Minorities Must Be Thankful To 'The Majority' For Giving Them Rights!

Say what you want about the Texas Board of Education - that they are viewed as backward hicks who attempt to jam Christianity down the throats of students at the expense of science and reason, or who attempt to legislate what they can't accomplish via common sense and fairness.

At least they embrace their unsophisticated, uneducated, misguided views in public where there can no dispute about their agenda.



Link via Talking Points Memo

Rick Perry - All Asshat, No Cattle

Remember when Texas governor Rick "Goodhair" Perry threatened to secede from the United States of America rather than continue to have the federales mess with Texas?

I believe he turned down nearly $556 million in Obama administration stimulus funds to be applied to Texas unemployment benefits. There may have been some hitchin' of his britches and nutsack adjustin' as he hopped from tea party to tea party, posturin' and demagogin' and bein' all "we can care for our own in Tejas."

Yeah...Texas is asking the feds for a $170 million loan so they can keep paying those unemployment benefits. So much for independence.

Media outlets are reporting that Texas is expected to request $650 million in funds. I know that Texas schools are all about that there readin', writin', and 'rithmetic, so surely they know that's about $100 million more than they turned down initially.

Maybe they are going to secede, and the $650 million is like key money for a new apartment. Once they get the cash, they'll change all the locks and stop returning our calls.

Don't mess with Texas.

Image by StevenM_61 on flickr

Don't Mess with Texas

From Paul Krugman:

Matthew Yglesias notes that Tom DeLay is under the strange misapprehension that Texas is rich thanks to its low taxes and lack of regulation.

Just one minor issue: you really shouldn’t use median income, which can be distorted to the extent that inequality differs across states. You should instead use income per capita. As it happens, the comparison is even more striking.

Texas, with its glorious free market regime and deeply incentive-creating 25 percent rate of health uninsurance, has a per capita income of $37,187; nanny-state New Jersey, with its oppressive taxes and regulation of everything (what it takes to get permission to cut down a dying tree … ), has a per capita income of $49,194.

Texas Politician Shows Her Ignorance

A Republican Texas state legislator, Betty Brown, has shown how gloriously ignorant she is in general, and how unprepared she is to live in a new global environment specifically.

In House testimony, she complained that the names of Asian-Americans are way too difficult to pronounce, but she has a pretty simple solution in mind:

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?”

Wow.

She's not backing down from her earlier statement under pressure, either. In a statement made to a rep from the Organization of Chinese Americans, Brown clarified her position:

“Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

But she's not a racist. Republicans are simply misunderstood.

Lawmaker defends comment on Asians

USA Shaped Bookshelf

Neatorama has an entry on a bookshelf design that resembles a map of the United States.

There seems to be an inversely proportional relationship between the design of the bookshelf and the number of actual books read in the states themselves. The photo shows way too many books in the southern states, based on my travels.

Am I right, Texas?

USA Bookshelf, via Neatorama

Final Meal Requests

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (motto: Over 10,000 Executions Held!) actually has a website that lists the final meal requests of condemned prisoners.

How macabre.

Not a lot of healthy fare listed - there seems to be quite an affection for fried chicken, french fries, chicken fried steak, and fried eggs, which leads me to wonder if sociologists and nutritionists have ever thought of teaming up to ascertain if there's a link between corn oil and crime.

That said, the list got me thinking about last meal options, and what they might reveal about our preferences or the comfort we take in food. So I had an interesting idea.

Leave your last meal request in the comments, and I'll collect them and put together a snazzy graph to reveal any trends.

C'mon, people. It's for science!