This is not a snark.
I have several times given reasons why it's imperative Rick Scott not be given a second term. Our voting rights, our environment, the health care exchanges, or S.B. 1188: which is a bill that passed in April that gives the winner of this year's governor's race the right to kick off the three liberal judges!
I don't have the patience or space to list all of the well over 230 reasons Rick Scott needs to go, but I'll now add one more:
Alan Hays, a pro-business and anti-education Florida state senator, said he will draft a bill to be voted on for next year's regular session, which starts in March. The bill will force all middle and high school students in all of our 1,700 public schools to watch a crappy propaganda film, America: Imagine a World Without Her, by a convicted felon who plead guilty for election fraud and will likely serve prison time: Dinesh D'Souza.
The film, although a hit with conservatives, has been a commercial flop only garnering a few million bucks--a far cry from his earlier film which was a character assassination on Obama. Already it is disappearing from theaters. This new film offers unsourced, revisionist history that every nonpartisan observer has panned. (Below the orange cloud I have a full review on each of the film's dishonest and downright bigoted claims on African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, along with his shoddy defense of Wall Street and every foreign conflict. Spoiler alert: Liberals are the source of all of America's ills.)
Right now, the FL GOP holds a supermajority in our state House and Senate. Even though this is clear government indoctrination of students, and even though our education ranking is at the bottom (only in front of Alabama), and even though our public schools have been slashed to the bone with this legislature, the buzz in Tallahassee is that this bill will pass. They expect it to pass legal muster because parents can go through a process to opt their child out of viewing. (That seems fair, I'm sure no GOP politician would have objected to a forced viewing of Michael Moore's "SICKO".)
The only person who can stop this travesty is the governor. If Rick Scott is re-elected, he WILL sign the bill. It's no secret that Rick Scott is just godawful, but try to imagine how he'll be with NO re-election to worry about.
D'Souza, who normally screams about the free market, can't come to terms that his piece of garbage has flopped. He actually blamed Costco and Google executives for an elaborate conspiracy theory to explain his failure, and said the conspiracy was "a fact". This alone discredits the film and all of the unproved allegations that he refers to as "facts". Costco called him out and said the book he based the film on simply wasn't selling. Google, however, disgustingly caved on his ridiculous claim that anyone who searches "America" should be routed to his stupid film. (Google gave him exactly what he asked for. Try it.) But if this bill passes, he can expect to make some dough from our already cash-strapped schools. That's because state Senator Alan Hays, a teabagger already infamous for proposing stupid bills, saw a movie that Salon called a "laughable embarrassment" and gave this reaction:
"I saw the movie and walked out of the theater and said, ‘Wow, our students need to see this!YEAH, genius, there's a reason for that!I’ve looked at history books and talked to history teachers and the message the students are getting is very different from what is in the movie,” Hays said.
History is based on facts, NOT right-wing fantasies. Next thing you know they'll want to require textbooks challenging science! Oh, wait...
Last year, the FL GOP lost it over a history textbook that dared to mention Islam, and called the book "indoctrination"--even though they could not point to ONE example of the book being biased or wrong.
I can point out several lies in this unsourced, cringe-worthy, Powerpoint-esque film. But actual propaganda is fine in our schools as long as it promotes Tea Party thinking. Once again, irony is lost on the GOP. They scream about Obama being a dictator, but I don't recall him or any Democratic politician mandating propaganda to be shown in schools.