Because it is such a large market and has a very central purchasing authority, Texas carries a lot of weight with textbook publishers, meaning that students of many states will receive textbooks crafted to meet the Texas requirements.  (California is an even larger market but is not buying new books for a long while due to its ongoing slow meltdown.)

Am I worried?  Less than might be expected by people who know me.  Why?  Because I’m a teacher.  I have learned that the easiest way to cause students to reject any piece of knowledge is to proclaim it loudly in a textbook.  Especially with an increasingly distrustful and tech-savvy student population, attempts to ram down an official line on anything seem likely to fail.

Apparently, the release date is 2010 December 17.

Just for completeness, the original Comicon 2009 trailer is embedded below the fold.

The majority vote is tyranny of the minority.

I agree that context is everything, so please, go ahead and read the whole bit.  (You’ll have to search through the transcript; I’ll wait.)

How dumb is this?  Let us count the ways:

1. Ms. Matalin is arguing that the Democrats should not use the process of “reconciliation” to pass health care reform using “only” 51 votes in the Senate (as opposed to the 60 that would be needed to break a filibuster).  That is, she believes a minority of Senators (= fewer than half, in case she’s forgotten what “minority” means) should be able to hold up legislation forever.  That could be a textbook definition of “tyranny of the minority”.  Reconciliation, on the other hand, is a process used to reconcile two versions of a bill that has already passed both houses — and, in the case of the Senate, has already survived the filibuster.  Passing it would be following the rule of majority; that is, democracy as typically understood.
2. Ms. Matalin was perhaps confused or flustered, and meant to invoke the phrase “tyranny of the majority”; that is, the potential in a democracy for 50%+1 to impose unacceptable rules on everyone, including those who don’t agree.  Tyranny of the majority is a legitimate political concern.  It’s why very important things (amending the Constitution, going to war) have a higher bar than simple majority.  But it’s only the very rare things that have that bar.  Most middle schoolers understand that, by and large, decisions should be made by majority.  Saying “The majority vote is tyranny of the majority” would be tantamount to saying that democracy is necessarily tyranny.  What, exactly, does Ms. Matalin propose to replace democracy?  I’d be interested in hearing… though I suspect that the answer is Matalin-ocracy.
3. “Tyranny” in general has connotations of power seized through unconventional means and exercises in an arbitrary fashion.  It would stand as the antithesis of the rule of law.  On the other hand, the Democratic majority (ooh, scary word there!) was duly elected through the usual process and is contemplating exercising the process of reconciliation, which has been on the books for decades and used extensively.  Reconciliation was created for exactly this situation (finding agreement on budgetary issues in the two bills).  While in power, the Republicans used reconciliation extensively, often for purposes not clearly intended by the original legislation.  Where was Ms. Matalin decrying that “tyranny”?

Is the Senate broken?  Or is the recent fretting over the filibuster just myopic whining that misunderstands our history?  The following graphs and links indicate that, in fact, the Senate is broken — the filibuster has been deployed more often, than before.  Details below the fold.

Via Ezra Klein “The Radicalism of Majority Rule“:

Cloture Motions

From Talking Points Memo “The Rise of Cloture“:

Who Uses Cloture?

Again via Ezra Klein:

More evidence the Senate is broken

Record snowfall does not “disprove” global warming.

To advance the opposite proposition seriously, you’d have to do one or more of the following:

• Fail to understand the different between “global” and “local”.  Being cold here says nothing about the global aggregate.
• Fail to understand that “weather” is not the same thing as “climate” and that transient variations in daily conditions do not equate to long-term large averages.
• Be in the pocket of Big Oil and other industries with a vested interest in making sure we do nothing, ever, because it might someday mean that they reap only ridiculous profit levels rather than the truly obscene ones they get now.

More than likely, most people braying that this is God’s message to Al Gore are committing all three mistakes at once.

Oh, and the heck is a hold?  David Waldeman explains.

Also, a pretty funny reimagining of the note that Shelby must have given Harry Reid and the President:

But I simply cannot abide the weak-kneed wimps who think that “the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security”.  How absolutely bat-crazy stupid do you have to be to write something like that?  Note that it’s even the ultimate right is actual security — it’s only that we have a sense of security.  So apparently, in order that Richard Cohen can sleep at night without worrying about the monsters under his bed, we should sacrifice legal standards, integrity, freedom itself.  It turns out I wrote my rebuttal of his argument about two and a half years before he even wrote his article, and I stand by it:

We are stronger than that.

We are smarter than that.

We are better than that.

On the Huffington Post, Paul Begala offers his own, lucid take on the choice facing Democrats:  Pass the Senate bill, or collapse completely come November.  It’s worth the time to read.

Now, here’s hoping the Democrats in charge get their acts together, get their courage on, and get moving.  Pass.  The.  Damn.  Bill.

• Pass a meaningful health insurance reform package without delay
• We need to show that we not just are focused on jobs but also create them.
• Make sure voters understand what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did for the economy.
• Don’t accept any lectures on spending.
• “Change” is not just about policies.
• Run great campaigns.
• No bed-wetting.

Good advice from a guy who’s shown he knows how to win.  Let’s hope someone in Washington is listening.