Science teachers association sells out

A memoirist quoted British 18th century Prime Minister Robert Walpole as saying: “All those men have their price.” The nation’s high school science teachers also have their price. They rank money higher than learning.
The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) has rejected an offer of 50,000 free DVDs of the Al Gore global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” because it is in the pay of the ExxonMobil Corp.
Oh, the association will not admit it has sold out. Instead, it offers bogus reasons for refusing the offer. Such as: other groups and organizations might ask for equal treatment; it doesn’t want to appear political by implicitly endorsing a Democratic Gore film; and there would be little benefit to the association in accepting the DVDs.

Above all, the association admitted that it did not want to risk its “capital campaign, especially targeted supporters.” (Read ExxonMobil)
Laurie David, producer of “An Inconvenient Truth,” wrote recently that ExxonMobil “for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it.
“It has run ads in leading newspapers questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere.”

The science group has received $6 million from ExxonMobil in the past decade, mostly for an electronic program setting standards for teaching and learning.
NSTA teachers also load up with freebies from other corporations. They get free lesson plans on forestry provided by Weyerhaeuser. They accept lesson plans extolling the wonders of genetic engineering provided by Monsanto.
These are classic cases of foxes instructing the chickens.
Meanwhile, schools in Sweden and Norway, not beholden to filthy lucre, require all students to view the documentary.
•
Gary Younge, columnist for The Nation, recently wrote a political truth: “Presidential politics are not designed to support progressive candidates. Indeed, they are set up to exclude them. Monied interests are too prevalent and the media gatekeepers too conservative.”
The five most progressive American presidents in the 20th century were accidental: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson.
TR succeeded to the presidency only because President McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Wilson was elected minority president in 1912 only because the Republicans were splintered by the Taftites and Roosevelt progressives. FDR was elected in 1932 only because his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, presided over the Great Depression. Truman became president only because FDR died in office in 1945. And LBJ became president on the assassination of Kennedy in 1963.
•
President Bush is the dumbest of all 43 presidents--and we are not talking here just about his bad grammar and atrocious language. His verbal gaffes are monumental, delighting late night show hosts and prompting books on his maladroit tongue and brain.
Bush told the American people that they should not misunderestimate him. Campaigning in La Crosse, Wis., he declared: “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
Bush is even worse than another linguistic mangler in the White House. On President Harding’s death in 1923, poet E.E. Cummings said Harding was “the only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors.”
•
For the following gem from H.L. Mencken, substitute Bush for Coolidge and 300 million for the figure and you get the perfect definition of democracy:
“Democracy is that system of government under which the people, having 35,717,342 native born adults to chose from…including many who are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be the head of state. It is as if a hungry man, set before a banquet prepared by master cooks…should turn his back on the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies.”
•
QUOTE OF THE YEAR?: A Seattle woman complained to her son’s sixth grade math teacher that her had no idea how to do long division. The teacher replied: “We don’t teach long division. It stifles creativity.”