The Hightower Report

Budgeting Room for Ignorance

Will Rogers said that when Congress comes into session, the public gets the same panicky feeling as "when the baby gets hold of a hammer."

Rogers' observation can also be applied to the mayhem that has broken out in various smash-happy state legislatures. All across the country, right-wing zealots are wielding their little ideological hammers to destroy common sense and wreck the common good. These anti-government extremists are going after everything from the basic rights of workers to our crucial environmental protections.

Their most shameful assault, however, is on our public schools. They're not merely clobbering teachers and shattering education budgets, they're after the very idea of public education. A few years ago, boneheaded Texas Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, asked, "Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education?" She sputtered on: "It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell." She was hooted down then, but this year, her Kafkaesque ideological extremism has moved from the legislative fringe to the center of the Republican majority's agenda. Using the huge budget deficit (which they created) as their excuse, Texas GOP lawmakers and the GOP governor are cavalierly abrogating our state's historic, constitutional commitment to providing an "efficient system of public free schools."

Even as student enrollment is growing exponentially, these ideologues are cutting the state's school budget by $4 billion. Worse, they are terminating the law that gives our public schools top budgetary priority based on how much we need to spend to educate our children. No more "entitlement," they scream – as stupidly as they can.

Unfortunately, Texas is not the only state putting budgetary ideology over school kids and undermining our entire society's future. As the old bumper sticker puts it: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

Shocking: Fed-Up Voters

Seventeenth century playwright William Congreve must have been a seer, for he wrote that even in hell, there is "no fury like a woman scorned." Apparently, he foresaw the tempest now roaring out of the League of Women Voters.

Long considered to be the church ladies of American politics, the group is best known for its sober voter-education efforts. But – pow! – the ladies have suddenly shattered that stereotype by delivering a powerful political punch to a couple of U.S. senators, making clear to a startled Washington that they are not to be trifled with. LWV recently ran some hard-hitting TV ads taking Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown and Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill to task for trying to weaken enforcement of clean air laws.

"I was shocked," cried McCaskill. "To me they have always been about civic engagement and debates." Well, hello, senator – you've just been civically engaged by a group of feisty women who realized that their polite and earnest letter-writing efforts to lawmakers like you were not working. With both parties kowtowing to the money of corporate polluters, senators were simply ignoring the letters, so the group toughened up.

Brown whined that LWV's ad was an ambush, as though the little ladies should stick to their inoffensive knitting. Pathetically, he tried to retaliate with an impetuous video slapping at the women's credibility, whimpering that they "have gone to the gutter with their negative ads."

Get a grip, Scott. You voted to gut the Environmental Protection Agency's clean air authority, so it's hardly gutter politics for a group of mothers and grandmothers to point that out to voters. You've also taken campaign cash from the lobbyists with whom you voted, so it's your credibility that's in question.

How shocking that senators are shocked when they're called to account by fed-up voters!