Texas Blue Mailbag: Week of November 11

This week's mailbag has a lot of talk about infrastructure, a sad piece of news about textbook accuracy, and some musings about the unfortunate occasional liberal fascination with Ron Paul.

Mark says:

I'd like to see some commentary on how totally inadequately prepared various law enforcement agencies (traffic patrol) and transportation authorities are in light of the recent fuel truck accident on I 35 E just north of Lake Lewisville. God forbid there should be a real disaster in the area. There appeared to be no inter-jurisdictional effort to keep traffic moving.

Josh says:

As that was unfolding, my wife Diana remarked that I-35E up between Denton and Dallas counties shuts down at least once a year, and it is always a logistical nightmare. Emergency response can only do so much when you have the kind of bottleneck that I-35E features. The real problem is city planning and infrastructure design, which is a common problem in and around big American cities. Notice that tons of money has been pumped into designing and building hurricane evacuation routes around cities that have been dealing with hurricances since before they built roads.

ED says:

The Miami Herald article re: Guantanamo Bay has been removed. Will you please let us know if you happen to find it elsewhere?

George says:

Thanks for pointing that out. I've edited our original piece to point to the article on Wired, also linked here for your viewing pleasure, which also has the Gitmo SOP manual for download.

Colin wonders:

Why do so many of my liberal pals think voting for Ron Paul is a great idea?

Josh answers:

I don't know. Staff writer and all-around progressive hero Betsy Parchem mentioned this at lunch today. Anyone that wants to vote for Ron Paul and considers themselves a liberal doesn't know anything about Ron Paul.

As an extension, if you like roads, or schools, or tanks and fighter jets, you shouldn't vote for Ron Paul. If half of these students standing on street corners understood that A#1 on Ron Paul's agenda for what to cut out of government spending is student loans, they would probably be less inclined to abandon the liberal activism they've been inclined towards in favor of whatever Ron Paul's doing.

If you watched when Ron Paul was on the Colbert Report, you will know that he wants to abolish the following:

• The Department of Education
• The Department of Energy
• The Department of Homeland Security
• The IRS
• FEMA
• The UN
• NATO
• NAFTA
• The WTO
• The United Nations Childrens Fund

The Department of Education? UNICEF? The UN?

Finally, he's a Republican. If you consider yourself to be a liberal, or a progressive, or (dare I say it) a Democrat, you should not vote for a Republican. Ever.

Buddy asks:

Why would the State Board of Education approve textbooks with errors?

George says:

My guess? They're bad at math. From using poor textbooks as children. Nasty little vicious circle.

No, seriously, you'll note in the article that the vast majority of the over 100,000 errors found — about 86,000 of them — were in books from Houghton Mifflin. They are one of the top five largest textbook publishers in the U.S. The textbook industry is lucrative and cutthroat, and the methods textbook publishers use to win contracts has been begging for scrutiny for a very long time. A quick Internet search can lead to a number of cases where inaccurate, outdated, or just plain wrong information made its way into textbooks directly under the noses of those supposed to assure their accuracy. I'd like to say that accuracy is paramount, but there's no incentive built into the system for accuracy. It's a money industry; money talks.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman described serving on a California textbook committee in his autobiographical Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. Some more details on his experience, and a more modern example, can be found here. For another example, you can look at this link. There are plenty of others.