The Contrarian

The Ku Klux Klan and the New Black Panther Party staged rival protests yesterday in Paris, Texas.

Ah, Paris.

The Panthers bused in several hundred protesters to voice their anger over prosecutors’ decision to drop charges in this case. The Klan showed up for a counter-protest.

AP writer Jeff Carlton’s dispatch describes several revealing moments.

The Klan turnout was the size of your average softball team:

Rock Banks, who says he’s the grand titan of the East Texas Ku Klux Klan, said his group met last week to discuss the event but decided not to hold a major rally because it would lead to more protests.

‘If we showed up in force, with all of our robes on, they’d be back here in a month,’ he said.

You know, they could have turned out in force. They just didn’t want to. Really.

The dueling protests were peaceful, Carlton reports. Although:

Things grew tense early on when a member of the New Black Panther Party walked into the protest zone set up for white supremacists and stood inches away from a skinhead. The skinhead screamed at the black man to go home as they two stood inches away filming each other with their cameras.

The videos will be on the Web any minute now. Welcome to radical street protest in the new-media age.

The Economist has a story out positing that Texas might just be swinging to the Democrats. They’re calling it a “Special Report on Texas.”

The subhead reads, “Whisper it softly, but Texas looks set to become a Democratic state.”

Lots of bloggers and journalists have written similar Democrat-comeback stories over the past few years (and I’ll admit that I’m in that group.) But I can’t remember seeing anything like this in the Economist (hat tip to Burnt Orange Report).

So why is Texas turning blue? Here’s the lead:

THE elected sheriff of Dallas County is a lesbian Latina. The leading candidates to become mayor of Houston in November include a black man and a gay white woman. The speaker of the House of Representatives is the first Jew to hold the job in 164 years of statehood and only the second speaker to be elected from an urban district in modern times. In this year’s legislative session, bills to compel women to undergo an ultrasound examination before having an abortion (to bring home to them what they are about to do) and to allow the carrying of guns on campus both fell by the wayside; a bill to increase compensation for people wrongly convicted sailed through. Lakewood, in Houston, the biggest church not just in Texas but in America, claims to welcome gays. As Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have said, we’re not in Texas any more.

If you’re rolling your eyes at this point, then you had the same reaction I did. Yes, Texas is more diverse and urban than the cowboy stereotype. But does that foretell a Democratic resurgence? I don’t think so.

Let’s add some context. The lesbian Latina sheriff of Dallas County — Lupe Valdez — was first elected in 2004 (when the state was very much Republican) and is now in her second term. The Jewish speaker of the House is — all together now — A REPUBLICAN, albeit more moderate than his predecessor. And I fail to see the correlation between a Jewish leader rising to power and the imminent resurgence of Texas Democrats. Quite of a few elected Jews in this state are conservative Republicans (looking at you, Florence Shapiro). And, yes, the mayoral candidate field in Houston — now a thoroughly Democratic city — is diverse. But before they can win a statewide race, Democrats will have to expand their influence beyond the cities and inner suburbs. That’s the real challenge. 

Then there’s the legislation that failed and passed this session. Does the death or survival of any of these bills hint at a larger cultural/political shift in Texas?

The ultrasound bill has died for several sessions in a row. Not surprising that it expired again, especially in a closely divided House.

I’m not sure the failure of the guns-on-campus bill is indicative of anything except it’s hard to squeeze a bill through in the frantic final days of the session. I suspect a large majority of people in this state, including many Democrats, have no problem with the guns-on-campus idea.

Lawmakers did increase compensation for the wrongly convicted, largely because of the tragic story of Tim Cole. In fact, the bill bore his name, and many Republicans supported it. This is how reforms get done in Texas. There’s a long history of high-profile scandals leading to reform — from conditions in state prisons to the Tulia scandal to parole reform to TYC. Those efforts were also the product of the hard work of dedicated criminal justice reform advocates and a handful of enlightened state lawmakers (John Whitmire, Jerry Madden, Chuy Hinojosa, former Rep. Ray Allen). Texas is still a lock-em-up state and probably always will be.

Finally, the Economist mentions the Democratic victory on voter ID. Well, a voter ID bill has died every session since at least 2005. They died due to clever legislative maneuvering by Democrats, which few people outside of Austin know of or understand.

None of which is to discount the steady gains that Democrats have made in Texas since their low-point in 2003.

But they’re still heavy underdogs in every statewide race and remain the minority in both chambers of the Legislature. 

Their long-hoped-for return to power still seems a few years off.

A reader passed along a link to this Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel story that shows just how much some members of the State Board of Education are trying to slant social studies classes in Texas.

The newspaper reports:

‘Would you consider yourself a conservative when it comes to patriotism, the constitution, the heritage of our forefathers, etc?’That was the last question that State Board of Education (SBOE) member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, asked SFA’s Education Coordinator Rhonda Williams in an e-mail interview for a spot on the state’s world history curriculum writing committee last December.

Williams was nominated to sit on a writing panel that would help shape the state’s social studies curriculum for the next 10 years. She was hoping that she would be selected for the world history writing committee where she felt her expertise could be best utilized. The writing teams are usually made up of high school and college level educators who help to draft curriculum standards in their respective fields.

Now, a lot of people hold politically conservative views of the Constitution, and that’s perfectly fine.

But can someone explain to me how on Earth anyone could consider themselves conservative or liberal about “patriotism” and “the heritage of our forefathers”?

The story continues:

‘I believe that citizens cannot be truly patriotic without being fully informed about the history of their country — its background, its development, its achievements, and its mistakes,’ Williams said in her response.Without ever hearing from Cargill again, she was notified that she had been relegated to a lesser panel where she would not be responsible for drafting any content for the general classroom. Williams taught secondary level history in Texas public schools for 11 years, as a graduate student taught at Vanderbilt University and is now working at SFA where she develops digital lesson plan materials that are available free of charge for teachers and students all over the world.

I haven’t seen this email exchange between Cargill and Williams reported anywhere else. The story offers a peak at just how hard the right-wing board members are working to slip their particular political views into Texas classrooms.

The Daily Sentinel delves into delicious detail:

Peter Marshall, one of Cargill’s expert appointees to the review board that will advise the SBOE on how to vote in 2010 when the standards are finalized, recently made headlines across the state after his review of the writing committees’ rough drafts, which were published online. Marshall, an evangelical minister from Massachusetts, suggested that female aviator Amelia Earhart, anti-segregationist pioneer and first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Mexican-American civil rights leader Cesar Chavez are not important enough to be included in school curriculum.Marshall wrote, “To have Cesar Chavez listed next to Ben Franklin is ludicrous. Chavez is hardly the kind of role model that ought to be held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation.”Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association. He has many schools across the nation named in his honor, and his birthday, March 31, is officially recognized by the state of Texas as Cesar Chavez Day. In 2007, the University of Texas unveiled a statue bearing his likeness, and his portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.Marshall also discarded the importance of Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony after she advocated, through her Bible study groups, the need for more women’s rights. After her banishment, she played an instrumental role in the founding of the Rhode Island Colony. Today, her statue stands in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston.Marshall said of Hutchinson in his review, “She was certainly not a significant colonial leader, and didn’t accomplish anything except for getting herself exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for making trouble.”

It’s going to be a wild year at State Board of Education meetings. And that’s really saying something.

The New York Times ran a front-page story over the weekend about states that have expanded their health insurance coverage of children. Despite tough economic times and tight budgets, 13 states have spent more money on their version of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to cover more kids.

You can guess which states those were, right? Probably those big-spending, high-tax states on the coasts.

Well, no, actually.

Among the states that expanded coverage were these traditionally conservative, low-tax bastions: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and — of all places — Oklahoma.

Meanwhile, Texas lawmakers failed to pass their own CHIP expansion bill, despite the efforts of some of these folks.

The Legislative leadership — Straus, Ogden, Dewhurst — refused to allow a vote on CHIP expansion at session’s end. In the House, the leadership was so desperate to prevent a vote on CHIP that their machinations led to the recent three-day special session.

And the result?

Kids in Oklahoma receive better health coverage than kids in Texas.

It figures — given the state of the national media — that the most cogent and in-depth discussion of health care reform that I’ve seen recently aired last night on the Daily Show. (Can we really call it “fake news” anymore?)

Jon Stewart conducted a smart, 15-minute interview with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the details of the health care reform bill moving through Congress.

Stewart brought up a point that I wrote about yesterday: that the most hotly debated piece of the bill — the new government-run plan — might be a path to a nationalized, government-run health care system (single payer).

Sebelius denied that. She said — in bit of news-making — that large employers wouldn’t be allowed to enroll their employees in the new government plan. She said this so-called “public option” would be geared more toward the uninsured and the under-insured. Those restrictions still might not keep private insurers competitive with a government plan in the long run.

It was a fascinating discussion. And if you’re at all interested in the health care debate, it’s a must-watch.

The first half of the interview is here.

The second half is here.