Those who live where I do — Beaumont, Texas, — can find a lot to be proud of here slightly more than a half-hour’s drive from the Gulf of Mexico. Pass by on Interstate 10 and you can see an aging, paint-needing, Air Force jet poised next to a curious looking cylindrical building. The small cylinder building is home to the memorabilia of the hometown legend Babe Didrikson Zaharias. I hope they still teach her in school because she was the greatest athlete of the 20th century. Track and field, a founding womens’ professional golfer, basketball player, baseball, you name it, Babe was in it and she was the best. A number of great musicians call or called Beaumont home, Johnny and Edgar Winter, trumpeter Harry James, R &B queen Barbara Lynn, and country stars Mark Chestnut, Clay Walker, and Tracy Byrd grew up nearby and made their name playing Beaumont watering holes. For football greats, you had the Smith boys, Bubba, Tody among other sports stars like the Celtics’ Kendrick Perkins who grew up in or near Beaumont.
What Beaumont shouldn’t be proud of is its member on the nut-laden Texas State Board of Education. Republican David Bradley has dodged questions of his residency on a number of occasions. He votes with the ultra conservative block on the board, the same block that plays down Thomas Jefferson’s contribution to America and if they had it their way would ban evolution from Texas schools. Bradley, a Realtor who owns a number of apartments in Beaumont’s Old Town district, also wanted the state to show in its social studies books the “unintended consequences” of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation. Civil rights be damned!
Bradley now has the gall to say Texas schools should be excused from this year’s address to school children by President Obama. The reason? The state has initially been denied millions in emergency jobs funding by the Obama administration. But I thought the GOP was against federal funding? Especially our governor with the great hair. Bradley told the Houston Chronicle that Obama was “playing politics with public education” in withholding in a partisan manner the emergency funding.
Pot, Member Bradley? Not marijuana. I mean pot calling the kettle black. No pun intended. You can’t tell me that Bradley does not play politics every time he uses his board of education position to comment on something that doesn’t fit in his prim little, small-minded conservative world. Why does Bradley and his group of puritanical holy rollers want to set Texas back centuries? Politics. Playing politics, my eye. I realize that if hypocrites were banned from the GOP then they would have a very small party. But this, is just a bit too much.
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