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Thursday, November 06, 2008

Once again, wingnut blog outrage exists in inverse proportion to reality

by folkbum

Remember the manufactured flap a few weeks back about Racine's textbooks? It blew up online after a local blogger posted that the 8th-grade literature textbooks featured an excerpt from Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and his 2004 Democratic National Committee speech. Neither was overtly political or partisan, and the text was assembled and selected long before Obama was the Democratic nominee for president. But that didn't stop the outrage from reaching all the way to Malkinland.

Of course, reality has a well-known liberal bias:
The Racine Unified School District said Tuesday that no policies were violated when a textbook with parts of a memoir and speech written by Sen. Barack Obama was used in classes. [. . .] Some people complained that the material was not appropriate during an election year, but the district said the book was selected in May 2007, before Obama was the Democratic nominee.

In a Nov. 3 memo to the school board, Racine Unified Superintendent James Shaw and Jeff Weiss, director of curriculum and instruction, said there is a process within RUSD to handle complaints about educational materials, but the district received no formal, written complaints from parents or residents.

“Two parents asked for a review of the timing, questioning whether it was appropriate to teach the Obama selections one month prior to the presidential election,” the memo said. “Both declined to file a formal complaint about the material when offered that option.

“Because no formal written complaint was received from a Racine parent or citizen, no action under this policy was considered or initiated.”

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