation and instead posits the existence of a supernatural intelligence – can be made part of a science class, then why not demand that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism’s concept of creation be taught as well? Who could argue with that?

Read about Henderson’s efforts in the Hartford Courant.

Share your thoughts with Henderson at bobby.henderson@gmail.com and the Kansas State Board of Education.

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And I thought I was the only leftist, anarcho-communist, feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist in North America who was rasied a Protestant Christian Fundamentalist!

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Being a Protestant Fundamentalist

The Democratic Party appears incapable of challenging organized fundamentalism and the transformed Republican Party. Many liberals and a good number of leftists seek to restore the New-Deal-to-War-on-Poverty stance of government, but the policies of that era were driven by the organized working class in the first instance and the massive Civil Rights Movement in the second; those government policies were stopgaps to prevent the overthrow of capitalism. Now it is obvious that they did not go to the root causes of oppression and exploitation, and it is doubtful that the reform strategies of the past can be re-enacted today or in the future.

What concerns me is not so much that the ruling class has come to this strategy of populist fascism with politicized Christian fundamentalism as its mass base — after all, capitalism is a corrupt and unworkable (for the many) system — as that so many of those who are committed to social justice, even to a future socialist society, have written off the poor and the working class that they perceive to make up the “mass movement” of this project. Instead of working to unmask the agenda of the ruling class, many liberal and left activists are trying to figure out how to offer religion lite and avoid the issues of abortion, gay liberation, and other “social” issues. One thing I know about Protestant Christian fundamentalists from having been one, however, is that it cannot be substituted by “spirituality.”

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