Pathetic People #4: Reince (”Cut out the Pages”) Priebus

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

I swear, is there a single leader in the Republican Party that is not just nuts? The Republicans in Wisconsin have their panties in a wad over a literature textbook used in the eighth grade in some schools. It turns out that the text has an essay by (at the time of writing) a member of the US Senate, Barack Obama. The outrage! The book publisher should have known that Obama was running for President, some day.

Ole Reince was on Fox this morning with the pretentious and hateful Megyn (interesting spelling) Kelly. The text in question is the McDoougal Littel Literature book, apparently the 2008 edition. Now, as I remember it takes around two years or more to get a textbook published, but that is not the point.

Here is a short video featuring him from the Wisconsin Republican Party. I could not find the video of him from Fox news this morning anywhere.

[Admin note: The embed isn't working, so I changed it to a link. Kate]

Link to YouTube video

UPDATE: I finally found the video, but only on the Fox site. As much as I hate to have anything to do with Fox, here is the embed. It is pretty short clip, but is telling. I left the first one in just so you can see the belief system of the Wisconsin Republican Party.

Fox video

There is a 15 page essay by Obama in the book (counting the pictures), obviously, according to Preibus, intended to indoctrinate students. This guy joins the rest of the book banners by suggesting on the Fox segment that the school districts literally cut those pages out of every copy of the text. That got me to wanting to do a little checking on Priebus.

It turns out that he became the chair of the state Republican Party this year, and has the day job as an attorney who defends companies when they get their tales in a crack with OSHA. Yes, folks, he is (gasp!) one of those awful trial lawyers!

His education credentials seem OK, with a JD from University of Miami School of Law and a BS (political science and English) from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He had done quite a bit of law clerking, the most interesting one being for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Los Angeles, California. That one sort of gave me pause. I do not know if he could not find a different job, or if he wanted to do some infiltration.

His choices of organizations is sort of interesting, too. The one that I found to be most interesting is that he is an Advisory Board Member, CareNet Crisis Pregnancy Center of Kenosha. Crises pregnancy centers are the wingnuts’ answer to Planned Parenthood, and attempt to coerce, in many cases, unwed mothers to be to carry the pregnancy to term. So book cutting and extreme anti-abortion, too is he.

Other interesting connections are his association with the Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen. Van Hollen has his own problems right now, as there are serious accusations of attempts on his part to suppress the vote by scary brown and black people. Interestingly, the NAACP was one of the parties involved in bringing a suit against Van Hollen. Priebus says that the multiple contacts that he has had recently with Van Hollen were not related. It gets sort of complicated. Perhaps a reader in Wisconsin can add some detail. There is some information <a href=”www.uppitywis.org/tags/reince-priebus”>here</a>.

Other than that, details on him are pretty sketchy, at least on the Tubes. The only personal information that I can find is that he married his high school girlfriend in 1999. I was able to find out that he ran for and lost a state senate seat in 2004, but that is about it. However, I will keep looking and if a Wisconsin reader can add more detail, I would appreciate it.

One of the reasons that I posted about him, other than his outrageous display this morning is that there is so little about him available on the Tubes.

Warmest regards,

Doc

Tags: Censorship, Dailykos.com, Pathetic People, Reince Priebus, Wingnut