TEA BAG TIME MACHINE

The main difference between Liberals and Conservatives, or at least what passes for each group today anyway, is that Liberals believe that the conservative policies of the last 30 years are a failure and that they coutry should move forward from them.  Conservatives on the other hand think the last 80 years of liberal policies, including civil rights, are failures and want to take the country back to before the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Civil Rights Movement.

Case in point:  the Raleigh, NC school board believes Brown vs. Board of Education has now outlived its usefulness.

Immediately after taking office, the new 5-4 majority began dismantling the old diversity plan. The response was equally immediate. In February, Superintendent Del Burns - who started as a special education teacher in 1976 and had led the district since 2006 - resigned.

"It is clear to me that I cannot, in all good conscience, continue to serve," he said.

Supporters of the old assignment policy sued to have the board's March 23 vote overturned, alleging open meetings violations. A judge dismissed the suit, but the plaintiffs have appealed.

On June 15, when the board rejected Barber's demand for 45 minutes to address the full panel, he and three others occupied the board chamber. The only way they would leave, they said, was in handcuffs.

Police obliged.

Following their release, the newly dubbed "Raleigh 4" published an open letter titled "Thoughts While we were Being Handcuffed, and Processed at the Wake County Jail on June 15 after Engaging in an Act of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience" - a direct allusion to Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

"There is a tragedy unfolding in Wake County, but it is not confined to Wake County ... ," the letter read. "The shadow of resegregation is falling across the state of North Carolina and the nation."

The Teapublican argument goes like this:  since taxes pay for schools and all schools (except my child's school) are complete failures, and teachers are all incompetent parasites (except for my child's teacher) with corrupt unions, and the school district has no authority to tell my child what they should or should not learn, why should we pay for busing to integrate schools anymore?  Screw it.  Let them rot in their own urban hellholes!

Seems to me busing is more important that ever since the white flight out of the urban centers into the suburbs, and even more so since the second white flight from the suburbs to the exurbs.  But that requires money, and of course since government is purely evil (except for roads, cops, firefighters, schools, and the military) why should we care?

It's the Entitlement of the Taxpayer.  We've got a whole bunch of crazy loud people who disagree that government should be doing anything, frankly...so let's stop them from doing it.  There's no racism in 2010 (except for those people saying there's racism, I mean where's the National Association for the Advancement of White People?) so we don't need civil rights and busing and affirmative anything and I am a taxpayer and you work for me dammit!  LOUD NOISES!

More and more people have decided that since government doesn't do 100% of what they believe it should be doing (or not doing) then it shouldn't work for anybody.

Busing is too hard.  Let's cut taxes!  That's government...conservative style.