The Round Table (Rational Pagans Forum)

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.

Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a ''constitutional republic,'' rather than ''democratic,'' and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.

''We have been about conservatism versus liberalism,'' said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. ''We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it's appropriate.''

Following three days of impassioned and acrimonious debate, the board gave preliminary approval to the new standards with a 10-5 party line vote. A final vote is expected in May, after a public comment period that could produce additional amendments and arguments.

Decisions by the board -- made up of lawyers, a dentist and a weekly newspaper publisher among others -- can affect textbook content nationwide because Texas is one of publishers' biggest clients.

Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board's most prominent Democrats, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, who accused her colleagues of ''whitewashing'' curriculum standards.

By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding ''American exceptionalism'' and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.

''Some board members themselves acknowledged this morning that the process for revising curriculum standards in Texas is seriously broken, with politics and personal agendas dominating just about every decision,'' said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, which advocates for religious freedom.

Republican Terri Leo, a member of the powerful Christian conservative voting bloc, called the standards ''world class'' and ''exceptional.''

Board members argued about the classification of historic periods (still B.C. and A.D., rather than B.C.E. and C.E.); whether students should be required to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics (they will); and whether former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir should be required learning (she will).

In addition to learning the Bill of Rights, the board specified a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class.

Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement.

Numerous attempts to add the names or references to important Hispanics throughout history also were denied, inducing one amendment that would specify that Tejanos died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. Another amendment deleted a requirement that sociology students ''explain how institutional racism is evident in American society.''

Democrats did score a victory by deleting a portion of an amendment by Republican Don McLeroy suggesting that the civil rights movement led to ''unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes.''

Fort Worth Republican Pat Hardy, a longtime teacher, voted for the new standards, but said she wished the board could work with a more cooperative spirit.

''What we've done is we've taken a document that by nature is too long to begin with and then we've lengthened it some more,'' Hardy said, shortly after the vote. ''Those long lists of names that we've put in there ... it's just too long.

''I just think we failed to keep that in mind, it's hard for teachers to get through it all.''

Here's something you might not know, the English promised all of Trans Jordan Palestine to Feisel in return for his support in WWI.

As Far As I Know, they also installed the Shah in Iran, to have a 'puppet nation' as opposed to the Republic the Iranians wanted.

We have huge amounts of land here and in Canada--- why can't we just give them some space here to live in peace on?

The 1953 Iranian coup d’état (termed the 28 Mordad coup d'état in Iran), was the overthrow of the democratically-elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh by the Central Intelligence Agency;[1] It was the CIA's first covert operation against a foreign government.[2] The coup has been called "a critical event in post-war world history", and is thought to have influenced "all of subsequent Iranian history."[3] The coup was originally considered in America to be a triumph of Cold War covert action, but given its blowback, it is considered now generally to have left "a haunting and terrible legacy," both in Iran and worldwide.[4] In 2000, the U.S. Secretary of State called the coup a "setback for democratic government" in Iran, saying "It is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."[5] In 2009, President Barack Obama publicaly admitted US involvement in the coup; the first time a sitting US president had done so.[6]

In 1951 with majority support in Iran’s parliament, Mosaddegh had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), so Iran could profit equitably from the sale of its vast national petroleum resources that had so far been under the control of the British, who gave the Iranian government only 16 percent of Iran's oil profits.[7][2] Since 1913, the British had exclusively controlled Iranian oil through the AIOC,[8][2] and it was the British government 's single largest overseas investment.[9] Despite Mosaddegh’s wide support, the decision angered Britain, which accused Mosaddegh of violating the 1913 Qajar era agreement that had given Britain control of Iranian oil through the AIOC, and it instigated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, to pressure them economically.[10] Initially, Britain mobilized its military to seize control of the Abadan oil refinery, the world’s largest, but Prime Minister Attlee chose instead to tighten the economic boycott against Iran.[11] The later British government, of Churchill, successfully gained US support for staging a coup d'état against Iran's elected government; while the Truman administration had opposed a coup, the succeeding Eisenhower administration administration supported it.[12]

The British and U.S. spy agencies then persuaded the Iranian monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to order Mosaddegh's dismissal, while paying and organizing anti-Mosaddegh mobs, clergy, politicians and Iranian army officers, and waging a propaganda campaign against Mosaddegh and his government.[13] At first, the coup appeared to be a failure when on the night of August 15-16, Imperial Guard Colonel Nematollah Nassiri was arrested while attempting to arrest Mosaddegh. The Shah fled the country the next day. After several days of mass confusion, however, a pro-Shah mob marched on Mosaddegh's residence, which was also attacked by a tank column led by retired General Fazlollah Zahedi.[14] Subsequently, Mosaddegh was arrested, tried by military court, and placed under house arrest until his death..[15][16] Mossadegh’s supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. The minister of Foreign Affairs and the closest associate of Mossadegh, Hossein Fatemi, was repeatedly stabbed by a mob, and later executed by a firing squad. [17]

In the wake of the coup, Zahedi was appointed prime minister of a military government by the Shah who returned to Iran to rule as an authoritarian monarch[18], for the next 26 years, until he was overthrown by a popular revolt in 1979.[19] The Iranian-controlled national oil company was replaced by a consortium of Western oil companies which shared profits 50-50 with Iran but did not to open their "books to Iranian auditors or to allow Iranians onto its board of directors." [20] Washington went on to become the major backer of Shah, with the CIA training the Shah's secret police, SAVAK. The coup is widely believed to have significantly contributed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which deposed the Shah and replaced the pro-Western monarchy with the anti-Western Islamic Republic of Iran.[21]