Who Is Cynthia Dunbar And Why Is She Editing Textbooks?

Ms. Dunbar is the District 10 member of the State Board of Education. On Monday, she published an article for the Christian Worldview Network that suggests Barack Obama sympathizes with terrorists and would use an attack as an excuse to impose martial law. She serves on the State Board “to protect the textbook-review process.”  She has yet to hire a copy editor for her website. She was not up for re-election this year. 

32 comments

  1. Why are people so wacky?

    @ 10:09 am on November 6, 2008
  2. My goodness. I thought Sarah Palin was frightening. She pales in comparison to Ms. Dunbar!

    @ 10:11 am on November 6, 2008
  3. Her law degree is from Regents, the school founded by Pat Robertson!

    @ 10:15 am on November 6, 2008
  4. The Christian Worldview Network appears to have hired editors to check spelling and grammar, but not facts.

    @ 10:21 am on November 6, 2008
  5. Unfortunately, our TX State School Board is full of people like Cynthia. There’s also Gail Lowe:
    http://tfnblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/gail-lowe-straight-talker/

    “Gail Lowe, Republican candidate for the Texas State Board of Education, told the Young County Republican Women she will continue to fight for conservative values Monday.”

    Yet Lowe was just reelected, even though her opponent was an ex-university professor.

    How sad for Texas schoolchildren.

    @ 10:26 am on November 6, 2008
  6. This brand of oversight on school textbooks has brought us VP candidates who don’t know the nations involved in NAFTA and that Africa is a continent, not a country.

    @ 10:28 am on November 6, 2008
  7. on her website, she mentions having “pro-family values” – so why does the photo of her family have no “dad”?

    @ 10:29 am on November 6, 2008
  8. What happens to expand executive power when a state of civil disorder is declared? [...] [W]hy should we expect that if elected, all of a sudden [Obama] will try to comply with [the Constitution's] restraints?

    Hmmm…

    @ 10:33 am on November 6, 2008
  9. Is it horrible of me to relish in the thought of these loonies truly freaking out and losing their minds? Like if they really believe that some sort of socialist regime is coming into power and everyone will be forced to watch BET and hang out with gay people and that they will be taxed more heavily to pay for people to sit around unemployed on their couch and point and laugh at them, is it bad that I want them to keep believing that and freaking out just for my own entertainment?

    Please advise.

    @ 10:33 am on November 6, 2008
  10. Amandacobra,

    Short answer: No.

    Caveat: These people are not mainstream Republicans, they just think they are.

    The richer, more significant schadenfreude can be derived from watching their bewilderment as they’re disenfranchised from their beloved party.

    @ 10:39 am on November 6, 2008
  11. I had a poly-sci prof that used to talk about people that were so far right, they almost completed the circle to come all the way to the left.

    @ 10:42 am on November 6, 2008
  12. It just seems like it’s time for someone of influence–Wick, for example–to use that influence to try to correct some of these situations that are dragging our country back into the 1800’s. To have religious convictions is admirable and maybe even desirable, but to state that you are going to use those beliefs to affect how our schoolchildren are educated….well, that’s pretty much the definition of “unAmerican.”

    @ 10:46 am on November 6, 2008
  13. @ Daniel

    I can’t wait for them to break off and form their own party once conservatives kick them out of the boat for being too nutty.

    Might I suggest a party name:

    Standing-At-The-Back-Dressed-Stupidly-And-Looking-Stupid Party

    /quoting Black Adder

    @ 10:47 am on November 6, 2008
  14. Daniel – you are so right. These wackos aren’t anymore mainstream Republican than the Taliban is mainstream Muslim. Both kinds of extremism tarnish the image of the group they claim to represent.

    @ 10:48 am on November 6, 2008
  15. She says that she has been in the trenches for 28 years, fighting. I think we need to cut her some slack. She hasn’t seen daylight in a long time.

    @ 10:52 am on November 6, 2008
  16. TG — Immaculate conception?

    @ 10:57 am on November 6, 2008
  17. She needs a helmet.

    @ 11:07 am on November 6, 2008
  18. Don’t forget that “Texas State Board of Education Puts Strident Anti-Evolution Critics on Science Standards Review Panel.
    Two Authored Anti-Evolution Textbook, Presenting Serious Conflicts of Interest” –that’s of Oct. 2008

    http://www.tfn.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5455

    @ 11:27 am on November 6, 2008
  19. Yeah. Sure. And GWB planned 911 for profits…

    @ 12:05 pm on November 6, 2008
  20. Only two days after the election and you’re already harassing people and trying to get them removed from their jobs for doing nothing more than criticizing Obama. Nice, you people are going to self destruct quicker than anyone thought.

    The best part is watching you all conveniently ignore the fact that Democrats have controlled the public school systems and colleges for decades now and have said much worse about Bush and Republicans not just on their own time, as this woman did, but in the classroom directly to their students.

    Of course, when Democrats were doing it we were told that is was dissent and that it was the highest form of patriotism. How quickly things change.

    @ 12:27 pm on November 6, 2008
  21. Mike, you should stretch before allowing yourself those knee-jerk reactions. This woman is doing much more than “criticizing Obama” – she’s clearly, repeatedly accusing the president-elect of actively conspiring with international terrorists to bring down America as a democracy. And almost equally offensively to me as a citizen, she’s using her press-worthy office as a pulpit.

    Did you even read her comments?

    @ 12:36 pm on November 6, 2008
  22. @ Julie

    Attempts to inject Ideological influences in education are actually quite common.

    http://www.thefire.org/

    @ 12:38 pm on November 6, 2008
  23. @ For the record.

    Two words:

    John Murtha.

    @ 12:39 pm on November 6, 2008
  24. Steve, got a link? Two words don’t work in this context.

    @ 12:42 pm on November 6, 2008
  25. http://www.iowapresidentialwatch.com/pages/MurthaHadithaTimeline.htm

    Wild theories and accuations directed at presidents & politicians are as American as elections.

    In contrast, a sitting Congressman’s declarations of guilt against active servicemen at a time of war are about as un-American as it gets.

    He is getting his a** sued though, that’s positively American :)

    @ 1:05 pm on November 6, 2008
  26. Yeah, Murtha’s having it both ways – milking his military career for credibility while also throwing his fellow Marines under the bus with public declarations of guilt. Quite the pork king, too, I understand.

    Still, the subject ninny is ours here in Texas, and I’ll bet she’s one of the 23% of Texans who believe that Obama is Muslim. She’s a blindly fervent ranter. Somebody speculated earlier that if/when the GOP reforms, the loony evangelists might form their own party. Time to revive the “Know Nothing” party?

    @ 1:17 pm on November 6, 2008
  27. @FTR

    Lots of people have lots of nutty ideas about Obama.

    For instance, there are Muslims who subscribe to beliefs that anyone born of a Muslim father is a Muslim, and to leave the religion, as O has, is apostasy punishable by death.

    The prattlings of bitter gunclingers are a sideshow, like the giant puppet-heads declaring Bush as Hitler. But the concerns of *serious* people with *conviction* are more of a concern, IMHO.

    @ 1:34 pm on November 6, 2008
  28. America is blinded by the color. The old joke is not really a joke:

    How do you tell when a lawyer is lying?
    There lips are moving.

    1/2 Black, yellow, green or blue, we just put two more attorneys in charge of the executive branch and attorneys don’t know how to run things, they just think that they do.

    The question here should not be what a member of the State Board of Education personally believes, the question should be why do we have a STATE Board of Education. I believe we can thank the attorneys that have been running the Texas legislature for that.

    @ 2:27 pm on November 6, 2008
  29. Uh – just about every state has a state board of education. It helps to create – especially in this day and age of “No Child Left Behind” – somewhat of a baseline for each district, and standardization.

    So you can’t really thank the attorneys running the Texas legislature. Every state has a SBOE, and has for some time.

    @ 2:41 pm on November 6, 2008
  30. I’ll bet she’s a close personal friend and confidant of Ms. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian.

    http://www.bettybowers.com

    @ 3:53 pm on November 6, 2008
  31. Wick:

    Use this as an opportunity to write a long article about the wackos on the SBoE. The very wackos who will be rewriting the SCIENCE CURRICULUM OF ALL PUBLIC EDUCATION STUDENTS IN TEXAS THIS YEAR.

    Folks, these people are wackos, but they are determined and clever. Last year, they passed a new English curriculum — over the objections of SBoE moderates and education professionals, and in repudiation of the very professionals they had hired to do the job — that is based strictly on phonics. Phonics worked in the 1960s and 70s on this white, Scottish-English heritage 5th generation Texan. But phonics doesn’t work on first-generation immigrant populations for whom English is the second language — the very students who overwhelming populate Texas public schools.

    Texas’s future is on the line here. Folks, wake up before it’s too late. We’re almost there now.

    @ 10:20 am on November 7, 2008
  32. Hey Mike-when did you graduate from Regent? Or are you John Ashcroft is disguise or even worse, the clown who is engaged to Monica goodling? Hope the lithium therapy works.

    @ 10:37 am on November 8, 2008