Off to Texas

I'm looking forward to my trip tomorrow into the lion's den, the very capital of Republican criminality and incompetence, Tom Delay's Texas district.

Not tony, swanky, rich Sugarland but the more gritty, browner, less well-heeled Pasadena and Deer Park area, gerrymandered into Delay's district to dilute its Democratic voting power. Yet even there, they've bought into the Big Lie, that trickling down works, that it wasn't misleading when the incontinent President leaked already discredited material to willing publicists disguised as journalists, that Delay is really God's appointed representative and that a combination of a religiously-tinted message combined with a marketing plan makes a church. No, I don't think too much of Texas, just a certain Texan.

She teaches at an alternative school, electives for grades 9-12. She can see Bush's educational missteps repeated by his protege Perry as they try to take a business approach to education. A business approach to education means that you don't waste money on losing cases but that you measure education using business metrics. The number of credits you give students becomes a valid measurement, as does their scores on standardized tests. Result? You dumb down the class and you teach the test. Certain wingnuts in Texas have even gone so far as to state that teachers should work for nothing but the love of the job. In Republican Texas, let them try to pay their mortgages with love. Meanwhile, the students she gets are more and more the dregs. The school was established to give students who were failing or had fallen behind in the traditional, industrial-model schools a chance to catch up. You applied and not everyone was accepted. Now the school takes everyone and, well, they're a pretty motley lot. One told my favorite Texan, "I'm just here because the judge ordered it." In this environment, the measure of her success is how many credits she gives out. What would you do?

Next year, primitive agrarian society that modern Texas is, the Republicans have decreed that school can't start before Labor Day. There goes Thanksgiving break, half of Christmas break, Spring break but you get a month more to work those fields! While most states experiment with year-round school, opting for shorter but more frequent breaks, Texas opts for the regressive long-summer schedule but then, even their tax structure is regressive.

Pasadena and Deer Park, where good God-fearing citizens were circulating flyers calling for people to burn immigrants' homes, is brown. In many places I hear more Spanish than English there. Many of the inhabitants would become virtual slaves under Republican immigration plans, even though a couple of the leaders say they don't want illegal immigrants criminalized. It was Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives which passed the draconian measures actually criminalizing immigrants last week, who made this protest. Rings hollow coming from him and Frist, who also wanted enforcement without naturalization. It would be interesting to ask the opinion of some of those in Tom Delay's home district what they think but then again, I live in Tom the Xenophobe Tancredo's district. What their claim means is that both have changed their minds about immigration, what Republicans generally refer to as a "flip-flop".

It will be an interesting trip.