Making a killing

In weird news:

Mario Williams, the Houston Texans' much-debated No. 1 draft pick, has purchased a home with its own share of controversy.

The newly rich National Football League rookie bought the spacious, Mediterranean-style house from ousted Texas Southern University President Priscilla Slade for about $1.5 million, according to records filed last week.

Clcik on the names above for some backstory if you haven't been following either person's latest travails.

I once knew a couple when we lived in Midland during the Eighties who had bought a very nice home from someone who had recently been prosecuted as the neighborhood child molester. His name -- by the children whom he had invited to swim in his backyard pool -- was "Tickle Man".

Now it appears as if Williams got a $300,000 discount on his new home, and though I never got them to talk much about it, I'm sure my west Texas friends got an even better deal on theirs (not quite as expensive an abode, but the discount in terms of percentages was huuuuuge).

There's a point here...

At what point does this sort of thing traverse the boundary from predatory purchasing to just plain old creepiness? Does the line get crossed with the two situations I related? Certainly I understand that a significant enough price reduction can overcome nearly any queasiness, but still ...

If a real estate bargain is your primary --- indeed, your solitary interest, then be advised: there's a nice little high-rise condo going on the market in River Oaks very soon that you might want to look into. A recent assessment put it at $6.5 mil, down from $7.9 in 2002, by all appearances.

Its celebrity markup has recently been mitigated. Somewhat.

God didn't want to wait until Oct. 23

And apparently wasn't going to be happy with Kenny Boy spending the rest of his life behind bars. Though Judge Sim Lake is well-known for conducting the business in his courtroom quickly, nothing beats Divine Retribution.

Perhaps Pat Robertson will inform us in the next few days if God told him that Ken Lay died for his many sins against man. That would be one of the only things I would take His (not Pat's) word for.

Indoctrinating the children

The foul stench of conservative fundamentalism is now going to be force-fed to Texas schoolchildren, thanks to the packing of the state school board by the Talibaptists:

The State Board of Education, an elected body with a history of fierce ideological debates about textbook content, now wants to put its stamp on the curriculum that guides the instruction of 4.4 million Texas schoolchildren.

At its meeting Thursday, the 15-member board is expected to scrap a curriculum revision process dominated by teachers and the Texas Education Agency and discuss a new timetable for revising the English reading and writing standards.

Many on the board want to replace a student-centered curriculum that calls on students to use their own attitudes and ethics to interpret texts with teacher-centered instruction that emphasizes the basics of spelling, grammar and punctuation.

It was a fight social conservatives on the board lost in 1997, when moderates and liberals adopted the curriculum for all subjects. Now, with social conservatives expected to have a majority on the board for the first time after the November elections, the plan to rewrite the English standards is viewed by some as the opening shot in an effort to put a conservative imprint on the state's curriculum.

"This is really going to be the big battle in public education over the next few years — what is it our students are going to learn," said Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, a group that monitors the state board for influence by the religious right. "We could see a lot of textbooks that are based on personal and political beliefs of a majority of the state board rather than on facts that students need to learn."

And as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, the facts have a well-known liberal bias.

There's a lot more to the article linked above, much of the rest presented as mitigating the dangers of allowing the John Birch Society to write public school curricula, but the truth is this process has been well under way for over a decade.

The Republicans will continue to claim, as they did when they gerrymandered Congressional districts into the shape of fajita strips to ensure a GOP takeover, that this is 'the will of the people' -- or at least of those in Texas who can be bothered to vote.

I think there is a different will of the people, ready and impatiently waiting to be expressed at the polls, that may change their thinking.

Or not...