Sunday Reading List/ I Don't Wanna Do My Homework!

I hope everyone is having a nice Sunday afternoon.  If you need some more help procrastinating, here's some stuff that I've been reading on the great big series of tubes:

On the trail of the Piggyback Bandit - The weird and tragic tale of Sherwin Shayegan, an adult with an intellectual disability, possibly an Autism spectrum disorder, who has been banned in five states for jumping on high school athletes' backs. 

Texas's road to victory in its decades long fight against voting rights - I don't mean to be picking - "messing," I guess, would be the term - on Texas here.  I'm a big fan of Texas toast.  And, um .... Tim Duncan.  But, historically, Texas has been on the vanguard in opposition and resistance to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Something I learned was how the existence of the poll tax has morphed throughout the decades.  As Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo and proud racist prophesized: "“If the poll tax bill passes, the next step will be an effort to remove the registration qualification, the educational qualification of Negroes. If that is done we will have no way of preventing the Negroes from voting.”"

 Moving Beyond the Stereotypes - Thinking about images of persons with disabilities in the media.  Your always either Quasimodo or Captain Ahab, Tiny Tim or Richard III.  Is this changing?  Also: Peter Dinklage fan club!  He's going to be rocking my alma mater this summer. 

And now for something completely different: Yesterday was Bastille Day.  Also the anniversary of the beginning of the Third Reich's program of sterilization of persons with disabilities.  Fucking Nazis.
Finally, ForgetBobbyJindal. #FBJ: The boy-faced governor of Louisiana continues to dismantle his state's education system through voucher supported private schools. (i.e., public funding for private institutions.)  From the article:

A big chunk of the money already out there is being snapped up by conservative evangelical schools with exotic and hardly public-minded curricular offerings, with the theory being that any public oversight would interfere with the accountability provided by the market.

 At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains "what God made" on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution. "We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children," Carrier said.

Unfortunately, because the true core of the voucher movement is made up of social conservatives who just want taxpayer help sending their kids to Bible schools and consider "accountability" to be a code word for an assault on religious freedom, he's not likely to do anything of the sort.

This is the model for education that Mitt Romney has endorsed.