Right-wing bias found in textbooks

Gee, ya think?

For years, Texas education bureaucrats allowed the late Mel and Norma Gabler to "review" school textbooks to make sure the books were friendly to conservative causes. This had a national impact: Publishers didn't want to lose business from the second-largest state by putting out books the Gablers disapproved of, and many other states based their own lists of approved books on that of Texas.

This legacy of right-wing censorship doesn't seem to have subsided. While many accept the schools' indoctrination, some students are bold enough to take issue with it. And it took a high school senior in Kearny, New Jersey, to uncover right-wing bias in one of the most widely used textbooks on American civics. Scholars and scientists say the student is right.

The book is 'American Government' by James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio, and it's used in the student's advanced placement government class and in high school and college classes across the country. The authors' conservative links are insurmountable: DiIulio used to be Bush's director of faith-based initiatives, and in the '90s he played up the right-wing "superpredator" wet dream that helped fuel the prison boom. Wilson heads the Council of Academic Advisors for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute.

Of particular concern are the book's biased treatment of the school prayer issue and climate change. Some of the volume's statements aren't just biased but factually wrong, especially about the Supreme Court's school prayer rulings.

The Kearny school system has a history of intolerance. In 2006, teacher David Paszkiewicz got a Conservative Fool Of The Day entry because he was caught telling students they "belong in hell" if they practice the "wrong" religion and that there were dinosaurs on Noah's ark.

Silly me. I used to think most of this shit would stop once we got past 1992.

(Source: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jbrQTGcd9yRqQEuE_5cArsv8kvcwD8VTVOE80;
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1207716858218700.xml&coll=1)